Our Foreign Policy Elite Has Learned Nothing From Afghanistan – The Nation
Members of the Taliban patrol in the back of a pickup truck with a Taliban flag along a street in Kabul. (Bulent Kilic / AFP via Getty Images)
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Bush and Cheney sold the war, Obama normalized it, Trump disowned it, and Biden had the courage to end it.
Cecil Rhodes once said he would annex the planets if he could, and the United States, over the past four decades, has nursed an ambition quite as otherworldly. Everyone (we believed) would choose our way of life if only they had the chance. It followed that we should try to get them there through arts and manners and commerce and, if necessary, through wars. The wars would, of course, be fought against the enemies of freedom, even if the enemies were their neighbors and compatriots.
Tony Blair put the case memorably, just three weeks after September 11, 2001: The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux, soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us. What poetry! To look on the world as a toy! That, for me, was the initial impression of Blairs words. More peculiar, as one looks back, was the emphasis on dispatch. The reordering would be done soon and speedily, with a brave unconcern for prudential caution.
A few days earlier, Dick Cheney had spoken about the necessity of working the dark side. The larger context of the vice presidents September 16 appearance on Meet the Press showed the consonance of his thinking with Blairs. Things have changed since last Tuesday, Cheney said. The world shifted in some respects. But he spoke with a dour realism about the likely duration of the conflict: Theres not going to be an end date that we say, There, its all over with. George W. Bush, for his part, issued a promise of both lasting resolve and a lucky ending: We will not waver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail. MORE FROM David Bromwich
The regrets now emanating from the North Atlantic policy elite suggest how little the fate of that project has changed their thinking. In an August 31 New Yorker piece deploring the US evacuation from Afghanistan, Robin Wright commented with punitive scorn: America did tire. It did falter. And it did fail. Bold promises, over time, turned into mission abandonment. The hope of personal freedom has evaporated. But whose hope and whose mission was she speaking for? Ellen Knickmeyer, in an August 17 Associated Press story, made a tally more matter-of-fact than Wrights. Besides the 2,500 American dead, there were 66,000 killed among Afghan military and police, 51,000 among Taliban and other opposition fighters, 47,000 among Afghan civilians.
No metaphor of evaporation is needed to conclude that a large fraction of those 164,000 dead would not have died if the US had never occupied Afghanistan. For a proportionate sense of the numbers, imagine a civil war on American soilfomented, funded, and protracted over 20 years by a foreign powerwhich ends up taking one and a half million American lives.
The dwindling Afghan support for the US mission was not a rejection of freedom but a last heave of disgust at the staggering burden of corruption this war spawned and nourished. As for the European criticism of our departure, it has been reported without the slightest irony regarding the relationship between defunct 19th-century empires and their successor. Britain and France showed an understandable embarrassment at having ceded to America so much authority for such a dismal result. Blair weighed in again, with a magnificent ferocity of reproach, and Bernard-Henri Lvy was grandiloquent: The image of the liberal democracies, epitomized by the greatest among them, is tragically tarnished. Lvy denounces only our exit. He does not say the liberal image was tarnished by anything the US did while it occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. Regrets in a lower key were uttered by Leon Panetta: We can leave a battlefield, but we cant leave the war on terrorism. But Afghanistan was not only a battlefield but a proving ground for a system of bribery, bounty-hunting, and assassinations, as Cheney acknowledged early on:
A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion. You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, youre going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena.
Our interest in the dark side increased the supply of dark operators. Current Issue
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The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were debt-financed at a cost of $2 trillion. The final bill of health care for veterans of the wars, encompassing disability, burial, and related expenses, will probably come to another $2 trillion, Knickmeyer reports. The Senate Finance Committee questioned these costs just once over the past 20 years; the Senate Appropriations Committee queried them five times. Should that level of oversight be taken to exemplify the freedom we were bringing to people 7,000 miles away?
We think more easily of the saved than the drowned: We saved the women. What will the Taliban do to them now? American intervention improved the lives of some Afghan women, and many of those who hoped to leave will not be able to. It is harder to sayharder, even, to rememberthat we also killed many of the innocent and tortured brothers and husbands; or that the wedding parties we slaughtered in misjudged drone strikes also contained somebodys children.
Some years ago a friend, a Cold War liberal, surprised me by saying out of nowhere, Americans are better than other peopledont you think? It was clear from the context that this was not a chauvinist remark. The sense was rather that Americans, from a combination of national temperament and luck, were more generous than other people; and if on occasion we did real harm, it came from a reckless exuberance of goodwill. I didnt agree at the time, and dont agree now, but I believe this is the way a good many Americans think about us. We are generous judges in our own cause.
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Our Foreign Policy Elite Has Learned Nothing From Afghanistan - The Nation
- With no access to education beyond the 6th grade, girls in Afghanistan turn to religious schools - ABC News - July 24th, 2025 [July 24th, 2025]
- Green Card Applicant Who Served in Afghanistan Detained by ICE Agents - Newsweek - July 24th, 2025 [July 24th, 2025]
- UN report finds Afghanistan violated human rights of involuntary returnees - JURIST Legal News - July 24th, 2025 [July 24th, 2025]
- They worked with the U.S. in Afghanistan. Now Trump could return them to the Taliban - CalMatters - July 24th, 2025 [July 24th, 2025]
- The Taliban are remaking Afghanistan in their image. It should have us all worried - The Independent - July 24th, 2025 [July 24th, 2025]
- The US says no one has died due to aid cuts. We went to Afghanistan to investigate - CNN - July 24th, 2025 [July 24th, 2025]
- With no access to education beyond the 6th grade, girls in Afghanistan turn to religious schools - MSN - July 24th, 2025 [July 24th, 2025]
- With no access to education beyond the 6th grade, girls in Afghanistan turn to religious schools - Ottumwa Courier - July 24th, 2025 [July 24th, 2025]
- No safe haven: Human rights risks faced by persons involuntarily returned to Afghanistan [EN/Dari/PS] - ReliefWeb - July 24th, 2025 [July 24th, 2025]
- We holidayed in Afghanistan why its unlikely tourist hotspot for Brit women - The Sun - July 24th, 2025 [July 24th, 2025]
- Pakistan and Afghanistan sign agreement to reduce tariffs on agricultural items - Azrtac - July 24th, 2025 [July 24th, 2025]
- Ukraine Risks Becoming to Trump What Afghanistan Was to Biden - Bloomberg.com - July 22nd, 2025 [July 22nd, 2025]
- The Trump administration claims no one has died due to US aid cuts. Our trip to Afghanistan suggests otherwise - CNN - July 22nd, 2025 [July 22nd, 2025]
- UN concerned as Afghanistan women arrested over Taliban dress code | World News - Hindustan Times - Hindustan Times - July 22nd, 2025 [July 22nd, 2025]
- Appeals court lets Trump revoke temporary protected status for migrants from Afghanistan and Cameroon - Washington Examiner - July 22nd, 2025 [July 22nd, 2025]
- Afghanistan Returnees Overview (as of 12 July 2025) - ReliefWeb - July 22nd, 2025 [July 22nd, 2025]
- Court rules Trump can remove protected status from immigrants from Cameroon and Afghanistan - MSN - July 22nd, 2025 [July 22nd, 2025]
- Afghanistan Kankor Results Announced: Concerns Over Manipulation and Lack of Transparency - 8am.media - July 22nd, 2025 [July 22nd, 2025]
- Court rules Trump can remove protected status from immigrants from Cameroon and Afghanistan - africanews.com - July 22nd, 2025 [July 22nd, 2025]
- UN Warns of Crisis Facing Women Returning to Afghanistan from Iran and Pakistan - 8am.media - July 22nd, 2025 [July 22nd, 2025]
- Monday briefing: How the two-year effort to keep the Afghanistan data breach secret fell apart - The Guardian - July 22nd, 2025 [July 22nd, 2025]
- Germany presses ahead with deportations to Afghanistan - France 24 - July 22nd, 2025 [July 22nd, 2025]
- Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan Sign Deal to Study TransAfghan Railway - The Times Of Central Asia - July 22nd, 2025 [July 22nd, 2025]
- UN: Afghanistan Faces Threat of Devastating Earthquakes - 8am.media - July 22nd, 2025 [July 22nd, 2025]
- Germany and EU allies back tougher asylum measures, including deportations to Afghanistan and Syria - France 24 - July 20th, 2025 [July 20th, 2025]
- Afghanistan: This years kankor exam results announced - Amu TV - July 20th, 2025 [July 20th, 2025]
- The Nightmare of Return to Afghanistan: Hunger, Exile, and the QuestionWhere Do We Go? - Hasht-e Subh Daily - July 20th, 2025 [July 20th, 2025]
- Relatives of 2005 Chinook crash victims in Afghanistan find solace in one another - Stars and Stripes - July 20th, 2025 [July 20th, 2025]
- Ex-U.S. military interpreter from Afghanistan detained at East Hartford immigration office - New Haven Register - July 20th, 2025 [July 20th, 2025]
- Germany presses ahead with deportations to Afghanistan - themercury.com - July 20th, 2025 [July 20th, 2025]
- Afghanistan, Hundreds of Women Arrested in Kabul: Gender Apartheid - focusonafrica.info - July 20th, 2025 [July 20th, 2025]
- Afghanistan: car cooler hack beats the heat, passengers applaud the creative solution - WION - July 20th, 2025 [July 20th, 2025]
- Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi arrives in Kabul on a day-long visit to Afghanistan - Dawn - July 20th, 2025 [July 20th, 2025]
- Germany presses ahead with deportations to Afghanistan - The Sanford Herald - July 20th, 2025 [July 20th, 2025]
- The latest lapse over Afghanistan? Liz Trusss memory - The Times - July 18th, 2025 [July 18th, 2025]
- The United States Must Reclaim Afghanistan to Protect Its Interests - Fair Observer - July 18th, 2025 [July 18th, 2025]
- We were lucky to escape Afghanistan alive nine months later, were still waiting to be brought to safety - The Independent - July 18th, 2025 [July 18th, 2025]
- Kazakhstan in Afghanistan: From Rhetoric to Infrastructure - The Times Of Central Asia - July 18th, 2025 [July 18th, 2025]
- Afghanistan: Paktika teacher sentenced to death over alleged blasphemy, sources say - Amu TV - July 18th, 2025 [July 18th, 2025]
- ImpACT International | Talibans Kill List Exposes Brutal Repression and Impunity in Afghanistan - impactpolicies.org - July 18th, 2025 [July 18th, 2025]
- Hizb-ut-Tahrir Afghanistan Criticizes Russia's Recognition Of Afghan Taliban: 'Historically ... Russia Remains One Of The Most Determined Enemies Of... - July 18th, 2025 [July 18th, 2025]
- Data incident affecting applicants to the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy Scheme and Afghanistan Locally Employed Staff Ex-Gratia Scheme -... - July 18th, 2025 [July 18th, 2025]
- A future without women: Consequences of gender apartheid in Afghanistan - Global Voices - July 16th, 2025 [July 16th, 2025]
- Women This Week: Multilateral Organizations Increase Pressure on Taliban Over Oppression of Women and Girls in Afghanistan - Council on Foreign... - July 16th, 2025 [July 16th, 2025]
- Retreat from Afghanistan began as a farce, then it was a scandal, now it's a cover-up - news.sky.com - July 16th, 2025 [July 16th, 2025]
- The Islamic State in Afghanistan: A Jihadist Threat in Retreat? - International Crisis Group - July 16th, 2025 [July 16th, 2025]
- Afghan nationals: have you arrived in the UK under the Afghanistan Response Route? - The Guardian - July 16th, 2025 [July 16th, 2025]
- Teen From Afghanistan Reported Missing in Tehran Amid Surge in Migrant Hostility - KabulNow - July 16th, 2025 [July 16th, 2025]
- Afghanistan: Young woman driven to opium fields by Taliban restrictions - Amu TV - July 16th, 2025 [July 16th, 2025]
- Afghanistan: An Open Wound Still Alive, in Need of Becoming a Nation Again - 8am.media - July 16th, 2025 [July 16th, 2025]
- Remittance Disruption from Iran Deepens Economic Crisis for the People of Afghanistan - 8am.media - July 16th, 2025 [July 16th, 2025]
- Retreat from Afghanistan began as a farce, then it was a scandal, now it's a cover-up - Yahoo - July 16th, 2025 [July 16th, 2025]
- Over 178,000 People in Northern Afghanistan Benefit from Special Trust Fund Support - 8am.media - July 16th, 2025 [July 16th, 2025]
- Russia becomes the first country to recognize the Taliban regime in Afghanistan - MSN - July 14th, 2025 [July 14th, 2025]
- Afghanistan-Pakistan trade grows to nearly 1 bln USD in H1 - Xinhua - July 14th, 2025 [July 14th, 2025]
- Afghanistan 2024 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan: End-year Response Gap Analysis of Financing, Achievements and Response Challenges (January -... - July 14th, 2025 [July 14th, 2025]
- Afghanistan Taxi Drivers Resort To DIY Car Coolers To Beat The Heat: Works Better Than AC - MSN - July 14th, 2025 [July 14th, 2025]
- Afghanistan: Taxi drivers use handmade air coolers to beat the heat - BBC - July 12th, 2025 [July 12th, 2025]
- 6-year-old girl sold into marriage with 45-year-old in Afghanistan; Taliban intervenes: Wait until shes - Times of India - July 12th, 2025 [July 12th, 2025]
- Barbie Battles Diabeetus, Angel Reese Is A Cover Athlete, And Afghanistan Is Open For Business - OutKick - July 12th, 2025 [July 12th, 2025]
- In Cinema Jazireh, a Woman Dresses up as a Man in Taliban Afghanistan in Search of Her Son, Hope - The Hollywood Reporter - July 12th, 2025 [July 12th, 2025]
- Russia Recognizes Talibans Apartheid Regime in Afghanistan - Foreign Policy in Focus - July 12th, 2025 [July 12th, 2025]
- Shafiqa Jalali says she has a hard time sleeping, eating or going out knowing her son is incarcerated in the U.S. and is scheduled to be deported to... - July 12th, 2025 [July 12th, 2025]
- Russia Just Legitimized the TalibanWhat Comes Next for Afghanistan and the World? - Security Clearance Jobs - July 12th, 2025 [July 12th, 2025]
- Afghanistan Taxi Drivers Resort To DIY Car Coolers To Beat The Heat: Works Better Than AC - Times Now - July 12th, 2025 [July 12th, 2025]
- 'Welcome to Afghanistan': Shocking tourism promo urging Americans to visit the country goes viral - Hindustan Times - Hindustan Times - July 10th, 2025 [July 10th, 2025]
- Trump dishes on Milley clash over leaving military equipment in Afghanistan: 'I knew he was an idiot' - Fox News - July 10th, 2025 [July 10th, 2025]
- Russia becomes the first country to recognize Taliban's rule in Afghanistan - NBC News - July 10th, 2025 [July 10th, 2025]
- Statement of the ICC Office of the Prosecutor on the issuance of arrest warrants in the Situation in Afghanistan - | International Criminal Court - July 10th, 2025 [July 10th, 2025]
- Following decades in Iran, 'there's nothing left' for millions of Afghan migrants in Afghanistan - France 24 - July 10th, 2025 [July 10th, 2025]
- 45-year-old man in Afghanistan married a 6-year-old child: the Taliban's reaction was swift - - July 10th, 2025 [July 10th, 2025]
- Welcome to Afghanistan': This could be the most bizarre tourism video ever - Stuff - July 10th, 2025 [July 10th, 2025]
- The Hairdressers Story: Exile, Loss, and a Forced Return to Afghanistan - 8am.media - July 10th, 2025 [July 10th, 2025]
- ICC expresses sadness at the passing of Afghanistan umpire Bismillah Jan Shinwari - ICC - July 8th, 2025 [July 8th, 2025]
- UN adopts resolution on Afghanistan's Taliban rule over US objections - ABC News - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos - July 8th, 2025 [July 8th, 2025]
- Will Pakistan Be Next to Recognise Taliban Rule in Afghanistan After Russia? - Times Now - July 8th, 2025 [July 8th, 2025]
- Russia becomes first nation to recognize Taliban government of Afghanistan since 2021 takeover - CNN - July 8th, 2025 [July 8th, 2025]
- India abstains from UNGA resolution on Afghanistan, calls for coordinated global efforts against terrorism - News On AIR - - July 8th, 2025 [July 8th, 2025]
- Experts: Russia Recognizing Taliban Rule in Afghanistan Largely a Symbolic Move - The Moscow Times - July 8th, 2025 [July 8th, 2025]
- Pakistan warns UN of escalating terror threat from Afghanistan - Dawn - July 8th, 2025 [July 8th, 2025]