Coop Scoop: Afghanistan Is A Defeat Not A Withdrawal

We keep repeating the same imperial catastrophes

April 15-16

Issue #70

By Marc Cooper

For those who want to achieve that hallowed state of bi-partisanship, look no further than the final act – the final US act—in Afghanistan.  It’s been twenty years of a fully bi-partisan folly and train wreck of humungous proportions.  It cost more than $2 trillion, enough to rebuild a good part of American domestic infrastructure. Almost nobody can plead innocence.

It took 2400 American military lives and I don’t know about the number of “private contractors” killed because we just don’t discuss the specifics of the latter in polite company. Some 20,000 soldiers wounded.  And somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 Afghan dead – another figure that is unknown because who here cares about that number anyway?

And please do not start with the 50-year-old stories dredged up from Vietnam that we were forced to fight with one hand behind our back. Bullshit. We repeatedly pummeled Afghanistan with every bomb. bullet and drone in our arsenal.

More than 800,000 U.S. soldiers passed through Afghanistan over the last twenty years, the longest and without doubt the most senseless war ever fought by this country. We went the whole Goldilocks route in terms of deployment and strategy: mostly air, mostly ground, big, small, medium, a huge surge and then small footprints.All-out conventional war.Targeted provinces,And why not mention the cynical hoax of one General David Petraeus; he basically wrote up the failed counter-insurgency strategy we used in Vietnam, and then passed it off as a work of winning inspiration.When it also failed, Petraeus was still hailed as a Genius Hero by the media and both political parties and was even hired by two universities after he was convicted of sharing classified material with his girlfriend and biographer!

George W. Bush’s decision to invade Afghanistan after 9/11 was wildly popular.  I supported what I thought would be a short, devastating attack on the very deserving Taliban and that would be it. I confess.

I can claim, however, that less than two weeks after the attack on the Twin Towers I published a long interview with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) who was at the time the ONLY member of congress to vote against Dubya’s authorization of military force. You can read it here.

Here’s the money quote that showed a whole lot of awareness of the dangers of authorizing Bush to go ahead:

“I’m opposed to granting that broad power to any president. I believe Congress has got to be part of the decision-making process when we’re talking about going to war against sovereign nations. This resolution, even though it was focused on the World Trade Center attack, is open-ended. It doesn’t have an exit strategy; it does not have any reporting requirements. And the president already has authority to use force [internationally for 60 days without congressional approval] under the War Powers Act. So what was this about?”

I repeat, Lee was the only Democrat to oppose the initial invasion.  Even though the Taliban were overthrown in the first few weeks of the war, somehow we continued the fight with immeasurable hubris and ignorance with nobody able to articulate the reasons why we’re staying.

The default answer was to roll up Osama Bin Laden who, by the way, was almost never in Afghanistan but, rather, operated mostly from Pakistan.

We killed Osama ten years ago – in Pakistan!-- and, yet we still stayed.  We stayed because we could never really dominate the Taliban the same way we could never really dominate the Viet Cong. 

By the time Barack Obama had been in office a year or two he was truly torn over Afghanistan, He wanted to end the war but had no idea how to (actually he did know, it’s not that hard).  Some credit must be given to then Vice-President Joe Biden who argued that the war was stalemated and it was time to pack up – though not completely.

In the end, Obama let himself get rolled by the Pentagon and dispatched ten of thousands of additional troops there only to draw most of them back a year or so later. Would it be fair to say that Obama’s policy in Afghanistan was one of Total Drift? Yes, absolutely. I hope you will also remember that in the run-up to the 2008 election, all the Democrats, including Pelosi and Obama himself, were boasting how a Democratic victory would allow the U.S. to “redeploy” its troops from the Bad War in Iraq to the Good War in Afghanistan.

The American people were tired if not exhausted by the war when Obama took office.  He was, however,  decidedly not under much pressure even if the war was unpopular. Mostly it was just forgotten – by the people and by a fickle media.  I have to guess that if you surveyed American 18 year olds today, a majority could tell you nothing about the war, including if it was still going on or not. Yet, there are some young people deployed in Afghanistan whose father and/or mother also served there, the same frickin’ war.

Let’s be clear.  It will take American popular culture another 20 years to admit, but just as in Vietnam, we lost the war in Afghanistan. 

In the end, there was nothing noble, valiant or redeemable about it. We replaced the Taliban with one very corrupt puppet after another while the media celebrated our Potemkin elections as solid proof we were building a new democracy. Whether it was Cheney or Bush, or Obama or Hillary Clinton or General Petraeus, we were fed a steady diet of optimistic lies and distortions, always striving to put a good face on what was an ongoing catastrophe. Throughout all of this, the poppy fields kept growing and both our friends and enemies in-country kept Afghanistan’s place as global leader in heroin exports.

There is a practiced and refined tradition in American foreign policy of deceiving the American people. We don’t really like admitting that the war in Iraq served mostly to turn it into an Iranian client state.  Even in Vietnam, a half century later, the people we fought, the forces we fought to crush, are now in power.

As in Vietnam, we manufactured domestic governments that were more unpopular than the forces we were fighting.  The outcome should be no surprise.

As I write today, the heated debate is over what exactly is going to happen when the US and NATO forces (about 7-800 in total) leave by September.  Predictably, we have pols in both parties saying that it is premature to withdraw. Huh? Twenty years with the Taliban still controlling 70% or more of the country/ You want to stay another twenty?

Joe Biden knows exactly what is going to happen when the U.S. withdraws.  Sooner or later, and I would guess sooner, the Taliban will be back in full control of Afghanistan putting a nice red ribbon on our 20 years of stupidity.  There might or might not be some intervening peace talks, maybe even some short experiment in power sharing with the hollowed-out Kabul regime, but it will be the Taliban ultimately in charge,

Obama knew it back then and was not willing to take the hit.  Biden is and I give him some credit for this move.  He’s not taking a chance. He knows this will end in official defeat. He doesn’t care because this long ago stopped being any sort of issue for most of the electorate.

The bigger question is whether the Biden administration is merely cutting our losses in Afghanistan or is US foreign policy undergoing some significant change.  I think it is only the former, unfortunately.

I am more than pleased we are getting out of Afghanistan but I am worried about what we might be getting ourselves into in other places. The rhetoric around the sanctions against Russia announced today was pretty hot. 

Then again, the deployment of 80,000 Russian troops on the Ukrainian border is hardly a friendly gesture. The Chinese are threatening Taiwan after consuming Hong Kong. The Israelis just bombed an Iranian complex and that also roils the waters, to put it lightly.

In short, the U.S. and the world face a complex myriad of mounting conflicts and the conventional wisdom of how to deal with these challenges is not very reassuring.

Biden supporters are understandably anxious for Biden to expunge any trace of Trump’s America First posture and replace it with our traditional alliances with our traditional allies.  Nobody seems to notice that those “traditional” relationships were born out of the confrontational aspects of the Cold War and it assumes that the US and its posse of allies are the Cops of the World.

Certainly, Trump’s know-nothing foreign policy should be replaced by heightened cooperation and much more and better diplomacy.  But that’s different than an imperial swagger that takes it upon itself to sort out the conflicts in other countries.

Almost two hundred years ago, Ben Franklin famously and wisely pointed out that a Republic could not stand if it became an Empire.

We are both. And the cost of that empire (and I don’t just mean economically) along with accelerating social decay has now come to directly threaten the democratic Republic. The Biden administration stands at an historic crossroads.  He has taken one small but important step away from Empire. It would be wonderful if we continued along that path but I don’t see much hope we will.  Vietnam was a lesson we did not learn and right after we lost we jumped headlong into Central America, Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, Iraq and then Afghanistan again and each time we repeat the same bloody failure and learn very very little. +++

P.S.  With each newsletter edition I am going to be recommending other newsletters you might want to subscribe to.

This week we land on a new acquaintance of mine, Geoff Plitt. Geoff's a liberal comedian and his TikTok has 10+ million views on, but his side project is a comedy curation newsletter. Each week, he scours the internet for the funniest jokes and clips that you may have missed, including SNL sketches, Late Night monologues, Comedy Central stand-up sets, funny Tweets, or TikToks. Check out his newsletter here.

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