Karen Greenberg, Apologies All Around (Unfortunately, Not)
Just in case you didn’t realize it, the lost war in Afghanistan was their fault, not ours. If we had any fault at all, as Secretary of Defense and former Iraq War commander Lloyd Austin pointed out at a Senate hearing last week, it was not fully grasping how bad our Afghan allies — in other words, the very government and military we had created there — were. “We need to consider some uncomfortable truths,” he said. “That we didn’t fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in the senior ranks. That we didn’t grasp the damaging effect of frequent and unexplained rotations by President Ghani of his commanders.” Oh yeah, and maybe that weird president we had not so long ago had something to do with it, too, when he reached an agreement with the Taliban at Doha, Qatar, for the withdrawal of American troops. As Austin put it: “And that the Doha agreement itself had a demoralizing effect on Afghan soldiers.”
The only people who had nothing to do with disaster in that country, it seems, were the splendid generals of the U.S. military who commanded up to 100,000 American troops and monumental air power against the Taliban at the height of the war and have never wanted to give up the ghost. As we now know, until the very last moment (almost 20 years of devastating failure after it began), they were still “advising” President Biden not to withdraw our troops from that land.
Honestly, our commanders who, like Austin, often enough made literal fortunes off their war records, should be ashamed and yet, two disastrous decades later, there isn’t an apology in sight, as TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg…
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