Look, I’m a foreign policy professional, very nuanced in my thinking, deeply grounded in history. I understand things that didn’t even happen, academic analogies that are so arcane that they require a seance to speak to someone who understands them. But let me speak clearly.
What we are doing in Afghanistan is giving up and going home. Many Americans fought there valiantly. Twenty-Four hundred made the ultimate sacrifice. We spent an unimaginably large fortune there. Any president would have gone in to try to get Al Qaeda and their Taliban enablers after 9/11.
But the entire enterprise since–despite the best efforts of good men and women and the worst efforts of some bad ones–has been a catastrophic, historic, waste of effort, a failure of imagination. We got some terrorists, but in the end, the country will remain in turmoil.
The Taliban and religious extremists will prevail. Women will suffer. Progress will be reversed. Terror cells will return to moving back and forth to the more lawless regions of Pakistan. And the bad guys knew all along that all they had to do was wait us out.
That formula has worked for millennia. It has worked again. They call Afghanistan “the graveyard of empires.” We will spin it like it did not have that effect on us. But it is too early to say what the costs to America of the mismanagement of the response to 9/11 was.
We do know the cost was so high that it has led America to recoil from playing a leadership role in the world through two very different presidencies since. We do know that retreat has allowed others to step in. We do know that while we were preoccupied with these vainglorious, futile, tragic wars, China has been free to focus on growth. We do know that our efforts unleashed profoundly destructive forces in the Middle East. And it is very clear that today, as we continue our meandering shuffle to the exit in Afghanistan, we are not the superpower we were in 2001. We have been diminished over the past two decades. We have been weakened. While we may not be quite ready for a “graveyard” for our empire, the deep wounds we have suffered should be plain to all with objective eyes to see.
The past 20 years have been fateful for America and our role in the world. We have answered the post-Cold War question of what we would do with our victory in that decades long confrontation and how we would lead when our foremost adversary was gone.
Thanks especially to the profound errors of the Bush Administration but compounded by those of the Obama and Trump years (Trump’s much worse than Obama’s), we leave Afghanistan as a lesser nation than we were when we entered. Our enemies and rivals are as strong or stronger than ever.
It is not over for the US. We’re still immensely powerful. We still have reservoirs of good will (despite the efforts of men like Trump to deplete them) worldwide. We are still the first among nations if not unchallenged, if not on a clear trajectory upward as we once were.
We can recover. But the first step toward shaping a constructive, leading role for the US on the international stage, one that enables us to protect and advance our interests, is acknowledging just how disastrous the past two decades have been.
