The L Should Stand for Learning

 

The Biden Administration is trying to do a thing that needed to be done some time ago, and it won't be without blood. The US is extricating itself from a war that began with no good definition, that moved from invasion to occupation and nation-building with no sense of what the exit needed to be, and no great sense of the local lay of the land, having made brutal mistakes largely of neglect and failure to understand that only so much can ever be done; to just take the "L" on whatever great plan existed and realize we could not backstop the Afghan government forever. 

We had 20 years. In that time, there were some human rights gains, but the problems that needed rooting out to our satisfaction were cultural and endemic. We were managing a crisis that wasn't ours--we didn't create Afghanistan. We waded in to do something about Al-Qaeda, and then...stayed. imagining we'd fix whatever was broken to pay these people back for the invasion. The US military hasn't any spiritual or crisis counseling options for what is going on. 

Mourning lost opportunities makes sense if opportunities existed, but I think we were sold on something that we created for ourselves--the idea that our ways and ideals were naturally exportable, and that our military was a great way to export them. But what the Taliban represent is something unique to the area and we gave them credibility by making them the face of anti-US imperialism. We helped to make them a stable and lasting presence and to treat with them like a stable opposition. And as President Biden just reminded us, The Former Guy even meant to negotiate with the Taliban at Camp David before the idea was scrapped. 

That he claims he would do things differently than Biden is doing now is inconsequential--Trump simply isn't president and pretending you would do something better and actually doing the thing better are quite different, and Trump has really only ever shown himself better at the former. For that matter, I don't know what pundits in media think should be happening now--were we to stay forever? Make Afghanistan a colony or a territory? Always and inadequately stand in the breach between the health of this country and other people who didn't give a shit, fought like motherfuckers, and incidentally, lived there? 

If Afghanistan cannot do it, with the support given for so long, themselves, this should tell us the value of that support. If what we could have passed on was fighting for the rights of women and children, if we could have passed on democracy, if we could have injected western values...

You can say we failed Afghanistan, but I say we're also failing here--we have our anti-democratic, theocratic, anti-woman, anti-LGBT, racist thugs here. The lesson is once you have a Taliban, it is maybe too late to stop a Taliban without extraordinary violence, which we did not do there and wouldn't have done because of what that would have made us. 

Afghanistan sees to Afghanistan. We see to ourselves. I don't like the outcomes. But if it can be a lesson, it isn't a failure. And all the "What if" in the world won't change it. I don't think were were really helping, maybe just putting on a bandage. But we never could have made Afghanistan different. We might have just made it more the same, adding to the eras of occupation, war, and opportunism. We can only learn not to do this again.