There’s a bit of “deja vu all over again” to sitting down to blog this week, as the news is full of stories about the collapse of the US-backed regime in Afghanistan. I started blogging back in 2002, when that war was relatively new, and now it’s limping to an ugly and futile end.
I don’t really have anything all that useful to say about this, other than a kind of meta-skepticism about the pundits who are expressing dissatisfaction with the way the US withdrawal has been handled. That is, while I agree that the scene as it’s unfolding in and around Kabul looks absolutely horrible, I am not at all convinced that there was any plausible way for it to end less messily. This was pretty much always going to be something that happened slowly, then all at once— it’s nice to think that they could’ve done a more orderly withdrawal of the embassy staff and associated folks, but I basically agree with the argument a couple of people make in this NYT piece, that once it became clear the withdrawal really was happening, it was going to turn into a mad dash.
I think the fundamental problem here is that most everyone involved, from the American generals in charge, to the local officials in the Afghan government, to the pundits back in the US lambasting the decision, thought the withdrawal was a bluff. That after 20 years, there was no way we were really just going to pick up and leave. As a result, they didn’t put any real effort into making plans and preparations for the event until it was too late to do it in a calm and orderly manner. Even the rapid Taliban sweep through outlying parts of the country didn’t really convince anyone— if anything, it seems to have been taken as an obvious reason why the US was just about to delay the final departure, any minute now.
This is an absolute shitshow, and I hope they pack as many of those crowds of people on the runways in Kabul into C-17s as they can fit, and sort them out somewhere else. It was always going to be a shitshow, though, regardless of who was in charge and what sort of plan they had. As noted in this Twitter thread, “It's Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever, there is no third team.”
And, of course, the whole Afghanistan project was misbegotten from nearly the start. I’m kind of in the Noah Smith camp of thinking the initial attack to get Al Qaeda was ugly but necessary, but that the idea we were going to fundamentally transform the country always strained credibility. Once the Bush administration shifted their focus to Iraq, it became a sad, sick joke that dragged on for two decades.
As you can probably tell, I don’t really have anything useful to contribute to the discourse here, but at the same time, it’s the kind of topic that I can’t not say anything about. This sucks in just about every way it’s possible for a situation to suck, but I don’t believe that there was genuinely a better option available. Staying longer wasn’t going to make anything better; it’s past time the US was gone from there.
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I’ll try to have something more useful tomorrow.