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 Kyle Smith | 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.
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.