This is just a squib of a diary, but I had to share it because the timing was so fortuitous. I recently finished reading One Minute to Midnight by Michael Dobbs, an excellent blow-by-blow account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with many previously unpublished facts and images. (Not relevant to this story, but I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in the topic — I got it as a Christmas gift in 2008 but just now got around to reading it. I’ve read other accounts, bu this was by far the best; it brings home just how close the world came to nuclear annihilation, much closer than I had previously understood. Just think if Trump or Bush had a similar crisis — it would probably have been the end of civilization.)
What’s relevant to Afghanistan, however, is a passage Kennedy wrote in a letter to his Swedish girl friend during in World War II, while he was commanding the later-to-be-famous PT-109:
It’s very easy to talk about the war and beating the Japs if it takes years and a million men, but anyone who talks like that should consider well his words. We get so used to talking about billions of dollars, and millions of soldiers, that thousands of casualties sound like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten I saw [in his PT boat after the Japanese attack], the people deciding the whys and wherefores had better make mighty sure that all this effort is headed for some definite goal, and that when we reach that goal we may say it was worth it, for if it isn’t, the whole thing will turn to ashes, and we will face great trouble in the years to come after the war. [Emphasis added by me.]
I read this as images of the evacuation at the Kabul airport played on TV — very serendipitous timing, to be sure. That’s it in a nutshell — we originally went into Afghanistan for the limited purpoose of getting bin Laden and dismantling the terror apparatus, but in the neocons’ hubris and ignorance, that limited, and commendable, goal transformed to some vague notion of nation buliding and imposing democracy from the top down. Skeptics could argue that it’s easy to be an armchair quarterback and criticize using hindsight, but guess what? The most knowledgeable people said at the time that our mission was foolhardy and doomed to failure. And many of us agreed. If ordinary people like us knew it was a fool’s errand, why didn’t the supposed experts?
JFK was far from perfect, but his experience in WWII gave him a perspective sorely lacking in the Bush, and frankly Obama, administrations. Using Kennedy’s formulation, we never had a definite goal in Afghanistan, much less a realistic one. Oh sure, if we had really succeeded in setting up a vibrant, self-sustaining democracy in Afghanistan, some could at least argue that it was worth it, but anyone with a lick of sense knew that would never happen.
That’s why so much of the reporting around the withdrawal and evacuation makes me crazy. What purpose would leaving a small force of 2500 or so troops in the country serve? Why should Americans and Afghanis continue to die to prop up a corrupt, illusory government that no one — including its own leaders — believed in? How can anyone cast blame on Biden? He’s the first President with the guts to pull the plug and take the political hit (which I predict will be small to non-existent after the dust settles) rather than to continue to throw good money after bad (not to mention human lives) merely to avoid political embarrassment.
(It’s too bad Kennedy himself didn’t keep his words of wisdom in mind as he got sucked into Vietnam, but that’s a different story.)