The Afghanistan Withdrawal Did Not Take Place
We should understand that both war and peace are largely media creations.
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is a pseudo-event.
It has not yet taken place: today there are probably close to 6,000 declared boots on the ground. But what’s more, the planned withdrawal was always symbolic and illusory.
I’ve already shared reporting that Joe Biden had planned to leave 650 to 1000 declared troops to secure the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan before the Taliban took over the country. Additional reporting about the planned withdrawal confirmed that this number was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg — the original withdrawal plans, reports The New York Times, included provisions to leave behind a “shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations Forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives.” Of course, this news was buried deep within a story announcing that Biden would fully withdraw troops and “end the war.”
Such special ops and black ops personnel do not have to figure into official troop counts. Nor will they have to later, if some remain after Aug. 31, Sept. 11, or whenever else we set our new, “final” deadline to be out of the country.
This is a reporting convention. It is also a blatant verbal deception: it lets stenographers in the media write and print things like, “U.S. draws down Afghan forces to 2,500 troops;” “U.S. adds 1,000 troops in Afghanistan, bringing total to 3,500;” and so on. Meanwhile the actual count including black ops and special ops is always “unknown.”
Some members of these ops — who knows how many? — are there now. ABC News reports:
Current and former U.S. military special operations and intelligence community operatives are using their own networks of contacts to get elite Afghan soldiers, intelligence assets and interpreters to safety as they’ve become increasingly disillusioned and fed up with the U.S. government-led evacuation effort in Kabul.
This group is now conducting “ad hoc” and “informal” missions. One was dubbed “Operation Pineapple.”
For this mission, a group of people somehow affiliated with the security state snuck a former commando and his family into Kabul’s airport:
“I'm very excited. I feel like on one side of the wire is Afghanistan and on this side is America, and I told my family we are now on U.S. soil,” the former Afghan commando told ABC News after his young children went to sleep inside the well-guarded airport.
In the news story, the search-and-rescue operatives (?) repeatedly emphasized how “informal” their overarching mission is:
“This is an informal, organic and eclectic group that spans the public and private sector with one goal: to get Afghans at risk to safety,” [said] Scott Mann, a former Green Beret and leader of the nonprofit Heroes Journey . . .
And even though these folks are supposedly moving faster than the “hamstrung U.S. bureaucracy,” they are committed to a “modus operandi” that moves (approximately) “one person” to the airport at a time.
Any reports in the future that such operatives remain in the country — to provide security, to conduct counterterrorism, or to serve some other inscrutable purpose — will have no bearing on the troop withdrawal narrative that most media consumers already believe. Even if there is some remainder of the formally announced troops left in Afghanistan for years, there will still be some partisans who believe forever that Joe Biden ended the war. But even in the best case scenario, vis-à-vis troops leaving the country, will it be that Biden has actually ended a war at all?
In interviews given before and after the fall of Kabul, President Biden has confirmed two things. One is that the “Afghan Security Forces,” along with the government they supposedly propped up, were almost entirely fictitious. The second is that the Biden administration plans to treat Afghanistan like Syria in the coming months and years. The difference between Afghanistan and Syria? According to Joe Biden, we have supposedly only been at war in the first country.
In Afghanistan, Biden inherited a warzone that largely comprised a fake army, a fake police force, and a fake government. As Glenn Greenwald describes, Biden had announced just a few weeks before Kabul fell that a Taliban takeover was not inevitable, because “the Afghan government and leadership . . . clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.”
When a reporter replied that intelligence assessments actually anticipated a government collapse, the one we all eventually witnessed, Biden answered, “That is not true. They did not — they didn’t — did not reach that conclusion.”
The inspiration for Biden’s statements in July, including, “the likelihood there’s going to be one unified government in Afghanistan controlling the whole country is highly unlikely” and “the likelihood that there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” was, of course, the venerable Afghan Security Forces.
Biden claimed repeatedly that this fighting force was 300,000 strong, “incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.”
But reports had warned consistently that these numbers were bogus. These reports complained of “ghost soldiers” and “ghost police,” non-existent personnel who were added to official rolls so that the U.S. would pay certain Afghans and businesses more money to train them. This, of course, was pure fraud. But it actually wasn’t all that different from much of the rest of the “war.”
First, let me clarify: there were certainly periods of the war in Afghanistan that were quite bloody — full-on, boots-on-the-ground invasion.
But that wasn’t what was happening as Biden shifted troops around in the country this year. As Afghanistan veteran and aspiring Senator Lucas Kunce has put it, convincingly, the war in Afghanistan long ago became, in effect, a jobs program for Afghans.
Literally, there were multiple jobs programs, such as the Afghanistan Jobs Creation Program and the Afghanistan Workforce Development Program, worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars collectively. But Kunce argues, after “training forces” and interviewing both U.S.-allied and Taliban Afghans in their native language, that the entire Afghan National Security Forces outfit was itself a jobs program:
The truth is that the Afghan National Security Forces was a jobs program for Afghans, propped up by U.S. taxpayer dollars — a military jobs program populated by nonmilitary people or “paper” forces (that didn’t really exist) and a bevy of elites grabbing what they could when they could.
The Security Forces were never really an army: it was just a bunch of desperate Afghans who realized that the quickest way to provide for themselves in their war-torn country was to be a pretend soldier, plus some gratuitous corruption. No wonder all the Taliban had to do to “defeat” these forces was essentially to announce that it was taking over the country.
As I pointed out previously, it never made any sense to assume that 2,500 U.S. troops, in a country of nearly 40 million, could protect the freedoms of Afghan women and girls. No U.S. soldier had died in Afghanistan in over a year by this April. To the extent there was still a war being fought, it was not being fought on the ground. The declared troop counts, at a certain point, became symbolic.
Which is why it’s disturbing that the anti-war left has essentially stopped subjecting Biden’s statements on Afghanistan to any scrutiny. The violent war in Afghanistan was in the air, and we should listen to what Biden had to say about air power in a sit-down with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos after the Taliban conquest:
STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the threat to the United States? Most intelligence analysis has predicted that Al Qaeda would come back 18 to 24 months after a withdrawal of American troops. Is that analysis now being revised? Could it be sooner?
BIDEN: It could be. But George, look, here’s the deal. Al Qaeda, ISIS, they metastasize. There’s a significantly greater threat to the United States from Syria. There’s a significantly greater threat from East Africa. There’s significant greater threat to other places in the world than it is from the mountains of Afghanistan. And we have maintained the ability to have an over-the-horizon capability to take them out. We’re — we don’t have military in Syria to make sure that we’re gonna be protected —
STEPHANOPOULOS: And you’re confident we’re gonna have that in Afghanistan?
BIDEN: Yeah. I’m confident we’re gonna have the overriding capability, yes.
Biden’s statement about Syria shows either a stupendous ignorance or willing mendacity — a deliberate reconstruction of definitions. As of July 27, there were 900 declared U.S. troops in Syria, Politico reports. There have been no plans to adjust this number as of this writing. And Biden’s administration bombed Syria just a couple months ago.
“Over-the-horizon capability” is just a euphemism for carrying out bombing campaigns. If U.S. intelligence is already willing to report that Al-Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan is imminent, then it will fall to Biden to forbid drone strikes hitting the country in response. But if he’s willing to do that, then why has he been so persistent and adamant in referencing continued military action occurring over the horizon?
On July 8, Biden said,
We are developing a counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region, and act quickly and decisively if needed.
Our military and intelligence leaders are confident they have the capabilities to protect the homeland and our interests from any resurgent terrorist challenge emerging or emanating from Afghanistan.
And on Aug. 24 (yesterday as of this writing), Biden announced,
We run effective counterterrorism operations around the world where we know terrorism is more of a threat than it is today in Afghanistan, without any permanent military presence on the ground. And we can and will do the same thing in Afghanistan with our over-the-horizon counterterrorism capability. [Emphasis mine.]
President Biden apparently believes, at least from time to time, that Syria counts as a place where we have no permanent military presence. And sure, maybe “permanent” is the wrong term to use in that country. But the odds seem decent that we will have black ops and special ops moving in and out of Afghanistan for the foreseeable future — along with, most likely, privatized security personnel and unmanned aerial vehicles.
Really, that was all that was left of the war.
The way that Scott Mann described his ragtag bunch of security operatives actually is the most fitting appellation of the late war in Afghanistan: “an informal, organic and eclectic group that spans the public and private sector” has been in the region doing “the war” — which has meant primarily trying to make money but also hoping, as a side effect, to neoliberalize Afghanistan or at least to keep it unstable enough to stop China and Russia from getting their hands on the lithium, poppies, and nearby oil. I see no reason to think these objectives have changed.
The anti-war left has swallowed the media narrative about a withdrawal that hasn’t yet taken place. I’ll be glad if we spend less money on Afghanistan. I’ll be glad if our declared troops meet the Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline. But do we really think that the troops deployed there will be brought home? Or will they, instead, end up in places where they’ll face more bodily risk, in all of these places full of “greater threats” that Biden constantly refers to? Is Biden obsessed with the term “over the horizon” for no reason?
Before 2020, Biden had rarely met a war he didn’t like. Maybe he’s changed. But I’ll wait to see.
For now, I’ll say, on Aug. 25: The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is a pseudo-event. Insofar as we believe that it ended a war, it did not take place.
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