Author: Daniel Larison

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.

Jonathan Katz spoke with Emma Green at The Atlantic about the resistance he encountered to using accurate language while writing a piece about Haiti and possible U.S. intervention there for an unnamed publication. Katz ended up taking the piece elsewhere, and Foreign Policy would later publish it. Here is the relevant exchange:

Green: You wrote recently about an incident where you got an assignment for a national outlet – you don’t name it. You were supposed to be writing about the recent assassination of the Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse. You used the word occupation to refer to the role that the US Marines played in Haiti from 1915 to 1934. And your editor questioned you on that word.

As a caveat, I should say: I think there are a lot of well-educated Americans who don’t know much about the history of the US presence in the Caribbean. And it’s an editor’s role to add nuance and push back and ask dumb questions.

Still, that story struck me because it seemed like you were encountering a reflexive resistance to telling the story straight. The assumption is that if you’re using this kind of loaded word, one that gets tossed around in academic circles, you’re not telling it straight. You’re bringing an accusatory, ideological lens to bear on history. Why do you think that reflexive desire to shy away from naming things exists at national outlets?

Katz: That period of time was officially called “the US occupation of Haiti.” There are letters from occupation officials referring to themselves and saying, “On behalf of the American occupation, thank you for the fruit basket.” Stuff like that. That back-and-forth with this editor reflects a tendency to try to downplay the most egregious parts of America’s past. To a certain extent, we’re seeing that in domestic conversations as well with the 1619 Project and America’s history of racism.

This is how an empire has to operate. If you keep in mind all of these individual moments and string them together into a narrative, the conclusions that one can draw aren’t very friendly to self-identity and national identity – to the imperial project.

As Katz pointed out in his follow-up article describing the pushback he received, the US referred to the occupation of Haiti as an occupation to defend itself against the accurate accusations of the crudest sort of colonial domination. A hundred years ago, it suited the government to call it an occupation because that word at the time made the policy seem less brutal and exploitative than it really was. It was, as Katz notes, a “euphemism.” If it happened today, it would probably be called a stabilization mission or a humanitarian intervention to avoid too much scrutiny.

That resistance to calling an occupation by the correct term is a familiar one. Even when it involves a policy from decades ago, there is a strong desire to deny that the US did things like that to other countries. Americans love to tell ourselves that this is something that other countries do, and that we are different. After all, we’re the benevolent hegemon, or so the hegemonists would have us believe. Marilyn Young described this mentality in one of the essays published in the new collection, Making the Forever War:

The United States has not been an aggressor, because, by definition, it does not commit aggression. The hostility of others to the United States cannot, again by definition, be a response to American actions, because the United States does not invite hostility but only reacts to it. What the United States claims it intends, rather than what it does, should persuade any fair-minded observer of the righteousness of its policies.

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.

If there’s one thing hawks enjoy, it is creating doubt about U.S. reliability:

Mr. Biden “knows from long experience that America’s actions abroad matter, but he is willingly ignoring the far-reaching consequences of America’s withdrawal in Afghanistan,” said Bradley Bowman, an Afghanistan veteran and senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Center on Military and Political Power, a hawkish think tank in Washington.

“We can expect Chinese and Russian diplomats to ramp up with new credibility a whisper campaign in capitals around the world that Washington is an unreliable partner who will abandon its friends sooner or later,” he said.

Maybe Chinese and Russian diplomats will make this claim, but why would anyone else take it seriously? The only people that seem to believe that US credibility everywhere else hinges on prolonging an unwinnable war in Central Asia are the hawkish dead-enders that never wanted our involvement in the war to end. The appeal to credibility here is disingenuous, and it is the last resort of war supporters that have no other arguments left. As Mike Black put it on Twitter yesterday:

Love that FDD is doing our adversaries' work for them by openly talking about this mythical whisper campaign on how a landlocked country in Central Asia is a barometer of the US's commitment anywhere else, because they all have brain worms https://t.co/3yY3Yn6kgm

— Mike Black (@MikeBlack114) August 11, 2021

These hawks warn that the US will lose credibility with all of its allies unless it does exactly what the hawks want in every crisis or conflict. They impute their own preferences to the allies to make them seem more important to US interests than they are. It is remarkable how all of our allies are supposed to have exactly the same view of every issue as the most aggressive American hawks. Hawks said that the UShad to bomb the Syrian government’s forces in 2013 to maintain credibility with allies the world over, and then when the US did not do that there were zero consequences for US credibility. They insisted that the US had to retaliate for the Abqaiq attack in 2019 or there would be dire consequences for US credibility in the eyes of its partners. The US did not retaliate, and US credibility was unaffected. Now they tell us that the US is proving itself an unreliable partner again by withdrawing from Afghanistan after almost twenty years. One wonders just how many decades the US has to prop up a client state in order to be considered reliable.

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.

While testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a top Biden administration Pentagon official confirmed today that the illegal US military presence in Syria would continue:

The Biden administration is committed to retaining US military presence in northeast Syria.

This is consistent with reporting from last month that said that US forces would be staying there. The continued presence in Syria has the least justification of any mission in the region, and it has absolutely no legal authorization, so of course it is the one that will continue indefinitely. Officially, the approximately 900 troops in Syria are there to advise the Syrian Democratic Forces against the remnants of the Islamic State, but now that ISIS has been defeated they have no reason to be there. They also have no authorization to be there, and their mission has nothing to do with US security. US forces have been operating illegally in Syria for the last seven years ever since the Obama administration expanded the campaign against ISIS there, and every day that they remain in Syrian territory is another day that the US proves that it has no respect for international law.

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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.

Derek Davison commented on the three U.S. strikes in Somalia that have taken place in the last few weeks, and noted that there is hardly anyone asking why the US is engaged in hostilities in Somalia in 2021:

There’s no questioning why al-Shabab, whose current ambitions don’t extend beyond Somalia and whose reach extends no further afield than neighboring Kenya, should be regarded as a threat to the United States. There’s no questioning why the 2001 AUMF is still on the books at all some 20 years later, when everyone involved in planning and carrying out the September 11 attacks is either dead or in hiding. There’s no questioning the absurdity of claiming the right “self-defense” in reference to another country’s military in a battle in which no American personnel were at risk. All of that is just How It Is, apparently, and there’s no sense wasting our beautiful minds on the subject.

The other wars that the US is currently involved in are like this. Once the US gets involved in a conflict, it never fully extricates itself. It doesn’t matter if the original reason for this involvement made any sense, and it doesn’t matter if there is no real legal authorization for it. It doesn’t matter that it has nothing to do with defending the United States, because once the military is involved somewhere it can claim to be defending itself without having to account for why they are there.

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.