The Boer War was a bitter experience for many Britons, who watched as their army flailed, seemingly helpless, against a farmers’ militia. H. H. Munro (Saki) wrote despairingly,
Dwindle, dwindle, little war.
How I wonder more and more
As across the veldt you hop
If you ever mean to stop.
After visiting the theater of war, Rudyard Kipling penned a poem starkly titled “The Lesson”. It begins –
Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.
Not on a single issue, or in one direction or twain,
But conclusively, comprehensively, and several times and again,
Were all our most holy illusions knocked higher than Gilderoy’s kite.
We have had a jolly good lesson, and it serves us jolly well right!
”Conclusively, comprehensively, and several times and again” well describes the beating that America has taken in Afghanistan. But what lessons will we learn from it? Some people, it seems, will learn only the lessons that they wanted to learn.
A popular moral, drawn by parts of both the Left and the Right – and very definitely by President Biden – is that we had no business in Afghanistan. Joe Biden was, in fact, dubious about our anti-Taliban campaign in 2001, declaring that our military should forgo air power and limit ourselves to “action that is mano a mano . . . going against other forces on the ground”. In 2021, he has gone only a little further, not only neutering our air power by abandoning Bagram airbase but refusing the commit the “forces on the ground” needed for a successful evacuation.
The essence of the case for the uselessness and futility of our presence in Afghanistan rests on two propositions: first, that America was foolishly trying to “build a nation where none had ever existed” and, second, that a Taliban victory was “inevitable”.
One can’t deny that some American efforts to bring about change in Afghanistan were ridiculous, such as spending three quarters of a billion dollars to promote “gender studies”. Nor was the Afghan government a pillar of democracy and rectitude. Our “nation building” constructed only a modest edifice. Still, one needn’t be a raging feminist to believe that a place where women can appear in public, attend school and be gainfully employed is a great improvement over one where twelve-year-old girls are forced into sexual slavery. The effort cost us very little blood. From our first incursion against the Taliban in October 2001 through the end of 2014, thirteen-plus years, 1,833 American soldiers were killed in action (11 to 12 a month). From the beginning of 2015 through the day before the Kabul suicide bombing, 80 months, the total toll was 64. Meanwhile, the Afghan army, which Joe Biden demeans as unwilling to fight, lost more than 66,000 men. From the American point of view, the streets of Chicago are a lot closer to an “endless war”.
The cost in treasure is harder to discern. Claims of trillions of dollars don’t look at the incremental cost. Much of the money spent in Afghanistan would have been spent in any event; we didn’t raise a special army just for service in that country. It is also true, and lamentable, that much money was wasted on such absurdities as the aforementioned “gender studies” programs. What one can say confidently is that, spread over 20 years, the cost scarcely strained the American economy.
Furthermore, we got more in return than a better life for the inhabitants of Kabul and Kandahar. Without our presence, it is certainly plausible that the Taliban would have quickly reestablished their rule, under which al-Qa’eda would have returned, as it is doing today. We also denied Red China access to Afghanistan’s substantial deposits of rare earth metals (even if we didn’t think to start exploiting them ourselves) and reduced the Islamofascist pressure on Pakistan.
As for the Taliban’s “inevitable” victory, the victory certainly happened, and happened very rapidly, but only after the U.S. cut off the support that the Afghan army required in order to conduct the kind of war for which we had trained it. During the 20 preceding years, the Taliban failed to take and hold even one provincial capital. They were an endemic, but not a fatal, disease.
It will take a while to sort out and digest the true lessons of this monumental failure, and it may be prudent to take some time for reflection before drawing them. We can usefully start that reflection by rejecting the old isolationist canards that Joe Biden and his fellow defeatists on both sides of the political aisle are trying to pass off as newly minted wisdom.
Further Reading: Col. Christopher Vanek (Ret.), “Abandoning Afghanistan comes with massive price” (Col. Vanek served in Afghanistan for six years. “A continued presence in the form of advising and assisting Afghan national security forces indefinitely could have guaranteed our future safety and provided both reassurance and hope to the Afghan people.”
Jim Geraghty, “The Americans Joe Biden Left Behind”
Jim Treacher, “8/31 is the New 9/10”
Dominic Green, “Biden is spinning the Afghan disaster faster than a Blackhawk’s rotors”
John Podhoretz, “An angry Biden blames Trump for Afghan pullout – then takes credit for it”