Kandahar is fallen. Kabul, too. To hear again those names is to bring back a lost youth a lifetime of operations overseas. When I heard that Kandahar had fallen to the Taliban...I had a bad day. I did not think ...
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from either side of the aisle.
t has long been my observation that groups, communities, and nations usually get the government they deserve. A virtuous people is usually ruled fairly well — an anarchic people either collapses into anarchy or is ruled strictly. I think this was President Bush's major conceptual strategic mistake in the post-9-11 wars. He believed that every nation longed for freedom and was capable of democratic self-government. As we have learned the hard way, our American constitutional government was not just ordered into existence by the Founders; it is the heritage of untold generations of Germanic tribal self-government, the monastic stewarding of the Roman legacy of education, the Anglo-Saxon traditions of consultative government, the compromise of the Magna Carta, the residue of the English Civil Wars and Bill of Rights, and the self-governing experience of the Pilgrims and the colonial founders in the New World interacting with the French and Scottish Enlightenment.
This was not Afghanistan's experience — the many peoples of Afghanistan lacked the human capital to democratically govern themselves. The vast majority of Afghans could not read, write, or numerate — parts of Afghan Army basic training were simply teaching soldiers to recognize numbers. The few Afghan elites were ethnically divided and mutually suspicious. Often there was no tradition of peaceful self-governance — of the clans living in a valley, often there would be a low-level war among them over resources. Simply put, the Afghans were not truly capable of self-governing democracy in the Jeffersonian sense. Therefore, they could not create a government worth dying for.
Sadly, we Americans ourselves also lacked the moral clarity and realism to even try to make the conditions to help build a moral government. All too often the phrase "it's an Afghan matter" was used as a rationale to excuse some immoral action of our Afghan government partners. We saw the evil actions of the Afghan government officials but did nothing about it — in great contrast to the colonial heyday, when British officials would say, "It may be your tradition to burn widows alive, but it is my tradition to hang those who do so." We simply shrugged our shoulders and said, "It's the culture" as we tolerated the evil that destroyed the legitimacy of the Afghan government.
Roads not taken
Our experience in Afghanistan reminds me of the biblical story of Abraham pleading with G-d to save the doomed city of Sodom: if fifty righteous men be found in the city, will you not destroy it? What if only ten righteous men be found there? And the city was destroyed because not even ten good men could be found.
Basically, there were not enough good Afghan leaders at all levels of the security forces to beat the Taliban. This is why the Afghan forces did not fall apart until U.S. forces withdrew completely. Afghan forces may not have trusted their own leaders, but they had some confidence in the U.S. forces. Only a very small number of U.S. forces fighting alongside the Afghans during the Trump years was enough to hold the Taliban at bay.
One path that might have worked would be some type of mercenary Western leadership and technical force. The military of the United Arab Emirates is led by an Australian general, with Western military staffing where appropriate, and the competent Jordanian forces were likewise led by a British general for many years. Within the military advising realm, when U.S. advisers were not hamstrung, only a few U.S. leaders were able to lead many local forces in aggressive and effective operations.
Similarly, I imagine that had President Trump still been leading rather than President Biden, the drawdown would have been paused — and some special forces teams and bombers would have been dispatched in sufficient numbers to halt the Taliban's advance. I note that during Trump's years, Afghanistan was relatively quiet. The Taliban did not attack so dramatically until they had taken the measure of Biden.
Watching twenty years of American blood and treasure float away like dust in the wind hurts. Perhaps we will draw some lessons from this pain.
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