We couldn’t save Afghanistan. But we can save Afghanis.
As Kabul falls, Canada and the United States have to lead fleeing Afghans to safety.
Thanks for subscribing to Rigid Thinking. This is a free post available for all subscribers. For even more content, plus the ability to leave comments, why not check out my paid subscription plans?
A lot of journalists were waiting a long time to get a picture like this:
After twenty years of trying to make Afghanistan a functioning country, I think the time had come for American troops to withdraw. Well, I thought that before I saw just how quickly the Taliban took back city after city, and are marching into Kabul as I write this.
Remember when there was a risk Kabul could fall within 90 days? Technically, they were right. A few days is less than ninety.
So who is responsible for this disaster? There’s a lot of blame to go around.
I blame George W. Bush for not pulling out of Afghanistan in early 2002, after the Taliban and Al-Qaida were delivered a message not to try another 9/11, and then starting a war on another front in Iraq. I blame Barack Obama for continuing to double down even after it was clear that things were going wrong. I blame the Orange Idiot for inexplicably trying to make a peace deal with the medieval thugs of the Taliban, and I blame Joe Biden for botching the withdrawal even worse than his predecessor might have done.
I also blame America’s “ally” Pakistan for its not so covert support for the Taliban, and I blame the West’s Afghan “allies” for their corruption and incompetence.
And I blame myself. I was all in on invading and rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq - check my old blog archives circa 2003 - and I wasn’t willing to listen to those who said it was a bad idea. Seeing socialists and peace activists and paleocons and isolationists and radical libertarians vindicated is almost as tough a pill to swallow as the fall of Afghanistan itself.
The only people I don’t blame are the people who actually fought this war. American servicemen and women and their allies, including several thousand Canadians, were given a near-impossible task and actually did it exceptionally well. Even a relatively small garrison of American troops was able to keep the Taliban at bay until the withdrawal began.
They didn’t lose Afghanistan. We did.
A common refrain I’m seeing on social media is that Afghanistan was always a lost cause, because “they want people like the Taliban in power.” My response is that there are many thousands of Afghans trying desperately to flee the country so they don’t have to live under the Taliban.
The American and coalition presence was long enough for an entire generation to grow up under a relatively free society and functioning state. Back in the day, I remember being moved when I read about ordinary Afghans being able to do things we take for granted which weren’t allowed under the Taliban, like watching movies with their friends.
This younger generation doesn’t want to live under a strict theocracy. Some will fight back. Many more will get out. And we should welcome them.
Canada’s announcement that it will take in 20,000 Afghan refugees is a good start, but it turns out that this much-lauded plan has an asterisk:
Meanwhile, many Afghans who helped Canadian Forces are stranded in the country. Since he wanted an election so badly, presumably to talk about important issues, Prime Minister Trudeau should be asked at every opportunity how he plans to get them out.
Canada took in 110,000 refugees - “boat people” - from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the decade following the fall of Saigon. And that was when our population was smaller and the national economy relatively stagnant.
We can do this. So can the United States, whose resettlement program for Afghans remains mired in bureaucratic purgatory and political dithering. George Packer, in The Atlantic, is absolutely scathing toward the Biden Administration:
There’s plenty of blame to go around for the 20-year debacle in Afghanistan—enough to fill a library of books. Perhaps the effort to rebuild the country was doomed from the start. But our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, staked their lives on us, is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided. The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency—and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden.
[…]
In recent days Kabul became the last point of escape for Afghans who fear for their lives under the return of the Taliban. Every provincial capital has fallen to the insurgent offensive; regional airports have closed; roads to Kabul and the borders are being controlled by Taliban checkpoints; government-security forces are in a state of collapse across the country. The U.S. has sent several thousand Marines to assist with the evacuation of embassy personnel, even as those officials deal with the flood of visa applications and entreaties from interpreters and others with American connections. Today, the U.S. government is more focused on saving our own than on saving the Afghans who counted on us. For many of them, time is running out. For some, it already has.
All of this was foreseeable—all of it was foreseen. For months, members of Congress and advocates in refugee, veteran, and human-rights organizations have been urging the Biden administration to evacuate America’s Afghan allies on an emergency basis. For months, dire warnings have appeared in the press. The administration’s answers were never adequate: We’re waiting for Congress to streamline the application process. Half the interpreters we’ve given visas don’t want to leave. We don’t want to panic the Afghan people and cause the government in Kabul to collapse. Evacuation to a U.S. territory like Guam could lead to legal problems, so we’re looking for third-country hosts in the region. Most of the interpreters are in Kabul, and Kabul won’t fall for at least six months.
Some of these answers might have been sincere. All of them were irrelevant, self-deceiving, or flat-out false. While some officials in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House itself pushed quietly for more urgent measures that might have averted catastrophe, Biden resisted—as if he wouldn’t allow Afghanistan to interfere with his priorities, as if he were done with Afghanistan the minute he announced the withdrawal of all remaining U.S. forces. This hardness is perplexing in a president who spent years in the Senate working on behalf of genocide victims and war refugees; who once promised an Afghan schoolgirl that he would make sure the U.S. didn’t abandon her; who cares intensely about the welfare of American troops.
Veterans, with their code of leaving no one behind on the battlefield, have been among the most passionate advocates for Afghan interpreters. A retired officer involved in discussions with high-ranking administration officials told me that the Veterans Administration plans to offer counseling to Afghanistan vets who will experience the trauma of losing their Afghan comrades to beheading by the Taliban. The retired officer struggled to understand Biden’s resistance. “If his son Beau were still alive today, he would be able to communicate to his father in a way that he’d be receptive,” the veteran told me. “I don’t know who else would be able to do that. I’ve literally thought, How do I try to get a message to the first lady? She and Michelle were both very engaged with military families and veteran issues. I thought she could convey the message in a way the president might be receptive.”
Some QAnon conspiracy theorists say Donald Trump is still the acting President. I wonder if they might be on to something.
The comparisons to the fall of Saigon in 1975 are inevitable. Then, as now, it must have looked like the United States was in terminal decline. The Iran hostage crisis of 1979 made it even worse.
Ten years after that, the Berlin Wall was down. And today Vietnam, still nominally Communist, is one of America’s closest allies.
This is a terrible day for the United States and its allies. But nothing is written in stone.