Tag Archives: #Afghanistan

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The failure in Afghanistan was a failure of understanding

American helicopters evacuating personnel from US embassy in Kabul.

I would love to blame the debacle in Afghanistan on President Joe Biden, I really would. And he, as the Commander-in-Chief, is certainly the one responsible for the extremely chaotic way in which we evacuated. The images of American helicopters over Kabul is terribly reminiscent of our copters trying to rescue personnel off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975.

But the sad fact is that this was more like Vietnam than anyone wants to say.

The younger President Bush had little choice: after the attacks which brought down the World Trade Center, we had to respond, and the only possible response was going after al Qaeda, holed up in Afghanistan. Devastating al Qaeda was a mission accomplished relatively quickly, as was smashing the Taliban government which sheltered them and would not turn the al Qaeda people over to us.

But President Bush, and so many other Americans, had seen to what the Taliban had reduced the Afghan people, with women reduced to little more than the property of men, and girls denied education, all to adhere to a fundamentalist form of Islam that I would like to say resembles the 9th century, but, in truth, isn’t that far away from present day Saudi Arabia or Iran.

President Bush, enamored as he was of the arguments of Natan Sharansky, the Israeli politician who wrote The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, believed that replacing the Afghan government with someone with a Western education and more Western outlook, could provide the experience with Western liberalism that Mr Sharansky believed would lead people who had lived under tyranny to so love the experience of freedom and democracy that they would just naturally take to it.

Didn’t work, did it?

It didn’t work in Iraq, either, because Western liberalism is more than just a political system, but a culture, something people need to feel naturally, something in which people need to be reared.

The experience in Iraq, and Afghanistan, was the experience of Islam, in a culture of tribalism. While Iraq’s somewhat more modern government had tamped down some tribalism, it soon became apparent, after Saddam Hussein was deposed, that the local culture of Tikrit, from which Mr Hussein had come, wanted to reassert itself. Remember; Iraq was not a ‘natural’ nation, born out of historical development, but a creation of the British Foreign Office.

We saw that not that long ago, when the plight of the Kurds, divided between Turkey, Iraq and Iran, came to public attention.

Afghanistan? Another faux nation, a collection of tribal regions called a nation-state by a Western system which sees only nation-states as the mechanism for governmental organization. And we have never been able to understand tribalism, understand relatively small groups governed by a leader, whether hereditary or a ‘strongman.’ What concepts we did have of ‘strongman’ government came as the result of political moves based frequently on socialism, on politics, rather than the extended family structures of the Middle East. ‘Strongman’ governments, in our conceptual framework, were governments of thugs like Fidel Castro, not tribal leadership.

What we also failed to understand was the concept of war. We have had many wars in our history, but have lost our way since 1945. Our Allies and we defeated Nazi Germany and Japan by killing and killing and killing some more, and by destroying their countries’ infrastructure and industry to the point where they simply could not fight anymore.

We killed and maimed their fighting aged men, but we did more than that. We killed and maimed civilians, including the younger boys who would eventually grow up to fighting age. Not only did we destroy their militaries, we devastated the next group of soldiers as well.

For awhile we tried to cloak that, targeting railways, transportation hubs, and the industries which produced war materiel, but let’s tell the truth here: many of those bombs fell on the residential areas surrounding those legitimate military targets, and fell on schools, hospitals, and churches as well. In the end, we gave up even pretending, as we launched firebombing raids on Dresden and Kobe and Tokyo.

Somehow, some way, those lessons were lost. We wanted to wage war more nicely, to target enemy soldiers but avoid non-combatant civilians, and we did that just as warfare stopped being nation against nation, but with one side being guerrilla fighters, fighters who not just blended in and hid among the civilian population, but who were fed and clothed and hidden by them. The guerrilla fighter depends upon the civilian population to provide him not with massive supplies, flown in on C-17s as the United States Army does, but on providing them with one or two meals at a time.

In effect, we emasculated the war-fighting ability of our Army, by changing the rules of engagement in a way which favored the guerrillas. Then, on top of that, we assigned the Army, an organization which is supposed to specialize in nation destroying, the mission of nation building.

We should have learned the lesson in Vietnam: that stuff does not work.

So, what had we in Afghanistan? A fool’s errand is what we had!

My older daughter spent the fall of 2017 at Bagram Air Base. She told us — after she got home; she was supposed to be in Kuwait, but knew she’d worry her mother to death if she told us she was in Afghanistan! — that she was startled the first couple of nights, as she heard stuff go boom. Apparently the Taliban was lobbing mortar shells, which the military called IDF — indirect fire — into the buffer zone surrounding the base. It never hurt anyone or anything. After a few days, she learned how to sleep through it.

But think about that: the fall of 2017 was after we had been in Afghanistan for sixteen years, and we couldn’t even secure the ground around the air base enough that the Taliban couldn’t get within mortar range of the buffer zone. Seven years under the younger President Bush, eight years under Barack Hussein Obama, and a year under President Trump, and we hadn’t secured even the area around Kabul.

By then we were training Afghan forces to defend their own country, but we never called it ‘Afghanization,’ because it was too close to ‘Vietnamization,’ and we all know how that worked out.

Afghanization was to turn the country back over to the Afghanis. Well, we’re doing just that, and they are getting back exactly what they had before we went in.

We can blame the chaos of the withdrawal on the current Commander-in-Chief, and he is responsible for the ineptness we see, but the truth is that we were never in a position to do anything but withdraw and leave the country to the Afghans. Other than the hunt for Osama bin Laden, that could have been done during the Bush Administration. President Obama did pull us out of Iraq, but not Afghanistan. President Trump campaigned on getting us out of Afghanistan, but even he delayed things with a scheduled departure date of May of 2021, which would have been, he had hoped, during his second term.

     Oops!

And so it fell to President Biden. Perhaps President Trump would have handled it a bit better, but there’s no way to know. But the failure of the Afghan mission was a failure of understanding, from the younger President Bush all the way down to today. Western civilization cannot be imposed on Muslims, and especially cannot be imposed on Muslims who want to live in the 7th century.

There is, of course, some fault to lay at the stinky feet of President Biden.

    This is Joe Biden’s Jimmy Carter moment

    By | August 15, 2021 | 9:58 PM EDT

    The utterly nauseating and unnecessary abandonment of Afghanistan to its fate recalls a similar humiliation at the hands of Islamist radicals in the Jimmy Carter administration.

    President Biden’s profligate spending policies are unleashing inflation that is sparking voter distrust so noticeable that even NPR is sounding the alarm.

    He is begging OPEC to come up with more oil while interfering with US production. He announced barely a month ago, with great confidence, “The Taliban is not the South — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability.

    “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

    Our president comes across as weak, meek, ineffectual, incompetent and confused. (Momentarily confusing South and North Vietnam doesn’t even make the list of the top 100 senior moments we’ve seen this year from this near-octogenarian, despite the fact that his staff is keeping him hidden to a degree with little if any precedent in the past half-century.)

Saigon evacuation, April 30, 1975.

There’s a little more at the link, but the title is a bit of a misnomer: while the author is attempting to link President Biden’s failures with Jimmy Carter’s, it should be remembered that Gerald Ford was President of the United States when we last had helicopters plucking people away from an embassy. Given that President Ford had been thoroughly hamstrung by a Congress full of Democratic hatred — and Joe Biden was part of that, in the United States Senate at the time — and could give virtually none of the aid that President Richard Nixon had promised should North Vietnam violate the Paris Peace Accords, it’s pretty difficult to blame Mr Ford, but the images are still there.

Vietnam was not a Middle Eastern Islamic state, but, in a way, it wasn’t that different: the Vietnamese people were not Westerners, and the notion that we could convert them to Western democratic thought, and they would come to love it, was ludicrous. South Vietnam had a succession of corrupt leadership in Nguyễn Cao Kỳ and Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. While the Vietnamese people might not have loved the Communists, at least they didn’t see Ho Chi Minh as corrupt or the puppet of foreigners.

In the end, this is the real failure of Mr Sharansky’s, and President Bush’s thinking. No matter how much the prospect of democracy might appeal to some people not used to it, they don’t like being governed by those they see as foreign puppets. No matter how nice a guy George Bush was, or how magnanimous Richard Nixon tried to be, they were still foreign white men. Throw in cultures completely different from Western democracy — dare I say white Western democracy? — and the situation becomes virtually impossible.

We were seduced by the fact that Japan and the Republic of Korea became democracies familiar to us, but it has to be remembered: they were devastated by World War II, and the latter by the Communist invasion of 1950, and had lost not only their entire leadership class, but much of the next generation of young men to grow up. We were never willing to subject Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, to the level of destruction which was rained down on Japan.

Democracy and freedom have to develop as natural parts of the culture, and one thing is certain: it will never develop to anything close to what Westerners would call real democracy in Islamic cultures.

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It’s time to leave Afghanistan

One of the better, but sadly more neglected, blogs out there is Donald Douglas’ American Power:

Afghanistan Bomb Attack on Girls Highlights Threat to Women’s Education

by Donald Douglas | May 10, 2021

Things are going badly in Afghanistan.

And at almost 20 years, I doubt the U.S. could do more to secure the country, besides sending in 500,000 troops and just take the whole place over. We’re still in Germany, Japan, and South Korea, for darned sake, and as it is the U.S. would probably defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion, although who knows that “China Joe” Biden has up his sleeves? Both China and Russia are major threats, and it’d be nice to know exactly which country — or countries — hacked the East Coast power grid a few days ago. But it probably doesn’t matter, because this kind of thing is going to happen more often, a lot more often, and the Dems probably do not care.

In any case, I’m not against the Afghan pullout, though I’ve also thought the most noble element of our intervention in that country has been our great earlier success at improving human rights, especially for women.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Afghanistan Bomb Attack on Girls Highlights Threat to Women’s Education

Kabul residents on Sunday buried dozens of schoolgirls killed by explosions outside a school

By Sune Engel Rasmussen and Ehsanullah Amiri | May 9, 2021 | 11:54 AM EDT

KABUL—Zainab Maqsudi, 13 years old, exited the library and walked toward the main gate of the Sayed Shuhada school to go home on Saturday when she was blown backward by an explosion. When she stood up, the air was thick with dust and smoke, and she was surrounded by shattered glass. 

“Suicide attack!” everyone yelled, she said, reflecting how common such attacks have become in Afghanistan. She noticed she was bleeding from her arms. An older sister took her to hospital.

“I’m not sure if I will go back to school when I recover,” Zainab, who is in seventh grade, said from her hospital bed Sunday, with her parents by her side. “I don’t want to get hurt again. My body shakes when I think about what happened.”

Preventing girls like Zainab from going to school was the likely goal of the terrorists behind Saturday’s attack in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Kabul. Widening access to women’s education was one of the most tangible achievements of the 20-year U.S. presence in Afghanistan—progress that could be reversed once American forces leave the country later this year.

Afghan authorities on Sunday raised the official death toll from Saturday’s attack that targeted schoolgirls at Sayed Shuhada to 53. It was the latest assault on the area’s mostly Shiite Hazara minority, which in recent months has suffered horrific attacks by Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate, including on a maternity ward and an education center.

No group has claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack. The Afghan president blamed the Taliban. The Taliban denied responsibility and condemned the bombings, accusing Islamic State of being behind them.
On Sunday, residents of the Afghan capital spent the day burying dozens of schoolgirls on a hillside on the outskirts of the capital. Hospitals across the city treated dozens of injured, including several who remained in intensive care.

We went into Afghanistan because the Afghan government, then controlled by Mullah Mohammed Omar and the Taliban, were providing sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, after the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. We quickly routed al Qaeda and pushed the Taliban out of power in the government, but we were never able to wipe out the thought and philosophy behind the Taliban and its very conservative religious views. We have been in Afghanistan for 19½ years now, which means that there are Taliban fighters who hadn’t even been born when United States troops moved in.

Natan Sharansky wrote The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, a book that the younger President Bush purportedly came to like and appreciate for its arguments. The amazon.com link says this about Mr Sharansky:

Natan Sharansky believes that the truest expression of democracy is the ability to stand in the middle of a town square and express one’s views without fear of imprisonment. He should know. A dissident in the USSR, Sharansky was jailed for nine years for challenging Soviet policies. During that time he reinforced his moral conviction that democracy is essential to both protecting human rights and maintaining global peace and security.

Sharansky was catapulted onto the Israeli political stage in 1996. In the last eight years, he has served as a minister in four different Israeli cabinets, including a stint as Deputy Prime Minister, playing a key role in government decision making from the peace negotiations at Wye to the war against Palestinian terror. In his views, he has been as consistent as he has been stubborn: Tyranny, whether in the Soviet Union or the Middle East, must always be made to bow before democracy.

Drawing on a lifetime of experience of democracy and its absence, Sharansky believes that only democracy can safeguard the well-being of societies. For Sharansky, when it comes to democracy, politics is not a matter of left and right, but right and wrong.

This is a passionately argued book from a man who carries supreme moral authority to make the case he does here: that the spread of democracy everywhere is not only possible, but also essential to the survival of our civilization. His argument is sure to stir controversy on all sides; this is arguably the great issue of our times.

Sadly, democracy, a think President Bush believed all people would want once they had the chance to experience it, has not proven that it can stand against a hostile culture, at least not 1,400 years of an Islamic culture which is hostile to its ideas. Dr Douglas wrote that he “thought the most noble element of our intervention in that country has been our great earlier success at improving human rights, especially for women,” but it has become clear that we have improved human rights only via military force; once our military force leaves — and it is already mostly gone — the Afghan government we have imposed and supported will fall, the Taliban will return, and the era of girls being denied education and women reduced to third class status will return.

Theodore Roosevelt once said, “If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” Well, we never had the Taliban by the balls; we tried to ‘educate’ the Afghans, but it never really took. As we previously noted, neoconservatives like Max Boot seem to want American troops to stay in Afghanistan, practically forever. When Dr Douglas said that he “doubt(s) the U.S. could do more to secure the country, besides sending in 500,000 troops and just take the whole place over,” I doubt we could do such even with half a million troops. The only way to truly defeat the Taliban is how our allies and we defeated Germany and Japan: we killed so many of their fighting-aged men, wounded millions more, and thoroughly cowed the boys too young to fight but growing up, we destroyed their economy and their infrastructure, we rained down so much fire and steel that Germany and Japan simply couldn’t continue to fight. We were not willing to do that in Korea, we were not willing to do that in Vietnam, and we were not willing to do that in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The British could not control the Afghanis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Soviets couldn’t control the Afghanis in the late 20th century, and we can’t control them in the st. That their religion and tribalism and culture do not go along with our ideas of what human rights ought to be is, sadly, irrelevant. After 19½ years, there’s really nothing more we can do that we haven’t already done, and we have been able to do far less than President Bush had hoped.

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The neoconservatives always want US troops somewhere! We have been in Afghanistan for 19½ years now; what can we accomplish by staying longer?

Being older than dirt — I turn 68 this coming Earth Day — I can remember the politics in the United States over the War in Vietnam. #NeverTrumper and neoconservative Max Boot, a Washington Post columnist, knows something about it as well.

Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal could be the first step to a Taliban takeover

Opinion by Max Boot | April 13, 2021 | 4:18 PM EDT

For South Vietnamese refugees, this month will always be known as “Black April.” In 1973, President Richard M. Nixon had concluded a one-sided peace deal with North Vietnam that led the United States to pull all of its troops out of South Vietnam while allowing the Communists to maintain 150,000 of their troops there. Hanoi began to violate the Paris Peace Accords as soon as they were signed, while the war-weary United States cut back aid to the South.

The result was a North Vietnamese offensive that resulted in the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. The U.S. military had to hastily evacuate American personnel and some of the South Vietnamese they had worked most closely with. But hundreds of thousands of our allies were confined to brutal reeducation camps and hundreds of thousands more took to the seas as “boat people.” Many died while trying to flee.

President Biden was already in the Senate when this tragedy transpired. Yet he risks a repeat of this fiasco with his fateful decision, revealed Tuesday in The Post, to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11.

Mullah Mohammed Omar

Every bit of what Mr Boot wrote is true, but what of it? When the United States pulls its last 3,500 troops out of Afghanistan, the Taliban will take over in a matter of months, if not sooner. But we have been in Afghanistan for 19½ years now, and we haven’t wiped out the Taliban, and are not willing to wipe out the Taliban. There are Taliban fighters out there, right now, who weren’t even born when the United States invaded to roust out and destroy al Qaeda, and the Taliban, because Mullah Omar and the Taliban were protecting al Qaeda. What can we accomplish there if we stay, the way the esteemed Mr Boot wants, that we couldn’t in the 19½ years we have already been there?

The ancient Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus attributed to the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus the expression, “They make a solitude, and call it peace,” frequently expressed as “They make a desert and call it peace.”

The expression was used a lot during the War in Vietnam. Another came from an old political science professor of mine, Ernest Yanarella, concerning the Viet Cong: “They were more willing to die for their country than we were willing to keep killing them.”

And it seems to be true in Afghanistan as well: the only way to truly defeat the Taliban is how our allies and we defeated Germany and Japan: we killed so many of their fighting-aged men, wounded millions more, and thoroughly cowed the boys too young to fight but growing up, we destroyed their economy and their infrastructure, we rained down so much fire and steel that Germany and Japan simply couldn’t continue to fight.

We did not do that to the Vietnamese Communists, and we have not done it to the Taliban, because we just don’t want to keep killing and killing and killing. But if we are not willing to do that, there is no other alternative that gives us some sort of victory in Afghanistan.

It’s time to leave. Heck, it was time to leave ten years ago! There is simply nothing to be gained by staying.

So, yes, the Taliban will almost certainly win; so what? They will ban girls from being educated, they will set up a ridiculously repressive Islamist regime, they will kill their enemies and cow those who remain alive. But at some point we have to say, that’s their business, and not ours.