Afghanistan: Deja vu again

One night several years ago, Kathy and I returned home to find Gimli, our small bichon frise dog, helplessly bound up with a glue trap. Gimli had discovered the trap, a small tray filled with sticky glue to catch mice, near the clothes dryer in the kitchen closet. 

The glue trap performed its task exactly right. 

Bichons are cuddly, furry dogs covered with curly white hair. Gimli had tentatively pawed the trap, got stuck, tried to pull the trap off with his other paw, got that stuck too, and finally tried to bite it away, so it was stuck to his jaw as well. 

When we turned on the kitchen light we found him gazing forlornly at us with several body parts conquered by the glue trap. We tried unsuccessfully to pull it off without causing him pain, but finally had to cut it off his curly white coat, taking globs of his hair in the process.

Stories about American military efforts in Afghanistan in the years since then always remind me of Gimli’s failure to disengage from the glue trap. 

The United States 20 years ago, seeking revenge for al-Qaida’s horrific air attack on New York’s World Trade Center towers, unleashed the American war machine against terrorists and their Taliban allies in Afghanistan.

At first President Bush, then President Obama, then President Trump, and finally President Biden sought to cleanse Afghanistan of the terror threat that lurked in its rugged mountains. Two decades later the Taliban remains a powerful military and political movement, and how many terror cells still fester in the nation is an open question, despite our killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011.

America found itself caught in the Afghan glue trap, unable to withdraw with honor and unable to cleanse Afghanistan’s political morass so that the threat of future attacks on American interests from there could be ended with certainty.

Obama set about to quit U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. He was unable to do so. 

Trump proclaimed an agreement to negotiate peace and shared power between the Taliban and the Afghan government, and to withdraw American forces from the nation by May of 2020. That fell through as well.

Now Biden has announced he will pull the U.S. military out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers. It appears he will achieve that goal well before that date — at least half our troops have already left. 

We will be turning over to the Afghan government our huge military installations throughout that nation, including the sprawling Bagram Air Base north of the capital of Kabul in the next few days.

Prior to the start of our withdrawal, the Afghan government and the Taliban had backed off their military confrontations. But lately the Taliban, far from continuing peace discussions, have ramped up their war activity, and have enlarged their holdings. They’ve made steady territorial gains, routing Afghan security forces often without a fight. Some government troops continue to fight, but some units have surrendered or abandoned their posts.

We’ve seen this movie before.

It’s depressingly similar to Vietnam, where the American people for years were told the Viet Cong and North Vietnam were on the run, only eventually to watch helicopters lift remaining American personnel off the U.S. embassy roof in Saigon as the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese overran the city. It’s now renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

We’ve been in Afghanistan longer than we were in Vietnam, and the future there looks soberingly similar to our Vietnamese experience. We were unable to achieve our goal militarily in either nation. The enemy was different in the two countries — communists in one and religious fundamentalists in the other — but neither situation lent itself to a military solution.

Biden, like Trump, Obama and G.W. Bush before him, has no good option. Congress itself is divided on what to do. Both of Iowa’s senators, Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, have been consistent in their opposition to total military withdrawal. Both voted against Trump’s proposal to pull troops by May of last year, and both have registered their concern about Biden’s similar plans as well. 

We need to protect those Afghans who sided with us and helped our forces over the years, including the thousands of interpreters who aided our troops. There’s little doubt they, and probably their families, will face torture and/or death if the Taliban take control of Afghanistan.

Grassley is in the forefront of efforts to provide sanctuary in the U.S. or its territories for our Afghan allies.

The late Bill Kendall, of Jefferson, who served for years with the U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam, emphasized to me the crucial need to protect and evacuate Vietnamese personnel who aided him and other Special Forces troops over the years. 

The same moral need exists today for our Afghan allies.

And it’s not just the humane thing to do. In the future we may decide to send our military personnel overseas to quell threats to us and our allied nations. If we abandon our Afghan helpers now, as we abandoned many who helped us in Vietnam, what’s the incentive for citizens of other nations to work with our troops? 

We need to salvage as many of our allies’ lives as we can, even if we can’t salvage our goal of a democratic, peaceful Afghanistan.

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