Afghanistan is the valley where great empires go to die.
We have always known this, though the beauty of our weapons sometimes blinds us. If you want to find an American institution that actually works well, look to our military. Our armed forces are extraordinarily good at doing the grim work they are designed to do. They are very good at, as Rush Limbaugh said, killing people and breaking things.
But the problem is that military excellence only solves some problems, and it only solves those problems if the civilian control that employs it allows it do what it deems necessary. There are missions that the military is neither designed for or suited to. And civilian authority, ever aware of politics and optics, tends to want to try to limit and guide the military--to govern the military, to make the military an instrument of policy.
That's almost always a mistake. A soldier is not a social worker. The military is a weapon. You don't pull a gun on someone unless you intend to shoot and you don't shoot unless you intend to knock the threat down.
If it seems simple, it's not.
Not everyone subscribes to the same worldview; not everyone shares your assumptions. Afghanistan is less a nation than a contested crossroads territory, situated along a crucial trade route between Iran and India, where central and south Asia meet. It is landlocked, consisting mostly of deserts and mountains, with the Hindu Kush dominating the center of the country, the Pamir in the east, and the Himalayas in the northeast.
It's been pretty much constantly invaded since the Iron Age; Alexander the Great was able to sweep through the lightly populated region in 330 BC and Genghis Khan's swept through the country some 1,500 years later. (Khan's conquest came at a price; during the siege of the Valley of Bamiyan in 1221 his favorite grandson Mutukan, was killed, leading the Mongol emperor to order the massacre of the entire population of the city of Shahr-e Gholghola.)
Since the Mongol invasion, no empire has genuinely conquered Afghanistan. Some, like the Mughals, who had nominal control over the area's main roads for three centuries, paid off local warlords.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the British and the Russians learned that while it was possible to conquer Afghan territory temporarily, and even defeat the Afghans militarily, occupying the region was a fool's errand. Eventually guerilla attacks and tribal uprisings wore down the great powers, eroding the political will of those who reckoned the proximity of soldiers and guns and airplanes might be enough to tame the irrational rebelliousness of the locals.
I'm not saying the U.S. military--or the Russians or the Brits--couldn't occupy Afghanistan indefinitely if they were willing to settle in, only that it would cost a lot of blood and treasure.
Could we defeat the Taliban? Sure, but to do so would require a geopolitically dangerous unsheathing of power. We'd have to make real war against them, on their own turf. We would have to give up the pretense of nation-building, and make enemies of a lot of the Afghans who were fighting against the Taliban. (Somewhere, somebody probably thinks this would be a good idea, and they probably have a bunch of Twitter followers. There's always a someone we should be bombing back to the Stone Age.)
Even as the Taliban moves into offices, holds press conferences and Tweets its new narratives, Afghanistan is better understood as an arena for dozens of local factions competing for power than any kind of coherent state.
Of course our exit strategy was bungled; most Americans saw no legitimate reason to stay. Whether it is fair or not, the popular conception of our adventure in the country was that it was an ill-defined mission and that the government we were barely propping up was corrupt, and that the Afghan forces we were training and supplying had little heart for battle. And if they weren't willing to fight for their country, then why were we?
Once we determined we were pulling out, it was inevitable that the Taliban would rush into the vacuum. And while I'm certain the Biden administration was surprised by the rapidity of the result, that's all they were surprised by.
It is quite possible that the debacle was completely unforeseen. But it sadly seems possible someone made the political calculation that, given the notoriously short memories of American voters, it was better to have this mess blow up now than a few months or years down the road.
There's plenty of blame to go around. George W. Bush's invasion of Afghanistan might have been problematic, but his bigger mistake was staying there after we'd achieved our security objectives. Barack Obama kicked the crisis down the road and Donald Trump invited the Taliban to Camp David, cut out the Afghan government, and essentially forced his successor to either pull out or escalate.
In exchange for withdrawing American troops, Trump trusted the Taliban to do the impossible: to root out every terror cell in the country and take responsibility for anyone who might want to attack the U.S. from Afghanistan, including new immigrants to the country. It was a capitulation framed as a beautiful deal.
But never mind that; the execution of the withdrawal it occasioned has been undeniably botched.
We should not have propped up the Afghan government indefinitely. We should have left it to the people of Afghanistan to determine how and by whom they would be governed. But we owed it to the tens of thousands of Afghans who risked their lives to help U.S. forces to see that they were given safe passage from the country.
They should have been airlifted out first. We should have kept a sufficient military force in place until they--and all U.S. and allied citizens, diplomats and contractors--were safely out of the country. It only seems logical to get the women and children on the lifeboats first, right?
The U.S. troops should have been the last to leave. I think most of our military personnel would agree.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected] and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.