President Biden Sets Date For Afghanistan Exit, For Real This Time, Supposedly

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast.

Related Post Roulette

56 Responses

  1. Oscar Gordon says:

    We’d probably do more good by announcing the pull out, and handing anyone who wants one a plane ticket to the US (assuming they aren’t a known Taliban fighter). We’ve been training and equipping them for two decades, either they are ready to curb stomp the Taliban, or they never will be.Report

    • InMD in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      This. And I think it’s where the comparison to Germany and Japan really comes apart. Neither of those countries would have fallen to home grown insurgents in ~1965. We were (are) still there for other reasons.

      The government in Kabul lacks legitimacy to a critical mass of people and no amount of money or troops from the West will change that.Report

    • North in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      This. The best time to leave is now. The next best time to leave is tomorrow. What an absolute clusterfish.Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      We’ve been training and equipping them for two decades, either they are ready to curb stomp the Taliban, or they never will be.

      So? Assume they’re not ready and won’t be for another generation or three.

      We’re sure it’s less expensive to leave and come back? Or we’re sure we won’t need to?

      Big picture, we’re good with the Taliban having the resources of a country? No problems with them supporting/enhancing Pakistan’s problems? No issues with them deciding that women don’t have rights and gays need to die? No potential for them going all in with whatever AQ is calling themselves today?

      Far as I can tell it’s pretty cheap for us to just stay there and pretty expensive to learn (again) that it can’t get so bad that we have to go back.Report

      • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

        How is the Taliban any different than any of the dozens of other awful repressive regimes around the world?
        Like, say, the Saudis?Report

        • Philip H in reply to Chip Daniels says:

          Or Israel?

          All these countries – from the Red Sea to the Tibetan Steppe and a good chunk of Africa – were created by others (mostly Europeans) trying to control resource extraction of one kind or another. Staying won’t ameliorate any of that. Leaving just allows the parties to resume trying to rend themselves apart.

          Our Western need for “stability at any cost” is really foolish. Doubly so when our own nation is not stable and we all want to KumByYa rather then tack the drivers of that instability.Report

        • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

          How is the Taliban any different than any of the dozens of other awful repressive regimes around the world?

          9-11Report

          • Philip H in reply to Dark Matter says:

            Funny but that applies to Saudi Arabia too and yet . . .Report

            • InMD in reply to Philip H says:

              Arguably moreso.Report

            • Dark Matter in reply to Philip H says:

              9-11 was done by enemies of the Saudi government.

              The same people in Afghanistan were allies/members/whatever of the government. After 9-11, the government of Afghanistan refused to do anything about those people because (at best) they didn’t see 9-11 as a problem and (more likely) viewed it as a good thing or even (at the very worst) something they’d helped set up.

              This brings us back to the issue of whether it’s a good idea to let the Taliban have the resources of a government again.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                This is the goal-free mission creep that has caused such a two decade long catastrophe.

                What is the goal? To permanently occupy and pacify every nation which has a cruel and unjust government?
                If so then we need to increase our military fivefold and invade about 30 other nations at once.

                Or ones that have lawless areas where people can plot attacks?

                If so, then likewise, we have a long list of lawless areas around the globe which need the Pax Americana.

                And even then, a new 9-11 can easily be plotted in London or Budapest or Jakarta, or for that matter, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

                What is the goal here, again?Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                What is the goal? To permanently occupy and pacify every nation which has a cruel and unjust government?

                No, the goal is to keep the followers of that specific ideology out of power. That’s why we went back into Iraq, AQ-in-Iraq looked like they were going to take over.

                We are basically dealing with Islamic-Na.zis. Unlike the American version, they’re popular enough to have an army, and their body count isn’t zero.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                What you are proposing- “to keep them out of power” is a form of top-down social engineering which has often been tried, but (as conservatives like to remind us) has only ever resulted in mountains of corpses and failure.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                What we are doing right now is shooting them when they get organized.

                We don’t need to win. We don’t need to impose order. We’re fine with disorder and dead bodies.

                Shoot a few people in charge and there’s an internal fight over who is in charge. After they figure that out we start over.

                With our current budget we can do this forever. Eventually the local level of income will get high enough to support roads and then maybe the central gov will be able to take over and this will become a police matter.

                However that might take another 50 years.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                A permanent imperial occupying army. History shows this never goes badly!Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                We’re not occupying, we’re just disrupting.

                Ideally we’d do it with robots run in bases in Nevada and such.

                As for it going badly, put an alternative on the table which isn’t handing a country to Na.zis. History suggests that goes badly too. For that matter 9-11 also suggests that’s not a great idea.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Dark Matter says:

                9-11 was carried out by Saudi citizens in good standing with their government. A government with a long history of creating regional problems by being highly oppressive and then exporting dissent and dissenters elsewhere so as to prevent attacks on its own soil. Hell, Bin Laden retained both his citizenship and his financial backing AFTER 9-11 for a goodly period of time.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Philip H says:

                9-11 was carried out by Saudi citizens in good standing with their government.

                If any of them were still alive and living in SA, then the Saudi gov would cut their heads off.

                Bin Laden retained both his citizenship and his financial backing AFTER 9-11

                OBL was exiled in 1992 and stripped of his citizenship in 1994. The gov talked his family into cutting off his $7 million a year stipend at that same time.

                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacksReport

          • North in reply to Dark Matter says:

            The window for a 9-11 operation opened with the hijacking and crash of AA Flight 11 into the World Trade Center and closed with the crash of UA Flight 93 in a field in PA when the passengers mobbed the flight deck.
            Subsequent to 9-11 airlines greater challenge is keeping their passengers from summarily mobbing and potentially killing anyone who behaves even remotely iffily on an airplane.

            It certainly isn’t a reason to continue pouring blood and treasure into the rathole of Afghanistan no matter how aroused it gets neocons, defence contractors and Afghani and Pakistani politicians.Report

            • Dark Matter in reply to North says:

              I’m confused. Are you claiming…

              1) This is the ONLY FLAW in our entire society that 19 suicide attackers can exploit?

              or

              2) Are you claiming we only care about mass fatalities if they’re created by air-planes crashing? We’re just cool with large numbers of dead bodies created by 19 soldiers doing other things?

              So if 19 suicide soldiers take over and make an atomic reactor melt down (or something else on that scale), we’re fine with that because it’s not airplanes?Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Dark Matter says:

        Why would we go back? The Taliban can not objectively strike at us, and, my understanding is that if we are not poking our nose into that hornets nest because of oil or the latest tragic NPR human rights abuse story, they are largely content to ignore us.

        Let be honest, AQ (not the Taliban) got lucky once with the planes, and could not repeat that performance. Since then, despite our bumbling with security theater, they haven’t been able to land another blow.

        I mean, this is Afghanistan, the country that sent the Soviets packing, and the Soviets play hardball in a way that the US has always been unwilling to stomach. These are not a soft people who can’t expel some group or other. If the Taliban come rushing back, it’s because the Afghan people largely want them in control.

        Hence, we hand out plane tickets.Report

        • Dark Matter in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          Let be honest, AQ (not the Taliban) got lucky once with the planes, and could not repeat that performance.

          What happened was we stopped ignoring them and treating every terror attack as a one-off from some random lunatic. We also took their host country away from them.

          The list of AQ attacks is a lot longer than 9-11. Worse, since they used 4 planes I don’t see how we can call that a result of “luck” as opposed to planning and resources.

          The real question is whether or not 9-11 is viewed as a success by AQ standards.

          If no (because the blowback included their leader hunted down and killed and we took their country away from them for 20+ years), then we won’t see a repeat.

          If yes, just like Columbine is viewed as a success by future school shooters, then we’ll see more of that sort of thing.

          My general impression is it’s closer to Columbine than a-bad-idea but this is very much not my field.Report

          • Oscar Gordon in reply to Dark Matter says:

            It wasn’t luck, so much as taking advantage of a policy of non-resistance to hijackers, but still, it is non-repeatable. Using aircraft like that again would require getting agents in the cockpit before the plane took off.

            Of course, we are still vulnerable, but 9/11 did wake everybody up to that fact, and security theater aside, a lot of effort has been made to fill the gaps. It’s not perfect, but it is a lot harder to strike like that.

            So I disagree, it’s not like Columbine.Report

            • Dark Matter in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              Using aircraft like that again would require getting agents in the cockpit before the plane took off.

              That’s great, as long as we’re only interested in preventing mass murder by aircraft (as opposed to preventing mass murder).

              The Columbine analogy isn’t “can this specific thing be done again”. One assumes Sandy-hook elementary has better doors or has even been destroyed.

              The analogy is “are other people inspired by this and do they view this as a success?”

              it is a lot harder to strike like that.

              I’m not going to post suggestions on how to create mass murder events (and I don’t want others to do so). However when I think about it, especially in the context of having real budgets, years to set stuff up, I seriously doubt any level of hardening can work.

              IMHO the bulk of the improvement has been on treating potential team-attackers seriously. That would include not letting them have the resources of a country (time, safety, money, etc).

              The last time the Taliban had a country, they gave a ton of resources to AQ. Do we think that’s not going to happen, and if so, why?Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Periodically, the security guy asks “How can we prevent people with root access from deleting files?”

                You can’t help but sigh.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird says:

                the security guy asks “How can we prevent people with root access from deleting files?”

                You do it by not letting obviously untrustworthy people having that ability.

                So if you have a guy who has a history of maliciously deleting files to hose companies, and he has an obvious grudge against yours, then it’s a bad idea to give him root access.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Dark Matter says:

                No one, and I mean NO ONE, has a plan for eliminating AQ or the Taliban. At least, not a plan that does not involve turning the ME into a glass desert.

                If you want to keep the Taliban busy with drone strikes for the next 100 years, fine, but we have to accept that bad intel leads to collateral damage, and collateral damage just recruits people to the Taliban/AQ, which means the problem doesn’t go away.

                The problem will never go away. This is the reality. It’s a chronic condition. We just have to live with it.

                The people of Afghanistan are perfectly capable of fighting off the Taliban, if they want to. If the Taliban take control, that means the people don’t care enough to stop them, or they actively support them, either way we are interfering in the selection of a legitimate government.

                As for funding terrorists and giving them haven: Iran does it, Saudis do it, I’m betting quite a few of the wealthy citizens all across the region do it. You are acting as if the Taliban is some kind of unique threat, when they aren’t. They are at best a weaker, more insular version of Iran. Hell, Iran is downright belligerent towards us, but even they know well enough how far they can take that.

                The threat we face is from lone actors and small cells, and the quality of those types is such that I’d be more worried about homegrown nutjobs in upper Michigan.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Cosign.

                And add that we have a lot of data that says persistant presence in the Middle East (and thus picking winners and losers) is a major contributor – in no small part because these countries were imposed by European imperialists to control resource extraction. The US will never succeed in cleaning that up.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                If you want to keep the Taliban busy with drone strikes for the next 100 years…

                Yes. That sounds like a fine use of their time and our money. One of the core problems is one 9-11 is roughly equal to a century of us playing garbage man with drones, however leaving and coming back is very expensive.

                bad intel leads to collateral damage, and collateral damage just recruits people to the Taliban/AQ, which means the problem doesn’t go away.

                The problem isn’t going away no matter what we do. Witness how pulling out of the region after the Russians left and letting them be is what led to 9-11.

                The problem will never go away. This is the reality. It’s a chronic condition. We just have to live with it.

                Exactly. That’s my point right there.

                The people of Afghanistan are perfectly capable of fighting off the Taliban, if they want to. If the Taliban take control, that means the people don’t care enough to stop them, or they actively support them, either way we are interfering in the selection of a legitimate government.

                There is a disconnect between “doesn’t have the ability to stop murderous thugs” and “legitimate gov”. Tony Soprano doesn’t get to claim “legitimacy” to everything he does just because he hasn’t been stopped.

                This also fails the “so what” argument. If you’re going to call the Taliban “the legit gov” then we instantly run into the problem that us being at war with them is then fine.

                As for funding terrorists and giving them haven: Iran does it, Saudis do it, I’m betting quite a few of the wealthy citizens all across the region do it.

                Sure. And countries go to war over that. Which is how we ended up here.

                Iran is downright belligerent towards us, but even they know well enough how far they can take that.

                Exactly. AQ and the Taliban don’t seem able to figure that out.

                Terrorism and it’s support isn’t a binary thing. Even by “terrorist” standards 9-11 stands out.Report

  2. Chip Daniels says:

    I hope that (one) of the lessons learned is that there needs to be some definition of goals that is achievable.

    There never was one in Afghanistan, other than permanent occupation and suppression of a group that poses only a vaguely plausible threat to us.Report

    • Philip H in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      Our dalliance in Afghanistan was originally all about Bin Laden. We intentionally got side tracked in Iraq. and then once Bin Laden was in hand we decided we need to remake a nation into a democracy that hadn’t finished being an occupied territory yet. Clearly we learned nothing from the Soviets – whom Bin Laden said he’d drive to the brink of bankruptcy when he was Mujahadeen. Our our own misadventures in Vietnam.

      America is not exceptional except in our inherent stupidity about how the world works.Report

      • Michael Cain in reply to Philip H says:

        Early in 2006 I was taking a national security public policy class taught by a Brit on loan from one of the US war colleges. His prediction at that time went like, “Everyone who’s tried to conquer Afghanistan since before Alexander has failed. The US will not do any better. My advice is declare victory and go home, sooner rather than later, because it’s what you’re going to do eventually.”Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    Maybe we could do a thing where we merely draw down? Remove half the troops or something? And leave behind the contractors and CIA?Report

  4. Damon says:

    So the graveyard of empires will claim another trophy. The British learned that lesson, the Soviets too. Now the US will learn it. You’d think we’d have learned from Vietnam. American doesn’t have the stomach for the kind of “nation building” that’s needed to turn Afghanistan into a peaceful country-neither the leaders or the populace. So much blood and treasure has been spilled to achieve mostly nothing but line the pockets of a few well placed “politicians” in that country.Report

  5. Marchmaine says:

    There’s a future PhD to earn his wings on the (swift) evolution of the Bush Doctrine under the influence of Cheney and the NeoCons. I remember the original formulation (being once a student of these things) and it was a pretty radical departure from the Clintonian Terrorists and Criminals structure. In Bush’s own memoires, he articulates it thus:

    “Make no distinction between terrorists and the nations that harbor them — and hold both to account.”

    To be sure, this is a significant departure (and much debatable, if desired), but in itself might have provided a good framework to pressure some states with financial, economic, and ultimately military sanctions lest they themselves participated in the suppression of the organizations waging asymmetcial war from within their borders. Doubtless the reaction of the state itself would drive responses… it isn’t simply carte blanche for pre-emptive war/invasion.

    It hinges too on the challenges/restraint of identifying the right organizations (and the proliferation post-9/11 suggests we were going to fail in this area) and the targeted deterrence of costly military or economic actions directed at the state until it agreed that the sub-group was not worth the cost.

    Afghanistan could have been a test-case and possible triumph of demonstrating the dangers of hiding groups that it could not control and/or quickly disabusing the legal fiction that a state could hide behind a pretense of criminal proceedings against individuals as per the prevailing international opinion at the time.

    Not without legitimate criticisms and concerns… but, possibly a framework to navigate out of the ‘Criminal Mastermind / State Plausible Deniability’ framework that international law was operating under. And to be sure, opening up new risks of operating under the dangers posed by ‘collective guilt’ and ‘lack of proportionality’ in any potential response.

    However, it would have had baked into it a minimal requirement for self-defence in that absent an actual action, it wasn’t simple Pre-emptive justification for anything based on prefabricated nonsense. In theory. If, say, the Powel/Rice faction had prevailed and adapted.

    The Powel/Rice faction did not prevail (I’m not sure if they adapted… that would be the role of the PhD candidate to suss out once all the documents are available)… and we know that the initial ‘doctrine’ became the much more aggressive doctrine of Pre-Emption and Regime Change tied to Strategic Global interests — which (pre-)determined the targets rather than responding to actual threats or actual provocations.

    Afghanistan, therefore, is not the test-case of the original Bush Doctrine, but of the Bush Doctrine his administration evolved into. And we can judge it to have failed in all of it’s stated objectives.

    The way forward shouldn’t be the Neo-Con Bush Doctrine, I’m not sure its a return to the (mere) criminalization of terrorism, I doubt we’ve the stomach for true imperialism, but sometimes I wonder if a restrained realism that co-opted or opted-in certain states might not be a better starting point.

    So now we exit, having ‘won’ in the short term by inflicting substantial costs on the Taliban for prevaricating and harboring bin Laden, but having ‘lost’ for failing in regime change and providing a foil against which the Taliban could rebuild. Does a destabilized Taliban rebuild? Perhaps. Does it seek revenge knowing that plausible deniability is no shield? I suspect not. Is it in a position to execute any frontal retribution? No. Power has its own rewards… and destroying those rewards and forcing a rebuild carries its own rhetorical power. Just ask Gaddafi.Report

    • Stillwater in reply to Marchmaine says:

      I can’t help it, but this sounds like a Bush supporter struggling to square their 2003 beliefs with the outcomes all these many years later. There was nothing good about the Bush Doctrine as you describe it since that wasn’t the Bush Doctrine at all. That described doctrine – to use political, economic, military means, ostensible in that order – was American foreign policy since WWII. No, what you call the Bush Doctrine was, instead, nothing but the Cheney 1% Doctrine whereby the US treats a threat with a 1% possibility as if it were a certainty. And that’s why – rhetorically, at least – we illegally invaded Iraq. Thee was a 1% chance that Saddamn! had nukes. (We all know that the REAL reason, outlined by the PNAC guys in the late 90s, was to control the flow of Iraqi oil, but whatevs.)

      The US returning to what you call the Bush Doctrine is, it seems to me, a huge advance over what was *actually* the Bush doctrine. It’s a better policy set, one that would have bigger payoffs over the long term. But an even better policy would result from pulling a page from the Chinese playbook and engage in positive sum transactions with countries we view as antagonists but want to – and should want to – partner with. We should want to pull them along in a preferred direction. But the reason we don’t, and ultimately can’t, adopt a better foreign policy is because American citizens refuse to be dissuaded from the belief that every foreign policy problem is a nail to be set by a well swung hammer. We are a punitive people.Report

      • Marchmaine in reply to Stillwater says:

        I realize after I hit post that it was much too long and rambling for a comment and much too short and ill-prepared for a post… so any failure to articulate what I was going after is my fault.

        However, even though I post pseudonymously I really do have advanced degrees in Foreign Relations and in History… so my interest in this is, as I state, academic and not partisan. I think your comment suffers more for it than mine.

        I fully acknowledge, and it’s in the post clearly (I thought) that the Bush Doctrine is indistinguishable from a Cheney/Neo-Con doctrine right quick. There is, however an analysis gap between Afghanistan and Iraq – which you are quick to skip because you want to get to the Iraq blunder while I’m contemplating the fleeting moment when we entered Afghanistan as we exit Afghanistan (TBD) — a moment where the Internationalist/Police model was being sundered and hadn’t yet been replaced. You specifically state I’m justifying sentiments in 2003… but the period I’m talking about is 2001/2002 based on the original Ultimatum to Afghanistan (from wikipedia for reference) and prior to the first official formulation of the Bush Doctrine in Sept 2002 which set the stage for the Iraq invasion in 2003:

        On 20 September 2001, the U.S. stated that Osama bin Laden was behind the 11 September attacks in 2001. The US made a five-point ultimatum to the Taliban:[41]

        *Deliver to the U.S. all of the leaders of al-Qaeda
        *Release all imprisoned foreign nationals
        *Close immediately every terrorist training camp
        *Hand over every terrorist and their supporters to appropriate authorities
        *Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps for inspection

        On 21 September 2001, the Taliban rejected this ultimatum, stating there was no evidence in their possession linking bin Laden to the 11 September attacks.

        There were boots on the ground and airstrikes in October 2001. Unanimous UN Security council Resolutions in Nov 2001 (#1378) and a UN/Nato Security presence (#1386) by Dec 2001.

        The Bush Doctrine as we know it is what you say… it’s what *I* say: “the more aggressive doctrine of Pre-Emption and Regime Change tied to Strategic Global interests.” My point, perhaps not communicated well in a comment, or perhaps not well apprehended by you with your partisan dander up… is that the movement from one dominant framework to the next was not foreordained and was shaped on the fly. Ultimately the opportunity was maximalized by the Neo-Con faction into their image. They won.

        I do guarantee, however, that dissertations will be written about that move… it’s interesting… it’s interesting to see how Bush is (mis-)remembering it, because he’s remembering it more like Afghanistan than Iraq.

        I honestly can’t say whether the Ultimatum and whatever was happening between 2001 and 2003 would have been better than what we got because we never stopped and assessed… and whatever started in 2001 became 2003 and Iraq… which in turn became the new and enduring Afghanistan policy…which is what we’re laboring under after various iterations 20-yrs later.

        So you and I both agree (and have agreed here in the past) that what has been the dominant framework since 2003 is a bad framework…

        Next up, we can wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t ridden a boozy Yeltsin to Nato Expansion and Oligarchic Orgies.Report

        • Stillwater in reply to Marchmaine says:

          or perhaps not well apprehended by you with your partisan dander up

          Only a person with advanced degrees in Foreign Relations and History would even *notice* such a dander ruffle, let alone make it a central point of their response. 🙂

          Ahh, the above the fray crowd never ceases to amuse and amaze.Report

        • InMD in reply to Marchmaine says:

          I don’t think Bush had a doctrine coming into office. IIRC he ran as a (relative) non-interventionist, with the prevailing conservative wisdom in light of Somalia and the Balkans being anti-nation building, particularly via the UN. I’ve always assumed the lack of personal principles on the subject was a major factor in going all in on the neocon view, which up until then was the minority, dissenting political faction.Report

          • Stillwater in reply to InMD says:

            Query: If the PNAC Neocon bros were a political minority why did Bush fill his cabinet with them?

            (Answer: because Cheney was the power center of Bush’s presidency.)

            Ha! I just remembered Cheney arguing, apparently in all serioiusness, that the Vice Presidency was a fourth branch of government that wasn’t responsive to either the judicial nor the legislative branches. Oh man, those were the days!

            And then we got Trump, and people acted like it was a surprise lolReport

            • InMD in reply to Stillwater says:

              I think they saw their moment and seized it.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to InMD says:

                No doubt.

                Look, if you attribute rationality to those guys, it’s in this area: they really believed that having Iraqi oil flow west, rather than east to China, was a (q-unq) ‘national security threat’. So they constructed a pretext out of 9/11 to invade a sovereign country to achieve that end. The rationale is understandable and insane both at the same time.

                “Greeted as liberators” captures the incoherence of the entire project.Report

              • InMD in reply to Stillwater says:

                I don’t know how many points I give them for rationality. I mean I know it wasn’t totally outside of the Overton Window at the time for some people to say we should have finished Saddam in ’91.

                I attribute what happened to a lot of factors. Definitely hubris. Definitely ideology. Definitely a big dose of having your cake and eating it too (i.e. we can go into these countries with just enough force to topple the government but never demand sacrifice on the home front to secure the peace).

                I think the deepest, and most disturbing answer, is that a lot of people in high places just aren’t that smart. Or maybe they’re smart but they lack wisdom. I’m always blown away as an attorney by some of the things impressively credentialed people say to me, or decision makers who seem to have no perspective. You get stuff like ‘well I know you say it’s a pig but if we draw up some official paperwork that says it’s a duck, can’t we then convince people it’s a duck?’ Obviously that’s an exaggeration but lots of people think this way and plenty of them find a way to the top. And I think that’s what we had. They really believed their own BS to the point of denying reality, and it isn’t like they were real subject matter experts. They just wanted an outcome their ideology said was possible.

                This may sound like I’m sort of letting them off the hook but I’m really not. One of the greatest responsibilities of a leader is to not talk themselves into a false reality and they deserve total accountability when they do it, especially with such terrible results.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to InMD says:

                Well, I disagree with the suggestion that they weren’t smart or wise. I think they were both. But they were also sociopaths, and that colors the reasoning. They thought things like extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation were necessary components of a contemporary American foreign policy structured to maintain American hegemony. And a priori, they may have been right. Surely more *force* will allow us to achieve our ends, right? Or at least give us the best chance of doing so?

                I don’t let them off the hook either.Report

              • Stillwater in reply to Stillwater says:

                What the neocons did then is not unlike what the state level GOP is doing now wrt voting: if we restrict it enough we can maintain power, right?Report

              • InMD in reply to Stillwater says:

                Maybe we part ways a bit here. I think those things are always temptations for the powerful, especially during wars, of choice or otherwise. They are indisputably evil decisions and Bush-Cheney will never be rehabilitated in my mind for having made them. But I don’t see it as a unique attribute to their ideology even if it was probably an inevitable result once they went all in.Report

            • JS in reply to Stillwater says:

              I suspect the cold hand of Dick Cheney on that, honestly.

              Look, Cheney — and his old pal Rumsfeld — really, really, really disagreed with Bush the Elder on Iraq back in 1992. They thought they could go all the way, root it out, see a million flowers bloom, etc.

              So Bush rolls in with a pretty non-existent foreign policy view, which Cheney was quite openly selected to help round out. So Cheney fills in foreign policy roles with his old buddies.

              And then he saw his chance to prove he was RIGHT back in the 1990s, and he went all in.

              I remember the coverage of 9/11. Dick Cheney was out there on TV trying to invade Iraq while the towers were still burning — he was hinting Iraq was behind it when nothing was known, and he didn’t stop. He was pushing Iraq even as it became clear it was AQ was behind it (he merely lied and claimed AQ, who listed Iraq just behind us on the enemy’s list, worked together) and it was pretty clear that if he’d had his way, he wouldn’t have bothered going into Afghanistan at all.

              He was laser focused on proving he was right back in the 90s. And he’d staffed the Cabinet and Pentagon with people who agreed with him. He even bypassed the CIA and State entirely to stovepipe in raw intel straight to him and Rumsfeld, which is how you got that one guy (Chalabi? was that his name) just out-right conning Rumsfeld’s whole shop.Report

          • Marchmaine in reply to InMD says:

            Yes on the Bush campaign rhetoric, but no… the Neo-cons had a deathgrip on the foreign policy apparatus in the Republican Party since Bush I left office. They had a very strong presence during Reagan (and Bush I), but there were some dissenting players with juice. Not so much by 2000.Report

            • Stillwater in reply to Marchmaine says:

              March, in what way did the “new and enduring Afghanistan policy” of the Bush admin differ from, say, Vietnam policy? In what way was the persistence of the Afghanistan War different from the persistence of the Vietnam War?

              Honestly, I don’t think Afghanistan matter a rats ass to the Bush admin. Their sights were *always* on Iraq. The Afg. war was started as a seed war, to massage the entrance to another – much more significant war – which the public was (correctly) hugely opposed to.

              Add: as an aside, I remember teaching the day after 9/11, and purchasing a New York Times paper with the headline, quoting Rumsfeld, stating that “We will annihilate nations”. Nations, plural. I remember that because I specifically mentioned it to my kids that the US is prepared to attack *multiple* countries in response to 9/11.Report

            • InMD in reply to Marchmaine says:

              I assume apparatus as in media, academia, and think tank though? It’s hard for me to imagine those people saying cruise missile strikes in Sudan was wag the dog, which again is my recollection of the Congressional Republican talking point. Or I guess we could assume Bill Clinton did it so nothing they said should have been taken as a serious policy stance.Report

    • “Make no distinction between terrorists and the nations that harbor them — and hold both to account.”

      That’s the doctrine under which Iran took the American embassy workers hostage.Report

  6. Jaybird says:

    Good news!

    This was one of the stories given as a reason that it was bad that Trump was leaving Afghanistan.

    I’m glad we figured out that it wasn’t true! Or is, at least, worth walking back.Report

    • Stillwater in reply to Jaybird says:

      A “newly disclosed assessment throws shade on the previously disclosed assessment” story will settle the matter once and for all. Right? Of course it will.Report