Author: Daniel Larison

Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, reminded us this week just how blinkered the opponents of withdrawing from Afghanistan are:

The alternative to withdrawal from Afghanistan was not “endless occupation” but open-ended presence. Occupation is imposed, presence invited. Unless you think we are occupying Japan, Germany, & South Korea. And yes, withdrawal was the problem.

An “open-ended presence” that is violently opposed by an insurgency is something quite different from military deployments in peaceful, allied countries. The consent of a kleptocratic client state that is entirely dependent on U.S. support is not the same as that of a stable, democratic ally. Anyone even slightly familiar with conditions in these other countries would understand that having troops there is not the same as keeping thousands of troops in a war zone. If the U.S. had kept an “open-ended presence,” that would have meant an increasing number of American casualties every year for as long they remained there. The U.S. has no vital interests in Afghanistan that would justify keeping a military presence there in any case. There is certainly nothing that would justify accepting the cost of more Americans killed in action in an unwinnable war.

One can debate the merits of a continued U.S. military presence in these other countries, but it is clear that they are not being put in harm’s way by staying there. If U.S. forces had repeatedly come under attack from local insurgents in post-WWII Germany, South Korea, or Japan, it is doubtful that they would have remained as long as they have. Another important point that Haass misses is that U.S. interests in these other countries are significantly greater than they have ever been in Afghanistan. The U.S. has more at stake in the security of these states than it does in fighting a desultory conflict in Central Asia. Haass knows this, and he is pretending not to see these differences because he is reflexively against withdrawing U.S. forces from anywhere for any reason.

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells profiles Elbridge Colby and discusses his hawkishness on China in a recent New Yorker article. This section was probably the most telling part of the entire piece:

Colby’s response is to try to sever the transformational vision of the forever wars from his own hawkishness – to argue that those were neoconservative adventures, intent on democratizing foreign countries, and that his own realist camp does not envision regime change and does not aspire to remake China. “What really makes me angry, frankly, is the aggressive kind of neoconservatives and liberal hawks. They are the ones that used up that gas tank of will [bold mine-DL],” Colby told me.

It is remarkable that Colby identifies using up the “gas tank of will” in the United States as his chief objection to neoconservatives and liberal hawks. He is not put off by their militarism or the destruction they have wrought, but he is angry at them for making it harder to sell his kind of militarism to the public. Indeed, “he is troubled by whether most Americans will see Taiwan as of sufficient interest to them.”

In fact, most Americans have consistently said for years that they do not support going to war to defend Taiwan. This is one of the more noticeable gaps between foreign policy elites and the public. As the Chicago Council of Global Affairs noted earlier this year in its survey report, “Majorities of opinion leaders across partisan lines support using US troops to defend Taiwan from Chinese invasion, while a majority of the American public opposes doing so, regardless of partisan affiliation.” Public support for going to war for Taiwan has increased since 2014, but it is still only at 41%.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

There is a lot of chatter from the usual suspects about how Biden will need to “reassure” allies and clients following the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but that seems like a serious mistake. First, it’s not at all obvious that allies and clients genuinely need any reassuring, and when the US has made the mistake of catering to the complaints of allies and clients it has led to some of the more serious foreign policy errors of the last twenty years. It was the misguided effort to “reassure” Saudi Arabia and the UAE six years ago that resulted in the disastrous policy of US backing for the war on Yemen, and that policy has been maintained for all this time on the grounds that the US could not “afford” to alienate these governments. The US needs to offer fewer reassurances to its allies and clients, because their dependency is a liability for the US and it does them no favors, either.

US allies and clients are so accustomed to relying on the US that they neglect their own defenses and capabilities, and then when the US does something they disagree with they find that they are not able to act independently even if they want to try. Far from viewing the US as unreliable, they are all too comfortable with the US bearing most of the burden for their security and show no interest in assuming more responsibilities. Contrary to all the yowling we have heard over the last two weeks, the US is perceived as being so reliable that these other governments feel no urgency to improve their own defenses. An interesting example of this appears in a recent Financial Times report from Taiwan, where most of the population doesn’t anticipate a Chinese attack and the government has not made much of a concerted effort to bolster the island’s military capabilities:

“The government should be raising people’s awareness of the military threat. But instead of doing real things, they just talk, telling people to hate China and love the US and Japan,” she said.

As Taiwan’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign gained traction this summer following donations from the US and Japan, many Taiwanese posted pictures of their inoculation records on Facebook with the words, “Thank you, Daddy America!”

Critics said Tsai’s administration had fed complacency by highlighting Taiwan’s ever-stronger relations with Washington. “The public will think that we are so safe, America loves us and will come to our rescue when push comes to shove – it takes away the urge to be self-reliant,” said Liu.

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

The forever war has now apparently expanded to the Congo:

US special operations forces have arrived in the east of the DR Congo to help in the fight against a feared jihadist militia enjoying “sanctuary” in the region’s nature parks, US and Congolese sources said Wednesday.

The fight is against an insurgent group called the Allied Democratic Forces. One of the group’s factions has supposedly aligned itself with the Islamic State, and it is on this extremely shaky basis that the US is sending troops to help fight them. Originally an Ugandan insurgent group committed to overthrowing the government in Kampala, it has carried out a number of deadly attacks in the DRC in the last decade. The group was added to the State Department’s foreign terrorist organization (FTO) list in March of this year under the designation of ISIS-DRC. As Jared Thompson noted in an analysis piece last month, “[State] did not provide extensive detail on the nature of the relationship between the ADF and the Islamic State.” There is no question that it is a brutal group that has killed many civilians, like many other armed groups that have operated in eastern Congo over the last twenty-plus years, but why are any US forces involved in fighting them?

There is no pretense that this has anything to do with US security. US troops are being sent on a mission that Congress never approved to fight in a country against a group that cannot possibly threaten the United States as a favor to a government that we are not obliged to defend. The nature of the connection between this group and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is unclear. Thompson writes:

A June 2021 report from the UN Group of Experts on the DRC, meanwhile, could not substantiate “direct support or command and control of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” with respect to the ADF.

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Anatol Lieven explains how the failure to anticipate the collapse of Afghan government forces illustrates how little the US understands Afghanistan even after twenty years:

I remembered this episode three years later, when the Communist state eventually fell to the mujahedeen; six years later, as the Taliban swept across much of Afghanistan; and again this week, as the country collapses in the face of another Taliban assault. Such “arrangements” – in which opposing factions agree not to fight, or even to trade soldiers in exchange for safe passage – are critical to understanding why the Afghan army today has collapsed so quickly (and, for the most part, without violence). The same was true when the Communist state collapsed in 1992, and the practice persisted in many places as the Taliban advanced later in the 1990s.

The Biden administration has said that the collapse of Afghan government forces is proof that they were unwilling to fight for their country, but this misses the point. It is true that these forces were not willing to fight for their corrupt government, and they had no interest in dying in a failing cause, so it made more sense for them to cut deals. A weak and corrupt government kept afloat with foreign money and military power is not going to command the loyalty of many people, and no one is going to want to risk dying to defend it when there is another option available. The fact that our government apparently didn’t understand this in Afghanistan is just more proof that our leaders never knew what they were doing there and were never going to learn.

Furthermore, the Afghan military had been designed to rely on the US The UShaphazardly built up an Afghan military modeled on ours and trained to fight in the same way, but that model and training make no sense when US air support isn’t available. The US built up an Afghan military on the assumption that our forces would never fully leave. That was a very poor assumption.

The U.S.-backed government was also always at a political disadvantage in part because it was U.S.-backed. Carter Malkasian commented on this last month:

The Taliban had an advantage in inspiring Afghans to fight. Their call to fight foreign occupiers, steeped in references to Islamic teachings, resonated with Afghan identity. For Afghans, jihad – more accurately understood as “resistance” or “struggle” than the caricatured meaning it has acquired in the United States – has historically been a means of defense against oppression by outsiders, part of their endurance against invader after invader. Even though Islam preaches unity, justice and peace, the Taliban were able to tie themselves to religion and to Afghan identity in a way that a government allied with non-Muslim foreign occupiers could not match.

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Bret Stephens is in full fearmongering mode:

Now, in the aftermath of Saigon redux, every enemy will draw the lesson that the United States is a feckless power, with no lasting appetite for defending the Pax Americana that is still the basis for world order. And every ally – Taiwan, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Israel, Japan – will draw the lesson that it is on its own in the face of its enemies. The Biden Doctrine means the burial of the Truman Doctrine.

Since everyone wants to make the comparison with Saigon and the fall of South Vietnam, it is instructive to look at what did and didn’t happen after 1975. Every other U.S. ally did not draw the lesson that it is on its own. Formal US allies did not change their allegiances, nor did they assume that the US wouldn’t fulfill its commitments to them. Just a few years after the fall of Saigon, the US terminated its defense treaty with Taiwan, and once again nothing of the sort happened. It’s as if other governments don’t judge US reliability as the hawks claim they do. Hawks are unable to see the world as these other states do, and so they project their reactions onto these governments to lend their complaints more weight. The trouble is that the allies and clients mostly don’t see things the way they do, and don’t draw sweeping conclusions about US reliability everywhere from its decision to end involvement in one conflict. When you see hawks holding forth about the dangers of losing credibility, understand that they are promoting a propaganda message and not offering serious analysis.

Hawkish credibility claims are annoying because they are both sweeping and extremely vague. According to them, the entire alliance system is now in jeopardy because the US ended its part in an unwinnable war. But they never spell out what that means in practice. Stephens says that allies and clients will “draw the lesson” that they are on their own, but what is the practical significance of that? What are these states going to do in the future that they aren’t doing now? If the hawks are right about this (they’re not), how would they prove it? If the other states were losing confidence in US guarantees, we should expect to see fairly significant and sudden changes in the military spending and shifting alignments of many countries. If these states now fear that they are “on their own” (they don’t), they ought to be taking more responsibility for their own security. If past experience is any guide, that isn’t going to happen. Warning about lost credibility is a cheap and easy way to attack a president’s decision when you can’t really defend your own policy preferences.

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Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.