The news from Kabul is terrible, but not unexpected. Explosions at the airport. A dozen or so dead. Terrible, but not unexpected.
The double-negative is purposeful. Implies emphasis. Not unexpected, meaning very much expected. The double-negative calls attention to the phrase. Makes clear that we should not be surprised.
CBS News says the Biden administration knew this was possible. It was why it warned, in clear and decisive tones, that those who could should take the first plane out. Why it is not extending its deadline for troop withdrawal.
There are those who will see this as a provocation that demands response from the United States. Who will use this as an excuse to stay in a country we should have left a decade ago or more. The country is not stable, they’ll say. They’ve been saying. But our presence will do little to prevent further attacks.
Americans have an inflated sense of self, believing we can control outcomes around he globe by our very presence. This kind of exceptionalism thinking has led us over the last 60-plus years into one quagmire after another. Led us to act and interfere in places we probably were better leaving to themselves.
I was asked by a friend who once supported the Afghan invasion and who is now far more ambivalent than he ever expected to be what I thought we should have done in response to 9/11, the ostensible reason for our invasion. Honestly, I’m not sure. I supported a limited police action designed to capture Osama bin Laden, was somewhat neutral when the war started, generally opposed to military action, but also unsure whether we had much of a choice.
I sensed at the time that Afghanistan would be a disaster — it is known as the graveyard of empires for a reason — but I was frozen, shocked, unable to fully rebuke the Bush response.
I should have made my criticisms clearer at the time. Should have spoken up more loudly and more strongly. I should have known Afghanistan would lead directly to Iraq, as it did, the Afghan invasion helping to grease the slide into was in Iraq, a war I opposed very clearly and repeatedly in column after column.
There were dozens, hundreds of voices making the same and usually better arguments against these dual wars. They were correct then, and history has proven this. Still, TV commentary gives priority to the military experts, nearly all of whom got it wrong and have continued to get it wrong for the last 20 years.
Republicans are calling the withdrawal a disaster — and it’s hard to disagree, but it’s a disingenuous criticism given the realities and competing interests. We had to leave, and leaving was going to be messy. Staying would make the foreign policy establishment and the military-industrial complex (to borrow Eisenhower’s phrase) happy, but it was unsustainable. Occupations, by their very nature, are unsustainable.
In my upcoming column for the Progressive Populist, I called this a bipartisan disaster. It a failure of imagination — an inability to imagine anything other than war.
What we’re watching is terrible, wrenching, but we should not use it as an excuse to stay and continue a war that should have ended long ago.