Cav's Place

With this blog basically being reduced to little more than a personal diary for years, I haven’t been posting about current events and no longer even really think of trying unless one provides too good of an opportunity to throw a quick non-personal post here and therefore free a “slot” for another personal one, and it felt wrong to use the situation in Afghanistan in such a manner, considering the tragedy that unfolds for so many and its implications even on a global scale. But Biden’s speech is a somewhat different matter and deserves to be lashed out at even in such a hasty manner.

The main problem is the fact that he said the “mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building“, and that he “argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism — not counterinsurgency or nation building“, when that’s exactly what it should have been. When you are willing and able to charge into a failed state, you should ensure that whatever you do will result in it becoming a functional one, where rights and freedoms are respected, institutions work, people have a decent standard of living… Of course, I’d say above all one where the environment is in good condition and cared for, but that’s not the point of this post.
How that should be achieved varies from case to case, and it should have been clear from the beginning that the “graveyard of empires” that is Afghanistan required a unique approach. That approach most definitely should not, can not, include “a political settlement with the Taliban“, as Biden stated he urged Afghan leaders to seek, but it might well mean actually taking over the state, at least in some manner and to some extent, instead of pouring immense resources into its fundamentally flawed systems and institutions. If so, that’s what should have been done and that’s what should still be done, for the people of Afghanistan but also for the world as a whole, which will have to bear the consequences of this new monumental failure.
Yes, if we focus just on the places that harbor international terrorism, Biden is correct in saying that “the terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan” and more resources need to be redirected towards other areas, but Iraq is an example of what leaving a failed state behind leads to and you won’t get far by giving up an area first and hoping for a chance to make gains in another later. Willingly allowing some threats to greatly increase is obviously the wrong policy even if you just look out for your own interests and react to threats.
But just looking out for its own interests and reacting to threats is not what a superpower, which the United States still is, should do, and not what a world leader, which Biden definitely is, should do. With great power should come great responsibility, and I’ll once again stress that nation building, drastically improving the situation and guaranteeing that it won’t return to what it was, or worse, is most definitely what the final goal of any such intervention must be. And, sure, there are many more failed states, many more places where people are oppressed, many more places where intervention is desperately needed, and in some of them success would be much more probable, but after finding an “excuse” to charge in there, and just because they’ve been there for these past 20 years, the United States has far more of an opportunity to help and to “fix” Afghanistan. More importantly, it has far more of a responsibility to do so, to think of the people whose well-being, rights and freedoms, or even very lives, are in danger under the Taliban and act accordingly.
Do I expect something like that to happen? Of course not. People are rotten in general, and those with power even more so. After all, instead of bringing great responsibility, in reality power mainly corrupts… If it even needs to, because first of all it attracts the corrupt, and the easily corruptible. But I did expect a somewhat different speech, perhaps with more promises, and definitely more excuses, and admitting blame and mistakes, not something as bluntly selfish and heartless, and also I’d say misguided, as this.