Posted on July 26,
2021
Taliban Tools
We're all Ilhan
Omar now
by
Daniel
Clark
In a March 2019 speech to the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D,
Minn.) referenced the 9-11 attacks by saying, "some people did something." The Somali-born congresswoman was widely
denounced for that trivialization, but how much does it really differ from the
general attitude of the American people?
President Biden is now carrying out the policy that
was advocated by his two immediate predecessors, which is to "end" the war in
Afghanistan, without regard for its outcome.
Public reactions to his decision have, for the most part, ranged from
approval to resignation. Even many of
those who should know better have been reticent to criticize the feckless
order. Bill O'Reilly throws up his
hands over the Afghans' apparent unwillingness to defend their own
country. K.T. McFarland, the Reagan-era
Pentagon spokeswoman who served as Deputy National Security Advisor for
President Trump, is willing to yield to the Taliban on the basis that
nation-building never works. Both of
these critiques are fatuous.
O'Reilly's
remarks would make perfect sense if our mission in Afghanistan had been to
protect the Afghan people from the Taliban.
They become nonsensical as soon as you remember that the war is being
fought for our own national interests.
For our sake, we needed to depose the Taliban, and never again let them
return to power. There are only two
circumstances under which we should be willing to withdraw. Either we pursue the Taliban into Pakistan
and stamp them out, a move that would risk the possibility of nuclear warfare,
or else we maintain a small force in Afghanistan to repeatedly swat down the
Taliban whenever they arise. To pull out
even as the Taliban are attacking and gaining ground against the Afghan forces
should never have been an option. If the
Afghans are still incapable of defending their country against the Taliban,
that should be taken as a compelling argument for our continued presence there,
not for our withdrawal.
As for McFarland, she surely ought to realize that her
contention is plainly false.
Nation-building is not an enviable task, but there are obvious examples
of it working, even in our nation's relatively brief history of foreign
conflicts. Our nation-building efforts
indisputably succeeded in Germany and Japan.
They eventually did so in the Philippines after the Spanish-American
War, and arguably in Iraq. Granted, none
of these nations conducts itself today exactly as we would prefer. Nobody ever said we were going to turn Iraq
into Nebraska, but things did stabilize there to the point where we were able
to withdraw most of our forces, and do so victoriously.
Remember
that George W. Bush also spoke against nation-building when he first ran for
president in 2000, but he was referring to situations in which we needn't have
gotten involved, such as in creating new nations in the Balkans, and
reinstalling president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. Nevertheless, he embarked upon nation-building
efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, because he had no other realistic options.
Once you are dedicated to regime change, you can
either replace the old regime with something, or else you can leave the nation
in a state of chaos. In the case of
Afghanistan, in which our enemies are overthrown but not destroyed, this second
option would probably lead to them returning to power, as appears to be
happening now. If we were really serious
about holding the Taliban accountable, our only logical course of action would
be to maintain a significant military force in Afghanistan until that nation is
able to stand on its own, or until the Taliban are no more.
The only way we could possibly fail to win in
Afghanistan is if we quit, yet that's all anybody seems to want to do. We are said to be a war-weary nation, but the
vast majority of us have gone about our lives unaware of the war on a
day-to-day basis. Critics refer to the "forever
war" as if it had been 20 years of continuous combat, when in fact direct military
engagements have been so infrequent as to render comparisons to the durations
of previous wars irrelevant. Our terrorist
enemies are fully aware that they'd never survive a confrontation with the
United States military. Instead, they
hope to achieve victory against us softies back here on the homefront. For lazy-minded defeatists to suggest that
the war in Afghanistan equals the Korean War times seven plays right into their
hands.
What's really alarming is that defeatism has become a
bipartisan phenomenon. We already knew
the Democrats wouldn't stay on our side for long, but as the Republicans have
fallen in line behind Donald Trump, many of them have come around to supporting
his contention that the U.S. should never have invaded Afghanistan in the first
place. What should our response to 9-11
have been, then? A tariff on rugs?
By any reasonable analysis, the terrorist group that
took down the Twin Towers and the entity to which we're conceding in
Afghanistan are one and the same. It was
the Taliban who allowed al-Qaeda to operate in their country, and then refused
to give them up to us after the fact.
That's no minor point, or at least it shouldn't be. After almost 3,000 people were murdered, and
Manhattan turned into a post-apocalyptic heap of smoldering rubble, the Taliban
continued to harbor the perpetrators, even knowing that doing so would lead to
their own expulsion. They are
accessories to the 9-11 attacks, no different than if they had driven Osama bin
Laden's getaway car.
Regardless of the validity of the criticisms of the
post-invasion phase of the war, there's no excuse for ever allowing the Taliban
to recapture their operational base. Yet
this is what is being done, apparently without significant opposition among the
American people. What must terrorists
throughout the Islamic world be thinking?
Remember that bin Laden was motivated by the weakness America showed in
withdrawing from Somalia. If we now back
down from an enemy that was actually complicit in an atrocity against us, do we
really imagine that it will buy us peace?
There was a time when Rep. Omar's absurd
understatement that "some people did something" would have been genuinely
outrageous, but now she's just stating our national policy. People do things. Airplanes crash. Buildings fall. People die.
Get over it.
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