Clichés become clichés because they are true, at atomic for a while. Back the British started calling Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires” aback in 1842, they came up with one that had absolute abiding power. Added than a aeon and a bisected later, the Soviets active their benighted authority there, and now, with a little luck, so adeptness the U.S.
Of course, lots of bodies will accuse about this. They will say the authority could accept lived on if alone we had listened to them. They will be cornball for the canicule back it was still accessible to accept that they were active in a time back their nation was allegedly feared and admired because of the admeasurement and the accomplishment of its aggressive forces. This is broiled into the mentality of admiring for a absent empire, as it is for all absent causes. Anticipate of France in Algeria. (I am currently account aggregate one of Martin Walker’s “Bruno, Arch of Police” detective series, in which bigoted French folk are still accusatory about that in 2010.) Stephen Wertheim puts the point accurately in a Washington Post op-ed that begins: “You don’t get to lose a war and apprehend the aftereffect to attending like you’ve won it.”
More from Eric Alterman
One could address an absolute doctoral altercation on the multiple, overlapping failures that accept characterized best of the boilerplate media advantage of the collapse of the 20-year war in Afghanistan. So abounding of the pathologies that baffle with its adeptness to acquaint simple truths about our country and our apple are actuality run through this analysis that it would booty absolutely hundreds of pages to do amends to all of them; to explain how they accomplish beyond our media institutions and why they accomplish the way they do. Ironically, the splintering of these aforementioned institutions fabricated accessible by the internet has accustomed some writers and analysts to abduction a few of these, about in absolute time.
The best accessible amid the countless failures of boilerplate advantage of the crisis is its adamant ahistoricism. The Biden administering may accept busted up the avenue of U.S. troops and the affable Afghans who helped them, but hey, this was a 20-year, about $2.4 abundance war accomplishment that was congenital on lies and self-delusion and that we didn’t absolutely appetite to win in the aboriginal place. Prospect alum Matt Yglesias does a accomplished job of laying out some of the history that care to be included in any adventure about who is to blame, but about never is, in his Substack commodity “Biden (and Trump) Did the Right Affair on Afghanistan.”
For added accessible actual accomplishments on the conflict, booty a attending at these contributions from Adam Tooze, Robert Wright, Ali A. Olomi, and Sergey Radchenko, and (on Facebook) from Peter Galbraith. In affairs accompanying to “Af-Pak,” I consistently await on my acquaintance Husain Haqqani. Actuality he is on “Pakistan’s Pyrrhic Victory” in Adopted Affairs. Finally, for some bookish argumentation on the accusation aggregate on Zbigniew Brzezinski for the acceleration of the Taliban, you’ll accept to go actuality (h/t Rob Rakove).
Many decades ago, the polymath economist John Kenneth Galbraith (Peter’s dad) proposed a aphorism that every time a anchorman publicized an economist’s anticipation about the future, it should be anon followed up by a account of that aforementioned economist’s antecedent predictions. That would, in around all cases, authenticate the futility of demography the aboriginal anticipation actively (and hence, anticipate the allegation for the article, so his idea, because of its actual merits, was an accessible nonstarter). And yet today, the makeshift Afghanistan punditocracy is bedeviled by bodies who were either (a) clumsily amiss about around aggregate they said about the battle in the past, (b) lying about it, or (c) best commonly, alas, both.
I acquisition myself a little abashed to be advising a allotment by addition who is not alone “vice admiral for analysis and action at the Charles Koch Institute” but was additionally “President Donald Trump’s appointee for agent to Afghanistan.” But this William Ruger fellow, autograph in The National Interest, is additionally a adept of the war in Afghanistan, and best importantly, makes a abundant accord of sense. He praises Biden for “displaying absolute adventuresomeness by afraid with a accommodation that charcoal prudential accustomed the realities about Afghanistan and the United States. Biden is assuming the requisite realist back that America needs at this moment.” Ruger mocks his critics who affirmation the U.S. “could accept backward best at a low cost, all the while attention an Afghan government that was already ambiguous back alike added American boots were on the ground. They additionally abode the accusation for the collapse we are seeing on abandonment rather than on the bootless two decade-long Afghan nation-building activity and its architects.”
Getting bottomward to accepted assumption tacks, he indicts best MSM advantage because the critics in catechism “were those aforementioned [Afghan war] architects, forth with their admiral and supporters alfresco government. Indeed, these were about the actual bodies who the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock outed in his Afghanistan Papers alternation as accepting had little clue how to acquisition success in Afghanistan and who consistently addled the American bodies about the accompaniment of the war. Moreover, these critics are committed to propping up another, abundant above bootless project—the primacist access to the Greater Middle East and the apple added generally.”
With agnate apropos in mind, I wrote the afterward in my 2020 book Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse:
The advance of [the Afghan] war would additionally about-face out to be based on a massive attack of advised deception, as a absolute centralized Pentagon abstraction would eventually reveal. That advice was fabricated accessible afterward what the Washington Post alleged a “three-year accessible annal battle” amid the Post, the National Security Archive, a nonprofit analysis convention based at George Washington University alive with the bi-weekly on the project, and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), an bureau answerable with blank of US spending in Afghanistan. In backward 2019, added than eighteen years afterwards the war began, the Post was able to broadcast a diffuse overview of the study’s capacity forth with all-encompassing excerpts from the abstraction itself. Post anchorman Craig Whitlock, summarizing the added than two thousand pages of abstracts and interviews the Post assuredly obtained, said that the US military’s accurate compassionate of the aftereffect of the massive US military, diplomatic, and bread-and-butter advance in that nation was at allowance with what Americans had been told. “The documents,” he said, “contradict a continued choir of accessible statements from U.S. presidents, aggressive commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year afterwards year that they were authoritative advance in Afghanistan and the war was account fighting.
In added words, we accept abnormally bright and absolutely contempo acumen to apperceive that we accept been consistently aria to by the aggressive (as we usually are; see, e.g., Vietnam, Cambodia, Central America, Iraq, etc.) and by the actual bodies whom reporters are depending on now to acquaint you how clumsily the Biden administering is accusation up things and how abundant bigger aggregate would be if alone the liars and the bodies who absent the war, or cheerled for it, were in allegation now.
Ruger goes afterwards John Podhoretz, which is all to the good, but for a added analytical appraisal of an acutely archetypal specimen, go to Judd Legum’s Substack Popular Information, for his commodity “The Media’s Analytical Abortion on Afghanistan.” In it, and alone for purposes of example, he dissects a diffuse account address advantaged “Biden’s Promise to Restore Competence to the Presidency Is Undercut by Anarchy in Afghanistan,” by the Post’s Matt Viser, in which the anchorman credits letters that the accommodation and its beheading reflected “an disability to plan” and “an aberration of a adopted adversary,” laying accusation around alone on Biden for the accepted anarchy in Kabul.
Who are Viser’s sources? The anchorman describes them as “leading assembly and others” who accept that “the chaotic, and deadly, accomplishing of [Biden’s] accommodation reflects a abortion by Biden at a analytical moment to bear the abiding administering and complete acumen he promised.” But who are these sources, really? Legum addendum that Viser’s “lead adduce comes from above CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.” He again goes through Panetta’s antecedent statements about the war, and man, the dude was amiss about aloof about everything. Legum agreeably adds that “Panetta was additionally quoted by Fox News, the New York Post, The Hill, MSNBC, NBC News, the New York Daily News, CNN and abounding added outlets. None of them acclaimed Panetta’s above-mentioned inaccurate predictions about the approaching of Afghanistan.”
The best accessible amid the countless failures of boilerplate advantage of the crisis is its adamant ahistoricism.
(I agenda that in Politico Playbook, Panetta is respectfully quoted adage to CNN’s John King: “I anticipate of John Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs [botched Cuba aggression in 1961]. It abundant bound and the admiral anticipation that aggregate would be fine. And that was not the case.” I accept accounting abundantly about the Bay of Pigs in three altered books, including my doctoral dissertation. This is absolutely the stupidest animadversion I can anytime bethink seeing about the Bay of Pigs debacle. To analyze it to Afghanistan is like comparing apples and, say, orangutans.)
Back to Legum: “The abutting being quoted [by Viser] is Ryan Crocker, the above Agent to Afghanistan during the Bush and Obama administrations.” Crocker goes so far as to say of Biden, “I’m larboard with some grave questions in my apperception about his adeptness to advance our nation as administrator in chief.” Yes, well, apprehend his antecedent statements and again admiration if Viser should be commendation him as an able and if the guy should accept had the acceptable faculty to STFU in the aboriginal place. But he does not. Again, Legum notes, “Crocker’s role in accoutrement up the bribery of the Afghan government is not mentioned in Viser’s Washington Post commodity or the added outlets that quoted him for criticizing the withdrawal—NBC News, The Hill, Axios, and Fox News.”
There are others. In archetypal enactment “the Republicans are not crazy and it’s important to adduce ‘both sides’ so as not to accord advance to those who affirmation we are a advanced media conspiracy” journalism, Viser apprehension up with added attacks from Afghanistan hawks Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Mark Warner, and Seth Moulton. But “unrepresented in Viser’s piece,” Legum adds, were “any choir that accurate abandoning U.S. armament from Afghanistan—even admitting a poll aftermost ages begin that 73% of Americans accurate withdrawal.” Eric Boehlert has added on this affectionate of thing, here.
Oh, and accept any Republicans been asked about why, on its now-deleted webpage, the GOP animated the actuality that on February 2, 2020, the Trump administering active a “‘preliminary accord agreement’ with the Taliban that ‘sets the stage’ to end the U.S.-Afghan war that had been angry for added than two decades.” The Republicans trumpeted the actuality that their hero had adjourned a accord that would see “nearly 5,000” U.S. troops aloof from the arena in barter for “a Taliban acceding to not acquiesce Afghanistan to be acclimated for transnational terrorism”—in case anyone needs a refresher.
Note that I’ve been afraid to the mainstream, not alike ambidextrous with the aberration over at, say, Fox. But I did appear aloft an commodity by one of the few conservatives I adore and apprentice from, Walter Russell Mead over at The Wall Street Journal. To my horror, his not-all-that-terrible commodity absolutely ran beneath this antic headline: “Biden’s Chamberlain Moment in Afghanistan”—perhaps the affliction affinity imaginable. (Going to Hitler, as a rule, about consistently agency you’ve already absent the argument.) Scrolling bottomward to the article’s end, it was followed in adjustment by recommendations for these added Journal masterpieces:
(And this was afore the cardboard ran Mike Pence’s absurd commodity that insisted that had Biden ashore to Trump’s schedule, and larboard four months earlier, aggregate would accept been hunky-dory.)
But the best abhorrent allotment I came beyond all anniversary was Mark Thiessen’s Washington Post op-ed “Biden Is Blaming Anybody but Himself. But He’s the One Who Gave the Taliban a Green Light.” In it, this apostle for ache in Iraq appropriate that it was too bad Trump was no best admiral because if he were, “[h]e would accept unleashed a bombing attack the brand of which the Taliban had not apparent back 2001.” This is not alone belied by aggregate Trump said or did apropos the Taliban, it’s additionally a alarm for asinine (and pointless) accumulation murder. And the Post printed it. Shame on anybody involved.
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