The Fall of Afghanistan, Two Years Later

What have we learned?

Two years ago this month, the Afghan capital city of Kabul fell to the Taliban, nearly twenty years after United States forces ousted them following the 9/11 terror attacks. Thirteen American servicemen and women were killed by a suicide bomber during the chaotic evacuation, and that tragedy was compounded when a retaliatory drone strike killed ten innocent people rather than the terrorists responsible.

It was an ignoble end to an adventure that started with such passion and promise. In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks that killed 3,000 people, Americans were united in their desire to, as Toby Keith sang, “put a boot in [the] ass” of those who had attacked us. President George W. Bush assembled a coalition of allies and Afghan rebels who quickly toppled the Taliban and occupied the major cities. Osama bin Laden, the Saudi terrorist who was accused of masterminding the attacks, fled into the Tora Bora mountains.

Had US forces captured bin Laden in December 2001 and then withdrew to allow the Afghans to rebuild their own country, it might have gone down as another massive US victory, similar to the first Gulf War. Alas. Bin Laden escaped, the mission of our troops changed to a vague idea of nation building, and the Bush Administration had already begun drawing up plans to invade Iraq, leaving Afghanistan on the back burner.

They call Afghanistan the Graveyard of Empires. Alexander’s empire shattered after he crossed the Hindu Kush; the British Empire lasted only a few years after their Third Afghan War; and the Soviet Union dissolved a mere two years after they withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Will the United States break the streak, or will we too fall to the inexorable forces of history?

Consider what changes the last two decades have wrought on our country:

• The Patriot Act ostensibly gave government necessary tools to stop terrorists, but now we see it being used against American citizens instead.

• The Great Recession hobbled entire generations - Millennials came to accept that they would never experience the prosperity their fathers and grandfathers took for granted, while GenZ has grown up in a post-9/11, post-recession world where such prosperity is nothing more than myth.

• Social media and smartphones have radically changed how human beings relate to each other, and to society in general. We do not yet fully grasp the long-term effects of this transformation.

• Perhaps because of all of those things, trust in government and America’s civic institutions has plummeted. Tens of millions of Americans correctly recognize that our intelligence community as working against us, public health agencies are led by jackbooted totalitarians, and that our government is run by bureaucrats and NGOs rather than our elected representatives.

The world of geopolitics has changed as well. China has rapidly joined the ranks of world powers since the turn of the 21st century. In 2000, both Presidents Clinton and Bush approved of bringing China into the World Trade Organization, hoping that openness and commerce would lead to them becoming more democratic. Instead, western governments and corporations have taken on some of the more totalitarian aspects of the Chinese Communist Party.

In May 1999, the US Air Force (relying on data from the CIA) accidentally destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during a NATO operation against Serbia. This was certainly a major diplomatic incident, but few feared it would lead to a major war. Imagine such a thing happening today. The rise of China is perhaps the most consequential change in the past two decades. Consider that they quickly moved to take advantage of our withdrawal from Afghanistan by establishing relations with the new Taliban government.

By the end of our occupation, there were American service members on the ground in Afghanistan whose fathers had taken part in the initial invasion before they were born. At 19 years, 10 months, our military adventure in Afghanistan was longer than the American Revolution, Civil War, and World War II combined. Our death toll never approached those conflicts, but that was perhaps a double edged sword, as it allowed the endless war to fade from the headlines and continue simmering on the back burner.

While the Afghan War continued indefinitely, Americans became accustomed to a lower standard of living, a media/industrial complex that hates us and everything we love, an opioid epidemic that continues to kill hundreds of thousands each year, and a political system that is increasingly divorced from anything resembling the will of the people. Did our ill-fated adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq directly cause these issues? Perhaps not. But I contend that they played a large part in sapping the conservative movement of the will and the ability to combat our social decay. Rather than reforming government, reigning in spending, or protecting the family, we spent our political capital defending what became increasingly indefensible.

To find the seeds of this association of conservatism with militarism we must go back to the Vietnam War. Opposition to the war quickly became identified with the far left, as antiwar activists made common cause with socialists, communists, hippies, druggies, and other dregs of society. Support for the troops, then, became a strong component of the conservative movement. Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over the antiwar George McGovern showed that the silent majority was still a powerful force in America.

When Vietnam veterans returned home and faced mockery and ostracism from antiwar protestors, conservatives responded with unconditional support for the military. This reached a fever pitch during the Gulf War and continued into the Global War on Terror. In the days after 9/11, the entire country was united in their desire for retribution. However, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began to drag on without end, a new antiwar movement developed, coming mainly from the left. Conservatives still believed that it was important to support the troops, and that supporting the troops necessarily meant supporting the wars.

The left promoted the antiwar cause not out of principle, but because it was a way to attack President Bush and the Republican Party. They made heroes out of Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, and Julian Assange, who published evidence of American war crimes. One of the primary reasons that Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary was because she had initially voted to authorize our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Once Obama was in the White House, this left-wing antiwar movement disappeared overnight. Sheehan stopped being invited to cable news, and Assange would eventually be prosecuted for exposing the malfeasance of Hillary Clinton and her cronies. Yet the wars dragged on, and Obama even expanded them into Syria, Yemen, and many other locales. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton bragged about the destruction of Libya and the death of its leader Muammar Qaddafi. Later, when four Americans were killed in the chaos that resulted from Qaddafi’s death, Clinton brushed off any responsibility. “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Conservatives who had hitched their movement to the wars found themselves in the awkward position of supporting the troops while opposing the way in which Obama continued to use them. It did not help that the Obama Administration made regime change in Syria our official position, which meant aiding the same people in Syria that we were still fighting in Iraq. Yet it was not until Donald Trump denounced George W. Bush and the Iraq War in the 2016 presidential primary debates that the floodgates opened and a right wing antiwar movement opened. This created tremendous cognitive dissonance in the Republican Party, as war hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham became increasingly out of touch with the rank and file. At the very moment that American voters sent Trump to the White House to end the wars, the administrative state was planning the next one in Ukraine.

Today, you will most likely find opposition to endless foreign wars on the right, rather than the left. Even so, many conservatives still support sending American money and equipment to Ukraine, and would likely support intervention both there and in Taiwan. If our government did plan to send troops abroad yet again, they would surely say that it won’t be another Afghanistan or Iraq, just as twenty years ago they said it would not become another Vietnam.

I believe that conservatives need to unite against further foreign wars. George Washington warned us against entangling alliances, John Quincy Adams warned us against using our blood and treasure to fight for liberty throughout the world, and Dwight Eisenhower warned us about the growing influence of the military/industrial complex. Yet since World War II, we have allowed our country to become the world’s policeman, acting as both sovereign and slave to the liberal world order.

The purpose of the United States military is to defend American citizens and interests. According to the Constitution, though the president is commander-in-chief of the military, it is ultimately Congress that decides when and where to deploy our service men and women. Yet our elected leaders have entirely abdicated that responsibility. Congress passed an authorization for use of military force in 2001 that is still used by the Biden Administration today as a blank check to deploy our troops anywhere in the world for essentially any reason. Numerous attempts to repeal the AUMF have failed.

In a twist of fate, Congress never authorized Obama’s deployment of troops to Syria, yet when Trump attempted to withdraw them, Congress passed a resolution opposing him.

Congress has not issued a declaration of war since 1942, nevertheless American forces are currently engaged in combat operations in dozens of countries. As patriotic Americans, we all support the men and women who put on the uniform of our armed forces, but endless war is not a conservative principle.

The same Toby Keith who spoke for millions of Americans after 9/11 hit a more melancholy note the summer that Afghanistan fell: “Seems like everybody’s pissin’ on the red white and blue; happy birthday America, whatever’s left of you.”

It’s time to focus on America first, before we spend any more blood, treasure, and political capital on the rest of the world. We need our elected leaders to take a stand against these forever wars and reclaim congressional oversight over military operations. I don’t see this happening with our current congressional delegation - Sen. Jim Risch is the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and has taken the baton from John McCain as the biggest cheerleader of foreign intervention. Perhaps his successor will have a better perspective.

One concrete action we can take here in Idaho is to support Dan McKnight’s Defend the Guard measure. This simple bill would prevent the Idaho National Guard from being used to supplement the US military in foreign conflicts unless there is an actual congressional declaration of war. This should be common sense, but the warmongers in Washington depend on state guard units to carry out their endeavors, and so they have pulled out all the stops to oppose this legislation in every state it has been introduced.

Reclaiming our sovereignty as citizens and as states requires letting go of the idea that conservatism must equal militarism. Our troops deserve our respect and support, but that does not mean we must blindly allow our leaders to use them as pawns in neverending geopolitical games. As conservatives, we must devote our energy to fixing our problems at home rather than trying to fix the problems of the world, before the sun sets on the American Republic for good.