George Rebane

Diplomacy unsupported by the threat of force is nothing but duplicitous hot air.

Has Kabul fallen?  For all intents and purposes the answer is yes.  How else to explain all those towelheads carrying their AKs and RPGs, casually walking the streets of that city of six million, while thousands are desperately trying to get on a flight out from the airport’s military side still under American control?  Last we looked, the Afghani ‘security forces’ who had yet to flee were still wearing their uniforms.

Our display of existential historical ignorance is on parade.  Even backwoods snuffies like me have known for decades that Afghanistan is not a ‘country’, but a region of ethnically and culturally similar tribes of the mostly fanatically devout and concomitantly ignorant Muslims.  As recounted here numberless times and echoed by RR’s commentariat, attempting to deal with that region as a unified sovereign nation-state has been a fool’s errand, as history confirms.  The only time Afghanis unite and cooperate is when they fight to expel foreigners from their sandbox.  All foreign policies should start recognizing those truths.

Re Afghanistan as the on-again, off-again home of international terrorists.  Years ago Rebane Doctrine called for no nation-building, no long-term boots on the ground, but the use of our vaunted over-the-horizon military capability to whomp terrorist hotbeds as they arise in the region.  We should deal with the terrorists from the air or at most with expeditionary raids – go in quickly, kill and destroy, and extract quickly.  This is a policy that we should already be or become very good at, and apply worldwide against anyone who represents a clear and present danger to our nation.  It has worked in the past, and it will work again.  And the response of the international community to such a clear and consistent policy would be refreshing – it will not be a beauty contest and we will maintain our usual cadre of enemies, but it would make our diplomacy more meaningful.

The enduring problem with such a policy is that it will still require wise, educated, and experienced leaders to determine who to whomp, when, and with what.  Starting with its leader, the present administration does not have a senior level team in place to carry out such a policy – their forte consists of wrongheaded and untimely appeasement.

Afterthoughts:  I first learned the gory details about Afghanistan back in 1978 when James Michner’s Caravans: A Novel of Afghanistan was published.  (All the Rebanes were avid readers of Michner’s and Clavell’s historical novels in those days.)  Immediately apparent was that this region was not a country in the ordinary sense of the world, no more than were China (that at least made pretense) and India before the western colonists intervened.

Before the USSR’s recent intervention in the 1980s, the last anyone tried to colonize Afghanistan was Great Britain in its strategic maintenance of the British Empire in the 19^th century.  Britain’s goal in controlling the region was to deny czarist Russia’s expansionist forays in central Asia that included Afghanistan as a strategically important access to a warm water port unencumbered by climate and foreign controlled narrow straits.  In 1878 Britain attempted the tried-and-true approach of imperial colonials – go into a region consisting of warring and distrustful tribes, pick a tribe with a capable and malleable leader, and support him in conquering and annihilating his ethnic brethren.  That leader would then be celebrated as the ‘great unifier’ of his heretofore non-existent country that would become a satrap of the western invader.  It worked in so many places, it was sure to work in Afghanistan.

Well, it didn’t, and all the west got out of it was a bunch of pretty good literature.  But it did give the Russians about a century of pause before they decided in 1980 that they could do it better.  But after ten years, the communists in Moscow pulled out of Afghanistan – it turned out that they had bigger problems at home and with their European colonies.

What should be of some amazement to all Americans today is that less than 25 years later, the double dummies on Team Bush2 decided to have another go at nation-building with the idea that a unified Afghanistan under our security umbrella would become a stable and loyal ally.  An ally that would serve as a geo-strategic anchor in the mid-east and south Asia from which the US could manage its regional, and even global interests.  (Our allies were all for it given their own interest in securing the region’s supply of oil.)  Then reality stepped in, and we saw before ten years had passed that we weren’t going to do any better than the Brits or the Russkys.  But our hubris and wallet seemed boundless, and the comparatively low rate of casualties was politically acceptable – since we were making the world safe from terrorists – and we stuck it out for another ten years, ignoring a constant stream of evidence that there was no good ending to this growing trail of tears.

So what did we do, we decided to pull a Saigon 2.0 in Kabul, thereby completing a trifecta of a wrongheaded invasion, followed by a frustrating and futile occupation, and concluding now with an ignominious exit.  And today half of Americans want to enlarge our government while giving it more money and more control over our lives.  How did we become such an ignorant and contentious people?

[16aug21 update]  To salvage some remaining honor from the ongoing and ignominious Biden Banzai for the exits, Rebane Doctrine proposes the following.  With the 5,000+ combat troops we already have there, the US should declare the Kabul international airport as a temporary sovereign enclave and haven to be retained and defended until the thousands of Afghanis already on the airport, or those who can get there in the interval, are processed for exit visas and transported safely out of the country.  First order of business should be to fly in tents, toilets, food distribution facilities, etc (and more gunships and fighting vehicles) to take care of the throngs while they await their exits. Should the Taliban do anything to thwart that process, we will declare publicly that we will whomp them with a new and improved version of ‘shock and awe’ that will give new meaning to the operation, and it will continue for an undetermined time to include Taliban targets all over Afghanistan.  In short, we’ll leave when we’re damn good and ready.

[17aug21 update]  Biden cannot learn from mistakes.  Bumblebrain has a 40+ year sorry record of understanding and making policies – this deficit is especially acute in foreign policy.  He was much younger when he started rejecting corrective feedback to his early blunders.  Today he has put a ribbon around his demonstrated ability/propensity to make a flustercluck out of all his initiatives and responsibilities.  Without the ability to understand and accept feedback from past mistakes, there can be no learning for improved performance.  And he’s demonstrated this by blaming Afghanistan on everyone except the guy in the mirror.  Today this mental (character?) defect is abetted by his visible mental decline which, I suspect, is making members of his cabinet and inner circle brush up on the particulars of the 25^th Amendment.  Pelosi must be inwardly overjoyed at the prospect, and Kamala is just too dumb to be worried about her own prospects should the musical chairs start.  And the rest of the country will suffer the consequences.

[21aug21 update]  Here is an especially interesting, informative, corroborative, and well told piece about the Taliban, how and why they fight, and why losing does not enter their minds as even an idle thought.  It's told by a AF gunship combat veteran whose job was to listen in on the Taliban and then kill them by the hundreds.  What's astounding is that the ragheads knew the Americans were listening in on their radio transmissions, and they didn't give a crap about being overheard.  'What I learned while eavesdropping on the Taliban' (H/T to reader).  Enjoy.