The Americans have left Afghanistan and though President Joe Biden and the public are happy, many of us have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, at 20 years it was the United States’ longest war, and no one wants to fight a forever war. On the other hand, there is a sense of a mission unfulfilled, or perhaps one extended beyond its original purpose and thus unfulfilled.
No one has any illusions about the Taliban rushing in to the vacuum left by the U.S. That, many say, is not our concern. Then why were we there in the first place? We have contingents in Germany and on the Korean peninsula and Guantanamo Bay. Why not maintain a small force of 2,500 troops to keep the Afghan warlords on their toes and ensure human rights, particularly where girls and women, long oppressed there, are concerned. (I remember once interviewing historian and documentary filmmaker Michael Wood about his series “In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great” and asking him what Afghanistan was like. “No place for a woman,” he said.)
There has always been a sense that Afghanistan has never been a place for anybody but the warlords who skirmish with one another and brutalize everybody else. It’s a kind of Arizona, we think, only without the malls and air conditioning — and without the American laws that guarantee our rights.
Certainly it’s not a place for any modern empire. The British and the Soviets tried to succeed there and failed. We Americans went there in search of Osama bin Laden and found him — in neighboring Pakistan in 2010. That mission accomplished, we stayed on, only to find the new mission more nebulous. As British historian John Keegan noted in part five of “Liberty! The American Revolution,” you can’t win the battles but fail to close out the war and call that a success. As in the American Revolution, as in Vietnam, the front kept moving in Afghanistan. And even though we moved with it, we never captured what in the parlance of the Vietnam War were called “hearts and minds.”
In light of this failure and frustration, it’s popular to call Afghanistan — a kind of desert Vietnam — “the graveyard of empires.” But it’s only the graveyard of modern empires. Indeed, a former soldier misspoke on the “PBS NewsHour” when he said Alexander the Great fought there with elephants and lost. (The elephants actually came later in his conquest of the Persian Empire, while he was in India, and he never lost a battle.)
Still, the point is well-taken: Alexander fought a long guerrilla war there. (See Frank Holt’s book “Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan.”) He married an Afghan princess, Roxane. And he was prepared to stay, with Babylon in what is now northern Iraq as his capital and Persia as the springboard for further adventures and explorations. But his men, like us perhaps, had had enough. Persia conquered, mission accomplished, they wanted to go home. Reluctantly, Alexander was sending much of the original army back to Macedon (in what is now northern Greece) when he died in Babylon a month short of his 33rd birthday, which we commemorate around July 20.
To stay or to go? It’s one of the defining questions of power, one that America has never reconciled. We demanded the British sacrifice their empire during World War II as the price for saving its pieces, then refused the imperial mantle we inherited when the sun set on it. America is an empire manqué, historian Neil Ferguson once told me: We’re driving down the road in a Humvee with blinders on, while everybody else is trying to get out of the way.
Now we’re being called on to help with the mess in Haiti in the aftermath of President Jovenal Moïse’s assassination. Biden has sent FBI agents to aid in the investigation but is reluctant to send the longed-for troops. He knows it would be a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. How long before Haiti becomes another Vietnam or Afghanistan with us staying too long at the fair, wearing out our welcome and forgetting why we went there in the first place?
Yet we have an obligation as the world’s sole remaining superpower to help. We should be engaged internationally instead of ceding the world stage to the Chinese and the Russians. But we need to define what form that mission should take and to strike a balance. And we’ll never do that effectively until we reconcile our isolationist temperament with our international inheritance.