On Afghanistan

 So, our forces have withdrawn from Afghanistan and the Taliban has taken over.  It seems indecent to let so momentous a development to pass without comment.

Clearly all our options were bad.  Either commit to an endless low-grade war, or permit a catastrophe.  On the one hand, I can see the viewpoint that, after all, the Afghans are the ones who will suffer if the Taliban takes their country, so they should be willing and able to fight for it.  On the other hand, the scale of the disaster makes it unbearable simply to walk away and let it happen. And, just to be clear, this is not comparable to our indefinite commitment in Europe or South Korea.  Neither of those are fighting an endless, low-grade counterinsurgency.

If we could have propped up the Afghan government indefinitely by maintaining a mere 2,500 troops in the country, I would say go for it.  But accounts are coming out about Afghan commanders agreeing to surrender as soon our our plan to withdraw was established, and there was a significant draw-down before Joe Biden was even inaugurated.  So I have to agree with people who say that the Taliban was holding back, that the prior status quo would not have held if we had changed our minds and decided to leave such a small force in place, that our options were not stay or leave, but stay or escalate.  And escalating would have meant, not just and escalation of our troop numbers, but an escalation of the war.  That would probably not have been politically sustainable.  

But what is inexcusable is the failure to get out Afghans and their families who worked with the US and who face retaliation from the Taliban as a result -- some 70,000 of them.  There are fewer and fewer people in the US government these days who are old enough to remember the fall of South Vietnam and desperate scenes of people in danger for their work with the US desperate to escape.  Joe Biden is one of them.  His inaction in that regard is inexcusable.  From Day One he should have developed and implemented a plan to get our people out.  He should have conveyed to the Taliban (through whatever discreet back channels we have) that we would stay as long as necessary and do whatever it took to get our people out.  Implicit in this is a promise that once our people were out, Afghanistan was the Taliban's to do with has they pleased.  But we should have made very clear that if the Taliban interfered with our removal of our people, we would retaliate.

Who knows what will happen next.  Taliban takeover, like the Communist takeover of Vietnam, is one possibility.  Another is endless war with regional power rivalry -- Pakistan supporting the Taliban, Iran supporting someone at least a bad, and the Russians getting their hand in as well.  I like to think that the Taliban will refrain from hosting any more terrorists who target the West, seeing what happened last time.  But who knows.  And destabilizing refugee flows.

I can think of one small piece of comfort here, and even that may be a cold one.  Vietnam long stood out as the first war we ever lost. But in the long run we won. We failed to prevent Communism from taking over in Vietnam, but in the end Communism proved to be a barren ideology and the Vietnamese abandoned it.  Turning the clock back to the 7th Century seems like an equally barren ideology.

On the other hand, Vietnam had some advantages that Afghanistan does not share.  Vietnam is a narrow strip of coastland, well suited to export-driven economic growth.  Afghanistan is a landlocked, rugged, mountainous country.  Vietnam had a long history of the state holding supreme power.  Afghanistan has a long history of warlords outside the control of the state.  And even granting that in Vietnam we won in the long run, in the short run things got extremely bad.