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It’s far more frequent than we thought.

Foreign Affairs The Real Tragedy of Afghanistan  The Abbey Gate bombing was only the culmination of many years of failed policy. (Photo by WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images) Any story of the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan must begin in the earliest days of the Obama administration, when the young president, possessed with an overwhelming mandate to end the endless wars begun by his predecessor, was rolled by members of his own cabinet—most notably Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—and his top military and intelligence advisers, who together prevented the president from doing what he was sent to Washington to do: End the disastrous wars begun under George W. Bush. Almost alone among Obama’s advisers counseling withdrawal were his vice president, Joe Biden, and Biden’s longtime adviser Tom Donilon, then serving as Obama’s national security adviser.  Twelve years later, President Biden must have felt some measure of satisfaction that it was he who was able to do that which his two predecessors, Obama and Trump, could or would not, when he ordered the final withdrawal of American troops from that Central Asian wasteland.  And yet, as with anything involving Biden and his national security team of Keystone Cops, all did not go as planned.  The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was and remains a deeply divisive one. While Biden for once showed some measure of political courage in ordering the withdrawal, the execution went badly awry. Tragically, on Aug. 26, 2021, thirteen American soldiers and 170 Afghan civilians were killed in a terrorist attack by the Islamic State–Khorasan Province at the Abbey Gate of Hamid Karzai International Airport. The reaction to the botched withdrawal from America’s own militants was swift. Clutching his pearls on CBS’s Face the Nation, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham exclaimed,  We set the conditions for another 9/11. I’ve never been more worried about an attack on our homeland than I am right now. And we did not end this war. President Biden said that he wanted to take Afghanistan off the plate for future presidents. He’s done the exact opposite. For the next 20 years, American presidents will be dealing with this catastrophe in Afghanistan. This war has not ended. We’ve entered into a new deadly chapter. Terrorists are now in charge of Afghanistan. Needless to say, none of this came about. In point of fact, it was the Taliban, once in power, that ended up taking out the perpetrator of the Abbey Gate attack. And, as an actual military expert, the decorated combat veteran and The American Conservative contributing editor Douglas Macgregor, told TAC this week,  The sudden, rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan removed the failed American ‘whole of government’ fiasco in Southwest Asia from the national spotlight, but at great cost, revealing the acute lack of professional military competence in the senior ranks of the U.S. Armed Forces. Criticism of Biden’s decision to withdraw has become a staple of Trump’s stump speeches. Missing from the criticism is the fact that the ceasefire agreement signed under Trump between the U.S. and the Taliban in February 2020 provided the US with a four-month window to withdraw—this would have been true regardless of who was president. Trump often claims that, unlike Biden, he would have kept Bagram airfield. Speaking at a rally in late July, Trump claimed,  I was getting out. After 21 years you get the hell out, but I would have kept Bagram. It’s one hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons. We gave it to them so stupidly. Translation: If I were president, we’d still be there.  His criticism reeks of opportunism. But still more, what it misses is that the entire enterprise was a tragedy—from start to finish—because it was unnecessary. The Taliban did not attack America; Al Qaeda did. Besides al Qaeda, the main movers behind 9/11 were Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Recall that Ahmad Uhmar Sheikh, at the direction of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence director general, General Mahmoud Ahmed, wired $100,000 to 9/11 hijacker Mohomed Atta. Bin Laden was hiding out in Abbottabad, Pakistan, with the connivance of ISI.  Meantime, a lawsuit brought by 9/11 families in May shows that, Saudi government officials and agents were acting within the core of their functions for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in coordinating an essential support network for pro-jihadist extremists, including the first-arriving 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf Al Hazmi and Khalid Al Mihdhar. Still more, over the summer it was reported that a close associate of the aforementioned Nawaf Al Hazmi and Khalid Al Mihdhar, Omar Al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national with purported links to Saudi intelligence, filmed the entrances, exits and security checkpoints of Washington, DC landmarks. The video was kept from the American public for over twenty years. The tragedy of Afghanistan cannot simply be consigned to the terrible events at Abbey Gate. The tragedy is that there are perpetrators of 9/11 who have never been brought to justice because the U.S. national security apparatus decided, in its wisdom, to pursue a twenty year long sideshow in Afghanistan designed to distract the American public from our actual enemies. Time and again, from October 7, 2001 to this very moment, the government has assiduously worked to divert our eyes from our “Saudi and Pakistani partners” elsewhere: to secular, multi-confessional Syria (2012); to Libya, which posed no threat to us (2011); and most fatefully, to Iraq (2003). And if the foreign policy establishment gets its way, Iran will be next. The post The Real Tragedy of Afghanistan appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs What Price Are Americans Prepared to Pay for Defending Taiwan?  Taiwan is profoundly important to China, but less so to the U.S. Credit: Amelia Y American policymakers appear set on war. The only question is against whom. Alas, they apparently believe the more, the merrier.  Washington continues to aid Ukraine, which is increasingly striking within Russia and recently grabbed Russian territory around Kursk, site of a historic World War II battle. Moscow just launched a flurry of missile and drone strikes on Ukraine. Israel and Hezbollah recently traded blows, and Iran continues to threaten retaliatory attacks on Israel, with American units on station to defend the latter. The U.S. Navy is battling Yemen’s Ansar Allah (the Houthis). In Asia the Pentagon garrisons South Korea, patrols the Asia-Pacific, and threatens China over Taiwan. This all comes naturally to Americans who grew up in a world in which the United States deployed the world’s most powerful military. Washington’s influence was constrained during the Cold War, but its relative power grew dramatically in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. National ego took over. “What we say goes,” declared President George H.W. Bush. His successors have acted accordingly, determined to run the world, as President Joe Biden put it. Yet who outside of Washington would commend Uncle Sam for the job that he has done? The problem is not just ostentatious failure. It is possible disaster. The Russo–Ukrainian war is dangerous enough. Allied policymakers and commentators appear to have concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin is little more than a paper tiger, unwilling to escalate despite Ukrainian strikes on and incursions in Russian territory. Nevertheless, Moscow still appears to be winning, advancing in the Donbas and biding its time before dealing with seemingly isolated Ukrainian troops around Kursk. If Putin comes to believe Russia is losing, he might choose to escalate and risk bringing the U.S. and NATO into the war.  The danger of conflict with the PRC over Taiwan is even greater. Consider war with a great power that is greatly increasing its military outlays while already possessing significant conventional capabilities, the world’s second-best navy, a formidable missile force, and an expanding nuclear arsenal. Imagine fighting thousands of miles away over territory less than 100 miles off China’s coast. All while U.S. allies could choose to remain neutral rather become permanent enemies of the giant next door.  From the outside Washington appears to be filled with Sturm und Drang over the great issues facing America. But these policy battles are mostly for show. There is little disagreement over whether U.S. policymakers should run the world. Rather, they fight over who among them should run the world. That’s why Washington launched a proxy war against nuclear-armed Russia in Europe. And why Uncle Sam showered Israel and Saudi Arabia with weapons to kill tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza and Yemen respectively. It’s also why the virtually unanimous view in Washington is that the U.S. should be prepared to go to war with the People’s Republic of China if it attacks Taiwan. Over the latter there is virtually no debate. Yet consider the consequences. Start with economics. If conflict erupts in Northeast Asia and surrounding waters, regional trade could collapse. If Washington and Beijing targeted each other’s maritime commerce, the conflict would spread worldwide. There would be massive trade, financial, and industrial shocks, the latter intensified by Taiwan’s outsize role in the world’s production of semiconductor chips. Bloomberg Economics figures that a simple blockade would be expensive for all: “For China, the U.S., and the world as a whole, GDP in the first year would be down 8.9%, 3.3% and 5% respectively.” The price tag for a shooting war could run “around $10 trillion, equal to about 10% of global GDP—dwarfing the blow from the war in Ukraine, Covid pandemic and Global Financial Crisis.”  Lost commerce would pale compared to other costs. Observed the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon: “World War III could not be ruled out, and the survival of the human race might even be on the line.” Never has there been a full-scale conflict between two nuclear powers. Although the Soviet Union and U.S. fought “limited” conflicts in Afghanistan, Korea, and Vietnam, and India and Pakistan swatted each other conventionally over Kashmir, it would be foolish to assume that Beijing and Washington could keep a battle over Taiwan similarly restrained. First, the interest involved, control over Taiwan, is more important for the PRC than the U.S. Even students otherwise critical of the Beijing government for its intrusive censorship, laborious demands, and other oppressive controls insist that the island republic is part of China. One reason is deeply emotional, the belief that reversing Taiwan’s detachment by Japan in 1895 would complete the PRC’s recovery from the “century of humiliation” at the hands of others. Another is security: no country, including the U.S. (remember the Cuban Missile Crisis!) will tolerate its great rival maintaining a military base but a few score miles offshore. For China more than the U.S., failure would not be an option. Second, Beijing would enjoy a significant geographic advantage, able to use mainland bases for operations against Taiwan and surrounding waters. This would force Washington to target the Chinese homeland, which the PRC would almost certainly see as an escalation requiring a response. The latter could include attacks on U.S. facilities in Guam and the Commonwealth of Mariana Islands, Okinawa and elsewhere in Japan, and even in Hawaii. It would be difficult for Washington not to escalate in return. Perhaps good sense would prevail. Yet the American and Soviet peoples barely avoided catastrophe in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. played the role of China today. It would be foolish to tempt fate twice. Third, the political price of failure in the PRC would be high, likely much higher than in the U.S. Despite Xi Jinping’s dominant position, initiating a failed war would allow his disparate foes to coalesce against him. Thus, he would be more likely to double down and escalate, daring Washington to match, than to retreat. If he fell, his successors probably would rearm and prepare for a rematch, like Germany after World War I, rather than accept the loss and go peacefully into the sunset. Defending Taiwan would require eternal vigilance and permanent militarization of the Asia-Pacific by the U.S. Such a commitment could not easily be sold to the American public. Whatever the PRC’s ambitions, conquering the U.S. is not one. The issue between Washington and Beijing is domination of the Asia-Pacific, the PRC’s home, not security of the Americas, about which Americans are most concerned. Taiwan has no direct relationship to this nation’s defense. At most, control over islands close to China would inhibit its naval operations. However, Washington should not go to war today because it might want to go to war in the future. Nor would doing so be worthwhile. The United States Navy War College’s Jonathan D. Caverley dismissed the security justification for war:  Taiwan is a small, 90-mile-wide island just off China’s vast coast. If it became a fully armed Chinese province, the difference in military power between Beijing and Washington would barely shift. China already possesses formidable space, land, air, sea, and cyber systems designed to detect and destroy U.S. and allied naval and air platforms far from the mainland. It does not need the island to menace the United States. Taiwan would give China a new place to base its systems, but the advantages that come from putting its weapons on the island versus the mainland are marginal. Caverley also warned that direct American defense of Taiwan “would provide Beijing with the chance to destroy many American ships, planes, and troops in terrain favorable to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The U.S. military would likely come away greatly weakened, even if it ultimately prevailed.” If Washington and Beijing are fated to struggle over global dominance, then the former should look beyond the Taiwan Strait, argued Caverley: “Beijing is better positioned to quickly reconstitute its regional forces, meaning it could press on more easily.” He prefers a strategy of “loading [Taiwan] up with drones, mines, and other relatively inexpensive defensive weapons, turning it into what military planners call a ‘porcupine’ that China would struggle to digest,” with only limited direct support. Other arguments for war are similarly unpersuasive. Would failing to defend Taiwan ruin U.S. credibility, especially with Washington’s Asian allies? Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea all have defense treaties with the U.S., the purpose of which is to provide a formal legal guarantee. The U.S. formally ended its Taiwan treaty in agreeing to mutual recognition with the PRC. Washington has no obligation to go to war for Taipei, which America’s treaty allies surely understand.  War would not save the Taiwanese semiconductor chip industry, since the factories would be turned into rubble, either by Chinese or American bombs. The solution to the West’s vulnerability to Taiwan’s stranglehold over the market is spreading production more broadly, the objective of the 2022 CHIPS Act. (The legislation probably will fail to achieve its ends, but is still a better approach than war with China.) There also are humanitarian interests at stake, but they are not sufficient for Americans to risk global and nuclear war. Especially since Washington is ever ready to kill civilians promiscuously, often through authoritarian allies and sometimes directly. Perhaps the best argument for threatening to battle the PRC over Taiwan is as a bluff to deter the former from attacking the latter. Nevertheless, pretending might make conflict more likely. Such a threat would suggest the existence of the kind of cooperative military relationship that Beijing fears and encourage China to preempt U.S. forces if it decided on war. If Washington did not back up its threats, then its credibility would be badly damaged. There are no easy answers if the PRC attempts to reclaim Taiwan. In June Donald Trump declared: “Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.” The Taiwanese certainly should pay for their own defense. The U.S., however, can support Taipei without going to war—selling weapons to the latter now and organizing allied states to isolate the PRC economically if Beijing strikes. Washington should seek to prevent a war, but not enter into one if it starts. So far there has been little serious debate over pressing issues in the presidential race. Few questions are more important than: For what would the candidates go to war? Taiwan would be a good place to start this conversation. The post What Price Are Americans Prepared to Pay for Defending Taiwan?  appeared first on The American Conservative.

Books When Soviet Dissidents Disappoint A new history of the Soviet dissident movement tries to make heroes of an underwhelming lot. Credit: image via Shutterstock To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans, Princeton University Press, 816 pages, August 2024 Professor Benjamin Nathans thinks Soviet-era dissidents don’t get enough respect in modern Russia. A 2013 Levada poll found that fewer than one in five Russians could name “any dissidents from the late Soviet era,” according to Nathans’s new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. The word “late” presumably excludes mid-century dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose works are studied in the standard Russian school curriculum. A Russian textbook from 2023 implies that “so-called dissidents” were tools of the CIA: “The West ‘took good care of them’ … and therefore their activities were closely watched by the organs of state security.” But what exactly about the Soviet dissident movement should be celebrated? There are two ways a dissident movement can be a success: Either it brings down the regime, or it serves as a remnant preserving noble ideals for a better day, in the meantime offering a moral example and a trenchant critique of the system. The Soviet dissidents were obviously a failure in the first sense. Nothing they did brought the demise of the Soviet empire closer by a single day. The USSR collapsed from its own economic dysfunction. To the extent that widespread disillusionment played a role, the dissidents did nothing to instigate or even guide it. They were too isolated from the population. One of the themes emphasized by Nathans is that the dissident movement was confined almost entirely to the elite and specifically the intelligentsia. Nearly half of the signatories of one anti-government petition from 1968 were employed in higher education. The attitude of the Russian man on the street to the dissident movement can be guessed from an exchange quoted by Nathans between Valeria Gerlin, a schoolteacher who lost her job for signing a petition in support of four writers on trial for anti-Soviet agitation, and her school board director. Gerlin said she was exercising her rights as a citizen. Her boss replied: Who among us never has grievances against Soviet power? It happens with everyone. This person didn’t get an apartment, that person wasn’t paid a bonus, and so on. Everyone has some issue. But what do we do? Well, we come home, we grumble a little in the kitchen, but that’s it. We take our grievance no further than the kitchen. But she—she writes it up! Interestingly, Gerlin was a child of the Soviet aristocracy. Her father was a high-ranking NKVD official with an apartment on Lubyanka Square. This kind of background pops up frequently in Nathans’s cast of characters. The most prominent female dissident, Larisa Bogoraz, had an uncle in the NKVD and her parents were professors. Other dissidents included the descendants of Litvinov and Sverldlov, as well as lesser known Bolsheviks like the Red Army hero Yona Yakir.  There are several possible explanations for this genealogical connection. Perhaps the luxury of dissent is only possible for those who enjoy a certain level of privilege. Or perhaps these men and women were simply carrying on the family tradition. Nathans notes that dissidents were “part of a generation that became the first adults in history who were not immigrants to socialism (voluntary or otherwise), but native born, the first indigenous speakers of its language.” They did the same thing their parents and grandparents had done, just to a different regime. Bogoraz made the connection explicit between her prominent communist family and her career as a dissenter: “Public activism was apparently in my blood. There was a feeling of being connected to society, of responsibility for what was happening in society.” If that is the case, then the dissidents were not opponents of revolutionary communism but its true heirs, literally and figuratively.  Certainly there was an ideological resemblance. With few exceptions, the dissidents in Nathans’s book were all socialists. None of them criticized the Soviet regime from the position of free-market capitalism. They were very poor analysts of the problems that made the USSR unsustainable, namely its economic pathologies. The rights that most interested them were the free speech rights of the intelligentsia or the freedom to emigrate. They cared far less about the daily humiliations to which ordinary Russians were subject. The populist conservatism of Solzhenitsyn was an outlier; the vast majority of dissidents were typical urban liberals. The true priorities of the dissident movement can be gleaned from the kinds of activism these individuals pursued after communism fell. The flowering of NGOs that occurred in Russia in the 1990s took direct inspiration from, and involved many of the same people as, the dissident movement. These NGOs focused on liberal issues familiar to their Western counterparts: women’s rights, gay rights, domestic violence, free speech, the rights of criminal defendants, the rights of ethnic minorities and refugees, the right to refuse military conscription.  Not coincidentally, they drew most of their funding from Western sources, including foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation, as well as outgrowths of the U.S. government such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. Here may be a good place to mention that the KGB was, in fact, correct to accuse the Soviet-era dissident movement of having extensive links to the CIA. Eventually Vladimir Putin cracked down on these NGOs, starting around 2006. His objections were, first, that they received foreign funding and colluded with foreign intelligence services (there was a famous instance when the British embassy’s human rights liaison was caught using a fake stone in a park as a transmitter) and also that these groups used “human rights” as a cover for interfering in politics, usually in alignment with Western priorities. Putin, like his KGB predecessors, saw an uncanny convergence between the foreign policy interests of America and the issues that Moscow liberals pursued, such as opposition to the Chechen war. Veterans of the NGO movement look back on the 1990s as a golden age, a nostalgia that is extremely revealing. Apparently, if you want to picture a world where the dissident movement came to power, it would look a lot like the Yeltsin era: maximum political and social freedom for urban liberals; maximum economic freedom for international corporations and their Russian oligarch allies; for ordinary Russians, poverty, exploitation, humiliation, and the erosion of national independence. The vast majority of Russians remember the Yeltsin years as a nadir. The USSR was an ugly regime, so it is tempting to assume that the Russians in opposition to it must have been right. Yet judging from Nathans’ 800-page history, the dissidents were not very acute in their diagnosis of what exactly made the USSR ugly. One can oppose communism and still find little merit in the dissidents’ liberalism, just as one can dislike the Putin government and still find very little merit in the critique of it offered by the performance artists Pussy Riot. The post When Soviet Dissidents Disappoint appeared first on The American Conservative.