Fantasy Intellectuals on Afghanistan

Various takes

I have been meaning to write an essay every week or two on the topic of “Catching up with the stars of Fantasy Intellectual Teams.” This will be the first of what I hope becomes a regular series.

I hesitate to start with the topic of Afghanistan. I actually have more respect for FITS who refrain from getting into the hot topic of the day, whatever it is. So let me start by praising those who so far have not talked about Afghanistan: Scott Alexander, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and others on the Fantasy Intellectual Teams roster.

Among those who did offer takes, Robert Wright says that the original mistake was turning Afghanistan into a pawn in the Cold War Game.

In 1979, the Soviet Union, fearful that Afghanistan’s Marxist regime might be drifting toward the West, invaded and occupied Afghanistan and supported a coup that reshuffled the regime’s leadership. The regime, by trying to impose secular values on a religious populace, had already inspired popular rebellion, and tamping that down now became part of the Soviet mission.

Jimmy Carter, with less than a year left in his presidency, began a program of arming the Afghan resistance. The resistance would have gotten outside military support in any event, notably from next door neighbor Pakistan. But the US support was massive and would eventually include Stinger shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, which ensured that the Soviets couldn’t easily subdue the insurgency. And, indeed, there ensued a thirteen-year conflict that eventually drove the Soviets out of the country and drove the government out of power. Somewhere in the vicinity of a million Afghans were killed in the process.

I find it interesting that Wright takes a very libertarian line on international issues. On immigration, for example, I have seen him ask why government should have any right to tell someone that they cannot make a decision to live in this country. Also, he is strongly anti-war, which puts him in the company of most libertarians. When it comes to foreign intervention, Wright sees past the good intentions used to sell the public on a foreign intervention and instead focuses on the adverse outcomes that frequently result. Libertarians challenge conservatives to explain how a government that they think is too clumsy and stupid to undertake activist domestic policy is somehow going to be brilliantly competent in intervening abroad. Wright strikes me as the reverse, in that he seems to see clearly the perils of activist foreign policy but to overlook those same perils when it comes to activist domestic policy.

Noah Smith says that policy makers learned the wrong lesson from the aftermath of World War II. They thought that we were the ones who brought liberal democracy to Japan and Germany, and so we can do the same thing anywhere. David Halberstam made that point, among others, in his classic critique of Vietnam policy, The Best and the Brightest.

On Bari Weiss’ substack, Jacob Siegel writes,

In 2012, I spent six months in Western Afghanistan as a U.S. army officer. While the war had long since ceased to serve any vital national security interest, it became clear why we were there: it provided lucrative opportunities for the defense industry and a relatively safe means of career advancement for senior U.S. officials and military officers. 

Halberstam made an equally severe accusation about America’s military in Vietnam. The claim is that military leaders wanted to perpetuate the intervention for career advancement reasons. I personally am inclined to be skeptical of that claim, but I have no first-hand experience in the military that would give me insights into incentives there.

Weiss offers space for a variety of viewpoints, including H.R. McMaster and others who are bitter about our abandonment of the intervention. But none of the people whose views she solicited sounds comparable to Vietnam-era hawks. Back in the those days, hawks insisted that with just a little more willpower we could win.