(Dobbs) It's a "No-Win Situation" and We Are Stuck In It
The best we can hope for is not to lose more.
Afghanistan defines “a no-win situation.”
If you didn’t think so before, look at today’s barbaric attacks outside Kabul’s airport. Dozens dead, including U.S. Marines. If, as intelligence suggests, it was the Taliban’s rivals from the Afghanistan-based affiliate of ISIS, the war-weary nation is in store for more deprivation, more fighting, more death. And Joe Biden is in store for more condemnation than ever.
A no-win situation? This is Exhibit A.
I’ve said from the get-go, we had to leave. No-win left us no choice. Some had advocated keeping a small military force in place to perpetuate the stalemate. They point out that since Donald Trump promised the Taliban a “complete withdrawal” to secure the “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan,” no U.S. soldiers have been killed. But that’s only because of the agreement. Had President Biden abrogated it, that story would have changed and we’d have faced even more American casualties for what has amounted for several years now to an ill-fated effort to rebuild a nation that defies rebuilding.
So, as Biden says, for all practical purposes, he was boxed into Trump’s agreement.
The airport attacks also underscore the no-win futility of the peace plan’s potential to “prevent any group or individual… from using the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” The Taliban are no better at preventing terror attacks there than we’ve been. When he signed the pact, Trump proudly proclaimed, “We think we’ll be successful in the end.” Secretary of State Pompeo called it “the best opportunity for peace in a generation.”
Neither saw what a no-win situation it really was. There’s blame to go around.
Critics today now blame Biden for “blood on his hands.” In previous columns the past two weeks I have pilloried the president for two things. One is, our withdrawal was bound to be messy but if we’d truly planned as he said for “all contingencies”— if we’d truly had an exit strategy— it didn’t have to be this messy. But it was, because we broadcast our plans to the enemy, we left our allies unawares, we didn’t give adequate notice to citizens we’re still trying to evacuate, and we didn’t eviscerate the red tape for Afghans who, because they worked with us, suddenly had targets on their backs.
What’s more, Biden didn’t warn us about just how messy it could be. Not only for the victims of the attacks at the airport today, but for Americans and Afghans who haven’t yet gotten out and now have more to fear than ever. That erodes the trust many Americans have in him, and the trust many allies have in us.
But blood on Biden’s hands? He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. As I wrote ten days ago, “If we stayed, then the toll of American casualties was destined to rise, and we would have poured more money down what still might have turned out to be a bottomless hole. If we left, as we’re doing, we’d end up with this.”
Just last night I went to a talk by Chris Hill, who has been our ambassador to Iraq, South Korea, Poland, Albania, and Macedonia, as well as special envoy to Bosnia and head of the U.S. team for the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons. He is one of the smartest and most honest diplomats I know. In his talk he told the story of his own arrival in Iraq in 2009. After a missile-evasive corkscrew descent to the runway of Baghdad’s airport, helicopters were the best option to get him to his new embassy, but sandstorms made them unfeasible. So although deemed dangerous, he went in by motorcade. Evidently it was a white knuckles ride.
The point of his story, he said, was that this was six years after the U.S. invasion. Yet the road from the airport outside Iraq’s capital city still wasn’t safe enough to confidently move an American ambassador 13 miles to the embassy, situated in the relative safety of the Green Zone in the center of Baghdad.
History repeats itself. 20 years on from our invasion of Afghanistan, the even shorter distance in Kabul between the United States embassy and the airport— not five miles— is a death trap.
Forget about a no-win situation. What’s left to figure out now is, how do we finish getting out without losing more.
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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.
You are spot on Greg. And it must be said and heard widely. Too few in the working press with any memory as this is inevitable in such circumstances. I think history will treat Biden well for this end.