Rahmat Gul/AP Photo
Taliban fighters display their flag on patrol in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 19, 2021.
Clichés become clichés because they are true, at least for a while. When the British started calling Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires” back in 1842, they came up with one that had real lasting power. More than a century and a half later, the Soviets buried their benighted empire there, and now, with a little luck, so might the U.S.
Of course, lots of people will complain about this. They will say the empire could have lived on if only we had listened to them. They will be nostalgic for the days when it was still possible to believe that they were living in a time when their nation was allegedly feared and respected because of the size and the prowess of its military forces. This is baked into the mentality of yearning for a lost empire, as it is for all lost causes. Think of France in Algeria. (I am currently reading volume one of Martin Walker’s “Bruno, Chief of Police” detective series, in which provincial French folk are still complaining about that in 2010.) Stephen Wertheim puts the point nicely in a Washington Post op-ed that begins: “You don’t get to lose a war and expect the result to look like you’ve won it.”
One could write an entire doctoral dissertation on the multiple, overlapping failures that have characterized most of the mainstream media coverage of the collapse of the 20-year war in Afghanistan. So many of the pathologies that interfere with its ability to tell simple truths about our country and our world are being run through this wringer that it would take literally hundreds of pages to do justice to all of them; to explain how they operate across our media institutions and why they operate the way they do. Ironically, the splintering of these same institutions made possible by the internet has allowed some writers and analysts to capture a few of these, practically in real time.
The most obvious among the myriad failures of mainstream coverage of the crisis is its stubborn ahistoricism. The Biden administration may have screwed up the exit of U.S. troops and the friendly Afghans who helped them, but hey, this was a 20-year, nearly $2.4 trillion war effort that was built on lies and self-delusion and that we didn’t really want to win in the first place. Prospect alumnus Matt Yglesias does a fine job of laying out some of the history that ought to be included in any story about who is to blame, but almost never is, in his Substack essay “Biden (and Trump) Did the Right Thing on Afghanistan.”
For more helpful historical background on the conflict, take a look at these contributions from Adam Tooze, Robert Wright, Ali A. Olomi, and Sergey Radchenko, and (on Facebook) from Peter Galbraith. In matters related to “Af-Pak,” I always rely on my friend Husain Haqqani. Here he is on “Pakistan’s Pyrrhic Victory” in Foreign Affairs. Finally, for some scholarly disputation on the blame heaped on Zbigniew Brzezinski for the rise of the Taliban, you’ll have to go here (h/t Rob Rakove).
Many decades ago, the polymath economist John Kenneth Galbraith (Peter’s dad) proposed a rule that every time a reporter publicized an economist’s prediction about the future, it should be immediately followed up by a list of that same economist’s previous predictions. That would, in virtually all cases, demonstrate the futility of taking the original prediction seriously (and hence, obviate the need for the article, so his idea, because of its very merits, was an obvious nonstarter). And yet today, the makeshift Afghanistan punditocracy is dominated by people who were either (a) terribly wrong about virtually everything they said about the conflict in the past, (b) lying about it, or (c) most commonly, alas, both.
I find myself a little shocked to be recommending a piece by someone who is not only “vice president for research and policy at the Charles Koch Institute” but was also “President Donald Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Afghanistan.” But this William Ruger fellow, writing in The National Interest, is also a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and most importantly, makes a great deal of sense. He praises Biden for “displaying real courage by sticking with a decision that remains prudential given the realities about Afghanistan and the United States. Biden is showing the requisite realist spine that America needs at this moment.” Ruger mocks his critics who claim the U.S. “could have stayed longer at a low cost, all the while preserving an Afghan government that was already teetering when even more American boots were on the ground. They also place the blame for the collapse we are seeing on withdrawal rather than on the failed two decade-long Afghan nation-building project and its architects.”
Getting down to proverbial brass tacks, he indicts most MSM coverage because the critics in question “were those same [Afghan war] architects, along with their advisors and supporters outside government. Indeed, these were often the very people who the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock outed in his Afghanistan Papers series as having had little clue how to find success in Afghanistan and who consistently misled the American people about the state of the war. Moreover, these critics are committed to propping up another, much grander failed project—the primacist approach to the Greater Middle East and the world more generally.”
With similar concerns in mind, I wrote the following in my 2020 book Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse:
The progress of [the Afghan] war would also turn out to be based on a massive campaign of deliberate deception, as a comprehensive internal Pentagon study would eventually reveal. That information was made public following what the Washington Post called a “three-year public records battle” between the Post, the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute based at George Washington University working with the newspaper on the project, and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), an agency charged with oversight of US spending in Afghanistan. In late 2019, more than eighteen years after the war began, the Post was able to publish a lengthy overview of the study’s contents along with extensive excerpts from the study itself. Post reporter Craig Whitlock, summarizing the more than two thousand pages of documents and interviews the Post finally obtained, said that the US military’s true understanding of the effect of the massive US military, diplomatic, and economic investment in that nation was at odds with what Americans had been told. “The documents,” he said, “contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.
In other words, we have especially clear and quite recent reason to know that we have been consistently lied to by the military (as we usually are; see, e.g., Vietnam, Cambodia, Central America, Iraq, etc.) and by the very people whom reporters are depending on now to tell you how awfully the Biden administration is screwing up things and how much better everything would be if only the liars and the people who lost the war, or cheerled for it, were in charge now.
Ruger goes after John Podhoretz, which is all to the good, but for a more systematic takedown of an extremely typical specimen, go to Judd Legum’s Substack Popular Information, for his essay “The Media’s Systematic Failure on Afghanistan.” In it, and merely for purposes of example, he dissects a lengthy news report entitled “Biden’s Promise to Restore Competence to the Presidency Is Undercut by Chaos in Afghanistan,” by the Post’s Matt Viser, in which the reporter credits reports that the decision and its execution reflected “an inability to plan” and “an underestimation of a foreign adversary,” laying blame virtually exclusively on Biden for the current chaos in Kabul.
Who are Viser’s sources? The reporter describes them as “leading lawmakers and others” who believe that “the chaotic, and deadly, implementation of [Biden’s] decision reflects a failure by Biden at a critical moment to deliver the steady leadership and sound judgment he promised.” But who are these sources, really? Legum notes that Viser’s “lead quote comes from former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.” He then goes through Panetta’s previous statements about the war, and man, the dude was wrong about just about everything. Legum helpfully adds that “Panetta was also quoted by Fox News, the New York Post, The Hill, MSNBC, NBC News, the New York Daily News, CNN and many other outlets. None of them noted Panetta’s prior inaccurate predictions about the future of Afghanistan.”
The most obvious among the myriad failures of mainstream coverage of the crisis is its stubborn ahistoricism.
(I note that in Politico Playbook, Panetta is respectfully quoted saying to CNN’s John King: “I think of John Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs [botched Cuba invasion in 1961]. It unfolded quickly and the president thought that everything would be fine. And that was not the case.” I have written extensively about the Bay of Pigs in three different books, including my doctoral dissertation. This is literally the stupidest comment I can ever remember seeing about the Bay of Pigs debacle. To compare it to Afghanistan is like comparing apples and, say, orangutans.)
Back to Legum: “The next person quoted [by Viser] is Ryan Crocker, the former Ambassador to Afghanistan during the Bush and Obama administrations.” Crocker goes so far as to say of Biden, “I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our nation as commander in chief.” Yes, well, read his previous statements and then wonder if Viser should be quoting him as an expert and if the guy should have had the good sense to STFU in the first place. But he does not. Again, Legum notes, “Crocker’s role in covering up the corruption of the Afghan government is not mentioned in Viser’s Washington Post article or the other outlets that quoted him for criticizing the withdrawal—NBC News, The Hill, Axios, and Fox News.”
There are others. In typical establishment “the Republicans are not crazy and it’s important to quote ‘both sides’ so as not to give succor to those who claim we are a liberal media conspiracy” journalism, Viser winds up with additional attacks from Afghanistan hawks Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Mark Warner, and Seth Moulton. But “unrepresented in Viser’s piece,” Legum adds, were “any voices that supported withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan—even though a poll last month found that 73% of Americans supported withdrawal.” Eric Boehlert has more on this kind of thing, here.
Oh, and have any Republicans been asked about why, on its now-deleted webpage, the GOP cheered the fact that on February 2, 2020, the Trump administration signed a “‘preliminary peace agreement’ with the Taliban that ‘sets the stage’ to end the U.S.-Afghan war that had been raging for more than two decades.” The Republicans trumpeted the fact that their hero had negotiated a deal that would see “nearly 5,000” U.S. troops withdrawn from the region in exchange for “a Taliban agreement to not allow Afghanistan to be used for transnational terrorism”—in case anyone needs a refresher.
Note that I’ve been sticking to the mainstream, not even dealing with the lunacy over at, say, Fox. But I did happen upon an essay by one of the few conservatives I enjoy and learn from, Walter Russell Mead over at The Wall Street Journal. To my horror, his not-all-that-terrible essay actually ran under this ridiculous headline: “Biden’s Chamberlain Moment in Afghanistan”—perhaps the worst analogy imaginable. (Going to Hitler, as a rule, almost always means you’ve already lost the argument.) Scrolling down to the article’s end, it was followed in order by recommendations for these other Journal masterpieces:
- William McGurn: “Afghanistan Reveals All the President’s Weaknesses”
- Review & Outlook: “Biden’s Afghanistan Surrender”
- Review & Outlook: “Biden to Afghanistan: Drop Dead”
(And this was before the paper ran Mike Pence’s lunatic essay that insisted that had Biden stuck to Trump’s schedule, and left four months earlier, everything would have been hunky-dory.)
But the most offensive piece I came across all week was Mark Thiessen’s Washington Post op-ed “Biden Is Blaming Everyone but Himself. But He’s the One Who Gave the Taliban a Green Light.” In it, this advocate for torture in Iraq suggested that it was too bad Trump was no longer president because if he were, “[h]e would have unleashed a bombing campaign the likes of which the Taliban had not seen since 2001.” This is not only belied by everything Trump said or did regarding the Taliban, it’s also a call for mindless (and pointless) mass murder. And the Post printed it. Shame on everyone involved.
