I felt it was important to share this.
Afghanistan Didn’t Fall:
It Never Existed
All wars are forever when you don’t
know what you’re fighting for.
Frontpage Mag
August 17, 2021
“Afghanistan’s collapse: Did US intelligence get it wrong?” ABC News asks. “Afghanistan Is Your Fault,” barks Tom Nichols at The Atlantic. “Why Afghan Forces So Quickly Laid Down Their Arms,” Politico ponders.
The one thing that the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan is good for is more media hot takes.
Afghanistan didn’t fall because it never existed. The Afghan army laid down its arms because it also never existed. And not just because many of the 300,000 soldiers were imaginary. Its Pashtun members surrendered to their fellow Taliban Pashtuns, or fled to Iran or Uzbekistan, depending on their tribal or religious affiliations which, unlike Afghanistan, are very real.
The Afghan army was there because we spent $90 billion on it. Much like Afghanistan with its president, its constitution, and its elections existed because we spent a fortune on it. When we left, the president fled, the army collapsed, and Afghanistan: The Musical closed in Kabul.
Afghanistan isn’t a country. It’s a stone age Brigadoon of quarreling tribes, ethnic groups, Islamic denominations, and warlords manned by young men with old Russian and American rifles. Unlike the fiction of a democratic Afghanistan, that is something they will die for.
And in the coming years you will see some of those same soldiers who laid down their guns fighting and dying for tribes and warlords, even fighting the Taliban, in the real endless war.
The forever war isn’t something we invented after 9/11: Afghanistan has always been at war.
Americans are impressed that the Taliban held out for 20 years. They shouldn’t be.
There’s no time in Afghanistan. Two decades of war are horrifyingly incomprehensible to Americans. To Afghans, it’s the way things have always been. We stepped into a place that has been a war zone for centuries, took sides, supplied weapons, and then left as everyone knew we would. The British and the Russians came and went. After us, the Chinese will come and go.
And the forever war will go on endlessly.
Before us, the Russians wanted the Afghans to pretend to be Communists. We wanted them to pretend that they were Democrats. But the Afghans aren’t ‘Afghans’, they’re Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Balochs, Hazaras, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, everything else is just a temporary costume.
The Taliban, another Pashtun bid to seize power, will be met with resistance, not by the proponents of a free and democratic Afghanistan, but by rival tribes and warlords.
We’ll probably end up funding some of them. And maybe this time we won’t be stupid enough to ask them to hold elections or any of the other nation-building nonsense from Foggy Bottom.
Our Afghanistan campaign after September 11 was fast, clever, and ruthless. The men who conducted it understood the society. They worked together with warlords to crush the Taliban. Their goal was a quick and dirty victory that would make an example out of the Taliban.
Our allies were anyone whose current factional interests in the endless power struggle aligned with ours. As the years went on, some of our allies became enemies, and some enemies became allies. The Taliban were the bad guys, but just like in Syria, so was everyone else. There were plenty of innocents caught in the crossfire, but innocents have no power.
The average Afghan rural villager doesn’t think of being a citizen of some country called Afghanistan. He cares little for elections and his elders confuse Americans with the Russians and sometimes even the British. The elites in Kabul are happy to dress up their power grabs in presidential titles and constitutions that no one else in the country cares about. USAID pays girls in Kabul to play at feminism and college graduates to talk about international relations.
None of it mattered a damn in the vast majority of the country as we are now finding out.
But Afghanistan didn’t become a complete disaster for us. Until Obama.
American forces peaked at 25,000 under Bush. Obama quadrupled them to 100,000. That’s the year more American soldiers were wounded than during the entire Bush administration.
1,200 Americans died during Obama’s Afghanistan surge, not just because he quadrupled the number of soldiers, but because the military was told to stop trying to defeat the Taliban.
Our soldiers became community organizers with guns who were told not to fight.
No hearts and minds were won. But cemeteries filled up with boys from Texas and West Virginia who weren’t allowed to shoot back because Obama wanted to win Muslim hearts and minds.
The military brass who embraced Obama’s strategy buried and crippled a generation of young men. Countless men and women came home wounded inside. They overdosed or killed themselves.
The surge receded. The military brass pulled back to secure the cities while the Taliban secured the rural areas that we spent so many lives on. All they had to do was wait for us to leave.
The speed with which the Taliban took the country only seems magical to CNN viewers.
The country was theirs for the taking. The Taliban fought few battles. The various warlords and leaders began switching sides when Biden announced his withdrawal to join the winning team. That’s the Islamic team backed by Pakistan, China, Turkey who are the big boys still standing.
But that doesn’t mean that they won’t switch sides next month or next year.
The hated government in Kabul was backed by our money and our air power. We’re out, so are they. But the locals will hate the Taliban too. And as the Chinese come in to set up mines, run roads, and offend the locals, they’ll find out what we, the British, and the Russians learned.
Afghanistan doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s its own forever war of quarreling tribes.
The forever war will continue whether or not we’re there. But we’ll probably be there in one form or another. We never really understood Afghanistan or Iraq. And so, we can’t escape them.
Al Qaeda and ISIS will operate out of Afghanistan. So will countless other Jihadi fighters.
Americans didn’t invent the forever war. It’s been going on in the Islamic parts of the world for over a thousand years. It’s unfashionable and politically incorrect to mention it. That’s why the media carefully describes the Taliban as “religious students” without naming the religion. It’ll refer to Sunni and Shiite infighting in Iraq while leaving off the “Islam” part of the group.
We came to defeat the Jihadists behind September 11 and we stayed behind to reform Afghanistan. But what were we reforming it from? We couldn’t name the problem.
And when you can’t name a problem, you never come up with a solution.
Having failed to fix Afghanistan, the process is now underway to bring as many Afghans as possible to America. The old plan to bring 100,000 “interpreters” and their family members has been vastly expanded to make any Afghan who did any work for American organizations, from aid groups to the media, eligible to come to America. By the time they’re done, we may end up with a million Afghan refugees in America. Some of them will become Islamic terrorists.
The final act of fighting terrorism is bringing the terrorists to America to create more terror.
The real tragedy of Afghanistan isn’t just that we lost so many of our best and brightest in the dust, it’s that we learned nothing from the experience. Nothing except to blame ourselves.
We didn’t fail Afghanistan. Nor did we lose Afghanistan. It was never ours or anyone’s.
Afghanistan wasn’t our forever war. It’s the forever war of the warlords and tribesmen who will keep on fighting it until the water dries up, the cattle die, and they all move to Fremont where 25,000 Afghans already live. Our mistake was not recognizing what Afghanistan was.
Americans like to believe that everyone is like us. It’s an easy trap to fall into. Wherever we go, the people speak English, listen to our music, and wear Nike shirts. They have opinions about our presidents and want to know how easy it is to move to Fremont. And we cheerfully supply them with more Nike shirts, bad music, worse movies, and try to persuade them to create a United States of Iraq or a United States of Afghanistan. Then when it doesn’t work out, they move to Fremont, Minnesota, or New York City, run for Congress, and tell us they hate us.
If we learn anything from Afghanistan, from Iraq, and from September 11, let it be this.
There have to be boundaries, physical and conceptual borders, between us and the rest of the world. American exceptionalism can’t be a narcissistic belief that everyone ought to be like us. If everyone could become us, there would be nothing exceptional about us. Our exceptionalism is that the rest of the world isn’t like us and never will be. And that if we want to protect ourselves, we have to stop trying to define the world or allowing the rest of the world to redefine America.
We could have won in Afghanistan, swiftly and decisively, and left, if we hadn’t been seduced into believing that Afghanistan could be America and that Afghans deserved to be Americans.
Likewise, Iraq.
Victories became defeats and cemeteries filled with the dead because we lost sight of the truth about Afghanistan and about ourselves. The more we think about Afghanistan or any place in terms of ourselves, the less we see it for what it is. And that can be a deadly illusion.
Americans have spent the last century trying to turn the world into America. Let’s spend this century making America what it was always intended to be: a refuge from the rest of the world.
We won’t win wars anymore because we can no longer remember what we’re fighting for. Unable to draw boundaries between the enemy and ourselves, between our nation and the world, we’ve lost touch with the fundamental purpose and even the concept of what a war is.
To win a war, we must remember what we’re fighting for. Ourselves.
The Afghans understand that concept. Perhaps they understand it too well. But it’s time we learned it too. If we can’t go to war for ourselves, not for democracy, human rights, or so that Afghan girls can go to school, then we will lose soldiers, lose wars, and lose our nation.
All wars are endless and forever when you don’t understand what it takes to win
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
7 replies on “Do you really want to know what is going on in Afghanistan!!”
Having spent considerable time both on the ground in and studying West Asia, the Middle East and Northern Africa (wherein are concentrated the longest standing Muslim populations) this article doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.
Though I knew all of this the article did put everything in a nice, neat, easily understood package which should benefit the majority of Americans.
The take-away lessons from this experience should be —
Americans who truly understand the situation on the ground in places like Iraq (an artificially created country) and Afghanistan (a region not a political entity) have been trying to tell American policy makers that nation building was a waste of blood and treasure since well before 9/11
It’s an amazingly arrogant idea to think we can and should go into foreign countries and try to make them like us.
The idea that “Inside every ____ is an American screaming to get out.” — Should have died when we left Viet Nam. Those people are not like us here in America. You can’t make them like us. They don’t want to be like us. They want to be like them, that’s why they are the way they are. Sociologically speaking, people in Afghanistan, Iraq etc. might as well be a different species from another planet.
You cannot identify with them, they will not identify with you. In order to deal with them you have to speak a language they understand. When you speak to them about democracy and self-government under the Rule of Law you might as well be barking like a dog. It’s not only that they don’t want our system of government, it’s that they are actively opposed to it — No matter what they tell you. Their religion forbids our form of Judeo-Christian philosophy. The only way that the U.S. can overcome that and change the political structure of such places is to become like them, forsake all our core principles, conquer them and then rule them with an iron fist. Even then they will resist and refuse to comply.
This is why Iraq was ruled by a strong-man dictator. This is why Syria is ruled by a strong-man dictator. This is why Iran is ruled by a council of strong-man dictators. This is why Saudi Arabia is ruled by a monarchy that beheads people and chops off hands for petty crimes. This is why Jordan is ruled by a monarchy. This is why Sudan is ruled by war lords. Etc.
The reason Al Qaeda was able to successfully assault the United States was that Osama Bin-Laden and his minions were able to bring force to bear on the U.S. in the form of a terrorist attack. The Al Qaeda terrorists had no intention of conquering the U.S. and making us into a nation in the image Islamic theocracies. They were “speaking” to us in the universal language of violence and force.
Because that is how such people do things in their culture.
It would have been far more effective and enormously cheaper in blood and treasure if after the Twin Towers attack when we had identified Afghanistan as the origin of the group that carried out the attack — We had simply blown everyone who cooperated in any way into tiny little moist pieces of unrecognizable organic matter. That would have sent a clear message that if you hurt us, we will hurt you more to at least an order of magnitude.
Then if we felt more was needed to protect America we could have sent teams into Afghanistan to talk to each and every major tribal head. Their message would simply be “If you harbor anyone, or aid anyone in any way, that results in an attack or the planning of an attack on our interests … We will drop hellfire on you out of the sky from a place where you cannot reach us.”
It would have taken a few examples of actually doing that to get the idea across and show that we meant it. It would have conveyed an effective and useful message in the universal language of force. It would act to deter cooperation from any Afghani tribe and deny terrorists like Al Qaeda from establishing a foothold to create a base of operations. Afghani tribal leaders, war lords and whatever else is there would be forced to tell their minions “You’d better not be doing something that is going to get bombs dropped on me or I’ll kill you.”
It’s easier, cheaper and more effective to work within their own system than it is to try to make an adversary into something like us. If that was going to work then the Crusades would have accomplished it.
After a military action the course of events is analyzed, parsed and lessons drawn both from what worked and what did not. In the military you have to do this if you want to expect any success from the next military operation. This has been going on for thousands of years. From the first caveman that learned it’s more effective to throw rocks and spears down hill than up hill.
There are no real “new ideas”, anyone who thinks he’s stumbled across a better way is arrogant, ignorant and foolish. The Democrats in power botched the Viet Nam war by micromanaging it. Obama botched our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan by micromanaging them. When civilian politicians and lawyers control every aspect in the combat theater, including stupid things like if you can return fire or not, if you can shoot on one side of a road but not the other, etc. — That conflict is already lost, it’s merely a matter of how many Americans will die before that loss is fully realized.
It is not only a good idea to have civilian leadership in charge of the military, it is essential to our system of self government. The military is a powerful, dangerous tool that needs to be kept under firm control. However, “firm control” does not mean telling military how to go about doing the job that civilian leadership wants done. It means creating and maintaining a military that will not depose the civilian leadership.
The proper, consistent and effective application of military force is for civilian leadership to determine what needs to be done, then tell the military to go do that. What that looks like in the case of Afghanistan is —
“Go kill all the terrorists. Take whatever steps are needed short of total depopulation and which are within our laws and the Conventions of War to accomplish that. While you’re at it do what you can to nullify future threats. Call us when you’ve finished that so we can see if you have another job coming up. Bye.”
Anything else is a waste of manpower, money and expertise. Just as we do not want the military governing the United States, so too we do not want politicians trying to manage military operations. That is why we send our military people to our War Colleges and Academies, so they can learn how to apply military force in the most professional, effective manner. With minimum loss of American lives and minimum expenditure of capital. Doing anything else is like hiring an electrician because your pipes are leaking or hiring a plumber because a fuse keeps blowing.
Bucket loads of sense in your comment. This is why allowing our borders to be open, unprotected and essentially a welcome mat is such a catastrophically evil thing – the people invading America are seeking our riches, enticed by statists who hate America, or at least half her population, who they want to kill or reduce by shear numbers of invasive species.
The forces that move people across the face of the Earth have not changed since pre-civilization. Need, greed and the drive for power are the same today as they have ever been.
The Muslims came swarming out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th Century and nearly conquered the known world. That they were stopped at the gates of Vienna and the battle of Poitiers/Tours is all that saved nascent Western Culture from becoming vassals of Islam. One need only look at the Islamic countries today to see how that would have turned out for the entire world.
You would be walking around in a Hijab or would have joined me in being executed as an infidel rebel. Poverty and repression would be the rule not the exception in our Western World.
Yet today Europe is again being invaded by the same ideology. It boggles the mind that there are people in the U.S. that think the European model is superior.
The same unction that is causing the invasion of Europe by Islam is happening here in North America. An invasion of people who do not share our values, who bring the very problems they are fleeing with them. Different players, same result.
People are people. The Founders were aware of that simple fact and attempted to counterbalance the negative tendencies of humanity. The Left, both in Europe and here are moving to reinforce those negative tendencies whether the common useful idiot is aware of it or not.
The people driving Leftist ideology know all this. Before the Left conquered our institutions of higher learning this sort of thing was taught in academia. That teaching has been removed from the curricula.
The West is in peril such as we have not seen since the Mongol or Islamic invasions. It is true that peril has always been there. What has changed is that in the last couple decades our enemies have taken root amongst us to the point they are flourishing. Figuratively speaking — They are laying down their arms at Poitiers/Tours and flinging wide the gates of Vienna.
Thanks for adding this. I found it very helpful.
You are most welcome, Sir.
Daniel pretty much sums it up. We need to remember who WE are and fight to preserve our way of life. There will never be another USA. Thanks for posting his great summary about Afghanistan. I am of the same opinion as is Daniel..
Thank you for posting this very insightful commentary on our leaders failure to understand why America is exceptional, or at least was, and the ill-conceived notion that that other nations and cultures want to be like us. No. They are exceptional according their definition of exceptional, not ours.
Daniel Greenfield is always a good read.