The High Cost of Fantasy Fulfillment

 

The High Cost of Fantasy Fulfillment

©2021 Ross Williams

A bipartisan effort has been underway for some time to turn the longest war in US history into a latter-day Hundred Years War. As of October of 2021 – four months from this keyboard tapping – the United States will have been undertaking military activities in Afghanistan for 20 solid years. The presidency of Donnie Combover, in 2018, set the stage for ending this engagement, to which democrats and their Never-Trumpet establishmentarian allies raised holy hell. Their primary criticism of the Trumpian withdrawal plan was that it was Trumpian. It defied their previous claims of his being a saber-rattling, war-mongering neocon.

For his part, President Pro Tem Sniffy P deFile is continuing President Cheeto's ambition of discontinuing the Afghan War in the face of criticism from the same crowd of establishmentarians as well as the pro-Trump faction of republicans, ...who denounce the move as “withdrawal the wrong way”. Leaving now, they claim, would consign Afghanistan to bitter tribal and sectarian civil war. As evidence, they cite as a national security risk the military gains made by the Taliban in areas recently vacated by US forces.

This criticism is, naturally, correct. But as I have to remind people over and over and over [and over] again: you don't get points for being correct. You get points for being pertinent. The previous 5,000 years of Pashtun history were not the sunshine and daisies that these critics need it to have been for their criticism to mean a single god damn. Nothing the US could do would prevent Afghanistan from diving head first into a tribal and sectarian civil war the moment we left.  Nor has anything the US did prevented their attempts to beard the US lion every chance it got.  So let's just get the hell over our geopolitical messiania right now and save ourselves the time, trouble, lives and money it would cost to pretend otherwise.

Nation-state warfare, as I pointed out earlier, is for the purpose of ass-kicking the belligerents who go out of their way to misbehave to the point where the only reasonable recourse is to kick their ass. It is not for rehabilitation. Every single person who demands that the US remain in Afghanistan indefinitely is making, to one degree or another and whether they know it or not [and usually not], an argument for militaristic rehabilitation of foreign peoples. The notion that geopolitical rehabilitation is even possible from the outside is contradicted by the entire course of human history. Those who propose US foreign policy based upon it are either psychotic or retarded. They are absolutely without foundation in military doctrine.

Critics of US withdrawal from Afghanistan believe, in short, that continuing our military presence, painting targets on the backs of our soldiers, spending another few trillion dollars per decade on building and rebuilding and re-rebuilding infrastructure for the locals that those locals are only too happy to destroy out from under themselves will obtain a political victory in a land that has never seen a political victory of the type we desire. Like I said: psychotic or retarded.

The ineffectual counter-argument is, “Yabbut, yabbut... what happens when they get done with their civil war, consolidate their power and logistics, and take another swing at us? They've done it before, and if left to their own devices, they'll do it again.”

To which the reply is: once again you are correct. But you still don't get points for being correct. You still only get points for being pertinent. By remaining in a nation where three-fourths of the population hates us and attempting to obtain a political victory through militarism among a people who do not recognize political loss as a legitimate factor in military struggles, they have been taking multiple swings at us every year in any event. It doesn't matter whose devices they are left to – ours or theirs. They WILL be taking swings at us; they HAVE been taking swings at us. Why make it easier by standing next to them? Why spend the money building shit for them that they are going to destroy next month?

They pissed us off by coming here twenty years ago, knocking down our really tall buildings and just generally making assholes of themselves. We went there and kicked their asses for it. We broke their shit and killed their people. The function of war is to break shit and kill people, period. We should have left immediately after.

But, brainless sympathy junkies that too many of us are, we stayed there to pick them up out of the dust, we spent a few trillion dollars rebuilding the shit we broke and building new shit besides, and we did it all with quivering chin and puppy dog eyes ...as if that would convince them that taking another swing at us would be unwise. We did it because too many of us believe war is all about rehabilitating belligerent geopolitical assholes. And because we stayed, we lost soldiers needlessly, and money foolishly in a twenty-year Carnival From Hell shooting gallery where the ducks on the conveyor shoot back. We played whack-a-mole with moles burying IEDs.

In the long run – which is the ambition of responsible foreign policy – the United States would be far better off having left Afghanistan in mid-2002 [and, for what it's worth, Iraq in late 1991, and again in mid-2003], and daring the belligerent assholes to try it again. We would have saved the lives of hundreds of US soldiers, and countless trillions of US dollars [read: countless Chinese Yuan] even if the belligerent assholes did try it again and we'd had to go back to kick their belligerent ass once more.

The national security risk that leaving Afghanistan creates already exists, and it's been enjoying the target-rich environment of deployed US soldiery. It is made possible by the re-establishment of foreign infrastructure provided by US taxpayers [and Chinese hegemonists only too happy to watch our pointless profligacy]. Stay or go, that part of the world is a national security risk to everyone else.

The only meaningful question is: how many soldiers, how much time and effort, and how many dollars are we willing to spend to pretend that providing geopolitical assholes a comfortable and modern base of operations keeps us safe from geopolitical assholes.