July 8, 2021
Today, President Joe Biden announced that the military mission of the United States in Afghanistan will end on August 31. We have been in that country for almost 20 years and have lost 2448 troops and personnel. Another 20,722 Americans have been wounded. Estimates of civilian deaths range from 35,000 to 40,000. The mission has cost more than a trillion dollars.
Leaving Afghanistan brings up just how much the world has changed in the past two decades.
The U.S. invaded Afghanistan a month after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—which killed almost 3000 people in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania—to go after al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who had been behind the attack. The Islamic fundamentalist group that had controlled Afghanistan since 1996, the Taliban, was sheltering him, along with other al Qaeda militants. Joined by an international coalition, the U.S. drove the Taliban from power, but when the U.S. got bogged down in Iraq, its members quickly regrouped as an insurgent military force that attacked the Afghan government the U.S. propped up in their place. By 2018, the Taliban had reestablished itself in more than two thirds of Afghanistan.
In the years since 2001, three U.S. presidents have tried to strengthen the Afghan government to keep the nation from again becoming a staging ground for terrorists that could attack the U.S. But even a troop surge, like the one President Barack Obama launched into the region in 2009, could not permanently defeat the Taliban, well funded as it is by foreign investors, mining, opium, and a sophisticated tax system it operates in the shadow of the official government.
Eager to end a military commitment that journalist Dexter Filkins dubbed the “forever war,” the previous president, Donald Trump, sent officials to negotiate with the Taliban, and in February 2020 the U.S. agreed to withdraw all U.S. troops, along with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, by May 1, so long as the Taliban stopped attacking U.S. troops and cut ties with terrorists.
The U.S. did not include the Afghan government in the talks that led to the deal, leaving it to negotiate its own terms with the Taliban after the U.S. had already announced it was heading home. Observers at the time were concerned that the U.S. withdrawal would essentially allow the Taliban to retake control of the country, where the previous 20 years had permitted the reestablishment of stability and women’s rights. Indeed, almost immediately, Taliban militants began an assassination campaign against Afghan leaders, although they have not killed any American soldiers since the deal was signed.
Biden has made it no secret that he was not comfortable with the seemingly endless engagement in Afghanistan, but he was also boxed in by Trump’s agreement. Meanwhile, by announcing the U.S. intentions, American officials took pressure off the Taliban to negotiate with Afghan leaders. The Pentagon’s inspector general noted in February that “The Taliban intends to stall the negotiations until U.S. and coalition forces withdraw so that it can seek a decisive military victory over the Afghan government.”
In April, Biden announced that he would honor Trump’s agreement—“an agreement made by the United States government…means something,” Biden said—and he would begin a final withdrawal on May 1, 2021, to be finished before September 11, the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Today, the president explained that the withdrawal was taking place quicker than planned. He claimed that the U.S. had accomplished what it set out to do in Afghanistan. It had killed Osama bin Laden and destroyed a haven for international terrorists.
But the U.S. had no business continuing to influence the future of the Afghan people, he said. Together with NATO, the U.S. had trained and equipped nearly 300,000 members of the current Afghan military, as well as many more who are no longer serving, with all the tools, training, and equipment of any modern military. While we will continue to support that military, he said, it is time for the Afghan people to “drive toward a future that the Afghan people want and they deserve.”
For those asking that we stay just a little longer, especially in light of the fact the U.S. has lost no personnel since Trump cut the deal with the Taliban, he asked them to recognize that reneging on that deal would start casualties again. And, he asked, “Would you send your own son or daughter?”
Biden insisted the U.S. would continue to support the Afghan government and said the U.S. was working to bring to the U.S. Afghan translators whose lives are now in danger for working with U.S. forces. He also seemed to acknowledge the extraordinary danger facing Afghan women and girls under the rule of the Taliban as it continues to sweep through the country. And yet, he said, “I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome.”
But Biden’s argument for leaving Afghanistan is based not just on the U.S. having achieved its original stated goals and his own dislike of endangering our military personnel. He wants the U.S. to adjust to the reality that the world has changed dramatically in the past 20 years.
Since 9/11, the international terrorist threat has spread far beyond Afghanistan and is now far easier to target with financial measures than with soldiers. So, for example, in April, the Biden administration placed sanctions on Pakistani nationals for money laundering in what was likely an attempt to stop the money flowing to the Taliban through Pakistan, money that keeps the Taliban alive. It has also sanctioned Russia for backing the Taliban in its attempt to assassinate American military personnel.
Bruce Riedel, an expert on U.S. security, South Asia, and counter-terrorism at the Brookings Institution who was with the Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan when the Russians invaded in 1979, concluded after Biden made his withdrawal announcement in April that it is not clear that the Taliban will take over Afghanistan after the U.S. leaves. The country remains mired in a civil war, and who the winner will be remains open.
Threats to America are more likely to come these days from cyber attacks, like the one that hit the U.S. on the Friday before the holiday weekend. Apparently originating in Russia, that ransomware attack hit supply chains. Like the one that hit Colonial Pipeline in May, disrupting fuel supplies to the Southeast, such attacks have potential to do enormous damage. Biden has warned Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose country harbors hackers, that critical infrastructure is off limits, and that the U.S. will retaliate for any such attacks.
Finally, of course, Biden can turn his attention from Afghanistan in part because the U.S. has not suffered a major attack by foreign terrorists since 2001. Now, according to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas, our primary danger from terrorism is homegrown and comes from “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.”
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Notes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51689443
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49192495
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-46554097
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bidens-us-forces-exit-doom-afghan-peace-talks/story
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/07/08/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-drawdown-of-u-s-forces-in-afghanistan/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/us/politics/biden-russia-sanctions.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/domestic-terrorism-data/
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0126
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/04/27/bidens-afghan-gamble/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/us/politics/domestic-terror-white-supremacists.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/colonial-pipeline-ceo-testifies-on-first-hours-of-ransomware-attack.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-troops-prepare-pull-war-afghanistan-numbers/story?id=77050902
I feel deeply pained for the women and girls of Afghanistan, at risk of much harm from the soldiers of the Taliban army and its misogyny. The agony of my powerlessness in the face of such oppression and death leaves me stunned.
AND, Biden is doing the right thing. The USA needs to get out of its decades long meddling and warring in other countries to no better end than enriching the military-industrial complex. Our 'volunteer' armies of the poor, POC, and immigrants don't need to be put at risk for no apparent relevant rationale. The USA appears to have serious deficits in 'nation-building.'
Let us build peace. Here. At home. Let us bankrupt the war-makers. Let us re-purpose our bright youngers to civic service and enriching this nation.
I acutely remember our departure from Vietnam. Combat operations ceased in 1973, and over the next year we repatriated our soldiers back to the United States, leaving mounds of equipment and matériel in the hands of the South Vietnamese, who promptly abandoned it on the battlefield with North Vietnam. We got our prisoners of war back, some of whom had been in captivity for going on nine years.
In March 1975, North Vietnam launched a ground offensive against South Vietnam. By the middle of April, it was clear that Saigon was about to fall, and there was pressure on Congress to revisit its decision to not support any further military action in South Vietnam. We all know what followed afterward.
I also recall Henry Kissinger's stated objective to achieve what he referred to as "a decent interval" before Saigon actually fell. How decent that interval was is a matter of conjecture and/or personal opinion. It was clear, however, that as military objectives go, the war in Vietnam was unwinnable. Whether the United States achieve its political objectives by staying the course by bolstering the Saigon government between 1958 and 1975 is also a matter of conjecture. Maybe there a secret archives that will see the light of day sometime 50 years from now that will reveal what political objectives were actually being sought, above and beyond delaying the inevitable. If the war in Vietnam was supposed to be the place where the United States would lay down a marker about 'thus far and no further', that was a bad place to do it.
Worse yet, the American military establishment was still being run by the generals who would come of age during World War II, and who were apparently intoxicated by America's victory over Japan in the war that lasted just under four years, while utterly destroying Japan as a military power. Vietnam was not Tarawa or Guadalcanal, or the Marianas Islands. These are men who are used to getting their way, who mistook technology for national purpose. Politically, the war was the price of surrender of the American government to the so-called China Lobby, political allies within the Republican Party of the Chinese nationalist government that had been ousted from mainland China in 1949, and then seeking refuge on Taiwan.
American foreign policy towards China, and by extension, to China's neighbors in Southeast Asia was heavily influenced by American General Claire Lee Chennault, the military officer who had organized the American Volunteer Group, nicknamed 'The Flying Tigers', a group of American military pilots assembled by General Chennault to engage Japanese forces over China in 1941, the year before the United States officially entered World War II. General Chennault's second wife, known as Anna Chennault (born Chan Sheng Mai, in China, in 1923) had been a war correspondent; and following the death in 1946 of Chennault's wife Nell (Thompson) to whom he had been married since 1911, he married Anna and brought her back to Washington DC, where together, there were staunch advocates for the Nationalist Chinese government. General Chennault died in 1958, and Anna Chennault continued her involvement in Republican politics, and policies which were grounded on the idea that at some future point in time Nationalist China's leader, Chiang Kai-shek, would return to Beijing in triumph, supported by the United States. To them the communist victory in 1949 was utterly unacceptable. It was also Anna Chennault who tipped off the Diem government in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson was about to conclude a negotiated peace with North Vietnam, allowing the South Vietnamese to sabotage the nascent negotiations. Chennault was also overheard negotiating with then-candidate Richard Nixon looking to oppose Lyndon Johnson's request for a second term of office in the 1968 presidential election. This was overheard on a CIA wiretap; but presidential advisor Clark Clifford persuaded Johnson not to make an issue of it, treasonous as it was, because that would have exposed the nature of the wiretap, and the fact that it was being used against a member of the Washington political establishment. You can see how domestic partisan politics and political agendas can have worldwide consequences. Viewed in hindsight, Lyndon Johnson should have pursued the matter; he ended up withdrawing from the presidential race, and allowing Richard Nixon to continue to wage war for another five years until the 1973 cease-fire. But Johnson's ego got in the way, and his advisor, Clark Clifford, did him no favors. He would have done better, as John Kennedy did, following the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, by admitting his mistakes and moving on.
The other thread of the story has to do with supporting French ambitions to return to Vietnam and to restore its colony there in 1946. Again, the issue was communist-led opposition to French rule. Thus it happened that American arms provided to France between 1946 and 1954, when the French army at Dien Bien Phu was surrounded and destroyed by the Viet Minh, the North Vietnamese Revolutionary Army in May 1954. American President Dwight Eisenhower refused to intervene, and following a series of negotiations, what was then French Indochina was divided into a North Vietnam, based in Hanoi, and a South Vietnam, headquartered in Saigon. The United States had initially agreed to a plebiscite at which all Vietnamese would get to decide which country they wanted to remain with. United States reneged on the deal and began arming the South Vietnamese; much of this military buildup was due to congressional pressure by the Republican Party, envisioning a much more robust American response to the French defeat. In this, Anna Chennault was the go-to connection between the Republican Party and the South Vietnamese government under Ngo Dinh Diem. First it was Kennedy, and afterward it was LBJ, but the pattern was set, and the wheels were set in motion. After 1960, and through the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, whether we were consciously aware of it or not, we were on a collision course in Southeast Asia, because our previous decision-making was a one-size-fits-all pattern of opposition to communist regimes, emotionally driven, and with the egos of the actors very much in evidence.
Many of us of a certain age know or things ended up, very much like what we saw over the past 20 years in Afghanistan. We took sides in a war of national liberation against a European colonial power, France, as much because of our cultural affinity with France, and the American government's obsession with communism. That was the opposite tack that we took during World War II when we supported Great Britain against Germany, but as to the British Empire, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to support Winston Churchill's imperial ambitions. Before he died, President Roosevelt was overheard saying that he was not going to let the French back into Indochina after the war. The president who succeeded Roosevelt, Harry Truman, was unschooled in international politics, and so he let the re-militarization of Vietnam by the French government to slip by unchallenged. Following that we allowed our cultural affinity with France and the debt that we owe them historically by supporting George Washington's army at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1783, to cloud our judgment. Like Iraq, and Afghanistan, Vietnam was a war of choice; and, as with the other two, a war we lost
Given the history that I have laid out above, I have to view with a great deal of skepticism the argument that the United States is living Afghanistan 'too soon'. As President Biden said in his comments today, something to the effect of 'when is enough, enough'. The president noted that we had been in Afghanistan 20 years, and that the children of soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan 20 years ago were now doing tours of combat where their parents had fought. This is a perfect paradigm of the 'sunk cost' fallacy, throwing good money after bad, hoping to recoup your losses. There is also the 'Gambler's Fallacy', which is basically if you lose a long string of bets, your luck is bound to change. As the song says, and ain't necessarily so.
It has been said, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. I look at historical parallels to see patterns of behavior that seem to repeat themselves in somewhere other, because that is the way people behave. We got into Afghanistan, because George W. Bush got us into Iraq on false pretenses. Bad karma happens when you lie to yourself; but the problem is that you cannot lie about yourself. If we keep following the same old patterns that Republican administrations have foisted on us, were going to get the same bad results that we have now. Today, we have the right President, and at the right time. In the time that we have Joe Biden, let him heal us, and then maybe we can heal ourselves.