America's Failures in Afghanistan Were Bipartisan and Long-Running - Gerald Seib
Early on during the adventure in Afghanistan, U.S. officials banned negotiations between the Afghan government and Taliban leaders, so confident were they that the Taliban Islamists could be vanquished militarily. By last year, U.S. officials themselves were negotiating directly with the Taliban, in talks in which the Afghan government was the party excluded. That strange arc of diplomacy is as good an encapsulation as any of the long and misguided American odyssey through Afghanistan, now coming to a tragic end so ugly that it figures to haunt American foreign policy and the Biden presidency for some time to come.
The odyssey was thoroughly bipartisan, and in the end the retreat from it was widely supported by the public. In retrospect, it appears Americans lost their interest in Afghanistan when their leaders failed to keep showing that the exercise still was connected to its original and narrow purpose, which was to head off the threat of terrorism. Americans wanted victory over extremism, not an open-ended presence to make it less likely. Their leaders promised the former, and never prepared them for the latter.
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In retrospect, it appears that average Americans had only one priority in Afghanistan, and that was to stop the al Qaeda terrorism threat that produced the 9/11 attacks. Building a democracy in Afghanistan, creating a stable partner in the region, even protecting the rights of Afghan women and girls from the harsh excesses of Islamic extremists—none of those appeared to justify even the minimal American casualties of the last few years. National leaders, in turn, spent less and less time making the case that the American presence in Afghanistan actually was necessary as a terrorist deterrent. Instead of arguing that a small but open-ended American presence there was an acceptable price to pay for an insurance policy against an Islamic extremist upsurge, they maintained there could be a diplomatic solution that would pave the way for a neat exit.
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Americans accepted large and open-ended commitments in Europe and Asia because the threat of communism at the outset was more clear and omnipresent than is the current terrorism threat, says Chuck Hagel, who was defense secretary when President Barack Obama attempted to declare combat in Afghanistan at an end. Moreover, he says, those military outposts were established in a climate of peace, when fighting had ended, not during combat. That wasn’t the case in Afghanistan, where fighting ebbed and flowed but never really stopped.
In addition, Americans always saw Afghanistan as a mystifying place, unknown and utterly foreign to them. Mr. Hagel, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, says that disconnect was a repeat of the one that plagued the effort in Vietnam. “This is the lesson we learned in Vietnam, and we have to learn it in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, too,” he says. “We get into these situations, we’re never sure why we’re there. We never get to learn the country, the customs, the people.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-failures-in-afghanistan-were-bipartisan-and-long-running-11629118830 (subscription)
