If you’ve ever been on a date with someone who got up to go to the restroom and never came back, you know how Afghan officers at Bagram Airfield felt when they woke up the other day to find the American military gone.
According to the Afghans, our units vacated in the middle of the night without so much as a goodbye, cutting off the electricity on their way out. The sudden departure gave looters a chance to ransack some barracks before the Afghan military established control.
The American experience in Afghanistan has produced a lot of tragedy, but even tragedies can include moments of farce. It’s conceivable that the U.S. commander decided to escape without an awkward breakup conversation.
The U.S. says it coordinated its withdrawal with the Afghan government. It’s entirely believable that the Afghan military received a notification but, due to bureaucratic lethargy or simple bungling, never got around to acting on it.
In any event, the U.S. has completed 90% of its pullout from the country where our forces have been fighting for nearly 20 years. We are not leaving in the glow of victory but with the fragrance of failure. Our best efforts were never enough to stamp out the Taliban and establish a secure and democratic government in Kabul.
This really should not have come as a surprise. Afghanistan is a distant and alien land that, when we arrived in 2001, might as well have been on a different planet. The idea that we had the wisdom, resolve or tools to remake its society required an Olympic-sized leap of faith.
We might have learned from previous failures, including one that has been going on not for 20 years but for 60: Cuba. After Fidel Castro led a Communist revolution to gain power, the U.S. undertook a series of efforts to punish, isolate and topple the regime.
When Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in 1975, allowing her to rule by decree, U.S. ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan jokingly informed President Gerald Ford, “Under your administration, the United States has become the world’s largest democracy.”
President Joe Biden can claim his own dubious achievement. It was under him that, for the first time since 1959, Cuba freed itself from the Castros. In April, Fidel’s brother Raul, who succeeded his brother as dictator, stepped down.
Alas, he didn’t make way for a democratically elected leader. He handed the reins to a fellow Communist whose paramount mission will be keeping all power in the hands of the party.
The Havana regime has endured in the face of the implacable hostility of the world’s premier superpower. Washington has tried to impose its will with a variety of measures — blocking trade and investment, banning travel, cutting off diplomatic relations and sponsoring a clownish armed invasion by Cuban exiles. None of it worked, even after the 1991 demise of Castro’s longtime patron, the Soviet Union.
President Barack Obama tried a different approach, lifting the travel ban and easing economic sanctions. President Donald Trump reversed most of Obama’s changes. Through it all, life has gone on pretty much as always under Cuban communism.
Sooner or later, you would think, the rulers of a tiny island nation of 11 million people, located just 90 miles from Florida, would have to capitulate to the demands of the colossus looming over them. No one contemplating the mismatch in 1960 would have bet that Castro’s regime would survive this endless siege. But survive it has.
In Afghanistan and Cuba, not to mention Vietnam and Iraq, Americans have found out that shaping the world to our preferences can be not only hugely expensive and destructive but impossible. People in other countries, as well as their rulers, often have desires opposed to ours. And they are fully capable of foiling our designs.
Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Karl Rove, political adviser to President George W. Bush, told a journalist: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities.” Soon, however, Bush would learn the hazards of imperial hubris.
Future policymakers should take note. As Afghanistan and Cuba show, empires often find they are not the creators of reality. They are the victims.
