I Stand By My Untutored Assessment

Read @Jim_Dobbins on how a series of crucial early missteps made a better outcome to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan impossible.https://t.co/fBkN5P7se1

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) August 30, 2021

if only they had maps back in '01 https://t.co/mOnPGJfXsr pic.twitter.com/FwZyzKMHU3

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) August 30, 2021

Geography is the obstacle, and I don’t mean neighboring countries. Consider Switzerland.

There’s a reason no one has ever conquered Switzerland, and part of it us you can go around it. But that’s because of geography. In modern times you could disrupt daily life more easily from a central location, but if the Swiss turn out the lights and retire to their cantons, the military effort to control them would never cease, and never win. Ask Alexander; ask Britain; ask the USSR. Because the same holds true for Afghanistan; for the same geographical reasons.

And it’s a larger country with more people, making it even harder to control. The Taliban will control Kabul. They’ll control the rest of the country mostly to the extent they leave them alone.

The Swiss are in agreement as to how to be a country. The Afghanis are in agreement largely as to how many of them want to be left alone. Where I live, 100 years ago a hurricane was an inconvenience (well as long as you didn’t try to live on a barrier island like Galveston). This was farmland in the memory of some only recently dead. A hurricane meant wind and rain and debris. And when it passed, you went out, cleaned up the trees, and got on with it.

Kate Chopin’s most famous story, “The Storm, takes place during a violent storm in rural Louisiana in the early 30th century. The only thing the storm does is force two characters to shelter together until it passes. Only the length of time tells you we would call the storm a hurricane. When it passes, the characters return to normal life with nary a disruption.

A hurricane that doesn’t blow buildings apart still floods our concrete cities and leaves us literally powerless so we can’t work, shop, drive (no power for gas pumps), seek medical care, open our refrigerators. These conditions can prevail for weeks.

Life outside Kabul is probably more like rural America 100 years ago. Today, to bring us to crisis, cut off our cell service (Seriously; this is one of many major problems in New Orleans post-Ida. How do you call 911 without phone service?). How do you bring a country as rural and decentralized as Afghanistan to its knees, or even to heel?

No one has figured that one out in millenia.

Like @mattgaetz, America hastily withdraws from a poorly chosen 20-year-old and starts talking itself into the next one.

— OneHitPopehat (@Popehat) August 30, 2021

Much closer to correct.