On Christmas Eve, 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to help its fledgling communist satellite put down an Islamist rebellion, which seemed like a good idea at the time and, of course, was not.
After a few years of trying to figure out Afghanistan on the fly, the Soviets decided to leave most of the fighting to the Afghan army, whose specialty appeared to be desertion.
Seems no one made a note of it.
Less than 10 years into that quagmire, in the spring of 1989, the Soviets had had it and withdrew, which I guess makes them smarter than the Americans by about a decade.
Afghanistan has pretty much defied understanding by people and nation-states going back to Alexander the Great, yet has somehow failed to convince generations of diplomats and military strategists that it is irredeemably a geopolitical dead end.
The one country that should have been immune to the Afghan pratfall, the one that would never be sucked in to an impossible entanglement half a world away – the United States – somehow remained susceptible due to its chronic inability to learn and its perpetual enslavement to military weaponry.
No country that lost 56,000 of its bravest in Vietnam, a war without any persuasive purpose or exit strategy, could find itself in, of all Godforsaken places, Afghanistan, and barely a quarter-century after the fall of Saigon.
Could it?
Oh, sure.
So predictably, when Afghanistan uncoiled like a viper this week and went fangs deep into our convoluted purposes, we did the one thing we can’t seem to unlearn: We pointed the finger.
Your fault, his fault, their fault, not my fault.
George W. Bush put us in Afghanistan on the premise that it was a rat’s nest of terrorists responsible for the planning and execution of Sept. 11, never mind that 15 of the 19 hijackers involved were Saudis.
“You can run,” Bush said of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, “but you can’t hide.”
He hid for 10 years.
Even as Bush soon diverted his administration’s attention and resources to Iraq, even as the Barack Obama administration eliminated bin Laden during a nighttime raid in Pakistan, Afghanistan only became more perilous.
Of the four presidents with their fingers in this pie, Obama was best at pretending to understand it, which didn’t help a bit in making it any less dangerous.
Knowing basically nothing about basically anything, Donald Trump wanted only to get the U.S. out of there at any cost. In February 2020, he cut a deal with the Taliban that excluded the Afghan government.
The speed at which the Taliban took over the country is the outgrowth of so-called cease-fire deals, according to Susannah George of The Washington Post.
When Joe Biden announced he’d honor the Trump deal, the cease-fire deals and the Taliban resurgence went to warp speed.
Biden can only hope these are the worst days of his presidency. He took a back-burner international annoyance and turned it into a boiling set-the-kitchen-on-fire global embarrassment. He had no difficulty, no compunctions, no hesitancy about overturning, reversing or obliterating any number of Trump policies in his first eight months in the White House. How the ill-considered Afghanistan withdrawal deal didn’t make that list is a matter he’ll long regret.
Your fault, his fault, their fault, not my fault.
All that said, not all of our champion finger-pointers are created equal. If you are a political operative who can’t find Afghanistan on a map, never cared a lick for the opportunities of girls and women in the United States much less Afghanistan, don’t much care to defend democracy in America much less in Central Asia, or applauded mindlessly as Trump announced the Afghan pullout, then you can probably stop talking.
PG Publishing Co./Tribune Content Agency