gracchusdixit

For the better part of three thousand years, the bleak yet beautiful land we now call Afghanistan has enticed, entrapped, and ultimately humiliated one ambitious conquering power after another.  The United States of America is merely the latest in a long list of hubristic nations to see its vainglorious pretensions laid low by Afghanistan’s daunting terrain and deadly history.  

As the last Americans on the ground scurry to escape before the curtain finally drops on a twenty-year, trillion-dollar war, we leave behind nothing but blood and ignominy.  Thousands of Afghans who believed our promises have been betrayed.  Thousands of American families, whose daughters and sons were told they were fighting for a noble purpose, will be left with nothing but flag-draped coffins.  Friends and foes around the world  will see in this debacle dispositive proof—as if any more were needed—that the United States is neither the great power it pretends to be nor the trustworthy ally it claims to be.  

If there is any small consolation in this, it is the fact that we are not the first great power to have made the colossal mistake of thinking that we could march into Afghanistan and leave in any condition but disgrace.  And if history is a guide, we will probably not be the last.  

The Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great three millennia ago may have been the first to see its ambitions interred in the land often dubbed “the graveyard of empires”.  Having subdued most of the Middle East, the Persians looked down their long noses at Bactria, as Afghanistan was then called, as a trivial side-show.  And so it was, until Alexander of Macedon came along.  As the Persians were tied up trying to tame the ever-quarrelsome Bactrians on their eastern border, wily Alexander attacked them from the west, and, in a series of lightning-quick battles, toppled the Persians before they knew what hit them.  

Alexander the Great’s military acumen, alas, was not accompanied by an equal dose of common sense.  Not satisfied with defeating the Persians, the Great Man decided to push on to the fabled land of India.  This meant slogging and fighting his way through the pitiless mountains valleys of the Hindu Kush.  Alexander and his army barely got out of alive, and by the time they did reach India, the Great Man had a mutiny on his hands.  For the first time in his brief but meteoric career, Alexander was forced to give way.  He turned tail and headed home.  

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was the British who invaded Afghanistan—three times—with the aim of defending India, the “jewel” in their imperial crown.  The first invasion was an unmitigated disaster.  The second, intended to avenge the first, led to a symbolic military victory but no practical results.  And the third ended in a humiliating stand-off, whereby the Afghans gained their complete independence in exchange for a promise to leave India alone.  The damage done to the prestige of the British Raj was incalculable.

Sixty years later, it was Russia’s turn.  A communist government came to power in Afghanistan and introduced a series of political, economic, and social changes,  Among the latter was the novel proposition that women ought to have the same rights as men.  This was  enormously popular in urban centers like Kabul and Kandahar, but in the rural hinterlands, where attitudes on such matters haven’t changed since the middle ages, the reaction was nothing less than furious.  A rebellion broke out, stirred up by the people we now call the Taliban, and the new government soon found itself in trouble.

When Russia stepped in to support its friends in Kabul, the United States saw an opportunity to poke a stick in the eye of its existential foe.  The CIA began to shower the Taliban with money, weapons, and covert assistance.  It paid off.  After ten bloody years, the Russians were forced to withdraw—a humiliation that played no small role in the final collapse of the entire Soviet system.

Fast forward 30 years, and the United States of America decided that Afghanistan’s daunting history was not going to deter an “exceptional” nation like ours from flexing its muscles.   On the pretext of hunting Osama Bin Laden, we launched our own invasion.   When Bin Laden was finally discovered and killed, not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, you might imagine that we would have taken the opportunity to proclaim “mission accomplished” and gracefully withdraw.  Instead, for reasons that no one has ever been able to explain coherently, we decided that our “mission” was now going to be the creation of a new nation state, modeled along the lines of our own.  There was only one problem:  most Afghans didn’t care—for the simple reason that we never consulted them in the first place.

For more than a decade, we squandered countless lives and immeasurable treasure in an attempt to impose our “values” on an altogether different society, one that was either hostile or at the very least unable to adopt those values for practical or historical reasons.  In the process, we pitted the most powerful military force on the planet against the rag-rag band of fundamentalist guerrilla fighters we had once supported.  Though never more than 80,000 in number and outmatched by every measure of technology, training, weaponry, and firepower, the Taliban defeated the United States of America and did so decisively.  Once we could no longer deny this reality and decided to cash in our chips, the papier-mâché government we had installed in Kabul promptly collapsed, and its corrupt president fled the country, taking with him a carload of cash.

The tragic dénouement of our twenty-year foray into Afghanistan is not a “strategic withdrawal;” it is not a “choice” made for want of sufficient “political will;” and it is not a reluctant nod to public opinion.  These are euphemisms peddled by generals and politicians, pundits and journalists.  We are leaving, because we suffered an utter and complete defeat. 

For years, our military leaders assured us (as they invariably do) that victory was just around corner and could be achieved if only we spent more money, deployed more troops, had more patience, and let “the professionals” do their jobs.  This is the same fairy tale told by the four-star incompetents who presided over the catastrophes of Vietnam and Iraq.  Even now, it is being recycled, retroactively, by an assortment of former generals who decline to take any responsibility for the calamity they played no small role in causing.

Even so, it would be unfair to lay all the blame at the feet of the generals.  They prosecute wars and may be guilty of doing so with exorbitant overconfidence, but they aren’t the ones who start wars in the first place.  That dishonor belongs to politicians and, in no small measure, to the American people themselves.  It is the American people who are ever ready to wave the flag, beat the drum, and parrot jingoistic poppycock—until, of course, their kids start dying and their taxes go up.   As a people, Americans are the very embodiment of Tom Paine’s “summer soldiers and sunshine patriots”.  

If any good is to come from this particularly shameful episode in our generally shameful history, let it come in the form of four simple lessons:

First, no matter how righteous we imagine ourselves to be, we have no right to impose our values on other nations or peoples without their participation and consent.  If we truly believe in the worth of those values, the only way to persuade others to adopt them is to set a virtuous example.  Military conquest is neither persuasive nor virtuous. 

Second, the vast sums we spend on our military establishment and the never-ending “war on terror” are a grotesque waste, not only of money but of moral authority.  For all our technological prowess, the armed forces of the United States have proved themselves to be remarkably incapable of winning wars; our intelligence agencies keep getting the most basic (and obvious) things wrong; and the “war against terror” is an out-and-out scam.  Climate change, COVID-19, Republican governors who seek to ban the wearing of masks, and gun-toting domestic terrorists like those who attacked the Capitol on January 6th are far more dangerous to the average American than ISIS or the Taliban will ever be.

Third, the most terrible decision any nation can make is the decision to wage war.  The only possible justification for that decision is self-defense in the face of imminent danger.  Anything else—”preemption,” the protection of our “interests,” the preservation of our “values”—is immoral, and those who invoke such excuses for slaughtering other human beings are little more than war criminals.

Finally, let us set aside the self-congratulatory myth that we are an “exceptional” nation and “indispensable” to the safety and security of the world.  All that is rhetorical eyewash, designed to obscure the sometimes brutal, often lawless, and rarely just imposition of our economic and political interests on those unwilling to play by our “rules”.  Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has been nothing less than a global hegemon, running an empire in all but name.  If our humiliating defeat in Afghanistan teaches us nothing else, it should teach us that the time has come for that empire to bite the dust.