Afghanistan Is Your Fault
Kabul has fallen. Americans will now exercise their usual partisan outrage for a few weeks, and then Afghanistan, like everything else in a nation with an attention span not much longer than a fast-food commercial, will be forgotten. In the meantime, American citizens will separate into their usual camps and identify all of the obvious causes and culprits except for one: themselves.
Many Americans will bristle at the idea that this defeat overseas can be laid at their feet. When U.S. forces had to endure the misery of the retreat from North Korea back to the 38th parallel, no one made the argument that it had happened because of the voters. No one turned to the American people during the fall of Saigon and said, “This is on you.”
So why would I do that now?
Much of what happened in Korea and Vietnam—ultimately constituting a tie and a loss, if we are to be accurate—was beyond the control of the American public. Boys were drafted and sent into battle, sometimes in missions never intended to be revealed to the public.
Afghanistan was different. This was a war that was immensely popular at the outset and mostly conducted in full view of the American public. The problem was that, once the initial euphoria wore off, the public wasn’t much interested in it. Coverage in print media remained solid, but cable-news coverage of Afghanistan dropped off quickly, especially once a new adventure was launched in Iraq.
In post-2001 America, it became fashionable to speak of “war weariness,” but citizens who were not in the military or part of a military family or community did not have to endure even minor inconveniences, much less shoulder major burdens such as a draft, a war tax, or resource shortages. The soldiers who served overseas in those first years of major operations soon felt forgotten. “America’s not at war” was a common refrain among the troops. “We’re at war. America’s at the mall.”
And now those same Americans have the full withdrawal from Afghanistan they apparently want: Some 70 percent of the public supports a pullout. Not that they care that intensely about it; as the foreign-policy scholar Stephen Biddle recently observed, the war is practically an afterthought in U.S. politics. “You would need an electron microscope to detect the effect of Afghanistan on any congressional race in the last decade,” Biddle said early this year. “It’s been invisible.” But Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden all ran on getting out of the war, and now we’re out.
What the public does care about, however, is using Afghanistan as raw material for cheap patriotism and partisan attacks (some right and some wrong, but few of them in good faith) on every president since 2001. After the worst attack on U.S. soil, Americans had no real interest in adult conversation about the reality of anti-terrorist operations in so harsh an environment as Afghanistan (which might have entailed a presence there long beyond 20 years), nor did they want to think about whether “draining the swamp” and modernizing and developing Afghanistan (which would mean a lot more than a few elections) was worth the cost and effort.