Thread by @DamonLinker

Five Thesis on Afghanistan:

1. It’s always possible to find things to criticize when events go worse than one might have hoped. But this is the reality Joe Biden faced: The Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban for American withdrawal by May 1, 2021.

Biden pushed it back a few months, both because of logistical challenges and because he hoped it would go well enough to have withdrawal folded in a positive way into 20th anniversary stories about 9/11.

The latter was a blunder for which Biden will pay an indeterminate political price. But reneging on the withdrawal was not an option w/o a new surge, because the Taliban would have stopped holding back on attacking American troops. 3,000 soldiers wouldn’t have been nearly enough.

THAT was the option: withdrawal within a few months of May 1 or else celebrate 9/11 with a new round of military deployments to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban some more.

2. All Americans should be furious w Petraeus, Allen, McMaster, and the other generals. They have either been horribly wrong for at least a decade about the state of Afghan forces or lying to the American people for longer. Or both. washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/…

Without the US fighting for them, the Afghan military was worthless, which means it was worthless, full stop. 20 years. 40 years. 100 years. It wouldn’t matter. There was no viable plan to succeed.

3. Plenty of establishment types aren’t bothered by this at all. Just stay, they say, with no viable plan to withdraw. Any day we’re in charge and the Taliban isn’t is a good day. I can’t accept that.

Benignly intended imperialism is still imperialism. That’s bad, but not for the moral reasons adduced by the left. It’s bad b/c it’s governing another nation for them, taking responsibility for their defense, for their order, for their cohesion, for their existence as a nation.

4. It is extremely significant that the US founding period was initiated with a Declaration of Independence. Liberal democracy is not the default condition of the human race. Not remotely so. It is an achievement that is very hard to reach and sustain.

And the achievement isn’t just a function of giving a country certain institutions. The country needs to be an independent, potentially self-governing political community.

And one important way for such a community to be forged is for its citizens to rise up FOR THEMSELVES and declare their independence as a single thing, a single community, a single people acting in concert in defense of its own rights and freedoms.

We cannot give this to another nation like a gift. Providing these background conditions for them may make life better there for a time, but the benefits will be utterly dependent on us. The achievements will therefore be ephemeral, fake. We will be doing freedom for them.

5. America desperately needs to disattach its thinking about its own interests from nation building. We do not need to make the world into liberal democracies in order to be safe and to thrive economically. Which is good, because it isn’t possible.

The sooner we learn this lesson, the better. But it’s unlikely we will. It may be embedded in our national character to be holy fools for liberal democracy. And we may be uneducable about this, unable to move beyond our perpetual innocence about it.

Graham Greene’s The Quiet American is a good guide to this national trait. Especially this: “Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm." If you don't recognize something in that sentence, I don't know what to tell you. #endit