Monday open thread: The result of fighting a land war in Asia
When the George W. Bush administration decided to remake the Middle East, and left a gaping hole in Central Asia, the scenes we witnessed yesterday as the Taliban swept into Kabul—with Afghanistan's feckless "president" hightailing it to Tajikistan—were inevitable.
In the twenty years of our misadventure in Asia, we built a 300,000-man army which was supposed to fight the Taliban and keep it out of power. Instead, as this Washington Post article details, this corrupt army and its corrupt leadership had been making deals with the Taliban for years. A modern army with modern equipment and training simply faded in the face of a medieval death cult because it simply didn't believe in what it was supposedly fighting for.
And yet, pundits who love war are braying that we should have stayed in Afghanistan. Ten, twenty, a hundred years. Our national honor was at stake.
Yes, our national honor was at stake in Afghanistan. After the US and the Soviet Union turned that benighted country into the last major arena for Cold War supremacy, we owed a debt of honor to that country. That's why I supported going into it after the events of 9/11. But we immediately failed in paying that debt. Afghanistan was relegated to a sideshow as the big war in Iraq geared up. We didn't destroy the Taliban; we probably never could have, completely, as it had much support in the Pashtun tribal areas. But by neglecting the country for the shiny object of Baghdad, the events of the past three weeks were bound to happen.
And, of course, remember: the previous "president" was the one who made the deal with the Taliban to pull out US troops. And he not only made that deal, but reduced the US footprint in the country to the bare minimum.
Wars are easy to get into, but very messy to get out of, short of having secured a decisive victory. Were we to pour more troops into Afghanistan, when its own army had no stomach for the fight? Could we have secured a decisive victory? Perhaps. But March 20, 2003 put an end to that strategy. From then on, it was merely a delaying of the inevitable, as one corrupt government succeeded another, billions of dollars went to waste, and an endless war dragged on.
The Taliban can celebrate its "victory". But Afghanistan isn't a nation. It's an area inhabited by a collection of tribes. There's little if any loyalty to the idea of the state. And the Taliban will find it difficult to impose Pashtun supremacy.
We failed in Afghanistan. But we never tried to succeed. And we never brought the Afghans into believing in what we were putatively offering them. All they saw was a series of crooks running an ineffective government. How did that promote the idea of democracy?
There were no good solutions remaining. Anyone telling you there were is simply lying to you. It's what they're good at: never taking responsibility for their actions, but quick to blame the man who had to make the final decision to end an unwinnable war.
Give your thoughts to the women and ethnic minorities betrayed by their useless government. Our war had been over for years. Their war is starting again.