Day: September 9, 2024

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Americans really don’t want to hear about Afghanistan, as much as the Trumpublicans would like them to as the presidential campaign reaches the clubhouse turn. For starters, scenes of the stomach-churning Kabul rout interferes with our persistent, highly self regarding notion that “We’re Number One” (even if the Vietnamese told us a half century ago that we were really Number 10 —and made it stick). Who wants to go back over that? 

So it’s appropriate that the mainstream media have largely ignored the “investigative” report from House  Republicans on the Kabul debacle, timed to muddy Kamala Harris on the eve of Tuesday’s winner-take–all debate, “blaming the disastrous end of America’s longest war on President Joe Biden’s administration and minimizing the role of former President Donald Trump, who had signed the withdrawal deal with the Taliban,” as The Associated Press  accurately put it. The report was quarterbacked by House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tx), with Trump no doubt coaching from the sidelines.

In their admirably even handed but pointed story, the A.P.’s Farnoush Amiri and Ellen Knickmeyer neatly summed up: 

“The partisan review lays out the final months of military and civilian failures, following Trump’s February 2020 withdrawal deal, that allowed America’s fundamentalist Taliban enemy to sweep through and conquer all of the country even before the last U.S. officials flew out on Aug. 30, 2021. 

“The chaotic exit left behind many American citizens, Afghan battlefield allies, women activists and others at risk from the Taliban,” the A.P. said. The tragedy goes on.

But here’s the rub for Trump & co.—on top of the fact that nobody wants to hear about Afghanistan beyond MAGA world (and of course, those Afghans we promised to bring back with us but then abandoned):

“The House Republicans’ report breaks little new ground as the withdrawal has been exhaustively litigated through several independent reviews,” wrote Amiri and Ellen Knickmeyer. “Previous investigations and analyses have pointed to a systemic failure spanning the last  four presidential administrations and concluded that Biden and Trump share the heaviest blame.”

There’s plenty to go around, in short.

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Does it really need saying again that Trump got the Afghan hairball rolling with his impulsive decision months earlier to “get the hell out “ in a deal that set an impossibly quick deadline—and desperately freed 5,000 Taliban prisoners, accompanied by Trump’s sick Camp David invite to the medieval mullahs to celebrate it? 

Biden, who had long wanted to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan but on a more measured timetable, inherited Trump’s screwball scenario and got the Taliban to delay the exit from May until September.  That only made the impossible semi-doable.

That the whole Afghan enterprise would start crumbling as soon as the U.S. starting pulling the struts from under the colossally corrupt Kabul regime as a surprise only to those who had stopped paying attention, thanks to the decades long deceptions and self-delusions of the generals and other officials who ran the war, as The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock so thoroughly documented in his monumental—and unrefuted— account of American perfidy, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War.  

“It’s clear that this was a war that had fallen apart at the seams, that the strategy, the mission, the objectives—none of it really added up or made any sense, despite what people in charge of the Pentagon, the White House, and the State Department had been telling the public for 20 years,” Whitlock told me on the SpyTalk podcast a few weeks ago. “I think the history is pretty well settled on that.”

History, alas, is not a strong suit in American life, especially when it’s curated by America First nativists with an ostrich approach to unpleasant facts.

Those of us who’ve been around for a while were stunned by America’s headlong plunge into constructing an Afghan democracy at gunpoint back in 2002.  We’d seen this before, in another far off place where it didn’t go so well: Saigon.  

“The fact is we learned little to nothing from Vietnam because no one wanted to acknowledge defeat,”  former senior CIA analyst Frank Snepp, who knows a thing or two about ignominious endings, wrote on the first, dolorous anniversary of the chaotic Kabul exit, in September 2022. “I know, because I wrote one of the first public post mortems on the war, Decent Interval, and was buried by the U.S. government for it. (The government, pressured by the CIA, took Snepp to court for his unauthorized autopsy and forced him to forfeit his book earnings. He wrote another book about that.)  

“Nor was mine an isolated case,” Snepp continued. “One of my Vietnam colleagues, a lifelong Army intelligence officer named Colonel Henry Shockley, who had come out of defeated Saigon in shock, later tried to persuade Pentagon brass to do a study of lessons learned, believing this would help save lives the next time we ventured into an overseas quagmire. But everywhere he turned, he was told that rethinking the war was unthinkable because it would likely demonstrate that all the U.S. dead and wounded had been martyred in vain.”

And so it went. Onward, into Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria…

Snepp thinks Biden has been unfairly maligned for the way the Kabul exit turned out: He played a bad hand as well as possible. The Trumplicans have been trying to wash their hands of their own complicity in the Kabul chaos from the get-go. 

“With the midterms drawing near,” Snepp wrote here at SpyTalk on September 22, 2022, “the president is being lambasted for not keeping a residual force in place to protect our friends and preserve our supposed gains. He is being lambasted just as viciously for not sending enough aircraft during the evacuation to save all those who fit our definition of the good and worthy Afghan. On both counts, he is getting a bum rap—and being judged against goals that were never realistic or achievable or even part of his agenda.”

“Let’s start at the end, with an assessment of the evacuation itself,”  Snepp, the last CIA man out of Saigon, went on (and I’m allowing a good chunk of it).

“For perspective, please keep in mind that retreat is always the most dangerous of military operations. Crawling out of a country standing up demands more moral flexibility than anyone should have to embrace in a lifetime. No U.S. government agency offers staff instructions on how to play God, which is what you must do if you are trying to hustle an overabundance of the desperate onto the last outbound ‘fixed-wing’ [plane] or ‘chopper.’ And executing such an operation under hostile conditions is predestined to be seen as a debacle because not everyone who wants to get out will make it. 

“That said, by any reasonable measure—and certainly as compared to the precedent set in Vietnam—the airlift out of Kabul was an astounding success, especially considering these facts: 

• The Afghan army disintegrated overnight with barely a visible ripple. 

• The entire Kabul regime evaporated in a day—literally. 

• Taliban forces were so much in control during the final two weeks that they had to be enlisted to help secure the last key exfil point, Hamid Karzai airbase. 

“Despite these appalling conditions, the U.S. and its coalition partners evacuated in those same two weeks 123,000 people—twice as many souls as fled Saigon with some sort of official U.S. help during the entire last month of the Vietnam war,” Snepp noted.

Digest those numbers in the cold light of morning, not the klieg lights of the looming Harris-Trump slugfest in Philly.

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Digging Deeper

In November 2022, we published a critical autopsy of the Kabul exit by “C. Tatum,” pen name for someone with long experience in Afghanistan who had been involved in efforts to evacuate Americans and Afghans from Kabul.  He warned the Republicans that raking over the coals of the messy, and ultimately tragedy-filled withdrawal could blow up in their faces. 

“Such an inquiry will be sticky for the GOP… since President Trump’s 2020 Doha Agreement with the Taliban to end the U.S.-led war, which excluded the democratic government in Kabul from all negotiations, teed up the disaster of August 2021,” he wrote.

“Republicans will also struggle to escape the fact that Trump’s anti-immigrant policies the previous year also meant that less than 2,000 Special Immigrant Visas—a quarter of the annual allotment—were approved for Afghans, leaving a backlog of 18,000 applications of interpreters and other contractors by the time the Taliban took Kabul, thus creating the urgent need for the largest U.S. military airlift in history.”

Truth is, though, the Trumpublicans aren’t “struggling” to escape such facts, because it’s long been clear they don’t matter. They heaped blame on Kamala Harris for the Kabul chaos even though, as the Democrats pointed out in their  minority report, “she is referenced only three times in 3,288 pages of the Committee’s interview transcripts.” It all got lost in the campaign noise.

Standing Tall

It makes me pine (again) for just some small measure of official accountability.

“There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” JFK famously said in an interview in which he accepted responsibility for the disastrous April 1961 Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba. Kennedy could have fingered the CIA for its invasion folly. Or his advisers. Or the former Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, for setting the foolhardy plan in motion (along with assassination plots).

But Kennedy stood tall and accepted the blame: “I am the responsible officer of the government,“ he said.

Oh, those were the days .###