What Else Was Supposed To Happen?

Earlier this week, the Taliban retook Kabul, negating a near twenty-year occupation in a little over 90 days. Naturally, Biden is facing intense criticism over this as we haven't had an embarrassment like this since the Fall of Saigon in 1975. So amidst all this embarrassment and humiliation I ask just a simple question:

What else was supposed to happen?

If your answer is an orderly retreat then what you need for that is a continued U.S. troop presence working alongside Afghan forces putting up a coordinated defense against the Taliban offensive. At the time of our withdrawal, we had 2500 troops in country. That all the major cities surrendered almost immediately shows that the Taliban laid the groundwork to accept them. Also, if you want an orderly surrender from an advancing enemy, you have to work that out with them beforehand. Tell me, what do you think would go over better: what's happening now, or Biden submitting a formal U.S. surrender asking the Taliban for terms for it to withdraw in an orderly fashion.

 

"But we should get people who helped us out of the country," I hear people say as if the last year of the government leaving its own citizens out in the cold wasn't indicative of anything. If the government is willing to watch over 600,000 of its own people die without lifting a finger, it isn't going prioritize poor people on the other side of the world either. Never mind the fact that getting people out of Afghanistan brings up the other question of where are they going to go. Tucker Carlson is already pushing the propaganda that bringing Afghan refugees here is a existential threat to the United States, so. This country isn't exactly fond of refugees, especially ones we created.It makes us look  bad, which we hate more than anything else.

 

If your answer is that we should've stayed until the job was done, then show me one time in world history, let alone our own, where one country under military occupation developed the political and social structures to exist under its own self-determination. Japan, West Germany, and South Korea are the only examples that come to mind but even then they don't readout apply here. Japan and West Germany didn't have coordinated armed resistance movements led by their deposed governments for the entirety of our occupation. South Korea doesn't apply either since most of its progress came after they overthrew the military dictatorship we installed to rule over them. 

But let's say that the whole nation building thing is possible, what does that look like? Seriously, how do you know the job is finished? Leaving out the Taliban, the Afghan national government is riddled with hilarious levels of corruption, leaving it lethally incapable of providing public services to its population. So if the mission was to create a government in our own image, we succeeded.

Or, maybe "staying until the job is done" means we stay until the Taliban is militarily defeated. What makes that complicated is that Pakistan gives the Taliban money and a place of refuge. So even if they lose battles in Afghanistan, the Taliban has a safe haven to go and regroup to which is exactly what they've been doing since we abandoned the war when we invaded Iraq. What then, is the plan for Pakistan? Do we invade it, sanction them, what? Keep in mind that Pakistan is also (ostensibly) one of our allies so anything we do there comes at the cost of making any agreements between the Taliban and Pakistani government even stronger which is why no president has done anything about the situation. 

So what we have is an enemy we can't afford to defeat on one side and a puppet government that's as self-sufficient as a ventriloquist dummy on the other. There can't be any negotiation between the two because for negotiations to work, it has to happen between equal participants. The Afghan national government never brought anything to the table because any legitimacy it had came from our military. Why would the Taliban honor any agreement in this situation? Why would they allow an enemy to hold onto territory and power when they could just take everything once we walked out the door?

Leaving aside all these questions, how is any of this surprising when for the last ten years we've told ourselves we had to stay in Afghanistan is because if we left, the Taliban would take over the country in less than a month. This was the message from both the Obama and Trump administrations so why is everyone acting like this is the first time we're hearing how what happened could happen. We don't have to live up to the stereotype of the ignorant American loudmouth every single time. 

What's happening in Afghanistan is happening because there was never any plan for what we were gonna do once we got there. We knew we were going to blow people up but aside from that, there was never a grand strategy from the Bush (or Obama, or Trump) administration defining what the goal of the war was or what victory even looked like. We've spent the last twenty years doing the equivalent of spinning our wheels while we tried to figure out what it was all those people were dying for. 

It's important to understand this because it tells us that we lost Afghanistan decades ago. The Taliban taking control of the country was inevitable as far back as 2007-2008. Nothing we did changed this reality which is perhaps the hardest thing for us to come to grips with because it's an ingrained truth of culture that because we have the most expensive military in the world that means we have the best military in the world. But the only thing that money does is generate mountains of hardware doesn't need and can't use. So it's no surprise that the people putting this equipment to its most effective use are the Taliban fighters posing in American military gear to rub their victory in our faces. 

So what now? CNN is running articles about how Afghanistan is home to literal trillions of dollars worth of minerals to power new technologies. This isn't new information, of course, and one of the many frustrations of our occupation was our complete inability to effectively extract Afghanistan's natural resources that weren't poppy seeds for the global heroin trade. There are others who are worried  the fallout of our retreat will embolden China to invade Taiwan or Russia doing evil Russia things. There's a huge fear that the retreat is making us look weak on the world stage which is something we can't afford. 

Except we look weak because we are weak. But it's not the retreat that makes us that way. What makes us weak is our suicidal refusal to recognize let alone admit what our limits are. This causes us to engage in not one but two decades-long wars that left nothing but failure in their wake. It leaves us with a military whose main concern is being a public trough for defense companies to feed at than an organization concerned with national defense. 

We can't accept that the utter collapse of the Afghan government isn't so much a reflection of our complete failures, it has to be the Afghan people's fault for being so weak that they wouldn't defend themselves or their country. It's out of the question that all the time we spent there left the Afghan people with a government so actively hostile to its people that it wasn't a government anyone would risk dying for. We have to push the failure of Afghanistan as far away from us as possible because we refuse to process that we can fail so completely. The thing about that though, is that the world exists outside what we tell ourselves. And maybe, just once, it'd be good for us to recognize that the world where we do everything right and have the best intentions when we get it wrong isn't the world we actually live in.