Facing the facts in Afghanistan

Afghanistan has fallen, for the second time, to a brutal band of Islamist fundamentalists with medieval views about how people should be governed. That’s a tragedy for Afghans who want to live in the modern world — including many girls and women, ethnic and religious minorities, educated professionals, journalists and civic activists, as well as those who worked with the United States and our allies to establish a capable national government.

That long, costly experiment in nation building has collapsed with sickening speed, and bitter recriminations fill the air. No wonder, given the thousands of U.S. and allied troops killed or wounded, and the $2 trillion taxpayers poured into a noble if losing cause.  

But amid all the facile finger-pointing and instant historical revisionism, let’s try to keep three basic facts in mind.

First, the U.S. intervention in 2001 was inevitable and unavoidable. Afghanistan was the base from which al Qaeda mounted the spectacular Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that demolished the twin towers, damaged the Pentagon and wantonly killed nearly 2,000 people while wounding about 6,000 others. 

Americans saw it as an act of war, a modern Pearl Harbor, and they expected their government to respond accordingly. When the Taliban refused to surrender Osama bin Laden and his co-conspirators, the United States went to war with the regime that had given them sanctuary and protection. We did not go alone: Invoking NATO’s collective security guarantee, many of our allies also sent troops and other resources.

Donald Trump and left-wing critics of America’s “forever wars” in Muslim countries disingenuously lump Afghanistan and Iraq together. This is fake history. Whatever you think about the Bush administration’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq, Afghanistan was a war of necessity, not choice. And there was little domestic debate about the need for resolute U.S. military action to defeat al Qaeda. On Sept. 14, 2001, the House voted 420-1 and the Senate 98-0 to authorize the use of force against the attacks’ perpetrators and enablers. 

Second, President Biden has made the hard but correct strategic call. The U.S. public has lost confidence in our Afghanistan mission. We long ago passed the point at which the costs of staying there outweigh the risks of leaving. 

The United States faces a recurrent dilemma. We have the unique military capacity to intervene effectively in crises and conflicts around the globe. Once our military has accomplished its goals, however, we don’t know how to leave.

The core problem isn’t an addiction to “imperialism” or a naive belief that U.S.-style democracy can be implanted everywhere. Instead, our difficulties typically arise from the fear of squandering what our troops have won on the battlefield, and from a commendable desire not to leave anarchy or new forms of oppression in our wake. 

The pivotal moment in Afghanistan came in the spring of 2002, when President Bush called for a Marshall Plan-style effort to reconstruct Afghanistan. Although the U.S.-led coalition did a lot of good for long-suffering Afghans, the Western presence also fueled a spreading Taliban insurgency. The rapid collapse of the army and government precisely measures how badly U.S. political leaders – apparently misled by top military brass – overestimated their ability to stand up a competent Afghan authority to which we could hand off power. 

This is not the hackneyed argument that we need to formulate elaborate “exit plans” before intervening abroad. As Mike Tyson famously said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Rather, our political leaders need the humility and discipline to stay focused on the security rationale for intervention, and to withdraw U.S. forces once they’ve done the job they were sent to do.

That’s what Biden is doing. “Our only vital interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: Preventing a terrorist attack on the American homeland,” he said this week.

Third, how we disengage from military interventions matters. The longer we stay, the greater the debt we incur to the people who risked their lives helping our soldiers, diplomats, aid workers, administrators and contractors do their jobs.

Here the president’s policy is harder to defend. “The likelihood that there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and own the whole country is highly unlikely,” Biden declared confidently at a July news conference.

He was wrong, and the precipitous U.S. withdrawal has left tens of thousands of Afghan allies in the lurch. The Taliban, however, has announced a general amnesty, and U.S. forces are airlifting thousands of refugees out of the country.

This is a hopeful sign that our long Afghan engagement may not have been in vain. If the Taliban have changed – and if they adhere to their pledge not to let their country again be used as a staging point for terrorist attacks on America and other democracies – the U.S. coalition may have accomplished its strategic objective after all.

In any case, the administration should pull out all stops to keep the airport escape hatch open. There is no shame in America cutting its losses in Afghanistan. But there is no honor in abandoning Afghans who helped and placed their trust in us. 

Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).