The Afghanistan Debacle: What Have We Learned?
You can’t avoid hearing about the disaster in Afghanistan the past couple of weeks. What lessons can we learn from this? Here are some candidates:
1. “We learned that Joe Biden was right.”
Yep, that’s what some people are saying. The disaster just proves that he was right to leave. (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-quick-collapse-in-afghanistan-proves-biden-was-right-to-leave-11629124589)
On the face of it, this is a surprising lesson to hear. As a general rule, if you do x, and immediate disaster results, you don’t usually say “This proves that I was right to do x”. Surely if everything went smoothly, the Administration would claim (reasonably) that that proved that they were right. So what exactly would have to happen to show that Biden wasn’t right?
2. “We should’ve left sooner.”
Possible argument: “Well, we had to leave some time. If 20 years of U.S. presence didn’t make Afghanistan stable, nothing would have done it. Therefore, we should have left much sooner.”
Why did we have to leave, again? H.R. McMaster (the hawkish National Security Advisor from 2017-18) gave these examples: at the end of World War II, the U.S. left troops in both Japan and Germany. You know how long they stayed there?
Indefinitely. They’re still there now. 35,000 in Germany, and 50,000 in Japan. Now, I’m not saying that’s a great idea – I don’t see why we need those troops there. But those examples makes it hard to claim that it was somehow unworkable or absurd to leave the 2,500 troops in Afghanistan indefinitely. In comparison with the 85,000 troops we have in Germany and Japan 76 years after the war, I don’t see why the 2,500 troops stationed in Afghanistan 20 years after the other war were such a big deal.
“But what were those 2,500 troops achieving?” you might ask. “They didn’t transform Afghanistan into a modern liberal society, so what’s the point?”
Well, apparently they were preventing the entire country from being taken over by a blatantly evil and irrational terrorist group. If the cost of stopping that from happening was keeping 2,500 troops stationed there for, say, the next 50 years, would that be worth it?
When people are grabbing on to airplanes as they take off, then falling to their deaths, in an attempt to escape from the new regime that has just taken over, that’s a pretty good sign that the old situation was better than the new one. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbS3nV3hZrY)
“Okay, maybe it was better for the Afghans to have U.S. troops there, but was it better for America?” Probably, yes. Because now the Taliban will have more resources to support terrorism. There’s now a good chance that the U.S. will wind up invading again, some time within the next decade, in another war that will kill hundreds of thousands of people. Or maybe we'll just keep sending drones and airplanes over there.
3. “We should never have gone there to begin with.”
Well, given the incompetence of the U.S. government, and given that we were eventually going to abandon the country to the Taliban in the most humiliating and horrifying way, it is indeed plausible to conclude that it would have been better to never go there to begin with.
4. How much can we blame on Trump?
It was President Trump who originally committed the U.S. to withdrawing. Here's my hypothesis: his advisors of course told him (as they told Biden) that the Taliban would take over if the U.S. withdrew troops. Trump decided to make a deal with the Taliban anyway, whereby they would hold off on attacking Americans, and the U.S. would withdraw troops at a time safely after the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.
That way, there would be no stories about Americans being attacked in the months leading up to the election. By the time of the disaster resulting from withdrawal, either someone else would be President and thus would take the blame, or Trump would be in his second term and unable to run again anyway. Hence, it was a good deal for Trump.
Cynical? Yes, but completely realistic about Mr. Trump's way of thinking.
5. Joe Biden is unfit to serve as President.
Despite his advanced age, I supported Joe in 2020. That is, I viewed him as better than Trump, and also a better bet for defeating Trump than any other Democratic candidate. He seems like a nice enough man. And earlier in his life, he would have done a reasonably good job as President (relative to other politicians, of course – at no time would he have governed from correct, libertarian principles). So this isn’t coming from a feeling of hostility toward Joe Biden.
But he just is no longer mentally able to perform one of the most consequential and demanding jobs in the world. Here are three examples:
In his interview with George Stephanopolous, Stephanopolous asks Biden to respond to someone who says “I wish we could have left with honor”. Biden responds:
"Look, that’s like askin’ my deceased son Beau, who spent six months in Kosovo and a year in Iraq as a Navy captain and then major--I mean, as an Army major. And, you know, I’m sure h--he had regrets comin’ out of Afganista--I mean, out of Iraq.
"He had regrets to what’s--how--how it’s going. But the idea--what’s the alternative? The alternative is why are we staying in Afghanistan? Why are we there? Don’t you think that the one--you know who’s most disappointed in us getting out? Russia and China."
(Full transcript: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/full-transcript-abc-news-george-stephanopoulos-interview-president/story?id=79535643.) He forgets which service his son was in, then which country his son served in. He follows that with an incoherent series of sentences and fragments. If he can’t handle an interview with a sympathetic reporter, how can Joe Biden handle the demands of the Presidency?
Before the withdrawal, Biden denied that U.S. intelligence predicted a Taliban takeover, and he said it was highly unlikely that the Taliban would take over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmMrfG7I5e4. This was false, not only about what was actually going to happen but about what U.S. intelligence predicted (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZrAxPHBeDo).
Here, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby contradicts Joe Biden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzSj-itFjTc. Kirby discusses al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan. A reporter then points out that Joe Biden said there was no al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan. Kirby lamely tries to cover for Biden’s error.
Now, without being privy to the inner workings of the Biden Administration, I think it’s very plausible that Joe Biden simply doesn’t know what’s going on. He can’t remember what he’s been told about Afghanistan, which is why he’s basing decisions on false beliefs and guesses about the situation. He can’t form coherent policy directives, because he can’t even formulate a coherent paragraph.
If Biden were simply bowing out and letting other people decide what to do, it probably wouldn’t be so bad. But to have a very confused person trying to continue directing policy is much worse. People have died and are still dying because of the incompetent withdrawal, and it’s very plausible that this is largely due to Biden’s cognitive decline.
Many people have noticed this decline. Republicans started complaining before the election. But it’s become increasingly obvious, to the point where even Democrats cannot fail to have seen it. It’s hard to believe that Joe Biden himself hasn’t seen it, but for some reason he thinks he can continue in the office for the next three years.
Biden isn’t going to care about Republican pundits pointing to his failings, as they’ve been doing for the past year and a half. He needs to hear from other Democrats. Democratic elites need to tell Joe Biden that it’s time to step down.