(Dobbs) Afghanistan: There Was No Good Choice
This is not a fairy tale. A disaster was inevitable.
Afghanistan is all but blowing up. The good people of the nation are going to suffer.
The ones who just want to protect their children and earn an income and put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads and live without violence and ensure the decent treatment of women. They’ll take the brunt of it as the Taliban take over. But once the U.S. decided to get out after 20 years of war— President Trump set it in motion, President Biden saw it through— the writing was already on the wall. The only thing that has changed is, that wall is falling faster than almost anyone thought.
Was our pullout wise? The Taliban now are running roughshod over the country, fighting fast and furiously. They have taken cities one after another. This morning they secured Afghanistan’s second largest and one of the nation’s key crossroads, Kandahar. A member of the Afghan parliament still stuck there told CNN, “Many soldiers surrendered and the rest fled.” It looks inevitable that within days they’ll take the capital, Kabul. Game over.
All of this has led to the United States turning its orderly military withdrawal into something more like an orderly rout. The laser focus now is getting both U.S. forces and U.S. diplomats out as safely as we can, as if anything there anymore is safe. My answer about the pullout, shaped by what I’ve seen in so much of the world, is this: sometimes there is just no happy ending to a story. If we stayed, then the toll of American casualties— already close to 25,000— was destined to rise, not to mention more money going down what still might have turned out to be a rabbit hole. If we left, as we’re doing, we’d end up with this.
There is no fairy tale ending in Afghanistan. There is no happy end to the story.
But it begs the question, why have we and our allies, from NATO to the Afghan government, lost? One part of the answer is that we ignored history. We ignored demeaning defeats imposed by comparatively crude fighters upon every army that tried to tame Afghanistan, from Alexander the Great to the British to the Soviet Union. We never asked, if they couldn’t do it, what makes us so different?
But another part of the answer, which applies to every invading army in Afghanistan’s bloody history, is that it’s hard to win when you’re fighting the enemy in his own neighborhood. I’ve seen it time and again, covering wars from Iran to Northern Ireland to Lebanon and, when the Soviets stormed in, to Afghanistan. Imagine that you’re chasing me into my neighborhood. I own the alleyways, I know the safe houses, I’ve got the friends.
You don’t.
Even if you have superior firepower and air power, as both the Soviet Union and then the United States did, that simple fact about advantage going to the locals doesn’t change. The French learned it the hard way in Vietnam, before we repeated their miscalculations and discovered it for ourselves.
Even the Afghan Army is collapsing in the face of a less sophisticated but still superior force. Reportedly as we geared up to leave, we left them well stocked. But there is more there than meets the eye. The nation is inundated with greedy corruption at high levels that has kept weapons and ammunition from reaching the combatants who needed them, instead making their profitable way to the black market… and into the hands of the Taliban. Paychecks for soldiers and police alike have been stalled for months— another consequence of the corruption— and as a result, government fighters have torn off their uniforms and returned to their faraway homes to rejoin and protect their families.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said earlier this week that Afghanistan’s security forces have the “equipment, numbers, and training to fight back.” But that was then, this is now. As that Afghan parliament member told CNN, soldiers are surrendering or fleeing. And the magazine Foreign Policy quotes Jonathan Schroden of the Center for Naval Analyses, who says, “They are running out of food and ammunition… calling for resupply, reinforcements, and air strikes, and not getting them at all in some cases. So then they have to run.”
Overall, I guess, the defense of a faltering government is not as strong a motivating force as fanaticism.
The saddest part now is, that fanaticism won’t end when the Taliban take over. It will control the culture. It will control the country.
If we had stayed, we might have held it off for a few years more. But all signs say, and our experience proves firsthand, we couldn’t hold it off forever.
There is no happy end to the story. No matter what we do.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe. He won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Paricularly when the U.S. President declares "it's not my problem" and goes on vacation.
Hey Greg, great piece showing there was no winning strategy. The one thing that nobody mentions is the fact that there are many deposits of rare earth minerals in Afghanistan. By leaving, we leave the door open for the Chinese or Russians to some day own the franchise. Steve Kaye formerly from Evergreen Colorado.