Banging on a Window That Long Since Closed

Victory in warfare is like art or pornography: it’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

What we have in Afghanistan is not victory by any definition, though it’s pornographic in that plenty of people got fucked.

President Biden recently announced that he will honor the treaty his predecessor made with the Taliban to withdraw all US forces from that country by the end of 2021. In fact, he named the date of that withdrawal as September 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of the attacks that led to this long and brutal campaign of US involvement there. The announcement has rightly gotten a lot of airplay, but the reaction to it has defied standard partisanship and cut across the usual ideological lines.

On the right, there are neo-isolationists who cheer the decision, given that — with a strong odor of xenophobia — they want the US to disengage from the world altogether and hunker down inside a mythical Fortress Amerika. But there are also plenty of more conventional conservatives who take the hawkish position that it’s a colossal mistake and portends disaster.

On the left there are hardliners who — while generally down on Biden — are also applauding, as they think all American foreign policy is imperialist and evil and don’t ever want to apply US power abroad. But there are also staunch…