Sheffield Telegraph image
By Hank Beckman -
The debacle currently unfolding in Afghanistan is the single most embarrassing foreign policy performance by an American President in my lifetime.
As resolutions to untenable situations go, nothing else even comes close; not the Bay of Pigs disaster, not the humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam, not the Iranian hostage crisis, nor any number of lesser crisis were handled this poorly by an American President.
The sight of Joe Biden stumbling through a press briefing—let’s not even call it a press conference—and hurrying out of the room like he was late for dinner reservations at some posh DC restaurant, coupled with administration officials contradicting his view of how the tragedy is unfolding, should be cause for serious reflection about what type of people we are sending to Congress and the White House, who’s running our foreign policy establishment, and just where many of the people reporting on this have been for the last decade.
John Kennedy ransomed the Cuban prisoners taken at the Bay of Pigs, Gerald Ford got our civilians out of Vietnam, and Jimmy Carter attempted an ill-fated helicopter rescue of the hostages.
JFK minced no words in letting the Soviets know that he wouldn’t be lectured about the mess by its murderous regime, Gerald Ford made a valiant but ultimately futile attempt to bolster support for the South Vietnamese army, and Jimmy Carter drew a line in the Middle East sand after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the aftermath of the hostages being taken.
To watch Biden trying to pin the blame on Donald Trump, the helpless American officials trying to explain away the mess and deny it’s even talking place, and even Democratic office-holders excoriating the President for his incompetence gives one the feeling that our ruling elites—call them the “deep state” or the “swamp” or whatever sobriquet you prefer—are the weakest, most incompetent community of people in the Western World.
I’ll leave it to others to highlight the shame that the strongest nation on Earth so richly deserves for leaving loyal Afghan allies to the fate that surely awaits them at the hands of the Taliban; turn on your television and you’ll see any number of talking heads and “experts” doing a thorough job of it.
But while we’re anguishing over our guilt and fretting about the poor “optics” of leaving a loyal ally to the mercy of fundamentalist barbarians, let’s not be naive.
No honest person can pretend that abandoning an ally is something new to the United States government or that the practice began with Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
Anyone paying attention to post-World War ll history is aware that we’ve perfected the art of bugging out when our leaders and/or citizens decide it’s no longer in our interests to expend blood and treasure in adventures far from home.
We began the post-war era by abandoning the Polish people and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe to Soviet domination at Yalta; we left the Chinese nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek to Mao Tse Tung and his lunatic marauders; most of the fifties were spent avoiding any action that would threaten Soviet power in Eastern Europe, notwithstanding the propaganda from our government about rolling back Soviet hegemony in the region.
We turned our backs on Fulgencio Batista in Cuba when Fidel Castro’s rag-tag army, on its last legs, rolled into Havana and forced him to flea the country; Ngo Dinh Diem held the line against the Communists in Vietnam for a decade before we allowed him to be assassinated in a military coup; Diem’s murder led to a second betrayal of South Vietnam, one that ended with the entire world watching people desperately scrambling to board helicopters on the roof of our embassy in Saigon. (a Democratic Congress shamefully cut off funding to the regime)
With help from leftist peaceniks in America, we cut the Somoza regime loose in Nicaragua, leading to a Sandinista takeover; after the Shah of Iran carried our water in the Middle East for a quarter-century, we dropped him like a bad habit, officials in the Carter administration naively thinking the Ayatollah Khomeini would be an improvement on the Shah.
The United States is a great power—the greatest ever, some would argue—and in the final analysis, great powers put their own interests above that of their smaller allies or client states, regardless of any moral considerations or questions of justice or rights among nations.
That simple fact may be lamentable, but it is easily verifiable by any honest view of history. Great powers make alliances and commit power for their own benefit; it’s one of the reasons they become great powers in the first place.
Of course, there is an excellent argument to be made that we weren’t exactly acting in our best interests by trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern nation, when much of the region consists of various tribes with no history of democracy or modern government.
But our elites calling the shots certainly believed the nation-building exercise was in our best interests, the theory being that democracies tend not to make war on each other. So we spent two decades, more the $2 trillion and just short of 2,500 lives trying to turn the region into a Jeffersonian democracy.
When the enterprise inevitably failed and the American people demanded—by electing two consecutive presidents that explicitly promised to get us out of the mess—our elites decided to do what we usually do—leave; moral considerations be damned.
In Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, his Melian Dialogue relates how the representatives of the island nation of Melos questioned whether the Athenians were being just in threatening to invade.
The Athenians responded that the “standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.”
He wrote that 2,500 years ago, so it’s not some new development in human nature or the art of statecraft.
But what does seem to be new, at least to the United States in this century, is this business of no one in authority suffering any consequences for leading providing over disaster.
Lt. General Wayne Short and Rear Admiral Husband Kimmel were both relieved of their command after the Pearl Harbor disaster and a presidential commission later found them guilty of errors of judgement and ”dereliction of duty” in the run up to the Japanese attack; CIA Director Allen Dulles and his deputy Richard Bissell were judged responsible for the Bay of Pigs screw up and relieved of their positions; Lt. Col. Oliver North and National Security Advisor John Poindexter shouldered the blame for Iran-Contra, with North being fired and Poindexter resigning.
Who’s taken responsibility for the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001? Has anyone resigned in disgrace after the intelligence failures that led to the ill-advised nation-building effort in Iraq? Or the mistakes made in Libya that led to our consulate in Benghazi being attacked and Ambassador Chris Stevens being murdered?
Indeed, has anyone been held accountable for the two decades of obvious lies and mismanagement involved in the Afghanistan fiasco?
You know the answer.
