As President Joe Biden watched Kabul descend into hell, did
he think of his beloved William Butler Yeats?
He is the poet Biden recited as a teen to conquer his
stutter. And Biden has quoted Yeats before while talking about the Middle East.
اضافة اعلان
“The Second Coming” eerily sprang to life in the president’s
helter-skelter exit from Afghanistan, a land that still prizes falconry and
falcons flying in widening gyres.
When Yeats writes about darkness dropped in the sands of the
desert and a slouching “rough beast” with “a gaze blank and pitiless as the
sun,” he could be describing the Taliban. Anarchy loosed upon the world, a
blood-dimmed tide, and the worst, full of passionate intensity.
When Yeats writes about darkness dropped in the sands of the
desert and a slouching “rough beast” with “a gaze blank and pitiless as the
sun,” he could be describing the Taliban. Anarchy loosed upon the world, a
blood-dimmed tide, and the worst, full of passionate intensity.
Biden did the right thing getting us out of there. But he
did it badly.
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, as some in military circles are
derisively calling Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken, and Biden, consider themselves
foreign affairs savants. Yet even Democrats can’t defend them and are convening
hearings.
The pandemonium drew comparisons to some of the worst
debacles in modern American history: the fall of Saigon and the Bay of Pigs. A
baby hoisted over razor wire into the arms of a Marine. Afghans clinging to the
wings and landing gear of an American jet as it took off, then plunging to the
tarmac; later, human remains were found on one of the wheels. A 17-year-old
Afghan soccer player falling to his death off the side of a plane.
Women’s rights vanished with the crack of a Taliban whip.
The Wall Street Journal said some Taliban commanders were commandeering young
women to be brides for Taliban fighters. The story captured the heartbreaking
moment for young women who had never lived under Taliban rule.
A young
researcher, caught by surprise at the fall of Kabul, was working last Sunday in
a short skirt. Trapped at the office as the Taliban closed in, she thought
about wrapping herself in a curtain before a friend arrived to escort her home.
Allies expressed their furious sense of betrayal, with
British lawmakers raging against Biden in Parliament. Biden’s abrupt unilateral
path was “throwing us and everybody else to the fire,” said one.
It was another
hard lesson about getting tied up with the Americans for the British, who
enabled George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld to execute their
spurious, attenuated occupations of Muslim countries.
Americans are not built to occupy feudal countries under
scorching suns halfway around the globe. Even the British long ago had to face
the folly of that — in particular in 1842, when some 17,000 British and Indian
army soldiers, wives, and servants were killed as they tried to retreat through
the snowy mountains to
Jalalabad.
The idea that we were going to turn Iraq and Afghanistan
into mini-mes of Jeffersonian democracy was always an arrogant miscalculation,
driven by macho hubris, not national security.
If we stayed for a century —
installing corrupt, larcenous puppets, listening to generals lie about turning
the corner, surging, and wasting trillions — we couldn’t do it. (Gen. David
Petraeus, please stop talking.)
But how could we leave the tens of thousands of Afghans who
helped and trusted us to the tender mercies of the Taliban? A UN report warns
that the Taliban were hunting down people who worked with America or NATO, as
well as their families, and threatening to kill them.
Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, looked flummoxed when
The New York Times’ Helene Cooper pressed him on why they did not have a good
plan to save the Afghans desperately clawing to get into the airport.
The greatest military on earth is now dependent on
“diplomacy with the Taliban,” as Cooper posed it, to save the people who risked
their lives helping us. Austin and Gen. Mark Milley seemed to have bungled the
whole thing. They did not inspire confidence in that news conference, which
aired even as some Afghans in the military fled their country in American
aircraft and the Taliban were seizing American guns, helicopters, and trucks.
Donald Trump could have made safe and orderly passage a part
of his deal when he negotiated his 2020 “surrender agreement,” as his former
national security adviser H.R. McMaster called it in an interview with Bari
Weiss.
Donald Trump could have made safe and orderly passage a part
of his deal when he negotiated his 2020 “surrender agreement,” as his former
national security adviser H.R. McMaster called it in an interview with Bari
Weiss.
But Trump and Biden were so impatient to get out, their
screw-ups merged into strangulating red tape.
The US State Department dawdled for months in getting visas
for Afghan allies, and as the Taliban seized cities, towns, and provincial
capitals, it neglected contingency planning for a possible evacuation.
Still, it is enraging to watch a parade of dunderheads preen
on cable — anchors and generals and chatterers — the same people whose
cheerleading ensnared us in 20 years of quicksand in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We didn’t know 9/11 was coming, even though we should have.
We didn’t know January 6 was coming, even though we should have. We didn’t know
the Potemkin government in Afghanistan that we’d propped up for two decades
would fall in two seconds, even though we should have.
What else don’t we know?
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Opinion and Analysis
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