By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, September
21, 2021
The American retreat from Afghanistan,
with its whimpering and scurrying and its generally cringing
tail-between-the-legs posture, would have been debacle enough without the Biden
administration’s having added a massacre of children and innocents to it.
The fact that it was a massacre enabled by
incompetence does not improve the situation.
General Frank McKenzie, who is in charge
at U.S. Central Command, confirmed last week that a drone strike carried out in
Kabul in order to ward off an imminent attack from ISIS-K actually killed a
carload of civilians, mostly children.
“I offer my sincere apology,” General
McKenzie said. Oh, at least it’s sincere. He affirmed that he is
“fully responsible for this strike and this tragic outcome.” If General
McKenzie is fully responsible, then perhaps he — or someone above him — should
act like it and see to it that he is, at a minimum, fully relieved of his
responsibilities.
But is General McKenzie really fully
responsible?
“The strike on 29 August must be
considered in the context of the situation on the ground,” General McKenzie
said, “in Kabul at Hamid Karzai International Airport following the ISIS-K
attack that resulted in the deaths of 13 soldiers, sailors, and Marines, and
more than 100 civilians, at Abbey Gate on 26 August. And also with the
substantial body of intelligence indicating the imminence of another attack.”
That is a useful context to consider,
because it is not a relevant military context at all — it is
a political context.
The horrifying attack on August 26
confirmed only the general sense that violent attacks against U.S. forces and
those under their protection were likely, if not inevitable, during our headlong
retreat from Afghanistan. It told us what we already knew. The events of August
26 did not tell us anything about whether that particular
vehicle — packed with an aid worker and his family — was likely to be part of
an ISIS-K operation. The events of August 26 are unlikely to have shed any
light on whether the intelligence, if we can call it that, preceding that drone
strike ought to have been judged credible.
The events of August 26 are relevant
mainly for political — or, we might as well say, cosmetic —
reasons.
And it seems to have been the politics that
we were responding to.
The collapse of the Afghan government and
the surrender of U.S. forces to the Taliban (and we might as well call it what
it is) already was shaping up to be a fiasco. Subcomandante Malarky boasted
that the Afghan military had been so well-trained and splendidly provisioned by
the U.S. government that its ability to hold off the Taliban was a near
certainty. “They have an air force,” Joe Biden said of the Kabul government. “The
Taliban doesn’t.” Someone might have reminded him that the Taliban already
conquered Afghanistan once without the benefit of an air force, and that the
attack on the United States that precipitated our involvement in Afghanistan
was carried out by means of box-cutters and building schematics.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken was even
more emphatic: “We are not withdrawing. We are staying. The embassy is staying.
Our programs are staying.”
(I know the Blinken type. When one of
these bloodless, dead-eyed Ivy League lawyers says he isn’t going to screw you,
you’re already screwed. Blaming them for it is like blaming a wasp for stinging
you — it is what they do, their nature.)
The seemingly instantaneous collapse of
the notionally U.S.-backed regime in Kabul — a regime that had been in reality
neglected by U.S. officials wearied by its corruption and inefficacy and then
actively undermined by the Trump administration’s decision to bypass it
altogether and conduct direct negotiations with the Taliban — calls to mind Lee
Smith’s “strong horse” principle, which he applied to the Arabic-speaking
Middle East but which also shapes political calculation in much of the rest of
the world. As Osama bin Laden once put it, “When people see a strong horse and
a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse,” a sentiment Smith
connects to the thinking of medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun.
We are the weak horse.
There are many factors that shape the
political life of Afghanistan: religion, ideology, tribe, geography, history —
but also the brute facts of brute force. That has always been the problem with
setting an arbitrary deadline for wrapping up U.S. efforts in Afghanistan:
Without the United States, the Taliban wins, and it is not in the interest of
anybody in Afghanistan to see to it that it takes the Taliban a long time to
win — if they ultimately end up on the losing side of that fight, they and
their families are going to be tortured and murdered. President Biden did his
best impersonation of Lyndon Johnson, who famously complained about sending
“American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home
to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for
themselves.”
That’s familiar stuff, and it generally
shakes out the same way. The same political decision that made Taliban rule
inevitable also made it imminent. This isn’t the Army–Navy football game —
there are real consequences for being on the losing side of a fight in
Afghanistan. It was never going to be the case that as Uncle Sam went limping
back home Afghans were going to stand there and make things worse for themselves.
The fact that the United States chooses to
be the weak horse does not change the political algebra.
American presidencies do not run on policy —
they run on magic.
They run on the superstitious (and,
indeed, idolatrous) belief that there is something magical about the person of
the president, that he enjoys the powers of at least a demigod, and that the
nation’s prosperity and security are mystically connected with his person and
his ritual performances in the democratic agon. That is how the
9/11 attacks came to be, in a very strange but true sense, about George
W. Bush. They became something more than an event.
When the nation is insulted or attacked,
then the president must respond in some symbolically satisfying way or risk
losing the Mandate of Heaven. Hence President Bill Clinton’s decision to blow
up an empty pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum in retaliation (or so he said)
for terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. There
were a couple of different stories told to justify that attack — some fiction
about the facility being used to produce nerve gas and that it was connected to
Osama bin Laden, who had lived in Khartoum a decade earlier — but the timing
was perfectly Clintonian: two months after the film Wag the Dog opened
in theaters and one week after the Monica Lewinsky matter became public.
Clinton, who had been a draft-dodging bum
in the 1960s (one of the many things he has in common with Donald Trump), was
intent on remaking the Democratic Party along more centrist and less
McGovernite lines, and he was sensitive about looking like too much of a flower
child. At the same time, anything that looked like a variation on the theme of
Vietnam was, in those years, strictly off limits, especially for a Democrat.
The question about U.S. military engagements in the Clinton years was never
about U.S. interests — the question was: What does this say about Bill Clinton?
It was a difficult question to parse
politically. The memory of Vietnam was alive for Clinton-era Democrats who had
cut their political teeth in the anti-war movement, but in the most recent
major U.S. military conflict before Clinton’s presidency, Operation Desert
Storm, President George H. W. Bush had if anything made it look too easy. U.S.
forces drove Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait in four days of fighting, a show of
force that was underlined by the ruthless massacre of some unknown number of
retreating Iraqi troops — estimates run from hundreds to as many as 10,000 — on
the so-called Highway of Death. President Bush’s actions were a sharp departure
from those of his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who must have been the most
dovish hawk there ever was, the greatest peacenik ever to be denounced as a warmonger.
The first Gulf War left Americans with the
impression — and the expectation — that U.S. forces could impose any outcome
they desired, anywhere in the world, with a minimal loss of life and a money
cost that was easily lost in the financial vortex of Washington. We still
operate, in no small part, under that misapprehension, failing to appreciate
that our ability to impose military outcomes is insufficient to secure the
political outcomes that are, in fact, our actual national-security goal.
Clinton’s only political goals were
self-serving. But Clinton nonetheless was compelled to act — politically compelled,
not militarily compelled. If anything, his obviously symbolic
response probably emboldened Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, persuading them that
the price of attacking the United States was, all things considered, quite
tolerable, a burden they were willing to bear in the service of jihad. Bin
Laden, being largely ignorant of American political realities and hostage to
his own messianic mania, had expected much the same thing after 9/11 — a
symbolic retaliation followed by retreat.
Because Barack Obama had at least the good
sense to more or less ignore Joe Biden out of existence for eight years, Osama
bin Laden did not live to see his expectations finally come to pass. But a
symbolic retaliation followed by retreat is precisely what President Biden
ultimately intended to offer, at the end, in Afghanistan. After the airport
attack — the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in Afghanistan in a decade — President
Biden was politically compelled to do something, lest his Big
Man Mojo be seen to wane and the Mandate of Heaven slip from his quavering
grasp. That compulsion surely was felt all the way down the chain of command.
And it resulted in taking the first opportunity to make a theatrical show of
force — in this case, against a car with seven children in it.
Because Congress is run by Democrats,
there probably will be no serious oversight effort made to learn how that
decision was made and how it went wrong. But the political dynamics animating
the administration are plain enough.
George H. W. Bush was far from indifferent
to political realities, but he was a politician of an increasingly rare kind:
one who was not only a politician. In the Gulf War, he understood
what U.S. interests were actually at stake, identified the most direct and
convenient means for securing those interests, built a grand coalition that
served U.S. military and diplomatic interests, and to a considerable extent
trusted — wrongly — that the contrast between his old-school competence and the
low-rent shtick of the grabasstical governor of Arkansas would secure his
reelection. But by 1992, our presidential politics already had become surreal:
George H. W. Bush was denounced as a “wimp” — the editorial cartoonists liked
to depict him as an old woman — by the same people who had five minutes ago denounced
him as a warmonger, not only for his leadership in the Gulf War but even before
that, for his courageous actions as an airman in World War II. (The charge was
strafing Japanese lifeboats.) There has always been an element of purely
symbolic exchange in our presidential politics, from George Washington on, but
by the 1990s that economy of symbols had become almost entirely unyoked from the
business of being president. That is the only way to understand the madness of
handing power over from the experienced and capable hands of George H. W. Bush
to such a man as Bill Clinton.
The symbolic presidency and presidential
administration remain disconnected. That makes it impossible for a president to
shut up and do nothing — even when that is the best course of action.
The prevalence of symbolism over all else
means that presidents are compelled to act — even when the
action is pointless or destructive. Sometimes, that is an ill-considered tariff
or a ridiculous promise about Mexico paying us to build a border wall.
Sometimes, it is showing up at a disaster scene as though the presidential
presence brought with it mystical healing powers rather than resource-consuming
distraction. Sometimes, it is the mystical laying of presidential hands upon a
Skutnik during the State of the Union address.
Sometimes, it’s a carload of kids being
burnt on the altar of muscular executive action.
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