Tuesday, August 31, 2021

We saw the opportunity taken by the murderous ISIS group known as ISIS-K, and even in the last few hours when Americans were just about to end the evacuation, the administration and military intelligence were warning of yet other attacks expected by that group known as ISIS-K. But the announcement came yesterday that the last American flight had departed the Kabul Airport and that Americans were, by the declaration of the Biden administration, safely out of Afghanistan. Again, those images came just a matter of hours after the president of the United States was seen in those images as he was there for the arrival of the bodies of the dead Americans, the 13, who were arriving at Dover Air Force Base. Much of the discussion about Afghanistan is overtly partisan and political, and there's no way around that discussion.

I discussed the fact that the even deeper issues were seen in the clash of civilizations between the West and the Islamic civilization, but also, the responsibility to understand history in a place like Afghanistan and to come to terms with the fact that it has been the graveyard of empires for centuries. You're also talking about the very struggle between order and disorder that marks human history, but what we also see is just a matter of deep national sadness. But we need to put it in some kind of historical perspective. Yes, Afghanistan has been the graveyard of empires for centuries. There was no reason to expect that the United States could succeed where other empires had failed in establishing a kind of stable Afghanistan over the long term. There is no stability when the very fundamental requirements of stability are lacking.

But that is not to say that the Americans were failing in Afghanistan over 20 years, because the reality is that a certain kind of stability had been not so much achieved as forced. The last casualty in the American military in Afghanistan went back to February of 2020. We should understand that the American presence made a remarkable difference. Now, one of the big questions for a nation like the United States, extending its military, political, and economic reach all the way across the world in a place like Afghanistan, is how long a sufficient national will would be in place to continue that investment in blood and treasure? The reality is that if you just look at the polling and the surveying of the American people, the American people were, at least by a clear majority, saying that a long-term investment of American military personnel and American authority in a place like Afghanistan was not a high national priority.