The Wholly Predictable End to the War in Afghanistan

The pictures coming out of Kabul are truly horrifying but they should surprise no one because this was always how the war in that country was going to end.

When the airplanes hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11 it was inevitable that the United States would respond with force. When they began to bomb Al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan I was supportive of those actions. 

Then the United States and some other countries decided to invade the country. I am not certain why. It could have been the factions fighting the Taliban convinced the United States that they could defeat them with US support. Maybe it was hubris on the part of the US administration that made them believe they could export democracy. Maybe it was just good old fashioned ideology that drove the US government the same as what drove the USSR before them. It was probably a combination of all of those factors.

The result was predictable. The US lead coalition overthrew the Taliban government but they failed utterly in destroying the Taliban. Many have compared this war with the one in Vietnam and there are indeed many parallels. The US intervention was designed to install a friendly regime but they failed to destroy the greatest threat to that regime. All they were able to do was suppress it. 

However, the failure in Afghanistan is on another level compared to the one in Vietnam. In Vietnam the US was fighting the Viet Cong, which was actively supported by the North Vietnamese, who actually sent troops into Vietnam to directly fight the Americans, and the North Vietnamese were supplied weapons and support by the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan the Taliban did not enjoy that kind of support from an outside power. Certainly, there might be some evidence of a faction of the Pakistani government providing some support but not on the scale of the North Vietnamese.

So after 20 years of futility and with no way to achieve "peace with honour" the United States just left. By some accounts some of the military units stole away in the middle of the night. It took a few weeks for the Taliban to get organized but when they finally decided to move their victory was inevitable. After 20 years they were still the only coherent political and military force in the country.

So now we are seeing the results. I am gobsmacked that Western governments are actually surprised by the speed of the takeover leading to the chaos we are now seeing. They should have seen it coming, and that includes the Canadian government, and began to take steps to rescue those Afghanis who would face retribution for collaborating with the coalition forces, weeks ago. Sure they started the process but it was ridiculously slow, bureaucratic and cumbersome. 

As it stands they waited too long and many of these poor souls will not make it out alive.