Afghanistan has been a disaster waiting to happen for the last 19 years or so. The English has to give up and leave Afghanistan and then later, so did the Russians.
The US didn't learn from these examples, or from Vietnam. We think of ourselves as exceptional and above history.
Now NPR is struggling to figure out what is happening today. The line up of stories today was pretty much all Afghanistan, plus two segments on the Haitian earthquake. It's what you'd expect of coverage in the middle of a crisis - lots of random comments, some blame game activity, and lots of opinion, most of it focused, without context, on right now.. The basic impression is disaster, failure, catastrophe.
Of the NPR segments I heard two people who seemed, at least in part, clear headed:
- Former U.S. Ambassador To Afghanistan Comments On Developing Situation In The Country Ronald Neumann served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007 He said, in various ways, "I really don't know enough to say." That's probably what many others should have said more. He also said that Biden's decision to pull out was a correct decision, but the execution of that decision has been absolutely disastrous. I think that's probably the clearest and most accurate assessment I heard.
KEITH: The Biden administration has essentially indicated they don't see this as all their fault. You know, this was two decades in the making. The Afghan military was trained by the U.S. and equipped. And in a way, it's like President Biden does not want to own this. Do you think that that is possible?
NEUMANN: Short answer is no. The long answer is you need to distinguish between the decision to withdraw, which I didn't like but is arguably correct, and the manner of implementation, of execution of that decision, which has been an absolute disaster from beginning to end. They could have taken more time. They had no plan how to support the Afghan military that they were leaving. We built an air force that depended on contractors for maintenance and pulled the contractors. Supply system - ditto. And we profoundly shocked the Afghan army and morale by pulling out and pulling our air cover when we trained them.
[I'd note that Neumann served as the Ambassador to Afghanistan under Bush/Cheney.]
But the US has been training the Afghan army for 20 years. How we're getting out is, the problem, but is there a different exit available. Neumann complains that we pulled out the contractors who maintained the equipment. Should we have left them in there? Many of them were highly skilled whites from around the world. Others were low skilled laborers hired on the cheap from poor countries. Why hadn't we trained Afghans for those positions? Surely in 20 years we could have. There are many highly educated Afghans. They aren't incapable of learning those skills.
But realistically, how many Afghan women would the US take and how long would that take? My sense is that this was a disaster that was going to happen eventually and up to now, no president was willing to let it happen on their watch.
If, indeed, the women of Afghanistan have the most to lose from the Taliban, maybe the US should have trained an all women Afghan army that would have fought as hard as the Taliban.
But maybe even that wouldn't have been enough.
The other interview that I thought made the most sense was an Army vet. Mike Jason.
- A Vet Formerly Deployed In Afghanistan Shares His Perspective On The Chaos In The Country - "JASON: We're all trying to process that, right? Like, 20 years - $89 billion, 300,000-some odd Afghan security forces. How is it collapsing as we watch? And so all I can write is my own little corner of the global war on terror. You know, Afghanistan - righteous anger and indignation over the 9/11 attack. And we went in with a light footprint and took the country over, like, lightning quick. And then what? What was the next step? And all of a sudden, we turn around, and two years later, we're in Iraq, and resources start flowing over there. And the question is, what was the strategy and policy for what the military should be doing with regard to security forces in both theaters? We didn't fight a 20-year war. We fought 20 individual wars incoherently, kind of without a policy strategic direction. So at the same time, the Afghans who are the recipients of this training, advice and equipment also know the clock is ticking and making their own calculus for their own safety and the safety of their families, while never really tackling, you know - all this cash is flowing in, the corruption, the drugs, the morale, the logistics. Why weren't we able to ever address these really problematic institutional issues? We voted - we, the American people - we voted for four sequential administrations that campaigned on getting out of this operation. The intent was clear. But I look back on the presidential debates over the last several elections. I mean, Afghanistan may have gotten seconds or minutes of debate. It was always in the background. But why didn't we debate it more? Why didn't we discuss it more forcefully? Why didn't somebody make the case to the American people clearly and forcefully why we should stay or go and why the sacrifice is or is not worth it?"
His take makes a lot of sense to me, as a former Peace Corps volunteer, who knows how much being able to speak to the people in their own language matters. It means you don't have to depend on interpreters, and it means you have a much better understanding of the culture and the differences between yours and theirs. Your struggle with their language means you understand your own ignorance and appreciate when they speak your language much better than you speak theirs.
I also did research in China, using my own Hong Kong students to help me out with interpretation. They would tell me when the official translation was not what the Chinese speaker had actually said. They told me about unspoken cues such as when the Chinese speaker's response was a non-sequitur: it meant, "Drop this line of questioning because I don't want to answer these questions." My students even took advantage of my foreignness and apologized for my ignorance and sometimes were able to get answers they themselves, because of culture, would never had asked. In other situations I had just one Hong Kong student acting as my interpreter and I could negotiate with him to ask the question a different way that sometimes gave us break throughs. I learned a lot about the politics of translations. Interpreters are human beings with egos. My students had to be sure they were respectful to the official interpreters and avoid making him look bad. And my Peace Corps experiences in Thailand helped me understand that I knew nothing and which made it easier to be humble and respectful.
I'm sure, from the fervor some US vets are showing in their efforts to get their Afghan interpreters out of the country, that many of them, if not most, had very close bonds with the interpreters. But I also suspect there were interpreters whose motivation for being their friend was a visa to the US, while others were passing on information to the Taliban. We all want to be liked and even knowing the culture and language, we get taken in by people who see us as a ticket to their freedom - whether that be financial, political, or professional.
We Didn't Learn From Vietnam
The basic justification for getting into Vietnam was the Domino Theory, based on how the Soviet Union took over the countries of Eastern Europe after World War II. The politicians and the military leaders in the 1950s and 1960s had been part of WWII and didn't want to repeat the mistake of trusting the Soviet Union. Thus we had to hold Vietnam lest China and the Soviet Union use Vietnam as the stepping stone to take over the rest of Southeast Asia. One domino falling after the other.
It was the wrong model. In Vietnam we were fighting a battle of independence from colonial masters. The French threw in the towel, but the US stepped in to take France's place. The US backed the Catholic (learned from their colonial conqueror) faction in the South and spent years trying to train the ARVN- the South Vietnamese army - so it could defeat the North. In that war, we had a conventional military mentality fighting against an army that used guerrilla tactics. The US troops never really knew who was one of our Vietnamese and who was one of theirs. We were fighting on Vietnamese land against an enemy that wanted to rule its own country. We were supporting the remnants of the colonial rulers. And we had the same problems with corruption because of the massive amounts of supplies and money coming into the country.
You'd think that the military and political leaders - again, many of whom had fought in Vietnam - would have learned from that war. But again, we went into a country that had thrown out two world powers - first the British and then the Soviet Union. Again, most of our soldiers knew nothing about Afghan culture or language. Again, there was an assumption that "the greatest country in the world" knew better. There was an assumption that modern weapons would defeat a guerrilla army.
A couple aspects of Afghanistan today are quite different from Vietnam in 1975.
- Afghanistan has been fought with an all volunteer army and extensive use of contracted labor. Since only those who wanted to serve (or saw the military as a way to get a job and education), the rest of the country could ignore the war. With all 18 year old men eligible to be drafted, the anti-war movement had a much more vocal and aware support to end the war.
- In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military had more control over what battle field footage the US public saw in the evening news. Embedding journalists with units had much different results than the way journalists and photographers were assigned in Vietnam. (See Embedded Journalism and the Forward of The Military and the Media 1962 - 1968)
- As Kabul falls, modern technology - phone cameras and social media - mean that we're seeing civilian created content and people are talking by phone live today and putting video on social media. For Vietnam we only saw or heard what the news media offered us.
Finally, Jason mentioned $89 billion. There's another way to look at this war.
