Watching Kabul Fall

August 16, 2021

I remember the day Saigon fell. My anti-war friends and I got a keg and threw a party, decorating our patio with balloons and Viet Cong flags. It turned out to be a bittersweet celebration, the mood dragged down by thoughts of the lives broken and ended by what had been America’s longest war. We didn’t enjoy seeing our country humiliated either, no matter how deserved its humiliation. We toasted the Vietnamese, who would finally see peace and healing after so many years of war, but most of the beer stayed in the keg.

And here we are again.

I remember when America invaded Iraq, an action I had desperately argued against. In the opening days of “Shock and Awe,” George W. Bush’s blitzkrieg of Baghdad, I remember thinking for a moment that maybe it would go better than I feared, that maybe the Iraqi resistance would collapse like it had during the first Gulf War, that America would go in quickly and get out quickly, and that the toxic mix of Iraqi factions might unite the country instead of blowing it up. But an aphorism kept nagging at me: “There’s no right way to do a wrong thing.” Invading Iraq was a terrible idea, terribly mismanaged by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and all. It was never going to work out, and America’s troops were always going to leave the country for the Iraqis to fight over, which they’ve been doing ever since.

And here we are again.

Going after al Qaeda in retaliation for the attacks of 9/11 was arguably a right thing. But overthrowing the Taliban in the name of the Global War on Terror and installing a new government in Afghanistan was a wrong thing, doomed to failure. In its history, Afghanistan has been ruled by either by Afghan warlords, criminals and zealots, or by foreign occupiers, all of whom were driven out by Afghan resistance. Civil war has been a way of life in Afghanistan for at least 40 years. Bribery and corruption have always been central to its politics. To think that pumping a trillion dollars into Afghanistan would make it less corrupt, or that a U.S.-imposed a government that respected democratic process and human rights would be sustainable, reflects the exact same hubris that got us bogged down in Vietnam and Iraq.

American generals saw this defeat coming, just as they saw the futility of the Vietnam War. They just didn’t want to tell us. The Pentagon Papers revealed their lies and misgivings about Vietnam. The Afghanistan Papers, a trove of documents leaked to the Washington Post in 2019, revealed a similar pattern of lies, including Pentagon lies about the capability of the Afghan security forces to survive without U.S. support. Accountability for the advocates of nation-building and counter-insurgency in the military-industrial complex is long overdue. Time and time again, those wielding the military hammer have defined every overseas crisis as a nail to be pounded with bombs and guns. Time and time again, they have underestimated the enemy and overestimated America’s ability to reshape other countries.

One thing I got wrong in 1975 was the assumption that peace would come to Vietnam once the Americans left. After the evacuation, while we looked the other way, the Vietnamese suffered brutal retaliation and repression by the Hanoi government, a flood of refugees and a war with Cambodia, where Vietnam intervened to stop the genocide of the Pol Pot regime we had helped create.

There are more dark days ahead for Afghanistan as well. There will be retaliation and repression. Women and children will suffer terribly. Refugees will have to find new homes – something the U.S. and its NATO partners can still help with. But the next chapter in Afghanistan’s history is theirs to write, not ours.

While I have sympathy for the Afghans, I’m in no mood for talk of “America’s failure.” Afghanistan had 20 years to come up with a government that could compete with the Taliban for the support of its people. Its government had all the military equipment and training money could buy to compete with the Taliban on the battlefield. Allies and NGOs from around the world joined hands to help build a free and modern Afghanistan. This is their failure.

Both of America’s longest wars ended quickly. The speed with which Afghan governments fell and Afghan military units surrendered in the summer of 2021 echoed the collapse of the South Vietnam regime in the spring of 1975. Saigon and Kabul had proved themselves capitals of corruption, unworthy of their people’s trust, their soldiers’ loyalty or America’s continuing support.

I’m not celebrating a U.S. defeat in Afghanistan, but I’m also not mourning the retreat from a mistake. The corollary to “there’s no right way to do the wrong thing” is “there’s no wrong way to do the right thing.” The right thing is to get out of Afghanistan and to make sure we never again go down this path.