August 17, 2021. Three strikes and you’re out. Three times now THIS COUNTRY HAS BEEN LIED TO and the media deluded as America marched stolidly over the cliff into failure. Recriminations are flying back and forth – who lost Afghanistan IS THE LATEST VERSION OF WHO LOST VIETNAM, IRAQ AND, FOR THOSE WITH LONG MEMORIES, ALL THE WAY BACK TO 1949 AND “WHO LOST CHINA.” What America has lost is, I BELIEVE, THE CAPACITY TO LEARN, TO LEARN FROM HISTORY AND FROM OUR OWN EXPERIENCE. In Afghanistan, American hubris – the United States’ capacity for self-delusion and official lying – has struck once again, as it has repeatedly for the last 60 years.
• I’d argue that no one who was paying attention should be surprised that the Taliban swept back into Kabul in a nanosecond. Or that a failed enterprise like the Afghan national army collapsed. Army and special operator trainers who went there could see the corruption, the personnel who left in the night and the disdain for corrupt political authorities in that army.
• And now the country faces the dark at the end of the tunnel in Afghanistan, where lying and self-delusion have continued for 20 years.
• An initial mission intended to remove the Taliban and close the al-Qaida training camps succeeded, though Osama bin Laden slipped away for another 10 years. But hubris kept the U.S. from stopping there.
• The mission expanded: create a modern democracy, a modern society and, above all, a modern military in a country with little history of any of those things.
• A new generation of U.S. officials in uniform and policymaker suits and dresses fooled the American people and themselves by lying about how well the effort was going.
• The failure was actually there to see, this time, well documented by the systematic auditing and reporting of the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, John Sopko. But government officials and the media blew by those truths, giving voice instead to the lies out of more visible officials’ mouths. The human price tag of hubris grew – 6,300 U.S. military and civilian deaths, and an understated estimate of 100,000 Afghan deaths.
• Author of this article is Gordon Adams, Professor Emeritus, American University School of International Service
• The fall of Kabul was inevitable. Washington, once again, deluded itself into thinking otherwise. The secretary of state said, “This is not Saigon.”
• It is Saigon. It is Baghdad. It is Kabul.
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