It Was Never Going To End Well

      Take a part of the Old World that lies between practically every empire that ever was (and has occasionally set up its own), a place that has lots of hills and valleys, a place that has had cities wiped out by invaders and has fallen back to stubborn farmers and herders only to rise again, a territory that has been a battlefield as far back as anyone can trace, and send in an army of outsiders.

      We did it.  The Russians had; the British had; one local tribe did it to the rest of the country at least once.  Before them, the Uzbeks stomped in, and before them, Genghis Khan's forces smashed cities and destroyed civil society -- and before that, waves of Islamic invaders had re-civilized the country, shoving aside the already civilized Buddhists and Hindus who had previously brought their faith to the region at swordpoint.  On and on it goes, as far back as anyone can find records to read and archeological remains to figure out.

      So the United States went there.  Did we expect a different outcome?  The Russians were sent packing; the Brits barely got in.  Alexander the Great (had I left him out?) marched through, charmed and/or intimidated the locals, and left a ruler in place whose successors eventually swapped the bothersome border province to an emerging Indian empire for vows of chumship and a player to be named later, and that's about the best exit anybody ever managed.  History, geography and luck for good and ill has been breeding cantankerous and tenacious people in Afghanistan since before there was any history there.

      Staying was hard but we stayed for twenty years, doing what we thought best.  Better (and better-informed) pundits than I have analyzed those polices and strategies, and none of them are very impressed.

      Leaving is harder, and harder still on those who worked with us.  The Taliban's taken most of the country as I write, succeeding in part because we were propping up the existing government more than we realized.  Any local who worked with, or worse, for us and who hasn't got out is effectively dead as soon as the Taliban finds them; people with essential skills may last longer but don't count on it.  Every time I see or hear a reporter live from Kabul, I want to tell them to get out immediately, especially the women.  The news media in-country is treating this as a spectator event.  The Taliban don't believe in spectators.

      There's a lot of domestic political hay being made over this; that's politics-as-normal.  Take it with a grain of salt: both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump promised during the 2020 campaign that they were going to bring the troops home ASAP, possibly as early as May.  It was never going to end well.  There's no good path through this maze.  Once you have reached the point where the occupied country's ruler has fled, presumably with whatever he could grab, the mess is non-recoverable: the exit not a cause, it's a symptom.

      And so here we are.  There are moral debts to pay but the price may be too high.  The price of not paying them may be even higher.