I have little patience for those--on the right or left--who now say we should have pulled out of Afghanistan after wrecking the Taliban and routing al Qaeda by early 2002. Had we done that the people we supported to topple the Taliban might have been defeated again in renewed fighting.
And then Americans would have wondered how we could be so stupid as to walk away from a victory and let enemies win. And jihadis--led by Osama bin Laden--would have been encouraged and enabled to renew their war on us at home many years ago.
We needed to build a state in Afghanistan. I think we should have tried to build a decentralized state, as I wrote about in early 2009 regarding a potential surge, that would have withstood the fall of Kabul:
The end result in Afghanistan, if all goes well, will be a nominal national government that controls the capital region and reigns but does not rule local tribes and which actually helps the locals a bit rather than sucking resources from the locals, who in turn do not make trouble for the central government or allow their areas to be used by jihadis to plan attacks on the West. We press for reasonable economic opportunities, with bribes all around (I mean, foreign aid), to keep a fragile peace.
And we stick around this time, unlike after the Soviets left Afghanistan when we ignored the place, for a generation or two to see if we can move Afghanistan into the 19th century (hey, let's not get ahead of ourselves).
In 2002 we had little choice but to help the winners keep the jihadi losers out.
I'll put in George Friedman's analysis because I respect him despite disagreeing with him on the inevitability of the Taliban victory. I don't think any war outcome is "inevitable." We only think they are in retrospect when we describe how a victory was achieved. Gather all those reasons and victory that often rests on the knife's edge looks inevitable. The Taliban are a minority in Afghanistan and we had allies who hated the Taliban.
Sure, nation-building was a mistake. But we had to build a state. And if we didn't use the form of democracy even though the society lacked the basis for rule of law which must exist for democracy to really work, what could we do that would be acceptable?
With continuing American and NATO support, Afghanistan could have gotten through the morale danger zone. Heck, beginning our withdrawal during the winter might have achieved that alone. The Taliban could have been stymied from capturing the country even if it could not have been prevented from carving out their own territory in the south adjacent to Pakistan. This near-total defeat wasn't inevitable. We screwed the pooch.
I'm stunned we stopped keeping our enemies out of power this year after paying the price we did over two decades. Especially because the price we've paid in recent years has been low in casualties as Afghan forces fought and died in large numbers during the last seven years.
God! It was such a rookie policy mistake to base a Afghanistan withdrawal decision on costs already paid rather than the price going forward.
Did we
get our dead troops or treasure back by losing?
But no mean tweets! America is back! The adults are back in charge. We are restoring trans-Atlantic relations. And Smart Diplomacy.® Did I miss a Newspeak Dictionary description of this clusterbiden, which are designed to hide Biden's debacle?
UPDATE: Huh (via Instapundit):
President Joe Biden waived a mandate in June that would have forced the Pentagon to provide a detailed report to Congress about the risks of leaving Afghanistan.
Under the federal statute, the administration was barred from reducing troops in Afghanistan below 2,000 without first briefing Congress about the expected impact on U.S. counterterrorism operations and the risk to American personnel. Biden waived the mandate in June, arguing that providing this information to Congress could undermine "the national security interests of the United States."
Yeah, providing that information could have led to a national security disaster, eh?
And I don't remember any stories on this. Perhaps reporting on that violation would have undermined the political interests of the Biden administration.
