15 Acres

Costing just under a billion dollars to build and a whole lot more to defend and maintain. The Embassy of the United States of America, Kabul, Afghanistan. It’s more than a 15-acre fortress that has implemented Washington, D.C.’s battle to take and hold as much of that rugged mountain nation as we could… never more than a third of the country was steadily under Afghan control with the support of the United States and its allies. The recent images of helicopters lifting off, carrying US personnel to and from the Kabul airport where swarms of people, Americans and locals, were desperately trying to leave, are the lasting images of our failed effort. Photographs of bodies dropping off US Air Force transport jets, locals who grabbed on to a departing aircraft that was to them their last ray of hope, a body in the wheel well of that same plane… all images that will sear into the memories of those who care, just as did those images of helicopters lifting the last Americans from the US embassy in Saigon on April 29, 1975… which the nation seems to have forgotten. 

Lest we forget, we have abandoned US embassies in Muslim lands since: Mogadishu, Somalia in 1991 and the 2014 evacuation in Tripoli, Libya. And now Kabul. In an escalating clash of civilizations, including the Western world vs the Islamist territories, we seem to be losing a war of attrition. Not that the United States has the stomach to fight that war without end. But will we ever learn that retaliation does not have to include occupation and administration of the lands of militant foes? China (with Uighurs) and Russia (Chechens and more) continue to have their own struggles with Muslims in their midst, most of whom are actually peaceful. It is so much worse in the middle of a spreading global pandemic.

As much as the “kinder, gentler” Afghan Taliban declare their respect for human rights, guarantee safe passage to diplomats and desperate people, they can afford to gloat. Their cry around the world, especially to insurgent Islamist terrorists the world over: we defeated the United States. We waited them out, harassing and attacking them for two decades, and we won. We have their abandoned weapons and buildings. Committed Afghan Muslims have now defeated both the Soviet Union and the United States, two of the greatest superpowers ever. Oh, and our pledge to respect human rights and female education are always going to be within our view of a very harsh vision of Sharia law. Allah is with us! So, don’t hold your breath. Extremist Islamists the world over are cheering. Even as the Taliban have pledged not to use their land as launching/training grounds for anti-US attacks, there should be no comfort in those words. Al Qaeda foreign fighters remain very much at home in Afghanistan. 

For most of recent months, we only had a few remaining troops in the country, and seemingly their efforts, their very presence, seemed to rally the under-motivated Afghan army and keep the Taliban at bay. Just to extract the remaining Americans and as many of our local supporters as possible, we now have more troops in Afghanistan that were there before the Biden withdrawal announcement. The current administration was well aware the Taliban had a strong possibility of complete control within weeks; it simply accepted the risks of a chaotic departure. 

My August 16th blog, Afghanistan Has Done What It Was Predicted to Do, Only Faster, pointed out the sheer absurdity from both the Trump and Biden administrations of setting immutable withdrawal dates. What seemed to be good politics to each politician at the time was sufficient to motivate the Taliban to begin an offensive for which they knew there would only be half-hearted resistance. We could have pulled out slowly, without big glossy announcements, and managed a less chaotic and desperate result; it would still have been less than perfect... but vastly less destructive. 

Instead, we simply pointed out to Islamist terrorists the world over… the United States can be defeated… just as the Soviet Union was crushed decades before. Fortunately, for the Biden administration, foreign policy does not seem to guide contemporary US votes in any national election. We have short memories and a fixated domestic focus. Unless it impacts us directly in our homeland, political memories just fade. Unfortunately, adding to the exponential rise in domestic terrorism from our home-grown extremists, we have just reignited the hopes and dreams of Islamists the world over. I’m sure many have rekindled dreams of overthrowing moderate regimes in the Muslim world… and escalating attacks on the US and our interests worldwide.

Most of our Kabul Embassy was evacuated by April. Departing Americans were provided with a book, pictured right above, with instructions and observations about that departure. Our embassy structures have evolved over the past few decades, built to resist takeovers and to protect both classified materials and essential personnel in the event of attack. “In Kabul, the U.S. embassy’s main building was designed to resist such [takeover] efforts. A substantial beige stucco structure with offices and apartments, and fronted by a large textured shatter-resistant glass facade covering thickly reinforced walls, the building is fortified to withstand bomb blasts, and is set back significantly from nearby roads to provide a physical buffer from potential gunfire. Designed by Washington, D.C.-based Sorg Architects, the half-million-square-foot building opened in 2013, and cost more than $350 million to build…

“But even with a gradual evacuation, leaving an embassy behind is a complicated process. A retired U.S. Navy SEAL with 20 years of experience, who requested his identity not be revealed, says evacuations are simply ‘chaotic.’ He helped plan an embassy evacuation in a North African country during a brief rebel uprising, and says it’s a combination of corralling personnel from within the complex and those who may be living outside its walls, helping the typically embedded CIA within the embassy to destroy sensitive documents and equipment, and leaving anything unnecessary behind.

“An evacuated embassy may remain secure for some time. Most U.S. embassies are compartmentalized with security systems controlling access to wings, corridors, and rooms. In Kabul, the former Navy SEAL says, the Taliban are likely to move in, and these security systems won’t be able to withstand efforts to break in.

“‘They will defeat those mechanisms over time and gain access to whatever they need to gain access to. But at the end of the day, you’d think the embassy folks would understand that,’ he says. ‘Just because we’ve got this secure and super cool system, it’s going to get broken into because we’re not coming back.’” Nate Berg writing for the August 19th FastCompany.com. What’s worse, the embassy shell could be converted to official Taliban use… but it will remain a monument to America’s failure… and the Taliban’s triumph. In the eyes of America-haters the world over.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I simply wonder when a self-righteous United States will understand that a knee-jerk retaliatory reaction to a serious act of foreign hostility is most likely to fail without a long-term and very realistic plan of what to do with that foe after the retaliation.