My Thoughts on Afghanistan- A Painful but Necessary Step, Like Dental Surgery
My thoughts on the news from Afghanistan.
I feel Biden was given a bad hand by his predecessors and played it as best as he could. The Afghan war was long-ago lost and likely unwinnable from day one; on top of that, the Pentagon and its generals seem to have botched things mightily and repeatedly lied about and hid unpleasant truths related to the conflict.
It was an ugly debacle, and Biden probably did the best thing he could do, which is fold rather than double down on an unwinnable war and what would have essentially become a colonial occupation if the situation had gone on in perpetuity. The pullout wasn’t handled well, but a lot of that seems to be the fault of lousy, overly-optimistic intelligence assessments regarding the situation. His speech struck me as a reasonably clear explanation to the public of why he took a difficult but necessary decision.
I don’t think anyone could describe this a stellar moment for Biden’s administration, but it was an adult one, painful but needed. I actually had dental surgery today and that wasn’t a lot of fun either, but if I had put it off for a year or three, that might have saved me short term expenses, stress, and pain but would have led to vastly more unpleasantness at some future point.
Politically, voters aren’t going to like seeing the chaos, but I’m not sure how much they’re going to care about the issue in a few months, and I don’t think anybody not still part of the dying and discredited neoconservative movement seriously thinks Afghanistan was a winnable conflict. It certainly doesn’t seem like our military establishment learned a heck of a lot from Vietnam. I’d also say this ending to the conflict firmly secures Bush Jr’s place as the worst President of the last fifty years or more. (Yes, I think his two disastrous wars caused more damage than Trump’s administration, even if Trump was probably the worst human being to ever sit in the Oval Office and managed to exacerbate the Afghanistan mess.) I do hope Biden can save as many Afghan refugees as possible: surely we owe Afghans who cooperated with America’s occupation that much.
The Middle East remains a turbulent hotspot, and in the future the United States can hopefully redefine its geopolitical interests in a more modest way. America’s credibility as a superpower is shot, but what else is new? I think we all know the days of a unipolar world are behind us, and the United States isn’t going to dominate the 21st Century the way it did the 20th.
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