Humiliation in Afghanistan By Byron York
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-humiliation-in-afghanistan
HUMILIATION IN AFGHANISTAN. The government of Afghanistan is falling fast in the face of a new Taliban offensive. The United States is urging Americans to “leave Afghanistan immediately.” The Biden administration has sent a small force of troops to speed the evacuation. In a particularly telling development, the U.S. is asking the Taliban — pretty please! — not to target the American embassy when they take over the capital of Kabul.
At the Pentagon Wednesday, a reporter asked spokesman John Kirby, a retired Navy admiral, whether the Defense Department “could have done a better job…in articulating what the goals were in Afghanistan and what things were supposed to look like or what they’re not expected to look like when we leave?”
Kirby’s answer was painfully revealing. He began by saying he couldn’t speak for the entire 20-year history of the Afghan war. He conceded that “the goals did migrate over time.” And then he said: “It would be wrong for us not to acknowledge that we did help enable some progress in Afghanistan. More children in schools, including girls, economic and political and social opportunities for women. A democratically elected government — not saying it’s not flawless, but a government. And living conditions that are much better, including life expectancy.”
Kirby echoed a statement made nearly five years ago, in October 2016, by then-Secretary of State John Kerry. Since the war began, Kerry said, “maternal mortality in childbirth in Afghanistan has gone down by 75 percent. Average life expectancy has risen from 42 years to 62 years. Access to basic health care has skyrocketed from nine percent to 67 percent. In 2001, there was only one television station, and it was owned by the government. Now, there are 75 stations and all but two are privately owned. Back then, there were virtually no cell phones, zero. Today, there are 18 million cell phones covering about 90 percent of residential areas connecting Afghans to the world.”
Could there ever be a more vivid statement of how terribly wrong the U.S. mission in Afghanistan had gone? We made Afghanistan a better place! The cell phones! TV stations! Girls in schools! The U.S. effort in Afghanistan became perhaps the most spectacular example ever of misguided nation building. And now it is ending in spectacular failure because a nation building mission was bound to fail.
Osama bin Laden and his henchmen used Afghanistan as headquarters to plan the 9/11 attacks. After the attacks, which killed 3,000 people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, the U.S. government had a solemn obligation to track down and kill every single terrorist who had any role in planning and executing the attacks. The mission was not to make Afghanistan a better place. It was not to reduce maternal mortality in childbirth. It was not to build health clinics. It was not to distribute cell phones. It was to kill the terrorists who attacked the United States. Then it was to maintain a minimal intelligence presence that would alert the U.S. government to any future terrorist planning there, and stop that, too.
The failure was entirely bipartisan. But Republican President George W. Bush bears the greatest blame for sending the Afghan war down the wrong path. While Bush did do great damage to al Qaeda, he also began the nation building exercise. And in the process, he failed to find and kill bin Laden, or top deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, or Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader who aided and abetted the attacks. When, in 2003, U.S. forces captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the top planner of 9/11, the Bush administration failed to deliver the swift justice he deserved. KSM, who should have been executed by the United States many years ago, is alive today, held at the American facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
President Barack Obama, to his great credit, found and killed bin Laden. But U.S. forces never got Zawahiri, and no one today seems to know whether he is alive or dead. Mullah Omar also escaped U.S. retribution and reportedly died of tuberculosis in 2013. On the other hand, cell phone usage in Afghanistan skyrocketed.
U.S. forces stayed in Afghanistan through the Bush years, the Obama years, the Trump years, and now the earliest part of the Biden administration. Give President Joe Biden credit for ending the misbegotten affair. Of course, he knew Afghanistan would fall apart when the U.S. left. The fact that it has crumbled so quickly is a pretty good indication that it was nowhere near ready to stand on its own.
Meanwhile, what is being referred to as the “fall of Saigon” moment is approaching. Some will blame Biden for abandoning Afghanistan. But this failure has been 20 years in the making. The current president just decided to put an end to it.
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