President Donald J. Trump has announced the withdrawal of 4,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan, with the intention of withdrawing all troops by the November election, thus bringing to a close America’s longest war, after 18 years. Or will it?.
The recent release of a trove of documents, obtained by The Washington Post, has detailed the deception and dysfunction that characterized the war.
“‘We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing,’” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015,” The Washington Post reported. “He added: ‘What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.’”
But why is that? Don’t they still teach ancient military history at West Point? Or are we Americans — who President George W. Bush once said aren’t good at looking in the rearview mirror — so far divorced from education that we fail to see that history isn’t the past but the story of the past, which is forever resonant?
Afghanistan has been called “the graveyard of empires” — although that should be amended to “the graveyard of modern empires.” It was conquered numerous times in the ancient world, most notably by Cyrus the Great and the Greco-Macedonian conqueror who sought to emulate him — Alexander the Great.
They understood the fierce tribalism of Afghanistan in part because they were themselves overlords descended from many warlords. Still, conquest wasn’t easy. Alexander waged a long guerilla war in Afghanistan — see Frank L. Holt’s “Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan”; took an Afghan princess, Roxanne, as his chief wife; and never went home, dying in his capital, Babylon (in modern-day Iraq); a month short of his 33rd birthday in June of 323 B.C.
Surely, we never intended to stay. Yet stay we did — and stay we will. Things might’ve been different had we had a clearcut goal, had we stopped after defeating al-Queda post-9/11. But those who fail to understand the past cannot hope to command the future.
I don’t think we’ll ever get out of Afghanistan.