In the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind, Michael Anton writes another blockbuster column that, in its sweep and precision echoes his famous “Flight 93 election” column written as Publius Decius Mus. He writes about the errors in Afghanistan going back to our beginning here in 2011 following the Al Qaeda attack on the twin towers and Pentagon.
Hindsight is always easier than foresight or insight, and using it he documents a vast shortage of as-it-happened common sense. There is blame enough to share among the Bush, Obama, and yes Trump administrations, but the stupidity reached peak intensity under hapless Joe Biden.
Anton basically catalogs all of the wrong assumptions which led to bad decisions which ended up with us in the no-win mess that eventually Trump and then Biden wanted us out of. Perhaps my favorite passage is this:
“The Romans,” Machiavelli says, “made their wars short and big.” We Americans have taken to making our wars small and long. We inflict pinprick strikes over decades rather than getting the whole thing over within a matter of days or weeks.
A better strategy, right after 9/11, would have been to do what we did, but finish the job at Tora Bora—and then leave immediately, with a note on the fridge saying “If you do anything like that again, we’ll be back quickly with overwhelming force, and we’ll leave just as quickly. We will do that as many times as you make us.”
It’s worth a try, what we’ve done for the past 20 years has failed expensively. Somebody carve this motto in stone: “No nation-building allowed.” The expanded version of which would be something like “How you run your country is your business. Leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone. If you insist on becoming a problem for us, we’ll become a near-fatal problem for you.”
