Readers Write: Withdrawal from Afghanistan

Last week, a Marine battalion commander was relieved for a Facebook posting wherein he demanded "accountability" from our senior military leadership for their inept handling of our calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan ("After 20-year war, a final departure," front page, Aug. 31). The commander was obviously grieving the needless loss of the 11 Marines killed at Hamid Karzai International Airport. However, I believe the most damning question he asked of our senior leadership was, "Did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, 'Hey, it's a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, a strategic air base, before we evacuate everyone?' Did anyone do that?"

The American people deserve an answer to that question. I think the answer will indicate that the military fiasco we are witnessing at the airport could have been prevented. By giving up our base at Bagram, we allowed ourselves to be trapped at the airport in Kabul in untenable positions with no room for maneuvering or effective defensive operations. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and the other service chiefs should have known better. Their incompetent leadership and lack of effective planning for our withdrawal violated or completely ignored basic military doctrine regarding retrograde operations.

The senior officers responsible for this debacle should be relieved and replaced by officers who know and understand fundamental military doctrine. They should be military professionals who recognize the terrorist threat we now face from a vastly energized jihadist movement.

The ultimate responsibility for this catastrophe rests squarely on the shoulders of President Joe Biden, the commander in chief. The buck actually does stop with him. He, too, must be held accountable for the military and humanitarian debacle in Kabul that now serves as a tragic bookend to 9/11.

Col. Buzz Kriesel, Somerset, Wis.

The writer is retired from the U.S. Army Special Forces.

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Martin Urberg, Edina

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The article "Kabul airport attack should have brought Americans together" (Opinion Exchange, Aug. 31) in Tuesday's edition was interesting because a tragedy such as the Kabul airport deaths, while sad and demoralizing to Americans, is the type of tragedy that years ago did bring the country together.

The April 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut resulted in 17 American deaths and the October 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut resulted in 241 military deaths. I'm old enough to remember that the anger was toward the terrorists in the Middle East, not the party of the president at the time, Republican Ronald Reagan. The same could be said about 9/11. The feeling was a feeling of us vs. them, not Democrat vs. Republican.

You can't really expect much better now, though, in our current anti-intellectual society, when citizens get their news from the Facebook comments of friends, partisan cable news channels, and far-left and far-right podcasts. We really have turned into mindless sheep, and that's right where the two major political parties want us.

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The images of people clinging to the cargo planes departing Afghanistan are heartbreaking and indelible. They are a testament to the power of photos and video to tell a story. But they are also an example of how images can create a narrative that is misleading and incomplete. The media (including the Star Tribune) and pundits (like John Rash) citing those images leaped to the conclusion that the withdrawal process was a failure. And yet within days after those pictures, the U.S. military had restored order to the Kabul airport and continued the successful evacuation of 117,000 Americans and Afghans within a period of a few weeks. This was accomplished by using one runway in an airport surrounded by panicked crowds and the Taliban. This may have been the most successful airlift since the Berlin airlift in 1948-'49.

There will be many postmortem reviews of the withdrawal process that will undoubtedly conclude that it could have been planned and executed better, but the notion that it was a failure is nonsense. Also, remember that the Trump administration had four years to plan for the withdrawal, the Biden administration had less than six months.

The U.S. succeeded in its initial goal in invading Afghanistan of eliminating the safe haven for al-Qaida. We obviously failed in the more vague goal of establishing a stable democratic government with Western values. There were many strategic and tactical mistakes made over the past 20 years. It is not clear that the policies and plans of any president could have changed the eventual outcome. But it is clear that the Trump administration hastened the collapse of the Afghan government. The critical error was to negotiate a "withdrawal" agreement with the Taliban — leaving the Afghan government out of the process. This sent a clear message to the Afghan leaders and people that the real power and future was with the Taliban. Is it any wonder that the Afghan officials and soldiers saw the handwriting on the wall and gave up quickly and without a fight? The Trump administration also "negotiated" the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters!

I hope we retain the desire and willingness to help the people of other countries establish and maintain stable governments and societies that enable all their citizens to thrive, but I also hope we recognize the limits of "hard" power and accept that we cannot force other cultures to adopt our values or system of government.

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As we reflect on the American-Afghanistan debacle, it's time America comes to terms with the responsibility of being an empire. "Empire" is part of the life cycle of all great nations, but ever since George Washington's 1796 farewell address, Americans have abhorred the idea of becoming one. America did not become an empire through conquest; instead, we are the first ideological empire. The American philosophy built the United Nations and the current world order. Americans are overdue in acknowledging our evolution into an empire, and if we want to remain the dominant ideological superpower, it requires us to take responsibility in wherever we invest our troops and resources.

I am not suggesting that America ought to invade every nation that opposes us, but when we do find it in our best interest to deploy our troops abroad, any amount of time that we spend in a foreign nation longer than is necessary to eliminate threats — like we did when we committed to "nation-building" in Afghanistan — we begin to incur responsibility to the nation we entered.

The tragedy in Afghanistan is not so much an indictment of our politicians — it is equally of the American people. We cannot continue to sway between opposing foreign policies every four years. The American people need to accept the ideological empire status of American foreign policy and commit to electing leaders who will consistently lead America, the beacon of freedom, into a stable and responsible foreign policy.

Riley Smith, Wayzata