Musings on Biden and Afghanistan

Since the debacle of American president Joe Biden's inglorious and sensationalised by the media exit from Afghanistan, Biden's approval numbers have been in freefall. For those of us like me old enough to remember President Ford's similarly inglorious and sensationalised by the media exit from Vietnam, the video and pictures of the fall of Afghanistan on media old and are all too familiar. Both, it turns out, even had their emblematic and symbolic inglorious end points, something the media with their sensationalise for today and don't remember much of yesterday mentality, goes orgasmic over. In the case of Vietnam there was that emblematic moment when a helicopter was pushed off the side of an American aircraft carrier. In the case of Afghanistan there was that symbolic moment of Afghans hoping to escape the coming fury of the bully boy theocratic Taliban regime trying desperately to get on aircraft flying those fleeing Afghanistan out of the country.

Something else I remember about Vietnam and something that applies equally to Afghanistan is that I was in favour of withdrawal from both of these wars that should never have been fought in the first place. I also remember that lesson the French learned, or should have learned from Vietnam and that Americans apparently didn't: you can't win a guerrilla war against those who have the time to wait you out since you are fighting the guerrilla war on their turf and whose hearts and minds are dedicated to getting you, the "invader", out of their country. 

There are, of course, other lessons the United States should have learned in Vietnam. First, you, an "invader", can't create a common identity, a common sense of community or a common government among disparate ethnic or ideological groups save by the brute force of a strong man. Second, you can't build a "democratic" (translation oligarchic capitalist) regime in places where "democracy" is novel and perhaps even unwanted by large segments of the population. Third, you ignore Machiavellian power games among various local elites at your own risk, Machiavellian competitions for power that complicate and intersect with ethnic and ideological realities often of a historical character. Fourth, getting out of situations made worse by your "invasion" of a "nation" that is questionably a "nation", is fraught with difficulty as Ford, who inherited a debacle that began under Eisenhower and which was misinterpreted thanks to its Cold War manichean homiletic contexts, and Biden, who inherited a debacle that went back to Bush the Second, learned.

As I said, I supported leaving Afghanistan and "ending" a war was never going to end well for the US whether that war ended under Donald Trump, who sat the timetable for withdrawal, or Biden, whose administration simply followed through on what the Trump set in motion. The exit strategy from a war that could never have been won despite the self serving delusions and fantasies of those convinced that they were the "best and the brightest" that they could go where no one else had gone before and easily win wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was always going to look bad on screens big and small regardless of who "ended" it or when it "ended". And that is another history lesson, a lesson drenched in the omnipresent absurdities of everyday life, Americans should learn or, better, relearn once again.