Leaving Afghanistan Better Than We Found It was Never Possible
By David Himmel
I’ve been thinking a lot about my friend Jordan lately. I haven’t seen her in a while and I would like to get together with her, her husband Tom—have them over to our new place, see the kid, drink some beer, have some laughs. But mostly, I’ve been thinking about Jordan because of a rule she lived by during her dating years.
“Always leave your ex better than you found them,” she told me. Yes, just like the old Boy Scout rule of leaving a campground cleaner than you found it. It’s a good rule, especially if you consider the Social Contract we’re all forced into by living on this planet among each other. You make a mess, clean it up. And hey, why not give it a little extra elbow grease. Make the thing better than it was. If we all did this, we’d all be living among things constantly being improved.
But not everyone is Jordan. And not everyone is a Boy Scout. Especially America.
Twenty years ago, the United States went into a country to disrupt things. Clean house, stabilize, spread freedom and democracy and American interests. After two decades of making a mess in Afghanistan, we’ve left it in no better shape than we found it. Maybe worse, but time will tell on that.
This isn’t President Joe Biden’s fault. Not entirely. The heap of disorder and plight of the Afghan people America left behind is a fault that rests on every U.S. president since George W. Bush and every military leader who had a say in how we managed that war. But the evacuation, that is, leaving behind two hundred Americans and who knows how many Afghan allies then and now, that fault belongs to Biden and his military advisors, and the leaders who were in country.
We lost the war. Of course we did. The United States isn’t good at winning wars or propping up successful democracies. As a military power, we’re all brawn. Like the Incredible Hulk in a fit of rage we smash a bunch of shit without regard for tact, nuance, or strategy founded on honesty. As a diplomatic power, were too proud of ourselves to look down our noses at the reality that’s been tugging at our hem all along saying, “Please, Mister, don’t do what you’re about to do.” Our humanitarian efforts are often left to non-profit organizations that get governmental funding, but are run by the best versions of our citizenry.
We lost the war. We made a mess of things. And we did a terrible job cleaning up. And we sure as shit did not leave it better than we found it. The timeline Biden put in place was not adherent to anything other than it’s good for a U.S. president to put stakes in the ground. But a better stake would be better placed at a point of tangible success rather than intangible time. I’m no military expert or even novice, but hear me out for just a moment.
We keep our best troops in country to aid in getting every single American citizen and ally of the U.S. and their families out of Afghanistan. Use the Special Forces to kill the bastards attempting to prevent a peaceful exit, support all that with Barack Obama’s beloved drone airstrikes. I mean, why stop? What’s a few more weeks going to do other than show our allies that we actually do care about them. Once everyone is out, then we remove military support. Then we can call it quits. Then we can return to the locker room to talk through what went wrong and why we lost another big, long game so devastatingly.
Instead, we got out fast, ugly, and without keeping our promises to our allies. And as a result, people have died. Again. Because we couldn’t do the thing we’d been failing at for twenty years: protecting the Afghan people, our own citizens, and making Afghanistan a better place for its people to live and thrive freely, if they choose.
Biden and his administration and leaders from past administrations will talk for decades about how America had every intention of leaving Afghanistan better than we found it. But that’s a lie they’ll tell themselves. Because Leaving Afghanistan better than we found it was never possible because America refuses to realize it’s a really messy nation incapable of cleaning up after itself.
It was never possible because America is no Jordan.
