End of the Afghanistan War brings "shock-and-awe" to some pundits and politicians

There is a lot of good analysis on the fall of the government in Afghanistan, not least because there are so many well-informed and politically engaged people who have been following the story of the war since 2001. My former Congresswoman Barbara Lee, for instance:

What’s happening in Afghanistan currently is a humanitarian crisis.

Let’s be clear: there has never been, and will never be, a U.S. military solution in Afghanistan.

Our top priority must be providing humanitarian aid & resettlement to Afghan refugees, women, and children. pic.twitter.com/DImw4Dc7Ns

— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) August 16, 2021

Gene Lyons had this irascible but well-informed take on Facebook 08/15/2021:

Way back at the beginning of time, I observed to my wife that Russians invading Afghanistan would end up "sorry they ever heard of that place." My skepticism was based on two things: reading Kipling's novel "Kim" about the British experience there, and talking with a knowledgeable friend who explained that there was no such country as Afghanistan, but eight or ten tribal regions more or less permanently in conflict with all the others. Pretending that a centralized government in Kabul could govern the region, as Paris governs France or Tokyo governs Japan was an illusion.

It follows that any analysis that treats the territory we call "Afghanistan" as a nation state begins and ends in folly. So of course the make-believe nation's army fell apart. It was never very much more than a jobs program; a massive boondoggle for people with the right connections to the fake national government. From the G.W. Bush administration onward, the Pentagon has played let's pretend and American politicians have played along.

Anatol Lieven, who has been reporting on and researching Afghanistan and Pakistan since the 1980s, published an article a few weeks ago that sketches the long history of the governance problem in Afghanistan. He gives decent attention to the Pakistan factor, which has always been huge in the US war. On p. 29-30 of that article, he speculated that after the US withdrew:

...the collapse of the Afghan state in the Pashtun areas may at some point happen not just very quickly, but also quite peacefully, as Pashtun soldiers and police simply go home, while their commanders flee or make their own deals with the Taliban. This, after all, is very much what happened both when the communist state collapsed in 1992 and the mujahideen took over, and as the Taliban swept through the Pashtun areas in 1994–96 and displaced the mujahideen warlords. (An Afghan Tragedy: The Pashtuns, the Taliban and the State Survival 63:3 2021)

Kevin Drum (In hindsight, suddenly everyone knows why the Afghan army collapsed 08/14/2021) points to the long-standing weakness of the US position in Afghanistan, which in some notable ways parallels the bad assumptions made in the Vietnam War:

Let's round this all up:

• Hubristic nation building.
• Starry-eyed constitution writing.
• Wildly unrealistic military training.
• Vast corruption.
• Lack of food and weapons for Afghan soldiers.
• Bad negotiating from the Trump administration.
• Afghan leadership void.

I'm glad everyone is finally able to admit this now that the war is over, but it sure sounds like it's been common knowledge for at least a decade. This is why I think it's folly to suggest that things would have been any different if we'd waited another six months before withdrawing.

There's no question that the US policy class has a lot to answer for here, but the bulk of the blame has to be placed on the army. They were the ones on the ground. They were the ones who built an Afghan military that was completely unsuitable to the country. They're the ones who apparently never grasped the full extent of the corruption they were up against. They were the ones who advised four different US presidents that things were going well if they could just have a little more time and a few more troops. [my emphasis]

Our bipartisan reverence and ritual adulation of the military and its generals is one of the unhealthiest aspects of American democracy. Not that Presidents and Members of Congress can escape blame. But the specific military aspects of the failure - poor training of the Afghan Army, the Pentagon's public misrepresentation of the actual situation - need to be widely examined, too. The same problems were to be seen in Iraq, like deficient training. But the training isn't just a technical problem. In Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the training of the national armed forces emphasized fighting with close-air support from the Americans. When the American air support goes away, the national army has a severe disadvantage.

As Juan Cole recently noted, "The US was massively bombing the country [Afghanistan] every year, the only reason that it was still able to be there. ... There was no mission. There was a morass of corruption and incompetence." (The Great Washington Ponzi Scheme in Afghanistan comes Crashing Down Informed Comment 08/13/2021.

Cole's Informed Comment site has consistently been an excellent source for analysis of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He writes about the Top 6 International Winners and Losers from Taliban Reassertion in Afghanistan 08/16/2021. His list of winners: Iran, Pakistan, and (potentially) Russis. The losers: India, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and, of course, the US. (That's actualy seven, but whatever.) For the US, he writes:

The U.S. looks like a clear loser, especially the Biden administration, which has egg on its face from the rapid collapse of the Afghanistan government and military. There are fears that the Taliban victory will embolden the fringe of Muslim radicals. On the other hand, the U.S. did not suffer appreciably from the fall of South Vietnam to the communists in 1975

Josh Marshall comments on the dazed political reactions of the moment in After Sunday It’s Even More Clear Biden Was Right TPM 08/15/2021:

It is crystal clear that the Afghan national army and really the Afghan state was an illusion. It could not survive first contact with a post-US military reality. As is so often the case in life – with bad investments, bad relationships – what we were doing there was staying to delay our reckoning with the consequences of the reality of the situation.

That’s a bad idea.

But as I’ve said in other posts over the last two days, we knew this part. What has been deeply revealing to me is the American response. And here I mean to say the most prominent media and political voices. It’s true this is quicker than I’d figured – not that I’d given the precise timing a lot of thought. And it seems to be quicker than the White House figured. But by a month? Three months? Does that matter? I don’t see why. If anything, given the outcome, quicker is better – since a protracted fall is necessarily a bloodier fall. But what the reaction has demonstrated to me is the sheer depth of denial. The inability to accept the reality of the situation. And thus the excuse making. Sen. Maggie Hassan’s press release below is a painfully good example of that. So is this article by in The Atlantic by George Packer. Virtually everything Richard Engel has been writing on Twitter for the last 24 hours. All so much the cant of empire. But more than this, far more important than this, simply unwise. [my emphasis]

Über-Realist Stephen Walt sounds irritated over some of the hand-writing from the foreign policy "blob," as he sometimes calls it:

What it may have damaged is confidence in US foreign policy judgment and competence, but that process began a long time ago.

— Stephen Walt (@stephenWalt) August 16, 2021

Quincy Institute President Andrew Bacevich in a QI press release (Reflections on the Events of the Past Week in Afghanistan 08/16/2021):

It’s striking that it took more than two years after the U.S. military withdrawal from Vietnam for Saigon to fall, whereas Kabul has fallen to the Taliban before the United States even completes its drawdown. Suffice it to say that the U.S. military has not gotten any better at the project of nation building over the past nearly fifty years. ... We can only hope now that the spectacular failure the last 20 years has wrought will compel a national reckoning with the profound limitations and liabilities of the use of U.S. military force abroad. [my emphasis]