"Why does every American setback have to be a morality tale," he wondered, "a search for scapegoats and an indictment of American foreign policy in general?" Why, he asked, had disappointments in Afghanistan "Been treated by so many as a tale of sin and hubris?" That the war on terror had "Come to be viewed as a symptom and for some the source of much of America's troubles today" was altogether mystifying.
The war on terrorism will continue, Wolfowitz believes, and it "Is going to be very long." As an incident in that long war, Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan compared with Neville Chamberlain's betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938.
The outcome of the war turned on Afghan memory and American illusions, the first infused with religion, the second tied to ideology.
If the items comprising that litany are familiar, why did Afghanistan's abrupt collapse in August 2021 come as such a shock? In The Afghanistan Papers, Craig Whitlock offers a persuasive answer: because U.S. political leaders and coalition commanders routinely lied about the war's actual trajectory.
No amount of buck-passing will absolve the U.S. military of substantial responsibility for the dismal outcome of the Afghanistan War.
In combination with its infernal twin in Iraq, the Afghanistan War represented a last desperate effort to sustain the global primacy to which Washington had laid claim following the Cold War.
With the end of the Afghanistan War, Americans ought to have had their fill of distant crusades.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-last-crusade/
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