We’ve learned some painful lessons this week. Painful to our soldiers and families who sacrificed so much. Painful to our national treasure. Painful to the citizens of Afghanistan. Painful and costly to the reputation of the United States of America.
But in my mind, the most painful part of all is, we already had learned most of these lessons before. I fear that if we forgot them then, we shall forget them again.
This catalogue doesn’t even cover them all.
One of the most obvious lessons is, as longtime AP foreign correspondent Mort Rosenblum wrote yesterday, “You can’t deliver democracy at gunpoint.” From my years covering conflicts, I’ll expand on that. We can’t always reshape the world in our image because whether we’re offering our culture, our modernization, our economics, or our governance, it’s not what everyone wants. During the revolution in Iran, when the U.S. was trying to prop up the Western-oriented Shah, people told me time and again, we don’t want what you have to offer. Their word for our way of life was “decadent.”
Another lesson is about corruption. For us, it’s a dirty word. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, corruption is a part of the culture. It can be the only path to improving one’s lot in life. Its rewards can be a measure of someone’s success. Coming in and trying to change that, however noble our intent, is a fool’s errand.
In The New York Times, Tom Friedman yesterday invoked an insightful lesson from the author of Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era: “We learn again from Afghanistan that although America can stop bad things from happening abroad, it cannot make good things happen.” Not always, anyway.
Then there’s a lesson about time. It is not always on our side. Afghanistan is hardly the first place in modern American warfare where we are dealing with an ancient society, a society where they measure their achievements in millennia, not months. A tribal society where if they have to, they can wait us out. It might take a year, it might take a generation, but while we are a quick-fix nation, they aren’t. They see time in the long context of their history. We don’t.
And of course, there’s a lesson about religion. In our society, religion is one factor in many people’s thinking. In societies like Afghanistan, it is sometimes the only factor. From the Crusades to the Holocaust to the short-lived caliphate of ISIS to the new Islamic Emirate of the Taliban, this lesson is nothing new.
Which leads me to a lesson about fanaticism. What we saw as the Afghan army crumbled was that fanaticism is a stronger motivator than a paycheck, that fanatics wield a more formidable weapon than firepower. Maybe in the wake of the Taliban’s triumph, an apt addendum to that is, even if people by our standards are primitive— Exhibit A: the Viet Cong— they aren’t inept. Two vital lessons we dare not forget.
This week there also were hard lessons that we’d already forgotten about our own government and how it operates. One is that even our highest leaders, despite information and intel that the rest of us don’t have, sometimes get it wrong. A journalist friend from ABC News wrote to me yesterday with an astute observation: “It is not always clear when officials don’t know the truth, when they can’t face the truth, or when they are lying to cover up the truth.”
What’s more, sometimes even if they’re not telling us flat-out lies, they’re only telling us half the truth. Up to and including the president. The upshot of this lesson is, neither Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, have a hammerlock on obfuscation and misinformation. Yes, we like best-case scenarios. But in a profession like mine, pessimism is baked in. So I believe that when national security is at stake— when people’s lives are at stake— it’s necessary to get the worst-case scenarios too.
We also are having to learn another lesson that we’ve learned before: when the United States makes a mistake, trust in us from overseas takes a hit. We’d already lost trust under Trump and we just lost more under Biden. We can get it back, but we should not automatically assume that it's there when we promise to defend threatened nations, or want to create a coalition of allies through the United Nations.
At the end of the day though, there’s a lesson to learn that overrides many others: it ain’t over til it’s over. It’s might be optimistic but not implausible to hope that we can safely extricate every American, and Afghan allies, from Afghanistan, although I worry deeply about the ones in the hinterlands, blindsided by our abrupt withdrawal. Right now we’re hearing happy-talk from the Taliban, its chief spokesman yesterday trying to assure the world that they will be more tolerant with women and won’t take revenge on citizens who sided and worked with us. He even pledged a “blanket amnesty.” But we cannot ignore their history, nor this morning’s dreadful reports where the picture on the ground doesn’t jive with their promises.
However, when they say they’ll treat people better than they used to, they might be driven by their needs: they need foreign recognition, they need foreign aid. So maybe they will treat rivals and dissidents and women better than before. What we have yet to see is, even if it’s true, how much better?
Finally, a lesson we dare not forget ever again. If we do go to war, just fight the war we came for. Then get out.
With history as our guide, someday we will have to learn that lesson again too. The hard way.
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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.
This is truly a brilliant perspective
As always, I appreciate your insightful take on situations like what’s happening in Afghanistan. I’m not sure how much we can rely on international pressure in the form of sanctions or withholding aid or condemnation of their actions to have an impact on the way the Taliban governs. They have sources of income from control of trade routes in the region that are very profitable for corrupt regimes.