Everything about the situation in Afghanistan is bad, and the way these things work, “ownership” lands in the lap of whoever sits in the Oval Office at the time. So the collapse there will be in Joe Biden’s obituary.
But watching news reports the last few days I kept remembering first-person descriptions of the country and it’s people — especially its men — in New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins book, “The Forever War”. Assigned to the country shortly after the US’s post-9/11 invasion, Filkins was merciless in his assessment that the deeply conservative rural population being “recruited” to hunt down Al Qaeda was so impoverished, so illiterate and so feudal in their attachment to their local war lords that they were functionally useless. They had no loyalty whatsoever to far away Kabul, and given a couple hundred dollars they’d switch sides in a heartbeat and go off hunting men they had served with the day before.
The chances that that particular crowd — the essential core of the Taliban — would ever submit to America’s idea of “nation building” by, you know, embracing US-style democracy, by getting a dozen years of classroom education, by marrying a nice girl with a career of her own, by buying a big truck and by starting a family in the suburbs was significantly less than zero.
And that was before Filkins got to the gobsmacking corruption of the educated classes running the so-called government.
Put simply, civilizing Afghanistan, bringing it into the 21st century, was always mission impossible.
The stain on Biden right now is the abandonment of the thousands of Afghanis who served US interests over the past 20 years. That’s inexcusable.
But the the original idea of turning one of — if not the most backward and least educated countries in the world — into a version of Oman or some other “moderate” muslim theocracy was misguided from the get-go. And again, because in actual fact Afghanistan is more a name on a map than an actual, unified country.
Joe Biden will have ‘splainin’ to do when he makes his speech to the country sometime this week. But from what I’ve read, he accepted the CIA version of Afghanistan’s reality — profound ignorance, tribal loyalties, medieval religious zealotry — and not the military’s, who told everyone from George W* to Barack Obama to The Orange God King, (whose eye-roller of a “deal” with the Taliban last year set this collapse in motion), to Biden that progress was being made. That Afghani soldiers could be trained to fight off the Taliban, and protect their daughters, wives and mothers from the Taliban’s, um, “toxic masculinity.”
And maybe they would have if corruption wasn’t so bad they were rarely paid, fed adequately or the Taliban hadn’t offered them a better deal … which the CIA said was always a likely scenario.
The argument that the 3000 US troops left in Afghanistan as of this spring was so modest we should have just accepted leaving them there … forever … like we do in Korea and Germany, overlooks the fundamental fact that Afghanistan is barely even a country, and more a collection of mini-empires riddled with religious-inspired ignorance and overall, wildly more corrupt than First World colossi like Korea and Germany.
The scenes coming over the next weeks and months, particularly the degradation of Afghan women back into 13th century subjugation, will be very hard to digest. But if you’re inclined to believe societies get the leadership they deserve, it’s hard to argue that the Afghanis aren’t getting exactly what was always inevitable.