Thread by @calxandr

Having now read the full article, I have two major comments. First, fear took the US to war in 1941 as well, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. That did not prevent the ensuing gargantuan US & allied effort from producing flourishing democracies in Asia, Europe & elsewhere. 1/10

https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1431131083257614337

The issue was never fear or even rage as motivating factors, nor 'nation-building' as either deliberate or incidental goals, but rather war strategy: we had a plan to fight 'Taliban' in Afghanistan, but never a strategy to deter or defeat the actual aggressor, Pakistan. 2/10

The US was in fact re-joining a war that had been underway for nearly three decades, as Pakistan's generals sought strategic depth in Afghanistan to compensate for the loss of East Pakistan/Bangladesh in 1971, & increasingly turned to global jihad in pursuit of this goal. 3/10

Thanks to Kissinger/Brzezinski, the US joined this war over 1979-89, leaving many blind spots with regard to Pakistan among US policy-makers. Al Qaida (1989), the Taliban (1993), TTP (2007) & IS-K (2014) were Pakistan's 'coping mechanisms' after that first US abandonment. 4/10

So the 'hubris' was not support for Afghanistan's institutions -- many of which advanced smartly for a decade or more, as Kagan notes. The insanity was to expect such institutions to survive withering, continuous, large-scale attacks by armed proxies of a another state. 5/10

The painful truth is that policy reviews by all four administrations since 9/11 -- even the @washingtonpost's own 'Afghanistan Papers' -- have down-played, under-estimated or missed altogether the world's 6th-largest military's role in creating & fielding the Taliban. 6/10

Kagan quotes Ryan Crocker in 2016 arguing the only option "would have been to make clear that there was no calendar for withdrawal." But there was a simpler option: treat Pakistan as a belligerent, guilty of gross acts of aggression in Afghanistan, & sanction them. 7/10

It is hard to fathom why this was not done in 2011, when Bin Laden was found living a few hundred yards from Pakistan's West Point, in the city where General Kayani, by then army chief, had been Baloch regiment colonel commandant when the AQ chief took up residence. 8/10

But the Obama administration was hard set on talks with the Taliban & over-indulgent of Pakistan. Far from 'hiding the truth', they seem to have ignored or not known it. Trump & Biden only gave Pakistan's military the opening they craved to go in for the kill. 9/10

Pakistan's proxies won't kill Afghanistan. The question now is whether we're ready, at long last, to use sanctions & other leverage to protect Afghanistan from aggression (& end Pakistan's 'forever war') -- as we have been doing for Ukraine & Belarus. 10/10

#SanctionPakistan