EJ Dionne/WaPo:
The Afghanistan outcome is ugly. Biden was still right to say: Enough.
The United States is highly competent at fighting wars when the objective is clear, victory is the only option, and a large share of the public supports the engagement.
Our country has rarely been good at sustained commitments in murky conflicts where the goal is a vague “political settlement” that is neither victory nor defeat.
We ought to have learned that lesson long ago. Afghanistan has taught it again. It’s why President Biden finally said: Enough.
Biden’s decision to withdraw is a cold, realpolitik judgment. However brutal the Taliban is, however reactionary and oppressive it might be toward women in particular and dissenters from its purist religious doctrines generally, U.S. interests would not be served by extending our military commitment any longer.
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Distinguished persons of the week: Let’s hear it for the deep state
This is what losing a war looks like. The decision to end a “forever war” meant we inevitably could not rescue everyone, including all the women and girls of Afghanistan. If we wanted to avoid the chaos and misery, including the plight of those women and girls, we should have stayed; but of course, Americans didn’t want that, either (though many speculated we could construct an ongoing, small and low-risk contingent of U.S. forces in the country).
But the story that the media resisted telling was less visible and far more positive — inspiring, even. It was the story of men and women running into the fray to save as many as possible from death and misery that a lost war entails.
Dan Berschinski/WaPo:
I fought and bled in Afghanistan. I still think America is right to accept defeat.
When the twin towers fell, I was a high school senior deep in college applications. The United States Military Academy topped my list. Watching the devastation of Sept. 11, 2001, unfold, I knew the Army would be part of the response, though I figured that response would be over by the time I graduated from West Point. Never did I imagine that, eight years later, I would be leading soldiers in a war provoked by that one terrible day.
Yet lead them I did, across Afghanistan, witnessing horrors and enduring losses I still struggle to describe. What I saw there convinced me that the awful scenes we are now witnessing were inevitable — and that President Biden deserves credit for nonetheless braving the fallout to do the right thing by our troops.
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale/AnneBonnyPirate:
Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation
A lot of nonsense about Afghanistan is being written in Britain and the United States. Most of this nonsense hides a number of important truths.
First, the Taliban have defeated the United States.
Second, the Taliban have won because they have more popular support.
Third, this is not because most Afghans love the Taliban. It is because the American occupation has been unbearably cruel and corrupt.
Fourth, the War on Terror has also been politically defeated in the United States. The majority of Americans are now in favor of withdrawal from Afghanistan and against any more foreign wars.
Fifth, this is a turning point in world history. The greatest military power in the world has been defeated by the people of a small, desperately poor country. This will weaken the power of the American empire all over the world.
Sixth, the rhetoric of saving Afghan women has been widely used to justify the occupation, and many feminists in Afghanistan have chosen the side of the occupation. The result is a tragedy for feminism.
Josh Marshall/TPM:
The Fall of Kabul, Washington and the Guys at the Fancy Magazines
Like hyenas and chimpanzees, reporters hunt in packs. There’s a reason they call them “feeding frenzies.” They’re also obsessed with images. But none of that is unique to the current situation. There’s something more at work here…
My point here isn’t that there’s nothing the Biden administration could have done differently or better. At a minimum they could have been processing exit paperwork more rapidly in advance for interpreters and others who worked for the US and had clearer contingency planning for evacuations of personnel outside of Kabul for a rapid collapse scenario. My point is simply that to a great extent what we are seeing today was baked into the US mission in Afghanistan all along. It is ugly. And a lot of people are going to suffer. It is mortifying on various levels – some trivial and shallow and others profound – for the United States. But it was always baked in. And what is critical to understand is that the fact that it was always baked in, and no one was ready to grab that kryptonite or make that reckoning, is precisely why we have been there for almost twenty years.
What is being imagined and demanded is an hermetic, clean and painless end to a failed military mission. That’s not responsibility but rather denial.
Dan Depetris/USA Today:
Taliban victory? Despite collapse in Kabul, withdrawal was the right course in Afghanistan
We've spent trillions and lost many lives. Afghanistan's government and military could never stand on their own. We needed to withdraw.
Afghanistan’s security situation is undoubtedly getting worse. Those who oppose the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces by late August are using the bevy of bad news to press their case for why Washington should continue to stay in the country. Five former U.S. ambassadors to Afghanistan counseled the U.S. to “prevent the defeat and collapse of the Afghan state” until a reasonable diplomatic resolution is possible.
What most of these critics don’t seem to recognize, however, is that those who believe a full and complete U.S. troop withdrawal is the best course of action understood quite well what could happen on the ground once the U.S. military left. Removing the best fighting force on the planet from a civil war will inevitably have some impact on the fighting.
Sarah Chayes/blog:
The Ides of August
From that standpoint — speaking as an American, as an adoptive Kandahari, and as a former senior U.S. government official — here are the key factors I see in today’s climax of a two-decade long fiasco:
Afghan government corruption, and the U.S. role enabling and reinforcing it. The last speaker of the Afghan parliament, Rahman Rahmani, I recently learned, is a multimillionaire, thanks to monopoly contracts to provide fuel and security to U.S. forces at their main base, Bagram. Is this the type of government people are likely to risk their lives to defend?
Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with U.S. fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints. By 2007, delegations of elders would visit me — the only American whose door was open and who spoke Pashtu so there would be no intermediaries to distort or report their words. Over candied almonds and glasses of green tea, they would get to some version of this: “The Taliban hit us on this cheek, and the government hits us on that cheek.” The old man serving as the group’s spokesman would physically smack himself in the face.
I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were. Note: it took me a while, and plenty of my own mistakes, to come to that realization. But I did.