Let the Post-Mortems Begin

Let the post-mortems begin!

Having been chased out of the New York Times building for the crime of supporting Israel, Bari Weiss is becoming her own media empire. In her current Substack site, she offers what is best called an alternative op-ed page. (via Maggie’s Farm) 

Yesterday, she presented a series of post-mortems about our recent adventure in Afghanistan. Surely, there will be many more, but Weiss called on a number of people, from Thomas Joscelyn to Eli Lake to H. R. McMaster to Nikki Haley to offer their reflections on the ongoing debacle.

While it is true to say that the Biden administration owns the current surrender, the American failure in Afghanistan has many fathers. 

I will excerpt a few of them here. Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. As he sees it, there is plenty of blame to go around:

Beginning with Bill Clinton:

Blame President Bill Clinton. His administration didn’t take Al Qaeda seriously. Clinton and his advisers passed up multiple opportunities to target Osama bin Laden. The Al Qaeda threat manifested on Clinton’s watch, leading to 9/11 and, ultimately, the war in Afghanistan.

And then there was the Bush administration:

Blame President George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. In 2001, they had the opportunity to deliver a death blow to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But instead of committing the forces necessary to hunt down bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and others, they hesitated. The U.S. relied on local warlords and other actors, some of whom were duplicitous. Bin Laden and Zawahiri finagled their way out of the remote Tora Bora Mountains. Al Qaeda regrouped in the years that followed.

Let’s not forget, the Bush administration implemented a democracy agenda, whereby they would save the world by bringing democracy to Afghanistan.

And, of course, Barack Obama merits some blame too:

Blame Barack Obama. Obama decided it was in our “vital national interest” to help the Afghans build the “capacity” to defend their country on their own. In December 2009, he committed forces — at their peak, more than 100,000 of them — to accomplish the task. More Americans were killed in Afghanistan during Obama’s war than in any other period of this debacle. But Obama wasn’t fighting to win. His surge in forces came with an expiration date of just 18 months and then he chased a fanciful peace deal with the Taliban. To his credit, Obama ordered the raid that killed bin Laden. But Al Qaeda lived, despite Obama’s attempts to declare the group dead.

It’s an interesting detail, deserving to be underscored. More Americans died in Afghanistan during the Obama years than during any other.

The Trump administration tried to make a deal with the Taliban. Its actions belied its rhetoric about winning:

Blame Donald Trump. His instinct was to bring the soldiers home. Instead, he agreed to a small increase in America’s footprint, claiming that the U.S. was fighting for “victory.” He didn’t mean it.

Blame Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who portrayed the Taliban as America’s counterterrorism partner, saying the group had agreed to “work alongside of us to destroy” Al Qaeda. Trump repeated Pompeo’s claim, saying the Taliban “will be killing terrorists for us.” This is nonsense. The Taliban’s men are terrorists and there’s no evidence they’ve broken with Al Qaeda.

And then, Joscelyn blames the generals:

Blame the generals. It is true that they were asked to fight a war that was undermined by America’s erratic political leadership. But no general ever stood up to say: No. We cannot prosecute an unwinnable war.

Since 2018, the U.S. military has been invested in the State Department’s delusional peace process with the Taliban, repeatedly claiming that there was no “military solution” to the conflict. But this was always a lie.

As the Taliban takes control of Kabul, Americans can see for themselves that the jihadists had a “military solution” in mind all along. The Taliban and Al Qaeda were never ambivalent about their jihad. They were fighting to win.

In the end, President Joseph Biden wasn’t ambivalent about the war either. He was willing to watch the jihadists resurrect the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. And so they have.

Now we move on to the thoughts of Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake:

As a candidate in 2020, Biden made a similar mistake. He was asked on Face the Nation whether or not he would bear some responsibility for the treatment of Afghan women if the Taliban seized control of the country after he as president ordered a withdrawal. “No I do not,” he said. “Are you telling me we should go to war with China because of what they are doing to a million Uighurs out in the west in concentration camps, is that what you’re saying to me? . . . I bear zero responsibility.”

This is morally illiterate. The question is not whether America should prevent an atrocity in a country where it is not fighting. It is whether America should keep a few thousand forces in a country that have prevented the atrocities that are now unfolding.

True enough, Joe Biden is congenitally incapable of taking responsibility for anything. 

Jacob Siegel has another take on our failure:

John Sopko, who headed the Congressional watchdog group on the war, cites two causes of the U.S. failure in Afghanistan. One is the “hubris, that we can somehow take the country that was desolate in 2001, and turn it into a little Norway.” The other is the “mendacity” of U.S. military and civilian leaders who misled the American public by exaggerating meager accomplishments and holding out the promise that, finally, we were “ready to turn the corner."

Intriguingly, Elliott Ackerman presents the problem as a play in five acts. Of the five, four have now been completed. He is also willing to call out the failures of previous administrations:

In one act, he criticizes the Bush administration for fixating on Iraq while ignoring Afghanistan:

When the Taliban-led government refuses to turn over Osama bin Laden after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush sends American troops into Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. After just two months, Taliban rule collapses. U.S. victory is decisive, but the administration loses focus as it mobilizes for the Iraq War. The Taliban reconstitutes itself as America fixates on Iraq. The first fatal mistake.

In another, President Obama declared that the war was over in 2014. It echoed a meme that floated through the nation during the Vietnam War-- why not declare victory and quit:

After his win, President Obama is under pressure to set an exit date for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. And in December 2009, in a speech delivered at West Point, he commits to one: 2014. Announcing a time-based, as opposed to a conditions-based, exit strategy is a crucial misstep. A second fatal mistake.

Ackerman finds fault with the Trump administration’s effort to disengage from world conflicts. And then, Trump believed that he could make a deal with the Taliban:

Trump’s “America First” nationalism leaves little room for sustained involvement in Afghanistan. The self-styled dealmaker negotiates — at length — with the Taliban. In doing so, he undercuts the Afghan government. The result is an unstable ceasefire (violated on numerous occasions by the Taliban) and a commitment that all U.S. troops will depart Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. When Trump loses re-election, his successor inherits this deal.

Joe Biden took a bad situation and made it worse:

During the first six months of Biden’s presidency, a total of two U.S. service members are killed by the Taliban. There are 2,500 American troops in the whole country. But Biden won’t budge. On August 14 he says: “I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan — two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth.” His decision-making based on sunk, as opposed to future, costs is our fourth, tragic mistake.

But classical tragedies don’t have four acts. Any dramatist knows they typically play out in five. Whatever crawls out of the new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is what will deliver us the fifth, final and devastating act to this tragedy.

Some gloomy thoughts for a rainy day.