THERE IS NO GOOD OR ELEGANT WAY TO DO IT.

I hold myself to high standards.  For example, I strive to avoid engaging in rhetorical sniping.  I also seek to avoid falling into a double standard.  When, for example, someone with whom I usually agree fouls up, I admit it.  If someone with whom I rarely agree fouls up, I admit that, too.  I do not feel obligated to commit every thought I have to a weblog, but I am intellectually honest.  I try to be fair.

I also strive to honor the slogan of the great Pierre Elliott Trudeau:

Reason before passion.

Anyone who knows much about the late Canadian Prime Minister understands that he had plenty of reason in politics and passion in his private life.  That is another topic, though.

I pray for more reason and less passion in politics.  The world would be better off if people were more rational.

Speaking of reason:

I do not believe for a New York minute that, if Donald Trump had presided over the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the result would have been much different.  The timing would have been slightly earlier, but the terrible news unfolding would have been about the same.  I would not have excoriated him for it either.

I try to be consistent in my approach.

As I have written at this weblog, I reject all political cults of personality and no mere mortal is beyond reproach.  Sniping and emoting aside, President Biden deserves criticism for the mechanics of the U.S. withdrawal.  Yet he also deserves much credit for telling the blunt truth:  the United States military does not exist to engage in nation-building.

I have a long-standing opinion regarding attempts to “fix” foreign nations:  it is a foolish endeavor.  I came to this opinion in the middle 1990s, when I was an undergraduate at Valdosta State University, Valdosta, Georgia.  President Clinton had recently reinstalled the exiled Haitian President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.  I became interested in the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), its causes, and its aftermath.  So, I researched and wrote a paper for a course.  I noted that Haiti was stable while the U.S. military occupied the country, and that Haiti fell apart after the U.S. withdrawal.

Regardless of the country and the timeframe, a simple principle holds:  The people of a country are ultimately responsible for that country.  Foreigners can help that country, but they can never fix it.

I draw an applicable lesson from another failed bipartisan U.S. experiment, South Vietnam:  A corrupt government that does not command popular loyalty may have a large, well-armed army, but that army is no match for a force that commands popular loyalty.  Of the two choices, the corrupt government may be less odious to Westerners.  That corrupt government may be less odious, objectively.  But that corrupt government will ultimately fall to its terrible opponents.

I, being trained in historical methodology, ponder current events in Afghanistan through the lens of centuries of events.  Afghanistan has earned its nickname, the “graveyard of empires.”  The historical short term of U.S. foreign policy toward Afghanistan reaches back more than forty years.  I realize that this is not how most Americans think about the unfolding crisis in Afghanistan.  I recall Gore Vidal‘s wonderful term,

United States of Amnesia.

Somebody needs to have a historical memory, though.

President Biden finally pulled the bandage off, so to speak.  Somebody had to do it.  One of his three immediate predecessors should have done it.  One may legitimately–without sniping or engaging in partisan hackery–criticize how he did it.  But somebody had to pull the bandage off.  Somebody had to exit the quagmire.  This was a thankless and unpleasant task.

Sometimes the choices are all thankless and unpleasant.

KENNETH RANDOLPH TAYLOR

AUGUST 18, 2021 COMMON ERA

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