Kabul Fell One Year Ago Today, Have We Learned Anything From Our Afghanistan Fiasco? – Opinion

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Afghanistan’s final withdrawal. It was August 15, 2021 when the Taliban overtook Kabul and President Ashraf Ghani disbanded his government. He then jumped the first thing to smoke out Kabul International in France, ending our twenty-decade-long war with that godforsaken land.

We have two pieces that are retrospectively covering the topic on our front page today. Dennis Santiago, my friend posted an interview with Hollie McKay (“The Fall of Afghanistan”: Hollie McKay shares her on-the ground reflections one year later). It is worth reading. Jim Thompson offers his Afghanistan Debacle in three parts. Finally, Levon Satamian covers General Jack Keane’s interview on FoxNews on the subject, One Year After the Disastrous Afghanistan Withdrawal, General Jack Keane Says ‘Taliban in Charge.’

It is Jack Keane’s commentary that I want to address.

GEN. JACK KEANE It’s a year later, and it’s still hard to fathom what we did here. My judgment is that the President made a strategic mistake in declaring an unconditional withdrawal, with an Afghan date, and it turned out to have been an unconditional surrender. Now, the Taliban are in control doing exactly what they did 20 years ago. Offering sanctuary for al Qaeda. We now know what happened in the last 20 years, for our troops, our intelligence service, and all those contractors who provided service. You accomplished your mission. It was to keep the terrorists in Afghanistan away from the United States. This did not happen. No foreign terrorist attack has been made against the United States by Afghans. This decision is a disaster. It’s an accelerant for our adversaries, as we can see. Russia, Ukraine and China as well as the mischief being perpetrated by the Iranians in the Middle East are all to be found. Trey stressed that there is no escaping the disaster. Suffering of Afghan People, what they’re leaving behind, close to 80,000. I mean, how shameful is that, that we were not committed to get everybody out for as long as it took, and we should have insisted upon that with the Taliban and put our feet to the fire and just told them straight up: listen, we’re going to stay here and get our people out. We know exactly where you are, so we are already in Kabul. If you’re going to stop us from doing that, then you’re going to feel the might of the United States on you as a result of it. They were not there, so we left and folded. It’s a sad situation. It’s still, as I said, difficult to accept what we did. 

Keane is one the most credible cable news contributors as he puts things down in the middle. Still, he falls into the error I posted on a few weeks ago, Why Are People Who Should Know Better Beginning to Agitate for a Return to Afghanistan?

Keane confuses two issues that I find distinct: withdrawals as policies and how they were executed.

It was an abominable act of withdrawal. We should have sent more troops to Afghanistan to ensure an orderly withdrawal. This is what I believe was the case. Having said that, when we chose to evacuate from Hamid Karzai International airport and not Bagram, it was like Blanche DuBois. Desire, a StreetcarThe kindness of strangers is what makes the situation possible. It is not surprising that the commander at CENTCOM felt hurt by Taliban violations of the Kabul agreement with the US.

It is equally shameful that this goat rope was not reported to the military and civilian authorities.

There are other parts of Keane’s assessment where I think he goes off the rails.

The line must be drawn where evacuation was owed to families and individuals who had worked in the US military. Details emerge of hundreds evacuated from Afghanistan over the last year. The people we allowed into this country as “refugees” were frequently criminals, security risks, and hardened sex offenders. We didn’t take the time to vet these people before evacuation, and we will pay the price for that decision for years. It is hard to live in Afghanistan. But we didn’t put these people in Afghanistan, and we don’t owe them a way out unless they worked for us.

Second, al-Qaeda will return if there is no will to do so. Al-Zawahiri’s hiding place in Kabul does not mean that al-Qaeda has built training camps. Both of these are not threats and should be dealt with immediately.

The third is that it’s been obvious for over a decade now that Kabul’s government could no longer survive without our support. The government was without popular support. The government itself didn’t believe it could survive. This is a reflection of a strategy failure dating back to 2002, when President George Bush declared that the Oct 2001 mission to kill people and break things had been accomplished and we now needed to bring democracy to America and create schools for girls. I believe that this was impossible unless Pashtun culture and other related cultures are eradicated and replaced by something non-Afghan. The Taliban won. Popular support was there for the Taliban, who govern using a code we found unpalatable but that is understood by and accepted by the citizens of this country. I will contend that we burned down any popular support we’d built by trying to impose a foreign and hostile culture upon a people who were perfectly happy with their own culture.

My previous blog post said:

In my long-held view, our best play was to leave in 2002 and make it clear that if things started regressing, we’d be back to kill people and break things. The CIA’s long-in-the-tooth and out-of-the-loop execution of Zayman al-Zawahiri, chieftain al-Qaeda, is a confirmation that the withdrawal was successful (Al-Qaeda Chieftain Ayman al-Zawahiri killed by CIA drone strike). Yes, the Taliban gave their word they wouldn’t shelter terrorists during the negotiations process, but did anyone really believe it? Al-Zawahiri was found, but rumors say he was killed by one Taliban faction.

Afghanistan has been over. Our strategic interest there is limited to ensuring that it doesn’t harbor terrorist training camps. It is my hope that we will have learned lessons about the foolishness of expecting US military might to bring about widespread cultural change. We killed and maimed a lot of fine young men and women by sending them on a fool’s errand, and it would be great to hear some of the architects of this strategic failure say, “I’m sorry,” but that ain’t happening. It would be awesome if the people who refused to plan for the evacuation hoping they could delay our departure, went to prison, but I’m not holding my breath. Afghanistan is responsible for everything except having the common sense to not go back.

 

 

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