A buffet for the war pigs: Afghanistan's suffering leads to a hot take bonanza
... and the conclusion is always the same: The writer was right all along.
The history of Afghanistan is long and columnists’ memories are so short that guppies feel sorry for them.
In 2019, after a three-year legal battle, The Washington Post published transcripts of interviews conducted during a “lessons learned” project by the US Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The so-called ‘Afghanistan Papers’ revealed what most people already suspected: The governments of the US and the UK consistently misled the public about an unwinnable conflict.
Like the Pentagon Papers before them, the Afghanistan Papers presented a ‘secret’ history of failure, corruption, and cover-ups. John Sopko, the head of SIGAR, told The Washington Post that the project showed “the American people have constantly been lied to”.
Across over 2,000 pages of transcripts from interviews with people who played a direct role in the war — including general, diplomats, aid workers, and Afghan officials — the puzzle pieces fall into place: Manipulated figures, falsely ‘rosy’ pronouncements, and institutional tactical ignorance over corruption.
But now President Biden has pulled the plug on the inflatable castle — largely bounced1 into it by President Trump’s Taliban ‘peace’ deal — the ‘smart’ people don’t say it was a fatal facade the whole time but say, “Oh, it’s his mistake.” Meanwhile George W. Bush picks up his paintbrush, chuckling to himself, and Tony Blair prepares to make another of his rare weekly interventions.
In The Times today, William Hague — the former Foreign Secretary and lifetime holder of the Most Embarrassing Baseball Cap Wearer In Politics title — writes a column headlined Biggest danger is to shrink from this fiasco, arguing that this disastrous military intervention should not put Britain off getting involved in more disastrous military interventions in the future.
After a tour through the recent history of military interventions both actual and contemplated, Hague concludes:
The right posture for western democracies is to be prepared to intervene when our own security or common humanity demands it. That means maintaining armed forces equipped for such action, but it also requires the political staying power to make all those who are hostile to free nations afraid of what we might do. After this fiasco, all of them will be less afraid than we need them to be.
It’s the kind of bloodless language that policymakers often delight in. It’s also rhetoric divorced from reality written by a man who, as a member of the 2010 coalition government, was part of a slashing of the military budget. The Tories have continued those cuts while posturing about ‘Global Britain’.
When Hague first became Foreign Secretary, he said the goal of the US/UK ‘mission’ in Afghanistan should be:
… to arrive at a point where Afghans can look after their own affairs without presenting a danger to the rest of the world.
Bin Laden was found in Pakistan, right under the indulgent eyes of the ISI. The US Department of Justice is currently undertaking a new review to determine whether it will release FBI documents related to Saudi Arabian government support for the September 11, 2001, attackers.
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan “present a danger to the rest of the world” in a way that Afghanistan never has. But those interventions would never be considered.
The return of Taliban government in Afghanistan also means the return of another retro experience from the 2000s: Vague security service briefings to the papers about the threat of Islamist terrorists ‘flooding’ into Europe. Elsewhere in The Times today, Hugh Tomlinson, the paper’s South Asia Correspondent, writes:
Western intelligence agencies have been reporting for months that international terror groups were seeking to rebuild in the Taliban’s shadow in Afghanistan, boosting extremists in Europe and the US. Now the moment has come. The Taliban’s triumphant march into Kabul on Sunday was exactly the “victory narrative” that jihadists had sought since Isis was defeated in Syria, [MI5 Director General, Ken] McCallum said.
In 2019, McCallum’s immediate predecessor Andrew Parker said ‘homegrown’ terrorists were still the biggest threat.
Over at the liberal ‘slow news’ white elephant Tortoise, Matthew D’Ancona2 offers his variation on the Hague column, complete with a dramatic headline (This is how the West ends: not with a bang but a whimper). He writes:
In the wake of the Cold War’s end in 1989, we completely squandered the opportunity to remake and reform the institutional structures that had been established after the Second World War, and to launch a series of Marshall Plans to fight off the many forms of atavisms that bubbled to the surface with the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
We failed again after 9/11, and again after the crash of 2008-09. The only respect in which the powerful and wealthy nations of the world can be said to think and act on a planetary basis is economically. Globalisation has not been matched in geopolitics, international law, the management of population mobility, the nurturing of democracy or the regulation of the digital revolution.
Who is this ‘we’, you’re talking about, Matthew?
Of course, he also manages to make it about Brexit…
Precisely when we should have been thinking most deeply about our interdependence as a species, walls have gone up (literally and figuratively); backs have been turned; and even (as with Brexit) supposedly great nations have seceded from alliances in the name of thin doctrines of self-sufficiency and national greatness.
… and offers the kind of hyperbolic, drama-filled conclusion that gets you paid the big bucks:
Only 26 days before the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, it feels as if we are back to square one. Nothing is predetermined. No collapse is total. But, for now, we must fully confront the bleak reality that the most powerful nation in the history of the world has been defeated by a mob of fundamentalists.
There I was thinking we’d had the end of history back in 1992. And that the USA’s win/loss records in wars hasn’t been all that great since 1945.
In The Daily Telegraph, Suzanne Moore correctly focuses on the betrayal of Afghanistan’s women, but Kyle Orton keeps his eye on President Biden, claiming with no mention of the Afghanistan Papers that it is “in extremely bad faith when commentators suggest that the collapse of the Afghan army is evidence that the mission was hopeless all along.”
Meanwhile, The Sun turns to renowned humanitarian and Auton representative on earth, Douglas Murray, who declares Joe Biden sealed Afghanistan’s fate – but it didn’t have to end like this. Still, I’m sure the immigration-obsessed author of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam and a video called The Suicide of Europe will support Afghan refugees, right?
Across the Atlantic, Miranda Devine in Murdoch-owned The New York Post gives space to Donald Trump to grandstand about how he would’ve got it right:
I asked Trump Sunday about the plan his administration had to get out of Afghanistan —which ultimately was obstructed by the same US generals who gave Biden a green light.
“We were going to not let people get slaughtered,” Trump said flatly. “I wanted to get out. But you have to get out safely and you have to get out with respect … We had all sorts of conditions … All civilians were going to come out before the military. Everyone should have been out before they took our military out … I was going to close this ridiculous embassy they spent a billion dollars on and move everybody out …
I was going to blow up every military base [before we left]. I was going to take out every single piece of equipment. I said, ‘I don’t want anything left [apart from] leave each soldier a gun …”
It goes on. And Devine appears to have transcribed it with a straight face.
For Fox News, Rep. August Pfluger, the Republican congressman for Texas and a US Air Force veteran, contributes a column headlined Afghanistan reveals the Biden Doctrine – Hear no evil. See no evil. Stop no evil and stretches for the obvious parallel:
The images of helicopters leaving the U.S. Embassy in Kabul harken back to those of Saigon in 1975. The lack of planning to address the safety and security of our Afghan partners is astonishing. Our promises to the Afghan faithful that fought and died alongside our U.S. service members and civilian personnel for decades have been shattered.
But voices like Pfluger’s will only take the Vietnam parallels so far. They won’t make the link between the Pentagon Papers and the Afghanistan Papers, nor go beyond the easy cliches about “blood and treasure” (a lot of Afghan ‘treasure’ was taken from the country by the US and her allies over those 20 years).
For The New York Times, David Sanger writes, beneath the typically exsanguinated headline For Biden, Images of Defeat He Wanted to Avoid, about “the American experiment in Afghanistan” (I’m sure the dead feel great comfort at having contributed to the progress of science). He says:
Even many of Mr. Biden’s allies who believe he made the right decision to finally exit a war that the United States could not win and that was no longer in its national interest concede he made a series of major mistakes in executing the withdrawal. The only question is how politically damaging those will prove to be, or whether Americans who cheered at 2020 campaign rallies when both President Donald J. Trump and Mr. Biden promised to get out of Afghanistan will shrug their shoulders and say that it had to end, even if it ended badly.
The only question…
Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post’s Media Columnist, wrote yesterday:
Maybe the pullout from Afghanistan really will go down as Biden’s Waterloo. But maybe deciding that should take more than a few hours.
But that’s too long to wait for the opinion columnists. They’ll keep using the events in Afghanistan to ‘prove’ that they were right all along and selecting facts to support their view with all the care of a seaside grabbing machine.
The apocryphal story that former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai responded to a query about the French revolution with the words, “Too early to say.”3 has often appeared in columns. It’s the kind of zingy quip that writers find useful. But it’s never too soon to say for a columnist on a deadline. And if they get it wrong? Well, they just pretend they never said it in the first place.
Here’s a list of things that you can do to help support Afghans right now
Pun not intended.
Boris Johnson’s successor as editor of The Spectator, lest we forget.
He was actually commenting on the then-recent events of the 1968 student protests.