Afghanistan, One Year Later
Some reflections.
It’s been a year since the fall of Kabul. At the time, I was reservedly optimistic about the prospects of the Joe Biden administration. But, just like many other Americans, it all came apart for me in August of 2021. But unlike most, it wasn’t the incompetence, the policy disagreement, or the moment. It was the soullessness that the President showed. I will forever disapprove of the job he’s doing because, in that moment, he proved to lack both sympathy and empathy. It isn’t that he wasn’t showing regret about the policy, but that he wasn’t showing regret about the human suffering. He reminded me of Donald Trump.
It’s been a year now. The administration has no Afghanistan policy. One day, you hear rumors that it wants to release some pressure on Afghanistan to mitigate the humanitarian disaster. Another day, nothing comes out of it. There is no vision, no objective, no interest. It’s truly democratic. It reflects how little people have come to care about a country they surrendered to monsters.
On some level, I’m both sympathetic and empathetic. I get that people didn’t know that we were doing very little in Afghanistan, that they thought that, because we hadn’t won the war in twenty years, it was not winnable. I am empathetic that their daily lives are becoming too difficult to care about anybody else’s. I am not the kind of guy who complains that the average American doesn’t spend a lot of time learning about foreign policy because that’s unrealistic. To begin with, I don’t spend a lot of time learning about medicine or engineering or plumbing. Why should a physician or an engineer or a plumber have an outsized interest in Afghanistan War? I’m enough of a capitalist to value the division of labor But on another level, I’m quite angry about how fast everybody has moved on. They have memory holed Afghanistan.
The professional class has also moved on. I have a hunch that partially they, especially the ones in their 30s and 40s and 50s, moved on because of their egos. They all wanted to be Klemens Metternich and Dean Acheson, and Afghanistan was just not the kind of policy issue that was going to feed their outsized egos. China and Russia have nuclear weapons and larger GDPs. They have huge conventional forces. It’s just more attractive than counterinsurgency. Sitting at a table in Vienna talking about arms control is just more appealing than fighting a bunch of savages with AK-47s. It’s their vanities that compelled them to move on.