Afghanistan and Defeat

 Love is blind. That idiom came up in a dinner conversation with friends several days ago. We were discussing the ongoing mess in Afghanistan in the context of American exceptionalism. One of our dinner companions posited that the idiom applies to too many Americans when we think about our country. He said that love is when you recognize the faults of another but choose to love them anyway; it is not blind but discerning and all the more meaningful because of that recognition. 

Commodore Stephen Decatur gave a toast at a celebratory dinner after his victory over the Barbary pirates in 1816. He said, “Our country - In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right and always successful, right or wrong.” That was paraphrased into the more jingoistic conclusion “...but our country, right or wrong.” But Carl Schurz, a Union general during the Civil War and later a U.S. Senator made the conclusion “...if right, to be kept right, and if wrong, to be set right.” I think Schurz’s ending is the most fitting, because nothing is perfect, including the United States of America.

As Heather Cox Richardson noted two days ago,

The Framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment: the idea that, by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society. Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project. Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshaled religion and propaganda to defend their dominance.

We are a nation built on an idea. It is easy to stray off that road when ideology takes the

stage. The Biden administration will bear a share of the blame for Afghanistan, of course. But instead of Monday morning quarterbacking, the real questions we need to ask are why were we in Afghanistan in the first place? I fully remember the fall of 2001. I was the TF Surgeon for Joint Task Force Civil Support at then Joint Forces Command. I remember the shock, the anguish, and the pure anger that suffused America. The terrorists who piloted those planes into the towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania were trained in Afghanistan. We were going to remove them as a threat and we did. But we did not have a “then what” plan. Iraq supervened and decisions were made to go to war to make Iraq and Afghanistan democracies. 

The love of our country blinded many of us. The history of Russia and Great Britain vying over Afghanistan in the 19th century was… forgotten. Great Britain lost a war in Afghanistan in the 1840s. The attempt by the USSR to change Afghanistan was… forgotten (as well as the fact that the United States armed the mujahideen in the 1980s in their fight with the Soviet Union). The USSR left Afghanistan with its tail between its legs and then collapsed. And now it was our turn.

Afghanistan is a society that is not and never has been a democracy. Built on intense rivalry between tribes, with cultural, religious, familial, and linguistic barriers separating Afghans who live over the next mountain range, it was not amenable to the Enlightenment idea upon which America was built. Yes, we spent trillions of dollars, sustained deaths and casualties and inflicted many more deaths and casualties on the Afghans -- and we lost. That is a simple fact. On August 20 in The Washington Post, Dan Berschinski, a retired Army infantry officer who lost both legs to an IED in 2009 summed up what was already apparent to him in 2009:

I saw early warning signs as a U.S. Army infantry platoon leader on my first mission in Kandahar in 2009. In my very first conversation with a local, a shopkeeper told me: “Lieutenant, I met the previous American lieutenant 12 months prior, I will meet another American lieutenant in 12 months when you leave.” He did not like the Taliban, the shopkeeper told me, but it would be in Afghanistan long after I would — and so he had no choice but to deal with it.

The Afghan shopkeeper was wise -- he knew that Westerners had come and gone in the past and that this iteration would be no different. His wisdom came from what he knew about his country in his soul that Americans did not.

So, the finger-pointing has begun and will go on for a long time. But politicians of both parties bear the blame and the game to hang it all onto Biden is simply ridiculous. As always, it will take time for history to sort this out. The real need is to restore American democracy to the ideals articulated by the Founding Fathers. We have many faults. Our job is to recognize and right them as Carl Schurz noted 150 years ago.