Dear Friends,
Decline is a choice. That was the title of a 2009 speech and essay by the late Dr. Charles Krauthammer. It remains quite an eye-opening read after the events of the past week.
Why not choose ease and bask in the adulation of the world as we serially renounce, withdraw, and concede?
Because, while globalization has produced in some the illusion that human nature has changed, it has not. The international arena remains a Hobbesian state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power. If we voluntarily renounce much of ours, others will not follow suit. They will fill the vacuum. Inevitably, an inversion of power relations will occur.
Do we really want to live under unknown, untested, shifting multipolarity? Or even worse, under the gauzy internationalism of the New Liberalism with its magically self-enforcing norms? This is sometimes passed off as "realism." In fact, it is the worst of utopianisms, a fiction that can lead only to chaos. Indeed, in an age on the threshold of hyper-proliferation, it is a prescription for catastrophe.
Or as a friend of mine paraphrased an insight by William Rusher: “When America is perceived to be strong in the world, tyranny recedes. When America is perceived to be weak in the world, tyranny surges.”
On the other hand, a highly followed genius on Twitter informed me that he had the solution to the debacle we are watching unfold in Afghanistan:
“No more wars!”
Don’t get me wrong: I am against bad things happening, too. It would be a splendid world indeed if we could solve, say, economic problems by banning poverty, and an even better one if we could solve the problems of violence, tyranny, and terror by banning war. But this is the real world. And what the real world has just witnessed is a catastrophe.
A catastrophe.
The effects of the United States of America reneging on her commitments and surrendering all of its hard-won gains (not just territory, but cultural ideals and institutions) to the very enemy we went there to topple will be felt for a generation or more. Not a sympathetic enemy, even. The Taliban cannot be characterized—though it hasn’t stopped people from trying—as the Viet Cong: poor, peace-loving peasant farmers. The Taliban are murderous oppressors in every sense of the word, and life for Christians, women, girls, and anybody desiring freedom and social mobility just got turned upside down. Don’t believe me? Ask the crowds mobbing the Kabul airport. Ask the young man who held on to a C-17 aircraft and lost his strength thousands of feet in the air and fell to his death. Ask the mother who handed her toddler to an American soldier on the other side of the wire.
We made promises to these people. And in relative terms, keeping those promises was not costly. We simply turned our backs. Decline is a choice. And we chose it.
For those of you who know me, this might sound strange. I have long been an advocate of “getting out” of Afghanistan. So allow me to explain. “Getting out” of Afghanistan for me has always been a rejection of the mission “creep.” I was not in favor of the massive military mobilization that had, at its height, something like 150,000 U.S. soldiers handing out soccer balls and candy to kids to get the Afghans to like us.
The mission was to kick out the Taliban and to keep them kicked out, denying safe haven for terrorists. The added value is that this provided space for a new governance not rooted in the 7th century to emerge and take hold. That job didn’t take 150,000 troops. Most recently, it took 2,500 U.S. troops. Not enough people are aware of this (a political messaging failure of epic proportions) but the last U.S. casualty in Afghanistan was 18 months ago. For the six years prior to that, it was (again, relatively speaking) extremely low, averaging one a month. Tragic, sure. But don’t fall prey to the temptation to infantilize American soldiers or portray them as victims. These men chose the job; they were eager to do the job; and they were very, very good at their job.
Our President—and the two before him—insists as a sheer article of faith that this kind of presence was unsustainable. To which I say, absolute nonsense. A few Green Beret detachments plus Afghan allies plus U.S. technology, intelligence, and airpower kept the Taliban on the margins of Afghanistan, and there is no reason whatsoever that that couldn’t be sustained. Indeed, to my mind the net benefit of having a strong U.S. presence smack-dab in the middle of central Asia overwhelmingly outweighed the costs—even if the Afghan government couldn’t get its act together. This was a political decision having nothing to do with our actual ability to keep the wolves at bay.
Special Forces + Afghan allies + U.S. tech, intel, and airpower. What happens when you remove, overnight, the first and last of those components? You don’t have to guess because we just witnessed it. And our President went on television and blamed the Afghan soldiers—who lost over 50,000 men over the years—for being lazy cowards. I have never seen a more shameful and morally despicable display in my life. We hung them out to dry. Period.
There is a strange phenomenon right now that I won’t spend too much time on, but it warrants comment. People posting things like, “At least there aren’t any more mean Tweets.” The implication is, of course, that the last guy in the White House would never have presided over such a catastrophe. Do not even start with me. The last guy in the White House crafted this very policy. He would have left sooner. He made a terrible deal with the Taliban—his Secretary of State ridiculously announced that the Taliban was going to help us fight al-Qaeda! That administration was a clown show, and you are not going to convince me that that cast of characters was any more competent than the current one. Most of the people responsible for this crap show are the same people: the Joint Chiefs, Pentagon brass, and the bureaucrats down at Foggy Bottom. The stain of this failure doesn’t just cover your political enemies—this is the fruition of mistakes and incompetence spanning four Presidential terms.
And a lot of people need to get fired. Right now. Starting with our obviously incapacitated President. (Did you know that he wouldn’t take a phone call from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson for thirty-six hours?) And if he’s not really incapacitated, fine. Impeach him for saying this:
Next on the list is basically the entire General officer corps of the U.S. Military. The Joint Chiefs should all resign in shame. The Secretary of Defense tells us “we don’t have the capacity to go out and get” American citizens on the other side of the wire. Resign now, and find us someone with guts and honor. Recall every recently retired full-bird Colonel who got passed over for promotion to General and restock the fetid pool called the Pentagon. Get rid of the Courtney Massengales and give us Sam Damon.
Can you tell I’m angry? Look: you don’t have to agree with me about maintaining our presence in Afghanistan. But you can be angry alongside me, anyway. What genius thought it was a good idea to get the military out first, and then American civilians, aid workers, and Afghan allies? Who made this proposal? What is his name? Where is his resignation letter? It is unimaginable and utterly humiliating incompetence.
The United States of America is begging and bribing the Taliban to play nice with our citizens. We are at the mercy of merciless people. Thousands of Americans, NGO aid workers, Afghan allies with visas are stuck behind enemy lines—yes, enemy lines. This is the single greatest national humiliation in my lifetime—maybe ever. I don’t think Saigon was equal to this.
I have never been so ashamed as a U.S. citizen when I listened to a British Member of Parliament speak on the floor of the House of Commons. He urged like-minded nations of the West to band together to hold the line against barbarism and terrorism. He listed the nations.
The United States of America was not one of them. You’d better believe the world has changed—destabilized—in an instant.
Our international reputation is in tatters. Jihadists of the world are poking their heads out of their caves in wonder and disbelief. The Taliban have a list of every Afghan who ever helped the United States, and are literally going door to door looking for them. Afghan Christians, who recently put “Christian” on their national identity cards, might be regretting that leap of faith. China is salivating over Taiwan. Russia certainly knows that they can act with impunity with their resource-rich neighbors.
In retrospect, Charles Krauthammer sounded prophetic in 2009. But he wasn’t a prophet. He was a man of singular common sense, who understood that “No more wars!” won’t cut it as a matter of policy or fact in this fallen world, and that statecraft has real-world consequences that requires moral clarity.
Yes, the neoconservative fetish for “nation building” tended toward the utopian. But he was right about this: choosing decline is “the worst of utopianisms, a fiction that can lead only to chaos.”
The chaos is here.
Miscellany
Did I mention firing the entire Pentagon?
Paul Miller explodes every single myth about U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. And he also explains what all this means for the world order.
Mindy Belz is an outstanding journalist and she’s got the pulse of what happening on the ground, particularly among the Afghan Christian community.
Jim Geraghty states the obvious: There is Something Wrong with the President.
Three cheers for Ben Sasse:
If you didn’t know who Courtney Massengale and Sam Damon are, you can order the book here. One of the finest military novels ever written.
I’ve got no entertainment content for you this week. I’m sorry for interrupting the Art, Scripture, & Imagination series, but world events intervened. I’ll plan for the final installment next week. Thanks for reading!
Krauthammer's rhetoric about power on the international stage doesn't exactly square with yours regarding power on the domestic stage. This has the makings of a good fireside bourbon lively discussion.