Leaving the ESPN Zone of Empires

Leaving the ESPN Zone of Empires

By Matthew Yglesias for SlowBoring.com

April 19, 2021.

Biden and Trump are both right; it's time to move on

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani (C) meets with US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin the Presidential Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan on March 21, 2021

(Photo by Afghan Presidency/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Joe Biden, apparently in defiance of much of the top military brass, has committed to removing the remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan over the summer.

There is a very strong consensus among analysts that this means the Taliban will overrun the Afghan government and reassert control over the country. If that’s right, it will naturally lead to a new round of takes about how Afghanistan is the “graveyard of empires,” as once again an arrogant superpower proved unable to assert control over this remote and rugged landscape.

But over a decade ago, when the Obama administration was deliberating on Afghanistan, I suggested that a better analogy might be that it’s the ESPN Zone of empires — initially intriguing, but on further examination, expensive and pointless, so you leave. Twelve years later, ESPN Zone has been out of business for a long time and the United States is finally ready to go.

The ESPN Zone of Empires

I’m just going to quote myself in full, but for the benefit of younger readers, ESPN used to run themed restaurants called ESPN Zone in a bunch of American cities. It was kind of supposed to be like Planet Hollywood or Hard Rock Café, but for sports. Except they had this slightly weird idea of tying it in with broadcast studios for ESPN radio programming. But more to the point, “a place where you can go with friends to drink beer and eat casual food while watching sports” is not actually a new business idea. The sports bar is an American icon. And there are lots of bars that aren’t quite sports bars but still have TVs where you can watch sports.

ESPN Zone was just overpriced and weird:

Afghanistan is often called the “Graveyard of Empires,” but I think the phrase is pretty misleading. It seems to imply that empires that venture in Afghanistan get defeated and die. But the fact of the matter is that empires tend to venture into Afghanistan, get defeated, and then walk away and be just fine. Alexander the Great couldn’t impose his will on Afghanistan, but his army just left the country still controlling tons of wealthy and important territory. The British decided to leave it alone in the 1860s and contented themselves with running the world’s chief industrial power, plus Canada & Australia, plus India, plus half of Africa, plus all the oceans everywhere, plus the bulk of trade in Latin America and China. The Soviets weren’t in such great shape when the left, but they weren’t in such great shape when they went in, either — their empire collapsed in Budapest and Berlin and Vilnius and Tblisi.

A better analogy might be that it’s the ESPN Zone of empires, someplace where from time to time a lot of people feel tempted to go, but when you get there it turns out to be not so great. But it’s surprisingly expensive to stay! Having gone out of your way to get there in the first place, you’re perhaps initially reluctant to just admit that it’s not worthwhile. But you can’t stay forever.

Back when I wrote that in 2009, the people on the other side of the argument were claiming to believe that this assessment was too bleak — that a brief “surge” of troops into Afghanistan would break the backs of the Taliban and make them want to agree to a negotiated peace that left the American-backed Afghan government in charge.

That proved not to be the case, and now the hawkish view is that maybe we should just stay forever.

“The easy way out”

I think Alex Ward’s reporting on a tense National Security Council meeting where Mark Milley, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued for staying indefinitely captures the flavor of the debate well:

Women’s rights “will go back to the Stone Age,” Milley said, according to two of the sources. He argued that it wasn’t worth leaving the country after “all the blood and treasure spent” there over the last two decades. He also added that, in his view, the lack of 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan would make it harder to stem threats from a nuclear-armed Pakistan.

“He went on for a while,” said a White House official, “and everyone was sort of like, ‘Whoa.’” The official said Milley’s plea was filled with “a lot more emotion than substance” but that “it wasn’t super logical.” 

After Milley finished, Secretary of Defense Austin during his turn to speak said he understood that there was a lot of emotion surrounding this issue after two decades of war. But, Austin asserted, “We’re not going to make decisions based on emotion,” two of the sources said. 

A Washington Post editorial characterized giving up on a hopeless military effort after 20 years as Biden taking “the easy way out.” Like Milley, they argue that departing “will almost certainly be a disaster for the country’s 39 million people — and, in particular, its women” and that it will mean “nullification of the sacrifices of the American servicemen who were killed or wounded in that mission.”

Here’s what I think a rational view of this is.

For starters, it’s simply not the case that overruling the emotional appeals of the top military officers in the country is easy. But not only did Joe Biden and his civilian advisors think that was the right course of action, but Donald Trump also thought that. Since Milley clearly has strong feelings about this and a lot of expertise in military matters, he has a strong incentive to develop an argument that says “Mr. President, here is a plan of action that is likely to result in victory in some reasonable time frame.”

If you’re Donald Trump, you have pretty strong incentives to say yes to a plan like that.

If you’re Joe Biden, you also have pretty strong incentives to say yes to a plan like that.

If two different presidents from different parties with different value systems both look at what Milley has on the table and think it doesn’t add up, it very likely doesn’t add up.

Indeed, even the Washington Post editorial page, the most reliable signal booster of the national security establishment around, can’t muster any kind of account of how staying is going to lead to a good outcome. The idea is just that we should stay indefinitely to forestall bad outcomes.

Over on the news side, meanwhile, the Post published this in December of 2019:

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

It’s worth reading through because the documents really do paint a very clear picture. By the time Obama took office, the whole thing had clearly gone to shit, but the military wanted to keep throwing good money after bad. They did it for eight straight years and they kept it up during Trump’s tenure in office. Trump, near the end of his term, finally committed to leaving, and it seems like the military figured that they could maybe ignore him (the way they ignored his orders to leave Syria) and hope Biden would rule differently.

Biden, having lived through the Obama experience, isn’t having it.

Praise Lloyd Austin

As a sidebar here, I think a lot of experts in civil-military relations misread the stakes in Biden’s decision to tap retired General Lloyd Austin to serve as Secretary of Defense.

The case against was that to have a former general in this post, especially so soon after James Mattis did it, would undermine the principle of civilian control. One bull case for Austin that I heard at the time was that Biden saw over Obama’s shoulder how aggressively the uniformed services would push back against the White House. Not just in terms of slow-walking directives they didn’t like, but in terms of political warfare and working their networks in the media and the think tank universe to make defying them costly.

Austin, according to this theory, was being put in place because as a former CENTCOM leader, he wouldn’t be subject to the kind of emotional blackmail that Biden was expecting.

During transition periods, there’s lots of jockeying for jobs and lots of people claiming to dish “the real truth” off the record. On the key economic policy jobs where I felt well-grounded, I weighed in. On the Austin stuff, it wasn’t clear to me. But in retrospect, this case for Austin seems to me to have clearly been correct — Biden really is defying the brass, and in Ward’s story, Austin is key to that. He acknowledges and validates Milley’s feelings, but also insists that those feelings not be the decisive factor. And his presence ensures that it doesn’t become a fight between those who’ve served and those who haven’t.

So even though I agree in theory that putting an ex-general in this role is bad for civilian control, in practice it’s good.

The larger story on civ-mil stuff, I think, is that down the road it would make sense to tap more people like Ruben Gallego or Seth Moulton or Tammy Duckworth for this kind of role. People who aren’t professional soldiers, but who have the cred as veterans to say “no” to the generals.

Back to the case.

Humanitarian militarism is a terrible cost-benefit

The good news about Afghanistan is that at this point, the U.S. isn’t involved in that much of a hot war. It’s been over a year since any of our troops were killed by hostile action, and while it got really expensive in the mid-Obama years, more recently we are spending “only” about $40 billion per year.

That being said, while I am glad the contemporary United States military incorporates humanitarian thinking into their analysis of strategic situations, the fact of the matter is that fighting wars is not a reasonable form of international charity. It was a long intellectual road for me to reach that conclusion from being a Teenage Balkans Hawk in the 1990s to being a remorseful ex-supporter of the Iraq War by 2004.

But the fact is that the cost-benefit of war is awful. GiveWell estimates that donor contributions to the Against Malaria Foundation amounting to $15.3 million in 2020 saved about 3,000 lives.

Now if you run the numbers, that comes out to say that if we spent that $40 billion on malaria prevention we could save eight million lives per year. We of course can’t do that because “only” 400,000 or so people die of malaria each year. But I think that gives a flavor of the scale of the spending we are talking about. When Biden wanted to make a big splashy commitment to COVAX to show he’s helping poor countries with COVID-19, he pledged $4 billion. PEPFAR gets about $7 billion a year.

About 1.75 billion people around the planet suffer from iodine deficiency, a problem we could plausibly eliminate for a fraction of the cost of the Afghanistan war.

Now to be clear, it’s obviously not the case that withdrawing from Afghanistan will magically lead to a huge increase in U.S. public spending on global public health.

But just as I think it’s important for Austin to put his foot down and insist that the military follow presidential orders, it’s important to push back against this idea of the military as a force for global uplift. There are things in the world that cannot be achieved with insecticide-treated bed nets or iodized salt. And that’s why you have a military. But if you want to make the case for humanitarian engagement, then push for real humanitarianism, not open-ended war.

Our allies are not great

I do not have a super-clear theory of why this is, but it’s obviously just very striking that after 20 years, nobody in the American national security community believes the Afghan government can fight the Taliban to a standstill without direct American military support.

That’s kind of wild when you think about it.

Not only have they had a lot of direct military assistance over the past two decades, but they’ve also had access to plenty of training and equipment and money. There’s clearly something that’s actually deeply dysfunctional about our allies there. Way back in November 2009, leaked diplomatic cables from the U.S. Ambassador in Kabul warned that, in his view, pouring too many troops into Afghanistan would encourage a cycle of dependency.

I don’t really feel like I have the chops to say whether or not that was correct. But at least it’s a theory.

By contrast, when you look at Michael O’Hanlon’s argument for staying that he published at Brookings, he’s just saying bad things will happen if we leave without mapping out a plan for success. CAP’s Peter Juul, similarly, is basically just saying that bad things will happen after we leave. Nobody is explaining the specific, fixable reasons why the Afghan government can’t win without us and what the plan is to fix them. These pieces make some good points — in particular, that you shouldn’t assume America leaving will “end the war.” Rather, the war will intensify as the Taliban redoubles its offensive efforts.

That said, if nobody has a theory of how our allies can ever stand on their own, then it’s just not credible to say we should fight there forever.

Similarly, over the years we’ve seen plenty of headlines like “U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies” and “US tolerated corruption in Afghanistan.” So what are we doing here exactly? Maybe in a war you tolerate your allies raping young boys because they’re an effective fighting force and you need them. But the point is they’re not an effective fighting force — they’re weak and corrupt — in which case why are we turning a blind eye to their bad acts?

Politics by other means

George W. Bush’s administration, to its credit, was always wary of adopting expansive war aims in Afghanistan.

To their discredit, however, they decided that meant they needed to adopt expansive aims for a totally different war in Iraq. Also to their discredit, they didn’t actually capture or kill Osama bin Laden, even though the immediate casus belli was the Taliban refusing to turn him over. Had they successfully killed him back in 2002, it would’ve been easy to look at that plus Hamid Karzai’s installation in Kabul and said that’s the win — the war is over.

But Bush didn’t get bin Laden. So he couldn’t declare victory. Instead, he made blunders we never recovered from. For example, here’s a story that not a lot of people know — the Taliban tried to surrender and Bush told them no:

Just as Kandahar was falling, fissures appeared in the Taliban movement. As most of the government was crumbling-Kabul and other major cities had fallen, leaving just Kandahar, Helmand, and Zabul provinces still under Taliban control-some of Mullah Omar’s chief lieutenants secretly gathered and decided to surrender to the forces of Hamid Karzai. This group included Tayeb Agha, at one point Mullah Omar’s top aide; Mullah Beradar, a former governor and key military commander; Sayed Muhammad Haqqani, the former ambassador to Pakistan; Mullah Obaidullah, the defense minister; Mullah Abdul Razzak, the interior minster; and many others. 

The group, represented by Obaidullah, delivered a letter to Karzai-then en route from Uruzgan to Kandahar city, one of the Taliban’s last standing urban strongholds. The letter accepted Karzai’s recent selection at the Bonn Conference as the country’s interim leader and acknowledged that the Islamic Emirate (the official name of the Taliban government) had no chance of surviving. The Taliban officials also told Karzai that the senior leaders who signed the letter had permission from Mullah Omar to surrender. That same day, Taliban officials agreed to relinquish Kandahar city, and opposition forces successfully entered the city 48 hours later. The surrendered Taliban leaders continued to exchange a number of messages with the new government to work out the terms of their abdication. 

The main request of the Taliban officials in this group was to be given immunity from arrest in exchange for agreeing to abstain from political life. At this juncture, these leading Taliban members (as well as the rank and file) did not appear to view the government and its foreign backers as necessitating a 1980s-type jihad. Some members even saw the new government as Islamic and legitimate. Indeed, Mullah Obaidullah and other former Taliban officials even surrendered to Afghan authorities in early 2002. But Karzai and other government officials ignored the overtures-largely due to pressures from the United States and the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s erstwhile enemy. Moreover, some Pashtun commanders who had been ousted by the Taliban seven years earlier were eager for revenge and were opposed to allowing former Taliban officials to go unpunished.

Now of course if things had gone the other way, it is extremely possible that the ex-Taliban folks would have eventually double-crossed Karzai or his successor. I think it would be foolish to look at this story and feel sure that had Bush made other choices, Afghanistan would be stable and peaceful today.

I just think it illustrates the fact that early on, we had a chance to achieve concrete war aims — get Osama, push the Taliban leaders out of power — and then when we blew it, we started making up new war aims. In fact, instead of deploying military force to try to achieve concrete political objectives for the past 10 years, I think we’ve been shifting our political goals around to try to achieve the U.S. military’s internal bureaucratic goal of saying the sacrifices of earlier soldiers were not in vain.

It’s a genuinely sad situation. I have friends who served in Afghanistan and I also wish we could say their services and sacrifices accomplished big important things. But asking more people to sacrifice further to avoid admitting that’s not true just doesn’t make any sense.