The Main Lesson Here: We’re Led By Buffoons– (Woke ones at that)
Biden said we had no choice but to leave Afghanistan. He’s right. There was no reason to stay there. The question is, how exactly do you get out? Just because something is necessary doesn’t mean you get to ignore the details. If you learned you needed an emergency appendectomy, would it matter to you whether your surgeon was a physician with a scalpel, or a drunk guy with a pocket knife? Yes, it would matter. But it didn’t matter to Joe Biden. He did the necessary thing in the ugliest possible way.
Everyone is saying it’s like Saigon in 1975. Helicopters evacuating an American embassy. Chaotic, distressing scenes at the local airport as American allies, or just plain fearful people, desperately try to flee the country. American officials convincing absolutely nobody with their unhinged claims that the ‘mission has been successful’ (in Anthony Blinken’s words). It’s clear for all to see, commentators insist: Kabul in 2021 is a replay of Saigon in 1975. America humiliated, its enemies ascendant.
Yet here’s the brutal truth: what is happening right now is worse than Saigon. Yes, America’s defeat in Vietnam was an epoch-shaping humiliation for the self-styled defenders of freedom in the Cold War clash with the ‘Evil Empire’ and its communist allies. But the routing of the US in Afghanistan, the alarmingly swift collapse of its allies in the Afghan government, the fall of Kabul like a house of cards, and the fact that Operation Enduring Freedom, launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, has ended with the endurance of the Taliban instead, with victory for the bad guys – all of this represents the most significant moment of geopolitical decline for the US in decades. Indeed, it raises questions not only about America’s global standing, but also about its very purpose and meaning as a nation.
The scale of the humiliation just suffered by the United States cannot be overstated. The most powerful military force on Earth and its incredibly well-funded allies in Kabul have been pushed aside by a regressive 12th-century movement that thinks adulterers should be stoned to death. The allies of the most technologically sophisticated army in the world have been sent packing by a ragtag Islamist army which set about painting over billboard posters for female beauty products the minute it arrived in Kabul. A nation founded in freedom – and which justified its international presence in the language of freedom for the entire postwar period – has been usurped by a movement so intolerant that it bans pop music, executes comedians who make fun of it, and beats women with canes if they are immodestly dressed.
The impact of America’s failure, of the slow, tragic journey from Operation Enduring Freedom to those images today of desperate Afghans clinging to the undercarriage of the last US military airplanes to leave Afghanistan, will be dire and long-lasting. Most immediately the US has shown itself to be an untrustworthy ally. Which nation or people in need of help would align with this supposedly freedom-loving superpower that abandons its allies to their fate when the enemy comes knocking? Who now will trust the US to assist in the building of new institutions given the rotten fruits of its multi-billion-dollar, 20-year ‘nation-building’ project in Afghanistan – a calamitously weak Potemkin government that capitulated instantly when the Taliban hit the streets of Kabul?
This geopolitical disaster for the US will also strengthen the hand of its opponents, most notably China. China is already moving to consolidate its relationship with the Taliban and to assert its authoritative influence in the new Afghanistan. Islamist forces will take succour from the victory of the self-styled Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, too. Both regionally and among aspiring jihadists in the West, the victory of the Islamist side in the ‘war on terror’, the return to power of the movement that was hosting al-Qaeda when it visited its barbarism upon the infidels of New York City and Washington, DC, in 2001, will inspire confidence and action. Israel must be incredibly worried right now, knowing that Islamic extremists are again in the ascendant, and that its one-time chief supporter walks away from wars on terror.
The Afghan humiliation is not only a military failure – it’s a political and moral one, too. Extraordinarily bad political decisions have been taken by the US, including its willingness to trust the Taliban and its belief that this brutal, misanthropic, misogynistic movement could be a player in the ‘international community’. Even now, Washington seems completely out of touch with events on the ground in Afghanistan. Its intelligence officers said the Taliban could take Kabul within 90 days. That was four days ago. They know nothing. One gets the impression of a confused, decaying empire looking with bamboozlement upon even those parts of the earth it rules.
But above all of that, above even the political and military incoherence of the American empire, there is the corrosive cultural dynamic. This might just be the most important factor in the Afghan humiliation – the fact that the US, and the West more broadly, clearly lacks the cultural resources necessary for a clash of civilisations. This wasn’t just a territorial battle, a fight over the land of Afghanistan. It was also a cultural clash. It was a war between one side that has very strong beliefs and is more than willing to die for them, and another side that doesn’t know what it stands for anymore and would rather avoid risk and self-sacrifice if at all possible. I’ll leave you to decide which of these is the Taliban, and which the US.
This was always the West’s problem in Afghanistan: it lacked faith in the very values it claimed to be delivering to that benighted country. We will liberate women from life under the burqa, Western officials said. But isn’t it ‘Islamophobic’ to criticise the burqa, or any other Islamic practice for that matter? Our elites have insisted for years that it is. We will replace your intolerant Islamist system with a civil society fashioned by clever professors, the West promised. But isn’t it judgemental and possibly a tad racist – certainly an offence against the ideology of multiculturalism – to imply that Western democracy is superior to Islamist theocracy? As one British think-tank says, in its definition of the term ‘Islamophobia’, it is wrong to suggest that Islam is in any way ‘inferior to the West’. The West’s post-9/11 bluster was continually undermined by the West’s broader descent into moral relativism. How can you assert the civilisational authority of Western values when your entire educational and university system is devoted to questioning and demeaning Western civilisation? You cannot partake in a clash of civilisations if you loathe your own civilisation.
Anyone who thinks the Taliban did not pick up on all of this, on the Potemkin nature not only of the Afghan government but also of Western civilisation itself, is kidding themselves. The Taliban will have watched as the mighty American military became bogged down in discussions of critical race theory and the problem of ‘white rage’. They will have clocked the British army’s recruitment drive that was aimed at ‘snowflakes’ and ‘me me me millennials’ – for real – on the basis that such people have the ‘compassion’ necessary for the touchy-feely wars of the 21st century. They will know that the contemporary West is shame-faced about its history and its civilisational values and lacks ideas for how to turn its fragile youths into a fighting force, and they will understand their own life-and-death devotion to Sharia as being the opposite to all of this. They know this was a cultural clash as well as a military fight, and that they were by far the stronger side on this front.
This is the truth: America and its Western allies are too consumed by wokeness to be able to pursue a moral or military struggle for their values. The past 20 years of this slow-burning Afghan humiliation have been a modern case of fiddling while Rome burns. An intolerant Islamist army gains in strength and plots its return to power while the American and British armies obsess over how to become more trans-inclusive, which gender pronouns to use (the Royal Air Force’s list includes ‘ze’, ‘per’ and ‘hir’), how to make training exercises more inclusive of ‘snowflakes’, and how to fight wars without offending the enemy. Who can forget when US navymen wrote ‘Hijack this, fags’ on a bomb destined for Afghanistan and all hell broke loose? Such ‘spontaneous acts of penmanship’ are completely unacceptable, said the then US rear admiral. The Taliban was fighting to the death for its theocratic vision – the West was squabbling over offensive words.
This is why the comparison with Saigon is an illegitimate one. Back then, the US was forced into retreat by powerful external forces – the Vietnamese, of course, and also the anti-war movement in the US, in which vast swathes of the youth and significant sections of the elite turned against the war. The Afghan humiliation, in contrast, is a product almost entirely of internal disarray – of the exhaustion of American politics, of Western geopolitical nous, and of the West’s belief in its own project and its own values. There is nothing positive whatsoever in how the Afghan War has ended. It is a disaster for the Afghan people, a devastating blow to the confidence of the United States, and another backward step for those of us who believe that the values of democracy and freedom are superior and are worth fighting for. The Afghan calamity will cast a long shadow, for a long time.
Success has many fathers, goes the saying, but failure is an orphan. Well, the catastrophe in Afghanistan has many, many fathers — none of whom want to acknowledge the terrifying progeny they have spawned. In immediate terms, the disaster must be laid firmly at the door of President Joe Biden. It was his decision to pull US troops out of Afghanistan by September 11 that has produced the shocking and tragic rout by the Taliban over the past few days. Biden took that decision in the teeth of warnings from his senior military advisers. He insisted that the Afghan army would hold off the Taliban. Denying that these insurgents were the equivalent of the North Vietnamese at the fall of Saigon, he said: They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy…Yesterday, the air over Kabul was reportedly thick with the noise of Chinook helicopters ferrying American personnel to the airport as the United States fled Afghanistan in panic, chaos and humiliation. What’s also on shocking display is the ineptitude of US intelligence, who were reportedly shocked — shocked! — at the speed of the Taliban takeover. What is the point of having an intelligence service at all if they couldn’t even grasp what was all too plain to those who watched aghast the speed at which the Taliban were taking city after city over the past few weeks?
A Taliban takeover has indeed been on the cards ever since former President Donald Trump cut his ill-advised deal with them in February last year. The agreement was that the US would withdraw its troops on the understanding that the Taliban would cut its ties with al Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS), and formulate a lasting peace agreement with the Afghan government. No-one with a functioning brain could have believed for an instant that this deal would be honoured, not least because there was no let-up in Taliban-inspired violence against other Afghans even when the talks were under way, and subsequently. The Afghan army certainly got the message that they were about to be abandoned to savage forces that would overwhelm them. Demoralised, they gave up, put down their arms and ran for their lives. So the Taliban victory is a bipartisan American disaster. And the deeper reason is that the withdrawal of US troops is backed by some three-quarters of the American public. Indeed, Biden reportedly believes that, once the dust has settled, the Democrats will reap electoral rewards at the mid-term elections from a public grateful that its wish for disengagement has now been heeded. But the American public also doesn’t like its country to be humiliated. So it’s possible that this amoral calculation will blow back in the Democrats’ faces. Even if that happens, though, whether the American public will fully grasp the implications of what it has now unwittingly willed into being remains a moot point. In truth, America and the west gave up in Afghanistan years ago.
Ignorant and arrogant analysis of what was required and doable there plus inept and half-hearted delivery, coupled with the debacle in Iraq following the toppling of Saddam Hussein, resulted in a loss of support in America and the west for their troops being in those countries at all. With 2,400 American fatalities and 20,000 injured in Afghanistan, the engagement there was seen as expending precious blood and treasure to no avail, since the goal of of bringing order and stability to such failed states was perceived as a fool’s errand. Defeatism, in the UK scarcely any less than in the US, became rampant. But this was to ignore the reason America and its allies went into Afghanistan in the first place. It was not from any humanitarian impulse; it was not to liberate Afghan women from the unspeakable brutalities of Islamist rule, however desirable that was; it was not to bring democracy and human rights to a primitive society. It was instead to defend America and the west from the significant threat that Afghanistan still posed.
In other eras and in other theatres of war, the west understood what needed to be done to neutralise such an enduring threat to its security. That’s why the US and its allies remained in Germany for some 11 years after the Second World War, with eight NATO members including the US retaining a permanent military presence there; that’s why allied forces similarly occupied Japan from 1945-1952; that’s why some 28,000 US troops remain stationed in South Korea. But today, if there’s a likelihood of casualties and in places furthermore that seem resistant to modernity, that western resolve has disintegrated. In the unholy armoury of the enemies of the west, their single most important weapon is their understanding that the west is no longer willing to do what it needs to do to defend itself. It is no longer willing to be in it for the long haul. It no longer has the stomach for a fight. In baleful contrast, jihadis take the longest possible view. They have been waging holy war against the enemies of Islam — as they view them — since the seventh century; and for them this holy war won’t end until the whole world is under Islamic rule or the world itself ends, whichever comes first. The west just doesn’t understand that mindset. It doesn’t understand cultures so very different from itself, and tries fatuously to fit them into a western template. It doesn’t understand that in Islamic societies negotiation is regarded as a sign of incipient surrender and therefore incites further aggression to achieve final victory. It doesn’t understand that Islamic religious fanaticism is fuelled not by helplessness or despair but by exultation. When in the 1980s America and Britain rejoiced in the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the war fronted by the Afghan mujahideen, they ignored the warnings from a prescient few that the people who had been energised and incentivised were Islamists who viewed their victory over the Soviet empire as a precursor to and augury of their forthcoming victory over the American empire. Those warnings were borne out. Afghanistan became the crucible of al Qaeda, providing a base for Osama bin Laden and resulting in the 9/11 attacks. Now Afghanistan is poised to become jihad-central with rocket-boosters. The Taliban have already released thousands of terrorists from Afghan prisons. Afghanistan will become a magnet and an inspiration for jihadis from all over the world. For the abandoned Afghan people, the consequences are likely to be hideous. But the malignant effects of this disaster are already rippling way beyond this epicentre of terror. America’s allies can now see that the US is a faithless friend, the weak link in the chain of western defences and with untold consequences for their own security. With America on its knees, other enemies of the west — Iran, China Russia — must be rubbing their hands in glee over the opportunities for evil now opening up for them as a result. Indeed, Shia Iran has reportedly already ramped up its tactical alliance with the Sunni Taliban — in other circumstances its mortal theological foe — to such an extent that in some quarters the Taliban’s military strength is being ascribed to Iranian influence. As Farhad Rezaei writes for the BESA Centre here: Afghan military officials have accused the Revolutionary Guards of providing military, financial, and logistical support to the terror group, to the extent that Tehran’s support enabled the Taliban to capture districts in western Afghanistan, including the provinces of Farah and Ghor, and the Taywara district. There are also reports indicating that Quds Force operatives had a “physical presence” in Ghor assisting Taliban fighters in their offensive against the central government. Fighting ISAF was only one of the goals of the Quds Force in Afghanistan. Drug smuggling from Afghanistan to Iran has been a profitable business for the Quds Force, which is known for its extensive ties to drug cartels in South America. In 2012, the US Department of the Treasury (DOT) designated Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Baghbani, the chief of the Quds Force in the Zahedan office, a narcotics trafficker. The DOT document noted that in return for Iranian business, Afghan traffickers moved weapons to the Taliban. Financial incentives aside, the emergence of ISIS in Afghanistan – especially in provinces that border Iran, such as Herat, Farah, and Nimruz – rattled the Iranian regime, prompting the leadership to ramp up its engagement with the Taliban. Unlike al Qaeda and the more malleable Taliban, the radical anti-Shiite ISIS poses a real threat to Iran’s interests in Afghanistan. Providing better training for the Taliban was thus not only a way to undermine the American-led ISAF, but a barrier to a new ISIS caliphate across the Afghan border. Various reports indicate that the IRGC created a training camp in South Khorasan province (Khorasan Jonobi) to train Taliban fighters, providing them with weapons and explosives. The Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation (Komite Emdad Imam Khomeini) in the same province is said to be donating untold amounts of capital to the terror group in addition to calling for volunteers to fight alongside Taliban forces. Some observers have directly linked improvements in the Taliban’s performance, and ISIS’s consequent inability to establish a strong foothold in Afghanistan, to Iranian support. Since mid-2017, Taliban and ISIS forces have regularly clashed in eastern Nangarhar province, with the Taliban easily defeating ISIS thanks to the military support it has received from the Quds Force. As one commentator put it, the “scale, quality, and length of training is unprecedented and marks not only a shift in the proxy war between the United States and Iran in Afghanistan but also a potential change in Iran’s ability and will to affect the outcome of the Afghan war.”We are today not just staring at the abandonment of Afghanistan.
We are staring at America’s abandonment of itself.
Now or Never 