We have officially got tired of the passion of Kabul airport. Hundreds and thousands are still there, trying to get out in the last 24 hours before the US and the UK abandon their missions.
But as with the Afghan war itself, our attention can stay only so long on something that keeps happening. We’ve emoted about our own failure, mourned the future of women and girls, raised the money, and now we’re moving on.
But it’s not the moving on that matters. What else can we do? Watch the absolute oversupply of images of suffering and destruction from every phone and sat cam? They merely give us the illusion that we could do something, that we are there. Arguably, the roots of the renewed liberal interventionism that began a generation after Vietnam lie in this spread of remote visual presence, and the permanent disjuncture of such. To see is to be present; instantaneous broadcast is a permanent category error.
So one can forgive the hand-wringing, I guess. The West has so little culture remaining — dissolved by US global cultural products and destruction of cultural protection — that we still cannot believe another one cannot be transformed in a generation. But what’s the excuse for the last desperados on the right, and the progressive side, getting all their final takes out on what they know is an epochal moment?
There was nothing strategic in the 10 days or so of wailing that came from The Australian’s pages as Kabul fell. Since it never liked Donald Trump much anyway, it was happy to acknowledge that he was the one who had basically surrendered to the Taliban last year.
But it couldn’t bring itself to admit the strategic truth: Trump’s rapid ceding of territory to the Taliban — by standing down the US army, hence no casualties for 16 months — made encirclement inevitable. Whatever errors were then made, possibly pretty huge ones, Joe Biden’s only other recourse would have been to resurge with 20,000 troops or so.
But even acknowledging this, the right prefer a cry of anguish that he no longer had something to believe in, stolen, by Biden. Here’s Paul Kelly:
You’re either a global leader or you’re not. You either have the resilience, cohesion, leadership and self-sacrificing of a great power or you’re just pretending. America recovered so fast, so brilliantly after the 1975 Vietnam debacle.
Really? Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada, which is like invading Gold Coast SeaWorld. When a single suicide bomber killed 200 US troops he withdrew entirely from Lebanon. Because things were still real in the Cold War, that move was not debated as a matter of prestige, but as a question of foreign engagement.
The fact is that America’s ability to extend any power short of annihilating force — to the tactical nuclear level — has been more projection than real since the end of Vietnam.
Bush Sr invaded Panama. That’s like storming a Miami crack den. Then, with the 1991 Gulf War, it avoided being exposed by leaving Saddam Hussein in place. In the giddy atmosphere of the 21ar century, it made the worst of all poker moves and called its own bluff. The anguish of the Americophiles is because they had been bluffed too.
Kelly’s enormous Eeyore sigh — I won’t even wade into Greg Sheridan here — has him describe Biden’s withdrawal as “emotional and personal”. Sounds like self-diagnosis on the part of Kelly, and a range of others in The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph UK, The Times and elsewhere.
Biden’s actions look like simple consistency to me. He opposed Obama’s Afghan surge, and wanted to get out in 2009. Now he’s doing it. And being honest with the US people about the dangers and the cost. Seems like leadership to me.
The last-flight-out right talk about the loss of US prestige, the loss of stable global governance. Today Peter Hartcher quotes Robert Kagan on the stable world of the post-war decades, now returned to anarchy. But those decades were anarchy for hundreds of millions in Indochina, Indonesia, Africa, South America … precisely because of that “stability”, whose twin Cold War forces used those regions as proxy battlefields.
It’s 2021 for god’s sake. You can’t simply look down on the world from the windows of the Brookings Institution and make a judgment any more. The world looks back at you, and there’s a lot more of them than of us remnant First Worlders. Africa and South America are clearly stabilising in ways they could not have in the era of “stability”. What Hartcher and others mean is that they have more options as regards larger allies and investment partners.
But the last-flight-out right and the Brookings bruthas have good company, as the last of the pro-war feminists mount a rearguard action on behalf of the Afghan mission.
The Afghan and Iraq wars were the first manifestation of what your correspondent dubbed at the time “imperial feminism” — those who thought that women’s rights could be advanced by bombing them. The late Pamela Bone was one, advocating the invasion of Iraq, a secular country where women had very significant rights. What happened after the invasion? The US signed off on a Shiite regime and a sharia constitution that sent them back to the veil and the home and killed them in their thousands.
Columnist Julie Szego was one of the other feminist war-boosters, and she’s not giving up. In The Age and the SMH last week she couldn’t decide whether the war was worth it or not if one Afghan girl tasted freedom. Well, few taste freedom in a peasant society, though some might get some schooling. But the cost has been estimated at 200,000 dead — 70,000 of them civilians, 30%-40% women and children.
We talk of one woman a week killed in domestic violence here; the Afghan war took 30 a week, every week, for 20 years. But yeah, OK, it might have been worth it. That can only be said because they were brown women and girls. The roots of the toxic dimension of white feminism today, its utter inability to really see non-white bodies, was in the imperial feminism two decades ago.
These people. They’ll do anything to shore up the fragments of their post-’60s politics against the ruin of the present. The Brookings bruthas yearn for an “order” that was simply the extension of imperial dominance.
The imperial feminists want to kill the women of Afghanistan in order to save them; Kelly wants to send other people’s sons to die there, while his own got an entree into a career at News Corp.
And they wonder why the one thing the rest of us can all agree on is what a failed charade it all was. They’re all at the airport now, waiting for the flight, drinking from the sinks, trying the vending machines to see if they can get some last piece of sustenance from the end of the mission.
Bravo, Rundle, gutsy!
As for ‘the loss of US prestige’, in my opinion that happened decades ago circa Vietnam. Long dead & buried.
Korea.
The half million Filipinos killed saving them from Spanish rule at the start of the 20thC might have a different view/prior claim.
Same thoughts zut. One of the hardest hitting pieces I’ve read on this schemozzle.
Thank you, Guy. I find this your best article yet. And the grievous habit of white, middle-class people banging on about themselves and virtue-signalling: I have nothing but contempt (even though I would be deemed as belonging to that category). Even worse, white, middle-class women (of whom I’m one) banging on about feminism in Afghanistan. Imagine a Sydney north-shorer’s son telling her he’s going to marry an Afghan woman … Feminism? I don’t think so. As you said, Guy: it’s only about white women only.
Thank you Guy, you’re more vinegar than oil, and that’s exactly what we need now.
A vicious and I’d say pretty accurate summation. The identity politics in much of the analysis circulating makes me wanna puke too.
Seeing the rise of populist authoritarians that undermine the democratic institutions that elect them, the autocratic dictators that rule with an iron fist, and the mass suffering of oppressive regimes (and failed states) around the world, it’s hard to buy into the “nation building” aspect of the two wars, each of which was a bit post hoc in justification. Likewise, it’s hard to wonder why we should worry about the plight of women in Afghanistan when we don’t care about the plight of women in any of the other Middle Eastern countries, or anywhere else around the world for that matter.
As Eastern European strongmen wind back hard-fought liberal rights, or as North Korea plods along in what can only be described as Orwell’s nightmare come to life, or as China effects a genocide while staying at the centre of the modern economy, really what are we meant to think about what’s happened now in Afghanistan?
My most charitable interpretation of it all is that because America (and its allies) saw fit to overthrow the Taliban, they effectively made Afghanistan’s progress into a modern democracy their problem, and on that note it feels like Afghanistan was wronged. Yet that wasn’t the mission, nor was it really intended to be – it was about fighting terrorists “over there”.
Good overview while one recalls the film ‘Wagging the Dog’ i.e. making (the wrong) choice in Afghanistan presented as ‘the’ threat but was more about political PR and assuming it would be over quickly, ignoring history, till their political campaign became an expensive two decades long quagmire that achieved little.
At least Bush Snr., with experience of war, kept his campaigns modest aka Panama and Kuwait/Iraq 1.0 included forming a true coalition and getting out by not attempting to invade and occupy Iraq proper.
One key lesson is that nation building is not something an outside party can do – unless it is working with a willing and capable partner in the country. There is way too much talk of democracy – which is rarely delivered in any meaningful way – and not enough about competent government. The result is to discredit democracy by associating it with token voting rituals and with incompetent corrupt government.
Then add in the disastrous approach the US seems always to practice of riding roughshod over local culture and thinking everyone wants to be little Americans. This is problematic on so many levels. One is that the USA is a somewhat flawed democracy itself and has its own share of problems with corruption and political extremism – none of which it seems particularly keen on fixing. Not exactly a good model – more a case of do as I say, not as I do.
A good point Peter. A benign dictatorship would be a great advance on a corrupt and incompetent democracy.
“A benign dictatorship tempered by assassination.”
Spot on Peter. That arrogance is also reflected in the way the Afghan Defence forces were organized: dependent on US intelligence and air support, which is how the US run their armed forces. When those were withdrawn in May the collapse was inevitable.