Afghanistan has unraveled into a s—- show, and the only surprise is that anyone is surprised at all.
But then, as President George W. Bush, who first got us into Afghanistan, noted, “Americans aren’t very good at looking in the rearview mirror.” No, they aren’t, W. Our ignorance and fear — they go hand in hand — of science have made a muddle of our response to everything from Covid to climate change. And our disdain of history has sent us careening from one hotspot to another in which we never have any clue as to the place or the people we’re purportedly trying to help.
President Joe Biden might think Afghanistan is not another Vietnam, but as today’s heartbreaking reports prove Afghanistan is Vietnam right down to the whirring helicopters and those poor souls clinging to the wheels of the planes, desperate to flee the brutality that is already there. (I shudder to think what life is going to be like again under the Taliban in a country that the historian Michael Wood once described to me as “no place for a woman.”
Afghanistan has long been a decentralized country run by warlords, so why was it a wonder when the puppet government propped up by the United States fled and the waiting-to-strike-like-a-viper-in-the-grass Taliban rushed in where angels fear to tread? Oh, yes, we predicted this was going to happen, we just didn’t think it was going to happen so quickly. Wait, what: We were prepared to see the Taliban sweep over the country? Is that what we wanted? Why we went there, bled and died? We couldn’t keep a nominal force of 2,500 there as a show of strength until we figured out a graceful exit? More to the point, we couldn’t have kept troops there permanently? We keep bases in friendly former enemy countries like Japan and Germany and on the Korean peninsula. Why wouldn’t we keep a foothold in an enemy country that was the breeding ground for Al-Qaeda, architect of 9/11?
The answer is we never want to stay, in part because we never want to go in the first place. We’re ambivalent about our role as the sole superpower, heir to the remains of the British Empire of which we were once a backwater. But we involve ourselves nonetheless. We bring along our dreams of democracy and our culture with its promise of freedom, which is not the same as actual freedom — never bothering to learn the language, religion or the customs of the country. How then can we ever hope to win hearts and minds in the parlance of another day, that of the Vietnam War?
That war — what the Vietnamese, now our trading partner, call the American War — exists only in history books. And what are those, am I right? LOL. We’re too busy with conspiracy theories and what Kim Kardashian is wearing. So our lack of knowledge of history leads us not only to repeat it but to reinvent it. Today’s pundits comforted themselves by noting that Alexander the Great said that Afghanistan is an easy place to march into, not an easy place to march out of.
Alexander never said any such thing. In the first place, we hardly know what he said, because the remaining primary sources on him, like those on Jesus, were written many years after him. It’s hard to imagine that the man who did say, “Nothing is impossible to him who would try” would take such a defeatist view of Afghanistan. True, he fought a long guerrilla-style war there that you can read about in Frank Holt’s “Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan,” but in the end he conquered it, just as he conquered the rest of the Persian Empire.
Why did Alexander succeed where we failed? Because he wasn’t in the business of getting in and getting out. He was in the business of getting in and staying. A ruthless king descended from many ruthless kings, Alexander understood the warlord mentality, marrying the daughter of an Afghan warlord, the princes Roxane. He never returned to Macedon (northern Greece), dying in his capital of Babylon in what is now northern Iraq in June 323 B.C., a month short of his 33rd birthday.
All of this is lost, however, on many of us, thanks to a lack of Alexandrian leadership — leadership from the front — and a failed educational system that have ground our dreams to dust on the plains of Afghanistan just as they once laid them bare in the jungles of Vietnam.
All of this is not, however, lost on me. I predicted years ago that a lack of leadership and education would doom this country. I knew the minute we went into Afghanistan that we would never emerge triumphant — no modern empire ever has, just ask the British and the Soviets — and indeed that we will never truly leave. And yet, some of my friends and family love to make fun of my passion for the ancient Greeks and Alexander the Great. Again, who needs history? LOL, right?
Except today, the sounds I hear are not those of laughter. Indeed those of us who are students of history can, like Cassandra at Troy, only watch and weep.