After using fabricated evidence and even outright lies to justify invading Iraq, the United States has since pulled out. And the violence continues. Nearly 8,000 civilians were killed last year in bloody sectarian/revolutionary violence.
Now the United States is preparing to pull out of Afghanistan. Indeed, President Barack Obama is talking about moving up the time table and even threatening to remove all U.S. troops by year’s end, in part because of his endless frustrations with Afghan President Muhammad Karzai. Obama’s advisers reportedly want him to leave about 10,000 troops behind to help battle Al Qaueda and Taliban insurgents.
Whether this is a real threat by Obama or just diplomatic brinksmanship is almost irrelevant to some degree; this year or next, the United States will pull out all or nearly all of its troops from Afghanistan, more than a decade after invading it.
Whether one originally supported or opposed the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (I vehemently opposed the former and had mixed feelings about the latter), the current issue confronting the United States has to do with the aftermath of invasion, not its impetus:
To what degree does the United States have a moral obligation to help nations it has invaded? And how much of that obligation is tied to the endemic violence that U.S. invasions helped unleash?
Responsibility in this vein was perhaps most famously described by Colin Powell as The Pottery Barn Rule: You break it, you buy it. But in this case an entire nation, not a hideous, overpriced tchotchke.
To be fair, Afghanistan was very broken before the invasion. The Taliban were in power and subjecting the country to its brutal, theocratic vision. But now it’s broken in different ways that the United States is partially responsible for.
Of course, not everyone is concerned with such responsibilities. Powell’s view was a minority in the Bush administration. The neo-Conservative war mongers who advocated the invasions from the start, like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, were interested in regime change and nation building. Only U.S. interests mattered to them.
In both nations, regimes have certainly been changed. But the degree to which the nations have been re-built to United States’ liking is a more complicated issue. Obama’s threat of an earlier and fuller withdrawal speaks to the endless U.S. frustrations with the Afghan government. Indeed, for advocates of nation building, the pullout from Iraq and especially the impending pullout from Afghanistan speak to, at best, only partial success.
And then of course there are those, like myself, who opposed one or both of these invasions from the start. For many of them, the pullout from Afghanistan can’t come soon enough. We never should have been there, they say, so the sooner we leave the better.
But we were there. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead and seriously injured as a result. And in many ways we will still be there even after our troop presence is reduced or even eliminated. Diplomats, military advisers, private contractors, NGOs: none of them are going away. And the consequences of the U.S. invasion, both good and bad, are forever.
Acknowledging and making up for all of that does strike me as being a moral imperative. But so long as interventionists from both parties influence and even design U.S. foreign policy, making up for our mistakes will always take a backseat to other priorities, some of which will undoubtedly lead to new mistakes.
Pulling out represents abandonment. Remaining represents imperialism.
Next time, stay home.
