"Wars Are Not Won by Evacuations"

George Will brings us a few words by Winston Churchill. The subject-- evacuations. As you know Churchill oversaw the evacuation of British soldiers at Dunkirk in 1940. If it had failed, World War II might have looked radically different.

In the immediate aftermath of the heroic rescue of soldiers from Dunkirk, Winston Churchill addressed the British as adults, reminding them that “wars are not won by evacuations.” As the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan ends, the authors of the ignominious and tragic last chapter are hoping that perceptions will be more malleable than facts are.

In America, leaders rarely address people as adults. They play for the politics. Will is not much enamoured with the Republican response to it all, but he focuses on the Biden administration’s grotesque mismanagement of the mission-- which is not so much evacuation a surrender.

Will quotes one Rory Stewart. While Stewart is a Tory, we recall that former prime minister Tony Blair expressed similar sentiments a week or so ago. Biden’s incompetence is playing poorly across the pond. Stewart takes severe exception to the Biden administration effort to blame the Afghan military:

So, Congress probably will not cast a cold eye on the incompetent and dishonorable conduct that Rory Stewart summarized with his riveting, scalding responses in a video interview in London.

Stewart, a British politician and diplomat, lived three years in Afghanistan and recalls that by 2001, when the previous Taliban regime was toppled, 4 million Afghans from a population of 20 million had fled the country to escape the dark night of theocratic cruelties. Stewart was incensed about Biden’s “incredibly offensive” Aug. 16 address, in which Biden disparaged the Afghans’ “will to fight.” Stewart:

“The United States provided all the air support for the Afghans. [The Americans] didn’t just take their own planes away. They took away 16,000 civilian contractors who were maintaining the Afghan helicopters. … So those things can’t even fly. And the morale damage. They left in the middle of the night from Bagram [air base]. They didn’t even tell the commander that they were leaving. The Afghans woke up in the morning. All their planes disabled, the Americans have left, no support of any kind. And you’re asking who exactly? Who is President Biden asking to fight?

“I mean, if you are an Afghan woman teaching in a school in Pul-e-Charkhi. Really? Really? I mean what are they expecting? A bunch of guys come riding in in pickup trucks with heavy machine guns, into your town. You don’t want the Taliban in there, you don’t support them. But if you’re genuinely asking them to put up a suicidal fight when the United States … was not even prepared to keep 2,500 soldiers and some planes in the country, with zero casualties, zero risk over the last few years. … No U.S. serviceman has been killed in Afghanistan for 18 months. No British serviceman for longer than that. This has not been a costly mission since 2014. … To basically hand [the Afghan people] over to the Taliban and then say, it’s your fault, you’re all a bunch of cowards, when we pulled out and weren’t prepared to accept a tiny presence.”

And, Will closes with a point that all savvy commentators have been making, namely that Biden has done severe and lasting damage to the NATO. Americans had been told that the Biden administration would be more concerned with fostering international alliances, that it would be kinder and gentler toward NATO than Trump had been,

How is that working out?

Biden’s hasty and unilateral decision to abandon NATO’s Afghanistan mission has done more damage to that alliance than the strains of 45 Cold War years did. Worldwide, nations are recalibrating their security policies, weighing reliance on a wobbly, impulsive United States against accommodation with a China that is on a different trajectory. Biden’s immediate task is to reassess his reliance on the intelligence, military and policymaking officials who gave him assessments and assurances that have been shredded by events. When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.

Right now, from the Biden administration, it’s all about covering your ass, and deflecting blame to the other guy. As for what wins wars, the Biden team has no interest whatever in winning.