Now Ain’t the Time for Your Tears

In April, when Joe Biden announced that he would follow through with Donald Trump’s impulsive decision to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan, I wrote a blog about that decision called “Banging On a Window That Long Since Closed.” The gist of that piece was that the window for any kind of American “peace with honor” in Afghanistan, or even anything that could be lipsticked-onto-a pig to pass as such (if you squint), had long since slammed shut. As I wrote back then:

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.

So as we watch the sudden, unexpectedly rapid end of a failed military campaign that sprawled over twenty brutal years, here’s what I got right and what I got wrong back in April.

Right first, because everybody gets a trophy.

I was correct that our cause in Afghanistan was lost and that the Taliban would regain power. That did not require the talents of Nostradamus, Kreskin, or even Madame Kavorca who reads palms in a storefront in between the vape shop and Ray’s Pizza on my street. I was correct that reaction to that collapse would cut across the usual ideological lines, and that the right wing would blame Biden no matter…