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Mitchell Wohlberg's avatar

In the past few days I have read more than a dozen articles about what happened in Afghanistan. None of them capture the real disgrace as well as David Hamburger's article. One can debate whether we had to leave or not but there is no debate that the way we left showed gross incompetence, disloyalty to allies and most grievously a lack of concern for human lives. One should have expected better from America!

Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg

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Mitch Barrie's avatar

I understand your critique is more about the media and the Biden Administration unironically declaring a disaster a success, and America earnestly fooling itself about the collapse of the Afghanistan mission, but Afghanistan was an unequivocal disaster from the very start, and could only end one way. And so it is ending.

I am less frustrated by the dissembling of politicians (we expect them to dissemble and they unfailingly rise to meet our expectation) than the willful refusal of people who are supposed to be smart (journalists and political advisors) to read and understand history. History doesn't necessarily repeat itself (except in the current case in Afghanistan, and oh boy is it repeating itself now), but history does provide lessons and guidance on how to tackle immediate problems. All these lessons were tossed out the window when the US invaded Afghanistan, to almost universal cheering from American media and American mobs (I recall vividly the announcement over the PA as I was leaving the SCTA land speed trials in El Mirage, CA, that the US bombing of Afghanistan had begun, and the resulting applause from the participants and spectators. It was nauseating).

Afghanistan isn't called the Graveyard of Empires for nothing, and I use to boggle at right-wing friends who insisted we could only "succeed" in Afghanistan once we took the gloves off and lost our squeamishness about engagement, as if the Soviet Union ever experienced a moment of squeamishness about anything during their decade of failure in Afghanistan. Our failure lasted twice as long as theirs because, honestly, we cared less. As monstrous as the USSR was, they didn't see the point in inflicting war on themselves and Afghanistan when it was clear they could not achieve their goals there. America, on the other hand, couldn't care less about the fate of far-away poor people (or the poor Americans who fight our wars) as long as CNN was looking the other way and the defense contractors who help pay for US elections were rolling in the hay.

The blueprint for how Afghanistan was going to go, for what happens when you start a war in a poor country with no idea of how you are going to extricate yourself, is in every best-selling book about the Vietnam War: Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, Max Hastings, even General McMaster. Is the fall of Kabul at all similar to the fall of Saigon? It is almost exactly like the fall of Saigon (including the fate of the local people who assisted America's foolish mission), and could have been predicted that early October weekend in 2001 when the bombs first fell. The only thing we couldn't predict was how long the US would prolong the misery.

And misery it surely was, as anyone who has read Gopal Anand's No Good Men Among the Living could tell you. But does anyone actually read anymore? Did anyone in the Bush Administration or the national media read Steve Coll's Ghost Wars or even the first Flashman book before cheerfully wading into a situation they clearly did not understand, and proceeding to reproduce just about every mistake made by Johnson, McNamara and Nixon in Vietnam?

And as we express astonishment at the speed and success of the Taliban's sweep across Afghanistan in 2021, is there no one in the media old enough to remember the Taliban's equally astonishing sweep across Afghanistan in 1996? So we enforced a 20-year interregnum in the Taliban's rule of Afghanistan, at the cost of the untold additional suffering and injustice that accompanies all wars. Aren't we proud of ourselves?

I can't get very angry about the fall of Kabul. I saw it coming 20 years ago and have used up all my anger since then. And I must confess there is something about today's media outrage that is as insincere as the Biden Administration's oh so predictable bullshit and spin. Surely sophisticated commentators saw the writing on the wall as far back as 2002.

This could only have ended one way. And so it is ending.

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