The predictable American accountability pantomime is in full swing: Who lost Afghanistan?!?! Just as the endeavor itself was a 20-year exercise in bloodlust, deluded expectations, venality, and performance art, so is the pale imitation of the reckoning with its end. Never mind the absurdity of the question, though telling as it is about the mentality of the imperial clerks and the public on whose behalf they beaver away in the corridors of power; Afghanistan was never ours to lose. But Americans demand answers because someone has told them that the US just lost something. Senate hearings are underway.
Answers to what? Senator Reed (D-RI), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, admitted he was interested less in how or why Americans came to make “enormous sacrifice … and vast US investment” to no obvious benefit, but in having senior military leaders explain how and why the Afghan state failed and the Taliban returned to power. He did mention “years of mistakes [related to] a war that spanned four presidential administrations, both Democratic and Republican” but, ultimately, it’s the [subtext: ungrateful] Afghans who failed. He promised Americans “an honest accounting”.
What if they don’t want one? What if they prefer the version of Senator Imhofe (R-OK), which reduces the range of inquiry from the project’s 240 mind-numbing months to a snapshot of the August 2021 chaos in Kabul, which he ascribes to President Biden’s “disastrous decision … [that] has expanded the threat of terrorism—and increased the likelihood of an attack on the homeland. … [T]he terrorist threat to American families is rising significantly, while our ability to deal with these threats has been decimated.” He wants “as many hearings as it takes,” if only to prove it’s all Biden’s fault.
This is masterful by Reed and Imhofe, and characteristic of senate veterans. A real and credible look at two decades of Operation Enduring Freedom (the Pentagon with a sense of humor; who knew?) would be painstaking and time-consuming, qualities to which senators know the American public remains as allergic as ever. It also would risk having to point to the many individuals who invented and sold the project to the millions who enthusiastically and unquestioningly gobbled it up. Nineteen Saudi criminals; let’s invade Afghanistan. We’re Number 1! (Anybody know where Afghanistan even is?)
No astute politician is going to blame the voters who made it all possible and in whose name the maiming and killing were done, even if Reed does promise hearings that “will be frank and searching, so that [wait for it] future generations of Americans will not repeat our mistakes.” This from someone who entered West Point in 1967, a year in which 400,000 American troops were doing in Vietnam exactly what they’d do 35 years later in Afghanistan: chase an elusive enemy to no coherently defined ultimate purpose. Not learning defines “American”.
Besides, what would real accountability look like even if Congress chose to find out? Send Bush and Cheney to The Hague? In that case, does the ICC have room also for the 98 senators and 420 representatives who, in a case of collective arousal, voted for the 2001 Authorized Use of Military Force resolution, which Washington has since used as a blank check to deliver “kinetic energy” (the Pentagon) or “death and destruction” (anyone normal) to hapless countries? What about the countless majors and colonels and generals who pushed their counter-insurgency “expertise” and got medals and promotions?
There will be hearings. They will yield the odd bit of news even though we already know the basics of the story. The exercise will come with the usual acts of political theater by members of Congress preening for their constituents. Congress will write and publish a report — with the most useful stuff classified and redacted — that fifty people will read, after which it will sink like a stone in a still pond. Shortly thereafter, except for sunshine-deprived boys in their mom’s basement with an Internet connection arguing that “we were never defeated on the battlefield,” no one will remember or care.
Most Americans will choose not to remember or care about the $2 trillion, all of it borrowed money; the 47,000 Afghan civilians taken apart by shrapnel (in pursuit of revenge for the 3,000 killed on 9/11); and the number of times between 2001 and 2021 the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee mentioned the costs of the enterprise: five (although, in fairness, that’s 500% greater than the Senate Finance Committee, which deemed more than once an unendurable strain. To counter this level of disinterest, Americans will look to balance the ledger by telling us, But now 37% of Afghan girls can read.
A noncasual approach to invading other countries would be as un-American as subsequently accounting for it. This makes inevitable the grooming of a new generation eager to sell — and buy — fresh martial adventures abroad in pursuit of some contrived but noble-sounding objective. Although the fashion of deploying ground troops has gone out of style (for places without serious mineral deposits, at least), the use of force against countries who cannot seriously defend themselves but are nonetheless sold to us as threats to our way of life is guaranteed to continue.
Pace Senator Reed, future generations will repeat what has been done before. That’s so because there will always be enough Americans who do not see the many prior experiments in solving geopolitical issues with the best high-tech ordnance money can buy as mistakes. For them, these are legitimate — and (for disturbingly many) deity-inspired — exercises in American entitlement and exceptionalism. Their version of accountability is for heads to roll but, obviously, never their own. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to recommend that the unfortunate people of underdeveloped countries (Congo and Venezuela come to mind) stay alert.
