August 26, 2021, Updated August 27, 2021 and September 2, 2021

By Jonathan Michael Feldman

How We Got In, How We Got Out, and What We Should Do

A number of observers want to focus on how we got into Afghanistan and others on the messy way we are getting out. Yet, there are two important commentaries on both that point to their linkages. One by Dexter Filkins (https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/dexter-filkins-on-the-fall-of-afghanistan) and the other by John Oliver (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dykZyuWci3g). One of these commentators is nominally a comedian, but unlike the (a) anything a Democratic President does is okay because Trump is worse group and the (b) since my career and ideology is based on anti-intervention, I can’t look at nuances as to how an intervention was messed up group, John Oliver is able to say: (a) the intervention was a terrible mistake and (b) because it was so, implicated and harmed the lives of thousands, some have responsibilities. The often right-wing focus on how we got out and not how we got in is similarly an unfortunate kind of displacement problem. One nuance is that the U.S. government has gotten thousands out, but the ways in which Afghans have been rendered disposable by this intervention and mis-planned pull out is disturbing and disgusting. There are some who argue that left and right are both criticizing Biden, but I regard that as less important than other similarities, see: https://www.foxnews.com/media/media-pummeling-biden-left-right-afghanistan-crisis-deepens.

In contrast to the Fox News framing system which focuses only on Biden’s mess, some Democrats, persons in the peace movement or left are simply emotionally unintelligent when it comes to this tragedy. What tragedy? The gap between those thousands who fear for their lives and may have to flee and the numbers who will actually be able to do so, with these numbers constrained by the design of the U.S. exit plan (made by the Trump Administration, with Biden Administration inputs). Some are pointing to the “great logistical successes” of what Biden has done as part of the formula, “if Fox News identifies a mess they must be lying about everything.” In contrast, other reports worry about Taliban canvasses of homes that would threaten many. A report in The New York Times noted: “Refugee and resettlement experts estimate that at least 300,000 Afghans are in danger of being targeted by the Taliban for associating with Americans and U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan.” By August 24, 2021, Tuesday evening, more than 70,700 persons had been evacuated. That’s a gap of more than 200,000 persons. The British armed forces have evacuated more than 11,000 (around August 25/26) and “the German military has flown out more than 4,850 people from Afghanistan” according to an August 25 report. The British, UK, and potentially other numbers may reduce the gap further.

A CNN report on August 24 also adds perspective to the potential gap: “Many Afghan allies who the US has aimed to help will be left behind, a senior administration official told CNN, adding, ‘That would be true whenever we evacuated and whenever the Taliban took over.’ The official said the 70,000 people evacuated in the last 10 days does not closely match the universe of Afghan allies potentially eligible to come to the US, which Biden has previously estimated at 50,000 to 65,000.” Yet, the 65,000 number does not match the 300,000 number. TV4 in Sweden reported on August 26th that about 88,000 flew out of Kabul since August 14th according to U.S. General William Taylor. A report by The New York Times on August 25th, stated that about a quarter of a million persons who worked with the U.S. had not yet been evacuated. This report explained: “Even if American forces continue their current pace of roughly 20,000 evacuations per day — a tall order — the estimates suggest the effort will not come close to rescuing the full group of Afghans who may be eligible to leave before President Biden’s deadline to depart, Aug. 31.” [Emphasis added]

Even if “many would be left behind,” fewer would logically be left behind with better foresight and planning or honesty that once the U.S. military pulled out, the Taliban would eventually soon be in Kabul (which some observers knew even if the Biden Administration did not know of them, hire them, or consult them). In two interviews cited below, Noam Chomsky has explained that the so-called “intelligence experts” that U.S. political leaders consult, know far less than what can be gleaned by reading newspapers and other sources.

Biden has certainly launched a program to get many Afghans out. The Republicans of course only harp on Biden’s mis-steps, when they also contributed to the problem of the intervention and the sloppy and idiotic withdrawal plan of Trump. Of course, Biden has been called out for his indifference to the non-U.S. citizens affected by the withdrawal, in his own statements identified by Filkins and Oliver above. There is a sad, if not pathetic, symmetry between: (a) career militarist types in the military, right-wing think tanks, and even moderate think tanks that wanted the intervention and wanted it to go on forever and (b) career peace types, certain left-wing analysts, and intellectuals who are totally indifferent to prioritizing the U.S.’s responsibility in screwing up Afghanistan, the lives of millions, and the threat to these persons. This symmetry partially relates to Marx’s criticism of atheists who make a religion out of not believing in God (although his essay on “the Jewish Question” where he lays that out has other limitations).

The “Just Say Yes” to militarism and the “Just Say No” to militarism positions are associated with limited arguments among elements of the right and left. Note, some on the right are actively trying to rescue people and some on the left as well. The just saying yes to militarism captured a little truth fraction which is that violence has been associated with liberation, e.g. think the American Revolution or anti-slave rebellions. The just saying no to militarism captured a bigger truth fraction which is that military power deployed by NATO has often and usually proven to be dysfunctional, counter-productive and immoral. One should oppose the militarism of A (the U.S), but that opposition is not sustainable when the violence associated with it is not displaced to other parties B (the Taliban, the violence of cutting off food and resources). Disarmament is based on the logic of opposing the militarism of A and B. The counter-factual argument is that there is limited leverage on B (as they are a quasi terrorist force or beyond the reach of pressure system), but that argument fails to understand that groups like B usually depend on other forces, like C (in this case, Pakistan) who can be pressured.

The Pentagon is NOT the American revolution (or an anti-slave rebellion). And the old Republican party isolationism is not the same as disarmament which involves creating a process that demobilizes violence on all sides of a conflict, involves sensible planning to disengage. The lack of literacy about actual demilitarization processes underlies part of a fragment of the left’s position as does the left anti-imperialist framework which is nice in that it appears to oppose imperialism (at least of the U.S. variety) but often says little about other nation’s imperialisms, indigenous violence projection, or how to dismantle actual state or even economic structures related to militarism. These debates go back to the New Left period and disagreements between Seymour Melman and Neo-Marxists. Of course, “indigenous” violence projection often has had U.S. fingerprints on it, but certain post-colonial treatments (or deconstructions of Orientalism) negate the non U.S. elements behind such violence. Interestingly, Edward Said is often misappropriated intellectually when his ideas are used to argue that victims can never be victimizers.

Large parts of the right have supported state violence to achieve so-called humanitarian goals (with some on the left thrown in). Yet, some form of violence is constructive or more precisely the capacity to project violence, e.g. peace missions (although some of those can be sloppily organized), or the Nicaraguan Revolution (despite its Leninist and caudillo regression phase). Most of the violence deployed by the Pentagon is totally counter-productive and has often been used to prop up authoritarian and anti-democratic forces. The decoupling of the democratic sentiments in the American Revolution (whatever you think of the limits of those) and the Pentagon is a sad tale of de-evolution. Of course, the U.S. founding was based on a genocidal attack on Native Americans, but ideas of democratic constraints on militarism can be grounded in part of the trajectory of the “Founding Fathers.”

Laissez-Faire Pullout Activity Continues the Cycle of Violence

Similarly, the “just say no” to war partially reflects another sad tale, i.e. the decoupling of the peace movement, parts of the left intellectual milieu and Democratic Party apologists from the logic of general and complete disarmament, the notion of planning for peace. Trump’s plan and anti-war of the right-wing libertarian variety tries to stop wars without the support of coherent state planning. This approach merely perpetuates the cycle of violence. When Margaret Thatcher just said no to military spending as part of her right-wing libertarian attack on the state, that was sublimated by increased arms exports, i.e. “just saying no” led to more militarism. Similarly, Trump’s just saying no to war creating the current refugee crisis and facilitates arbitrary violence by the Taliban or by the scarcity regime that exists by a sloppy exit. In sum, just saying no to war is not anti-militarism, is not disarmament, is not a comprehensive solution. The violence of the U.S. is displaced on to other violence which of course the U.S. helped partially or largely trigger. Dualistic and dichotomistic thinking suggests that before a disarmament process, you can have zero responsibility for the way the military disengages.

The totalistic view of the military as all evil and as having no responsibilities but to disappear actually perpetuates militarism. Protests against war plants and moralistic deconstructions of military workers by peace groups have often led to no advocacy of conversion planning to create options or alternatives. During the British Labour Party’s “unilateral disarmament” advocacy, the left lost elections because the public had concerns about security. The lack of nuance made it easier for the militarists to gain power. Presently, the U.S. military assists needed humanitarian assistance to refugees. In disarmament thinking, one creates a changed foreign policy system and phased military disengagement which is contingent on multiple parties coming to terms. Sometimes unilateral or abrupt military disengagement can create instabilities or crises which the military can later exploit.

The rejection of the idea of the state’s capacity to do any good, or a total social amnesia about what disarmament even means, is something that has infected parts of the peace movement, left intellectual strata, and Democratic Party. We have courageous figures who thought things out and did not just offer deconstructionist soundbites, i.e. Seymour Melman, Inga Thorsson, Alva Myrdal, Marcus Raskin, and numerous theorists of demilitarization. The “just say no” to militarism camp involves the displacement of disarmament. It combines a kind of pseudo-anarchist to retrograde anarchist rejection of any state action with earlier Republican Party-style isolationism, i.e. state action linked to planning for demilitarization is rejected in favor of messy pullouts, pullouts where the messy or tragic stupidities in planning are swept under the rug, where there’s no expectation that the state can do a good job in planning or should do a good job.

Beyond the Pentagon and Taliban: Social and Economic Reconstruction

The alternative to the limitations of parts of the right and left is a reconstructionist vision based on creating new kinds of institutions inside and outside of places like Afghanistan. There’s a terrible cycle of intervention, pull outs, refugee crises that are linked to the limits of military power and the Pentagon nation-building model. These limits are seen in the profits of huge war contractors, the very contingent (meaning time-limited or time-constrained) actions of NGOs that follow interventions, and the scramble for airplanes now underway in Kabul.

There must be an alternative to both the Pentagon approach and the Taliban approach. We get a rough idea of that in an important article by Vijay Prashad (see: https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/33-afghanistan/?fbclid=IwAR26gjkQr-jZMgkAxwm-GO0iJYmTuhfJNG0xH9YkyGHf4IjzPjxHZaVq-yM), which is basically sound although but has some limitations in specifying the full range of alternatives to Pentagon and Taliban structures. One consideration is that simply ending or challenging U.S. military power when Chinese military power is ascendant is not going to produce a utopian outcome. There are far broader discussions of alternative formations which exist in solidarity campaigns, divestment actions, and the creation of cooperative, mutual-assistance groups formed during certain left social mobilizations (in Nicaragua’s revolutionary period, during the Salvador Allende government before the Pinochet coup, during anarchist Spain in the 1930s, etc.). Currently, as one example, South Africans are planning a December 2021 conference on cooperatives, i.e. an alternative to the established market and state.

One might make the argument that the US government is structurally incapable of planning properly or that a too quick pullout would weaken the pre-Taliban Afghan government. Dexter Filkins shows clearly that the U.S. government knew very clearly that this government was more like a parasitic, criminal organization and so there should have been no surprise at its collapse, i.e. the government that needed to be protected was a mirage. In other words, the U.S. government knew that there was no government to protect once they pulled out. Therefore, the sequences of the pullout of troops before properly securing lives (of Americans and Afghans whose lives were jeopardized by the intervention) was based on a kind of cynical and brutal set of calculations. These calculations were part of a larger movement to end a stupid, evil intervention, that was glossed over by the concerted and often well-meaning efforts of NGOs (who did do some good, even if the totality of the equation was compromised by the militarist mess).

Marcus Raskin argued that the requirements for becoming president (see: https://www.amazon.com/Notes-Old-System-Transform-American/dp/067950530X) certainly limit utopian possibilities. Other barriers are blocks on progressives’ ability to enter the planning system, constraints on influencing public deliberations, the linkages among militarists, the media, and mediocre least common denominator thinking. These barriers are part of a larger set of forces that require systemic change. The messiness of this withdrawal can easily empower the Trump-aligned forces and sets a bad precedent for the necessary deliberation, user-driven, rational planning needed to combat the climate crisis, species extinction and plundering of the ecosystem. To cover up that mess is very dangerous.

The ecological crisis, implosion of U.S.-based manufacturing capacity, and declining living standards in parts of the North as well as South, all point to the need for a social movement, green mobilization effort linked to coherent state planning that links disarmament and development. This effort will be sidelined by messy wars, pullouts and negative demonstration effects regarding coherent and moral state planning efforts.

Post Script

After writing much of the above, I learned about two interviews Lawrence Krauss conducted with Noam Chomsky which basically make the same core argument that I do, i.e. U.S. policy should reflect Afghan needs, not simply a shortened and time logic of withdrawal (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htLMIMwne1E and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaxsX8LXL7I). Chomsky said in May of 2021, the withdrawal process “should take into account the opinion of Afghans.” This would include weak, but existing “Afghan peace forces.” The withdrawal was conceived for the U.S. government benefit, but if it occurs (Chomsky then argued) it should be done for Afghans’ benefit (or in a way that aided Afghans outside the Taliban). Just pulling out quickly without thinking about Afghan needs was ill-advised according to Chomsky. Given that 250,000 (as of around August 25th) less whoever is evacuated by Biden’s deadline of August 31st, 2021, may be vulnerable, the U.S. and aid agencies will probably monitor the status of these persons and use their control over aid and financing to extract concessions.

The terror attack on Kabul’s airport zone on August 26th killed dozens of persons and at least thirteen U.S. troops. This attack took advantage of a concentration of persons and troops around this area. This attack was preceded by another major attack on May 8th in Kabul, killing 85 persons. These attacks have both been attributed to ISIL-K, a force opposing both Taliban and the U.S.

Ezra Klein, a major columnist for The New York Times, makes various arguments claiming that there was no way to avoid the problematic withdrawal. He makes several arguments to support his thesis that, “Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem.” His work is an impressive example of the Democratic Party apologetics for what I have described as a messy withdrawal.

Klein writes: “It is worth considering some counterfactuals for how our occupation could have ended. Imagine that the Biden administration, believing the Afghan government hollow, ignored President Ashraf Ghani’s pleas and began rapidly withdrawing personnel and power months ago. The vote of no-confidence ripples through Afghan politics, demoralizing the existing government and emboldening the Taliban. Those who didn’t know which side to choose, who were waiting for a signal of who held power, quickly cut deals with the Taliban. As the last U.S. troops leave, the Taliban overwhelms the country, and the Biden administration is blamed, reasonably, for speeding their victory.”

The quick collapse of government forces showed the hollowness of the Afghan government. Dexter Filkins argues that the government knew all about the corruption and weakness. He explains: “The combination of warlords and American largesse, sanctified by Western-style elections, produced a state whose leaders’ main objective was to get hold of as much foreign money as possible. Enriched by graft, the Afghan élite began spending weekends in the United Arab Emirates, where they gathered in posh villas on an island called Palm Jumeirah. American officials had a droll name for the phenomenon: vertically integrated criminal enterprise, or vice. The Afghan state, venal and predatory, became the main driver of Taliban recruitment.” In other words, the Taliban itself represents the legitimacy crisis of the Afghan government. Biden’s actions of quick withdrawal simply underlined what was already established and known. Furthermore, what actually did take place was precisely what Klein suggests would have happened if Biden withdrew earlier: (a) “Those who didn’t know which side to choose, who were waiting for a signal of who held power, quickly cut deals with the Taliban;” (b) “As the last U.S. troops leave, the Taliban overwhelms the country, and the Biden administration is blamed, reasonably, for speeding their victory.” The confidence of the people in the Afghan government was not non-existent, but neither was it as great as implied here. Many persons associated with the government were cutting deals with the Taliban all along as was the U.S. government, according to some reports.

Klein refers to his colleague Grant Gordon, “a political scientist who works on conflict and refugee crises,” and offers another scenario: “If the Biden administration had pulled our allies and personnel out more efficiently, that might have unleashed the Taliban to massacre their opposition, as America and the world would have been insulated and perhaps uninterested in the aftermath. There have been revenge killings, but it has not devolved, at least as of yet, into all-out slaughter, and that may be because the American withdrawal has been messy and partial and the Taliban fears re-engagement. ‘What is clearly a debacle from one angle may actually have generated restraint,’ Gordon told me. ‘Having spent time in places like this, I think people lack a real imagination for how bad these conflicts can get.'”

I find this argument unconvincing for several reasons. First, it is possible that the Taliban used terror instrumentally to speed up the U.S. withdrawal. Therefore, the earlier the U.S. would have withdrawn, the less terror. Second, Gordon’s argument is counter-intuitive and seems empirically wrong. He seems to imply that carefully planned withdrawals, done over a longer period of time, are messier than quickly organized withdrawals. In contrast, by withdrawing smaller numbers over a longer period of time, one is less likely to concentrate persons seeking to flee in a spatially limited spot, i.e. the very concentration that makes individuals more vulnerable to a terror attack by a group like ISIL-K. Third, Gordon seems to imply that it is impossible to make peace deals or that the U.S. lacked any leverage in such deals with the Taliban. In contrast, I believe that the U.S. misuses the power and leverage it has and then dissipates that power and leverage. Fourth, the war itself and the failure to make the deal far earlier with the Taliban helps creates greater possibilities for terror as terror was often linked to the U.S. engagement. Finally, anyone who has carefully analyzed Biden’s long-term thinking about Afghanistan or explored his domestic priorities would recognize that almost nothing would motivate him to re-engage in Afghanistan. In any case, U.S. retaliatory strikes against a Taliban regime could easily occur given either quick and sloppy or slow and efficient withdrawals. Such bombing is a periodic feature of U.S. military policy and can be done in a way that would present little harm to U.S. forces or Biden’s domestic plans for infrastructure improvement, etc.

Klein raises an exceptionally important point related to knowledge and power of the U.S. He writes: “We are still holding not just to the illusion of our control, but to the illusion of our knowledge.” The illusion of power relates to “the limits to military power” which has been explained by scholars like Melman, Gabriel Kolko, and Andrew Bacevich–among others. I would contend that there is a way to project military power in places like Afghanistan, but it does not work in the way that the U.S. did so. The U.S. should have learned this lesson in Vietnam. The “illusion of our knowledge” is a theme I can’t believe in. The U.S. had a multi-year lesson during the Vietnam War. They gained the knowledge there. The world has organized many peace deals. There’s lots of knowledge there as well. Some will point to the limits of deal-making when it comes to North Korea, but this argument raises too many questions that I can adequately address here.

What is a more effective (in a narrow, instrumentalist if not opportunist sense) form of intervention? Pakistan has been able to project military power in Afghanistan quite successfully in contrast to the U.S. Their intervention utilized key mechanisms like the madrassa or religious schools (a kind of intervention from below), something for which the U.S. offered no coherent equivalent (focusing its intervention by deal-making with those above, with other complementary NGO programs from below having insufficient but sometimes important successes). While the intervention in Afghanistan by the U.S. was not justified, it was badly designed even on interventionist terms. China will intervene in Afghanistan, building up infrastructure and by providing other forms of economic aid. They will gain economically from that, whereas the U.S.’s form of intervention has cost trillions of dollars. The idea that the U.S., Pakistani, and Chinese forms of intervention are the only ones possible is certainly absurd.

Klein is correct on this point: “The alternative to polarization is often the suppression of dissenting viewpoints. If the parties agree with each other, then they have incentive to marginalize those who disagree with both of them.” And on this one: “Our wars and drone strikes and tactical raids and the resulting geopolitical chaos directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis.” Klein’s conclusions end in the correct way, but his detour of apologizing for the mess sustained in part by the Biden Administration, is wrong. Klein quotes from Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut: “I want America more forward-deployed, but I want it through a massive international financing arm and a massive renewable energy arm…That’s the United States I want to see spread across the world — not the face of America today that’s by and large arms sales, military trainers and brigades.” Thus, Klein correctly argues that the U.S. can choose to move beyond “isolationism and militarism.”

Biden’s August 31st, 2021 Speech

President Biden helped to address some of the concerns related to the above analysis in a speech on August 31, 2021 (here I use the White House transcript which corrected for some errors). The war was costly, continuing it served no purpose. He correctly assessed the limits to the war, the need to rebuild the U.S.’s declining social and economic structures and the need for an exit, but there are still questions that linger.

Biden acknowledged that he mistakenly assumed that the Afghan government would hold on, but this mistake proved very costly. Could Biden have used other publicly available information to make another decision? Biden himself said, “by the time I came to office, the Taliban was in its strongest military position since 2001, controlling or contesting nearly half of the country.”

While he said, “I had authorized 6,000 troops — American troops — to Kabul to help secure the airport,” this was after earlier troop withdrawals which (a) could have assisted with transport out of Afghanistan, (b) extended a larger perimeter around Kabul to negate possible infiltration within that perimeter and (c) helped track and vet entry into the perimeter (similar to pre-boarding security at an airport). It’s impossible to say how effective (a), (b), and (c) would have been to reduce the messiness of the operation, but these considerations are worth noting and represent opportunity costs to downstream success, i.e. with “downstream” meaning the actual mobilization to exit operations.

Biden says that he gave advance notice to U.S. citizens to leave, as early as March 2021. Some will interpret this to mean that people did not have to wait until the last minute to leave. Yet, notice what Biden did not say, i.e. this advance notice was not extended to non-U.S. allies. Two other pieces of information should be considered.

First, yes Biden gave advanced notice to the Americans and the vast majority got out who wanted to, leaving only about 500 or so behind, many of whom seemed to want to stay (although that point requires further elaboration), i.e. advance notice leads to success. Biden said “now we believe that about 100 to 200 Americans remain in Afghanistan with some intention to leave.” So as for the exit of Americans, great success can be claimed: “[Ninety-eight] percent of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were able to leave.”

Second, in contrast advance notice was not given to the allies or non-Americans with the result that perhaps two thirds were trapped or remained (assuming that about 100,000 left of the 300,000 who experts suggested wanted to leave):

Since March, we reached out 19 times to Americans in Afghanistan, with multiple warnings and offers to help them leave Afghanistan — all the way back as far as March.  After we started the evacuation 17 days ago, we did initial outreach and analysis and identified around 5,000 Americans who had decided earlier to stay in Afghanistan but now wanted to leave.

Biden said the following:

We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety.  That number is more than double what most experts thought were possible.

First, one really has to doubt what experts say. This weakens my argument about the 300,000 figure of course. Second, the ability to evacuate more was contingent upon acting earlier, not making false assumptions about the Afghan government, and the ancillary factors (a), (b), and (c) described above.

Biden said, “leaving August the 31st is not due to an arbitrary deadline; it was designed to save American lives.” Let’s assume that is true, the question is whether the mobilization should have been designed differently, i.e. done earlier and stretched over a longer period of time (if one studies the time line of what took place and the logic of my arguments, one can see that the “mistake” attached to the belief in the Afghan government lasting was potentially very costly for non-Americans). Biden’s defenders, including a number on the left, share this assumption: “the choice — the real choice — between leaving or escalating.” This was true and is relevant for debunking the right-wing argument about the need to stay on. Yet, there was a third choice tied to: accelerating the leaving earlier, keeping troops to facilitate that related to some Kabul perimeter. The design of the leaving is what is at issue here, with certain right-commentators making more or less disingenuous comments about that, but sometimes pointing out errors. For some on the left, so eager to end the war at any cost, the devil was never in the details, i.e. nuances about design of withdrawal were unimportant probably because these did not affect such person’s existential situation and that displacement was compounded by a kind of religious conversion regarding faith in government explanations and rationalizations.

Biden makes another good point related to use of diplomatic and other pressure to get the Taliban to assure for safe exit for those who want to leave. The Taliban seem to say that they will support such emigration, with credibility related in part to higher level leaders who may not control what local forces do. The problem here is that there are certain risks attached given the security situation in Afghanistan.

Biden correctly says: “the bottom line is: There is no…evacuation from the end of a war that you can run without the kinds of complexities, challenges, and threats we faced.  None.” But he also argued:

Imagine if we had begun evacuations in June or July, bringing in thousands of American troops and evacuating more than 120,000 people in the middle of a civil war.  There still would have been a rush to the airport, a breakdown in confidence and control of the government, and it still would have been a very difficult and dangerous mission.

I find this argument a bit confusing. The rush to the airport would exist in both scenarios. Therefore, there was no apparent advantage in waiting on that score. The breakdown in confidence and control of the government was there in the ascent of the Taliban and partially explains their growth and the switchovers of troops going from the government to the Taliban. The risk of the government was pre-ordained and the most obvious lesson was that there was nothing the U.S. government could do to influence that positively or negatively, except a futile effort tied to military power. Biden recognizes the limits to military power, but still contends that an earlier withdrawal would be messy. The earlier and later withdrawal would both be messy, but having more time to withdrawal eliminates certain kinds of messiness, related to volume of exits.

Biden is turning an ordinal or continuous variable, e.g. more or less messy, with a dichotomous one, i.e. messy or not. Many will be convinced by his rhetoric here, but I am not because while I agree with Biden’s arguments (it would be messy), I still contend it could be less messy. Why? We know from the logic of industrial engineering, management and planning that having less time to plan for a function is often messier. Of course, sudden shocks and crises can trigger solutions, e.g. making people more willing to believe, give up on the Afghan government and the like. Yet, social scientists understanding Afghanistan or the limits to U.S. military power understood that the whole enterprise would collapse even before U.S. troops entered the country.

Biden said: His choices were to “follow the agreement of the previous administration and extend it to have — or extend to more time for people to get out; or send in thousands of more troops and escalate the war.” Yet, Biden himself was involved in two time extensions which did not involve extensive escalation. First, he waited until April to make the decision to end the war (an “extension” of two or three months, dated from his inauguration on January 20, 2021). Second, he did extend the troop removal deadline to August 31st from May 1st (an extension of four months). Thus, we have an extension of six to seven months.

Biden correctly sees a path beyond the Pentagon and Taliban by stating: “the way to [help Afghans] is not through endless military deployments, but through diplomacy, economic tools, and rallying the rest of the world for support.”

In conclusion, some on the left continue to confuse the issue of doing the withdrawal properly with doing it at all. The issues center on ignoring contingencies, treating continuous or ordinal variables as dichotomous ones, and ignoring the potential extensions in time implicit or explicit in Biden’s timelines, with some measure of wishful thinking. It is very important to hold leaders accountable, even when they are correct on the big picture of ending senseless wars that this author never supported. Why? Because we don’t have a big margin of error in government planning given cascading crises and coordination needed to address them.

Some will think the U.S. is going to help save the remaining Afghans at risk. Their worries are my principal concern and motivation here even if the big picture was to end a costly war, i.e. the ones the U.S. made promises to. It is simply wrong to suggest that such persons are dispensable or them being screwed over and vulnerable will signal to other countries not to cooperate in future U.S. imperial adventures. The likelihood of such adventures in the near future seems infinitely small and by the time they re-emerge (if they do so) memories will be proven short (see the failure to learn from the Vietnamese adventure in the Afghan case). No doubt the Trump Administration’s way to handle an exit agreement significantly complicated Biden’s job.

References

For some articles that have elements that I would criticize, see: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/debacle-in-afghanistan?pc=1369&fbclid=IwAR1Zf5-T84sRn6-monmExVPcBWAWTB7FzkCLt-ji_2tYsIqHzew81lAduK0 and https://annebonnypirate.org/2021/08/17/afghanistan-the-end-of-the-occupation/amp/?fbclid=IwAR388wjQw4OJZCtCeeoeHcr13EdMFdUVYvsib0yk7_79AmShIp5zV0QFKCU These sources have some merits, but lack any clear answer to the immediate crisis or a long-term alternative besides not intervening. The mess created after the intervention is not adequately addressed or how one could fill the void during the intervention beyond militarism and fundamentalist extremism. I strongly recommend Melman’s The Demilitarized Society for the beginning of an alternative point of view. See also my article at this link: https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/25/2%20(91)/143/33540/From-Warfare-State-to-Shadow-State-MILITARISM.