There are many lessons to learn from the disastrous US pullout from Afghanistan, but there is one that we should take home right now: Failure must be punished.
The United States has been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years. It has been obvious for the last few years that we would be leaving soon. Former President Donald Trump wanted to leave Afghanistan, but the generals managed to slow him down and wait him out. Instead of making plans, they stonewalled.
When President Joe Biden ordered them to get out, there wasn’t a lot of time for planning, but they managed to get what they did wrong.
US forces fled Bagram under cover of darkness, with no warning to anyone. (But botched even that, turning off the lights as they left, which gave looters free rein for many hours before Afghan officials showed up.)
Not only did that midnight skedaddle deprive us of a valuable resource (we could use a secure airfield about now), it signaled weakness to the Afghans on both sides of that country’s civil war. When the Soviets left Afghanistan, they were defeated, but they left in order; we snuck out like a guilty lover with a husband approaching the front door.
Our efforts were marked by institutional failure at every level, from the lack of planning at the top to the spooks who told us, last Thursday, that the Afghan army might hold out for more than 90 days (it lasted fewer than 90 hours). These are the same intelligence agencies, by the way, that spent four years promoting the exploded “Russian-collusion” fable.
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