The big news of the week is that we suffered another Vietnam defeat--though the war in Afghanistan was different from the Vietnam War. The Trumpublicans want to blame Biden even though it was Trump who made a deal with the Taliban and who announced America's intention on leaving Afghanistan. Others would like to blame Obama and there are originalists who choose to blame Bush because he started the war.
But perhaps we should take a trip in the Wayback Machine to July of 1979 when Jimmy Carter was the President. For it was back then that the US first got involved in Afghanistan.
It wasn't like Afghanistan was a stable and peaceful nation back then. Even the Communists in that nation were fighting each other. But when Communist regime took power in 1978 in a coup that saw the overthrow of a Soviet friendly government that was granting rights to women, the Mujahideen formed a group to fight the liberal social changes that were introduced before the coup but were continued by the Communist government. In 1979, infighting between the Communists saw the assassination-aided replacement of one Communist leader with another. And in a move that was then judged to likely bring in Soviet intervention, Carter authorized $500,000 to be used by the CIA to covertly support, with non-lethal aid, the Mujahideen. That support was both timely and effective in maintaining the Mujahideen through a tough time.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan toward the end of the Carter Presidency. Reagan upped the aid and included weapons and, in conjunction with Saudi Arabia's efforts, brought in radical violent Islamic extremists from other nations. Reagan called theses fighters 'freedom fighters.' After the Mujahideen defeated the Soviets, Afghans were left to fend for themselves and rival terrorist groups, such as the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, fought each other for control. We should note here that the Taliban began as a group that wanted to restore order and an ethnic hegemony over Afghanistan. After gaining control, the Taliban allowed violent Islamic groups to have safe haven in Afghanistan. And then came 9-11 and Bush's invasion of Afghanistan.
In a blog discussion on the subject, one person suggested that the lesson to be learned here was that the US should not engage in nation building. That might or might be true, but it isn't the biggest lesson to be learned. Another lesson to be learned is that we cannot afford to employ binary logic to understand and respond to a complex world. In other words, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
But the biggest lesson here is that when Carter signed to to aid the Mujahideen, he was creating something that would eventually become too big a bite for the US to take despite it has most powerful military in the world. Though it is impossible to determine now, we should speculate on whether we would have the same problems with violent Islamic extremist groups today if we had left Afghanistan alone in 1979. After all, had the Communist government finally stabilized the nation by defeating the Mujahideen, we probably would not have had the Taliban for the Taliban came into being to stabilize the nation and it drew its initial members from the Mujahideen. That means that violent Islamic radicals would not have Afghanistan as a place to meet and greet and train. Even with the fall of the Soviet Union, a stable Afghan government that granted rights to women would not require US troops to invade the nation.
The big lesson here is that of our over dependence on militarism. We believe that because we are the most powerful nation in the world, that we can often use force, by either our military or proxies, as a means to accomplish strategic goals. But both Vietnam and now Afghanistan have proven that to be false. And not just that it was proven false, it was disproved at a very high price paid by civilians in those nations and by our military troops. Yet, we might not have learned that lesson. After all, much of our American pride is in the power of our military.
Our loss in Vietnam caused a brief period of reflection in the US. But that time period was all too brief as partially demonstrated by Carter's decision to covertly send aid to the Mujahideen and then very demonstratively by Bush's Persian Gulf War to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Evidence for our over dependence on the military can be seen in our military budgets. We spend more on defense than the next 8 nations combined. The same can be said about the Pentagon budget. What should be noted here is that our defense spending cannot be reduced to just the budget that the Pentagon is given.
Finally, there is something else we should note about our militarism. It is one of the 3 triplets of evil identified by Martin Luther King Jr. The other two members were racism and economic exploitation. And King described these 3 triplets as being inextricable. That means that we can defeat one without eliminating the others. So the question becomes with regard to militarism, when will we ever learn?
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