Up To Date With Ethan Callender 20: The Last ‘Stan

        Once again, I bear good news and bad news. The good news is that twenty years of war can in fact end in twenty days. The bad news is, it sure as hell didn’t go too well. Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban, leaving a profoundly humiliated Biden administration to pick up the pieces of their foreign policy. However, this fiasco can’t be solely attributed to the current administration. Rather, the failure here is in the nature of the system itself, with the four most recent administrations all culpable for this.

        People are blaming Biden and his administration for pulling out of Afghanistan and neglecting the Taliban threat. While they are not entirely wrong in blaming his bungled retreat, that is a gross oversimplification of the matter. After all, this war started in the administration of George W. Bush, months before I was even born. The War on Terror that he started has been raging for my whole life so far. The economic cost for the Afghanistan intervention is well into the trillions, and the death toll is in the hundreds of thousands. Still millions more have had to live through Taliban rule, endure two decades of American war and occupation, and for what exactly? A return to Taliban rule.

        Now, we have to look at the reasons behind such staggering statistics and flaming failures. This story begins with our 43rd President, a man affectionately and mockingly known as “Dubya”. After the 9/11 attacks, Bush really had no choice but to go to war with the attackers. However, his failure was in the logistics of the whole thing. The first of these logistical lapses was cutting taxes to pay for a war. Looking at past wars such as Korea and Vietnam, the Presidents at those times raised taxes to pay for the wars and prevent debt from piling on. Bush decided to do to the opposite, thinking the private sector would make up for the losses. That’s not what happened. What we got instead was a government $28.6 trillion dollars in debt and growing in addition to a certain 2008 recession we still haven’t fully recovered from. If enough revenue continues to not be raised properly, our government may very well wither and decay entirely. Our public services will be emptied. Our infrastructure will crumble. Our military will be unable to keep up with the world. In short, this decision to go to war could very well have made America’s economic situation untenable.

        Next was Obama, and under his watch occurred the only possible high point of this whole war: the end of Bin Laden’s reign of terror. However, the economic situation still sucked long-term, in part because the recession was so recent at that point. Taxes were low, and so was revenue. Perhaps some loopholes could have been closed, but that didn’t happen due to a GOP Congress having to work with a Dem POTUS, as well as general gridlock. On top of that, Bush had previously diverted resources to Iraq to take out Saddam Hussein. That reckless decision quite literally ending up blowing up in Obama’s face, as ISIS emerged from that power vacuum and one in Syria. Obama had a good shot to solidify Afghanistan’s future in the time after Bin Laden’s downfall, but he didn’t take it, and pulled out troops prematurely. He had a whole second term to fulfill that promise, yet he bit the bullet early. This led to a Taliban resurgence in recent years, and that is what made the war unwinnable.

        Then came Trump. By this time, the war had been going on as long as Vietnam did, and it showed. I will give him credit for realizing the untenable situation he was in, but his exit strategy was miserable. Trump came up with the genius idea to invite the Taliban over to Camp David, the President’s personal country retreat. However, he cancelled the meeting before it could start after backlash about accidentally giving the Taliban international legitimacy. Despite that, he and his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, made one more pivotal mistake by letting 5,000 Taliban prisoners go free to rejoin them in exchange for peace. Needless to say, the terrorists did not choose peace. It was here when an unwinnable war became an untenable fiasco.

        This leads us to Biden once more, and he finally pulled the trigger and said it was time to leave. However, his failure comes from his intelligence team. Simply put, they did not see any indication that Afghanistan would return to the Taliban so quickly, and Biden listened to them. Sadly, intelligence completely underestimated the Taliban, especially after Trump’s POW deal. They grew stronger than they had been in decades, but the will to fight was gone from both America and Afghanistan. In mere weeks, the Taliban had taken over the entire country, leaving Biden to take the fall. Only time will tell if Biden’s supporters or his detractors will be proven right.