Neoconservatives seize on Afghan debacle to celebrate military force and ‘war on terror’

You would think that the Afghanistan debacle is another blow to neoconservatives: That the school of foreign policy experts inside the Beltway who gave us the Iraq war would be further discredited by the fall of Afghanistan. That America’s humiliating defeat and the Taliban’s swift return to power despite 20 years of our remaking that society in our own image would crush the neoconservative doctrine of using overwhelming American force to impose “democracy” across the Middle East and thereby create a friendly neighborhood for Israel.

And you would be wrong.

In fact the neoconservatives are landing on Trump and Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan to argue that it only proves the merits of their worldview: the military occupation of foreign societies works, the Afghanistan war and the larger “war on terror” was actually a great success, and now the United States’ loss of appetite for military force is creating a power vacuum that will embolden jihadists and compel the only democracy in the Middle East — Israel — to step up to the plate.

And as for Iraq? “Vietnam… was a heck of a lot worse, obviously in terms of U.S. deaths,” Bill Kristol defends his war record.

The neocons demonstrate extraordinary stamina, and surprising traction in D.C. They are not a faction for nothing! Their faith in military might has sprung up again and again in Washington thinktanks and little magazines and Senate offices in the half century since the Vietnam defeat. And today despite another imperial setback, and Americans’ weariness of war (which helped both Obama and Trump gain the White House), the neocons continue to be able to grab the microphone in Washington.

Typical is John Bolton who describes the 20 year occupation of Afghanistan as a success, speaking to CNBC:

“We stayed there for… valid strategic reason… Which is to keep Taliban, Al Qaeda and other threatening terrorist groups from regaining a capability, to have a privileged sanctuary from which they could plan and direct attacks against the U.S. and our friends and allies.”

“What Taliban-controlled Afghanistan provides is potential for a regime that enables terrorist groups — unlike other regimes which try and hunt them down and eliminate them,” Bolton said.

Tim Miller of the Bulwark, Bill Kristol’s latest publication, says Afghanistan was perfectly manageable.

The status quo was a tenuously stable stalemate. It’s not as if our only options were forever war or leaving our friends to die and Afghan women to suffer for a generation. But we made a choice to do the latter and now there are gonna be real, horrifying consequences.

(That line echoes the Israel lobbyists who say that “managed conflict” between Israel and occupied Palestinians is preferable, even after 54 years, to Palestinian self-determination.)

Richard Haass, a long time war-supporter at the Council on Foreign Relations, bewails the U.S.’s “strategic and moral failure.”

Beyond the local consequences, the grim aftermath of America’s strategic and moral failure will reinforce questions about US reliability among friends and foes far and wide.

Neoconservatives echo the theme, saying the withdrawal from Afghanistan will unsettle America’s “friends” in the region — and thus empower Iran. Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, quotes a Wall Street Journal editorial that laments the decline of U.S. imperial influence among our allies:

President Biden’s chaotic Afghan withdrawal has shocked and angered U.S. allies. So much for a president who would consult closely with our allies and build alliances to deter our common enemies…. The Taliban’s victory may allow the clerical regime in Iran to build on the influence it has worked decades to build in the country. These two Islamist regimes have a common interest in fueling extremism and undermining the US & its allies.

The reference to friends and allies betrays the true neoconservative concern, for Israel and its military supremacy. Dubowitz is seeking to use the Afghan debacle to derail a return to the Iran deal. “American credibility & leverage is badly eroded. Israel must help its best friend restore both.” Dubowitz cites a recent Newsweek piece he co-authored warning the U.S. that Israel will use force even if the U.S. is tired of using it.

If there is no other option to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, the Jewish state will go it alone.

The Israel-centric neoconservative Elliott Abrams sees the Afghan withdrawal as good for Israel, because Israel understands the regional power map better than the U.S., and Arab countries will ally with Israel against Iran. He writes at the Council on Foreign Relations:

What is happening in Afghanistan will deepen the impression among Arab governments that they cannot rely on the United States to protect their security as they used to. So those states have increasingly drawn the conclusion that they have one neighbor who unlike Iran or Turkey poses no threat to them, and who continually displays a firm willingness to use military power against its enemies. That’s Israel. Israel in addition has a modern economy based on exceptional high-tech achievements, and maintains not only a close alliance with the United States but working relationships with Russia and China. For the Arabs, then, the Abraham Accords were at long last the victory of self-interest over ideology –and over outmoded versions of Arab nationalism and support for Palestinians….

That last word is Abrams’s core consideration. He wants to remove the greatest impediment to the fulfillment of the Zionist project in Israel/Palestine: Palestinian resistance. But Palestinians are here to stay, and their presence will always undermine the claim that there is a “Jewish democracy.” And the Israeli example reminds us that military occupation only/forever generates resistance in the occupied.

Bill Kristol offers a full sense of the neoconservative vision on the Matt Lewis podcast. The Afghan occupation was very sustainable. The war on terror has been a great success. Americans didn’t really tire of war; they don’t care, and elites are the actual deciders so the elites should exercise their sway.

Kristol says that Middle Easterners are like Osama bin Laden– they see who is the strong horse and who is the weak horse and they go with the strong one. The American defeat gives jihadists a “shot in the arm” that they haven’t had since Obama the Weak declined to use force.

[B]ad actors…. will come to Afghanistan. I’m sure that’s true…What about Pakistan, what about other places. There was a big surge in terror in Europe in 2015 after Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq and nonintervention in Syria and a sense among those who might be inclined that way, hey, this was the winning side to be on.

Things were going well in Afghanistan– the occupation “has been sustained a long time” — and going well in the war on terror.

That status quo in the overall war on terror, the war against Islamic extremism, was pretty decent. We were doing better than we were 20 years ago, doing better than what people expected four and five years ago. Really just to put all that at risk really was feckless and irresponsible.

Empire is messy but the U.S. empire has been successful. If you fundamentally believe that the liberal international order is a good thing, you see the last 75 years as a “more peaceful world than we have had in any other 75 year period….[with] a huge amount of economic development, extended longevity, infant health improved in a lot of places.” There were a couple of cases of the U.S. doing too much, but we dropped the ball in the Balkans and Rwanda.

Kristol has no contrition for Iraq. When Matt Lewis compared Iraq to Vietnam, Kristol bridled.

“Vietnam… was a heck of a lot worse, obviously in terms of U.S. deaths.”

This is an arrogant fallacy, when you think of all the Muslims who have died since we destroyed Iraq, and destabilized Syria and other neighbors.

But Kristol is unrepentant. “I’m very much a defender of all we’ve done in the 90s and war on terror.”

And here is his (Straussian) defense of the “elites” as the deciders. While it’s true that in Vietnam the public blew the whistle after 58,000 deaths, Kristol says,

What’s annoying about this case is that there was not a huge public… reaction the other way… The public was on board a week after 9/11… The public is going to be grudging in its support for foreign interventions.. But it also to its credit in America has been willing to go along and that’s really all you can ask. So there I do think elites matter a lot in foreign policy.

I think Kristol is deluded here about how folks outside the Beltway “go along” with ripping up Arab/Muslim countries and killing hundreds of thousands of people. I return to a persuasive political science analysis that said that Hillary Clinton lost Democratic strongholds Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by narrow margins in 2016 because those states were more ravaged than others by war losses in Iraq. Trump won those states by running as an anti-forever-war candidate. As Joe Biden ran in 2020, and won them all back.

Asked about the future of neoconservatism, Kristol says — wisely — that neoconservatism has been buried again and again, and come back from the dead.

We [neoconservatives] have had a rough decade. We had a president [Obama] who certainly ran against a cartoon version of it, and a Republic president who ran against it, and Biden isn’t exactly on board. I don’t know that it’s ever fully been in power, McCain was never president. We’ve had some rough times.

But as an “intellectual matter, it’s very strong,” Kristol concluded. “In foreign policy I think unfortunately the Afghanistan debacle is going to remind people that we do need American global leadership and we can debate exactly how to do that.”

He is right about that, too. We can only hope that American progressives and conservatives are influential in that discussion.