Af-Gone-istan, Con't

As Spencer Ackerman notes, the Taliban is sweeping through Afghanistan now and will almost certainly have taken Kabul by the time our 20th anniversary observance of 9/11 rolls around next month. The Afghanistan debacle is a disaster twenty years in the making, a war we lost in slow motion more than 7,000 days ago, spanning four presidents and most of my adult lifetime, and we did this to ourselves. 

 

But it is the people of Afghanistan left behind to fall into the abyss of Taliban rule that will pay the ultimate price for our hubris as a nation.

THE U.S.’ TROOP WITHDRAWAL FROM AFGHANISTAN is almost at hand, as is the Taliban’s reconquest.

The Taliban have made eye-opening advances in the country’s northern provinces, which they were never able to subdue before the U.S. invasion. They began the week by overrunning or capturing six capitals in five days. They ended it by taking Herat, Lashkar Gar, and the crucial southern city of Kandahar. Zalmay Khalilzad, the longtime U.S. envoy, flew at the start of the week to Doha, Qatar, where the Taliban maintain a diplomatic office, to see if anything remains of the peace process – and, reportedly, whether the insurgents would be kind enough not to sack the U.S. embassy and cause a combination Saigon/Benghazi moment. “He will press the Taliban to stop their military offensive and to negotiate a political settlement,” the U.S. State Department said in their Monday announcement, “which is the only path to stability and development in Afghanistan.” In essence, Khalilzad is asking the Taliban not to win the war.

Nothing is inevitable. But it’s important to be clear about what an outright Taliban victory will mean: revenge killings, refugees and repression, including gendered repression. I’ve spent no serious time in Afghanistan – two months total out of 20 years, and never did I see the country beyond its Kabul, Khost, Paktia and Parwan provinces – so I don’t want to front like I have an emotional connection to it. That said, I met people in Afghanistan, people who treated me warmly when they didn’t have to, and I’m thinking of them with some dread.

When the U.S. withdraws from a war, the ensuing suffering of innocent people becomes, to the “national security” community, an argument for re-escalation. Think of the Yazidis stranded atop Mount Sinjar and the role that story played in returning the U.S. to war in Iraq. (And buy Samuel Moyn’s forthcoming book Humane for an excellent critical exploration of such issues.) We tend to conceive of this kind of suffering not as the result of the war, but as an alternative to it. That has a certain intuitiveness: you cease fighting in a place and disaster emerges there.

But it’s a mistake to think of the disaster as a departure from the war. Remember that the Taliban offered terms in December 2001. Donald Rumsfeld rejected them. Everything that followed made the Taliban stronger. The idea that continuing the war for a twenty-first year will make the Taliban weaker could only occur to an American Exceptionalism junkie in withdrawal. It’s easier to wish-cast about glorious wars that might have been than to cope with the fact that America’s works were an avoidable disaster that built nothing enduring except human suffering. It is far easier to consider the bloodletting that follows the U.S. presence to be merely the result of its absence. But to take that position is to wash the blood from American hands that waged the war, all the while claiming that the retreat is the contemptible hand-washing.

One of the consequences of waging Forever Wars is that they obscure what it means to lose a war. This is what it means: the Enemy wins. The Enemy’s victory will likely be terrible. Among the reasons it is so terrible is that the United States of America is an accessory to it.

Look at who the United States tries to save and who it doesn’t. The Biden administration is engaged in a valiant effort – one that did not happen during the brief interregnum between Iraq Wars – to resettle Afghans who worked for the U.S. military. It is a baseline obligation and a matter of honor.

It is also a moral floor that functions as a moral ceiling: The U.S. will save only those who lent it a service. It is not throwing open the doors to refugees who didn’t work for the United States. Those refugees are bound for, among other places, Iran, whose government, according to the United Nations refugee agency, “has consistently welcomed Afghans fleeing protracted conflict and violence for over 40 years.” The United States, which has fueled that protracted violence and conflict for over 40 years – first through the CIA-Saudi-Pakistani anti-Soviet coalition; then for the past 20 years’ war – cannot say the same.

 

What is coming is slaughter, butchery, and horror that has been two decades in the making. In every way we made this situation worse, and we've been making it worse really through seven presidents and four decades, and nearly my entire lifetime since 1979.

 

The butcher's bill we're going to see over the weeks and months ahead will be the fault of the Taliban, yes. But they will have 335 million American accessories.