“Washington /needs/ to apply stricter standards when deciding to get involved in conflicts abroad. The choice to intervene should be determined not by sweeping ideological commitments nor by blind reliance upon American power but by a careful calculation of the interests involved and the power available. If the United States followed that guidance it would intervene less and succeed more.” (Hans J. Morgenthau 1967)

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Time flies, and we are now 5 odd years ahead of the late August 2021 drama, or rather disaster, in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan after a full 20 years of US-led Western governance and a full 20 years of Taliban armed insurgency: a “disaster” for the combined West, a triumph for the victorious Taliban, and a net tragedy for Afghans in general and especially Afghan women after the 20 years of gradual, relative liberation and emancipation; ”net” tragedy, since it needs to be remembered that the ensuing 5 years, again under harsh Taliban rule and international isolation, were also 5 years of relative peace, as compared to the preceding years of near-constant insurgency/counter-insurgency warfare and societal violence. In that, limited, sense the anniversary is a mixed bag. Relative peace, yes, but a peace mainly under dire conditions of poverty, misery and hopelessness. And now that peace is also under threat (Pakistan), millions have fled and many more million refugees have been forcibly returned by neighboring Iran and Pakistan. Poor Afghanistan, after all these decades of war and misery, and all these decades of failed foreign intervention-cum-domination.

A point of departure for needed reflections of the occasion of the anniversary could and should be the fact that on September 11 this year the US will have to celebrate another anniversary, the remembrance of 9/11 2001, Al Qaida’s brutal attack on New York and Washington, leading to President Bush’s declaration of war against terror, his “war on terror” that lead to a chain of “forever wars”, Afghanistan, Iraq, ISIS, and renewed US entanglement in the conflicts of the Middle East, notably Iran-Israel-Lebanon – and to “forever wars” fatigue in the domestic politics of the US, paving the way, later, for the arrival of the era of Donald Trump dominance, the latter leading to a strangely mixed bag of pledged attempts to end “forever wars” and pledges not to start new ones, and then doing exactly that, to the surprise and disappointment of his MAGA base and beyond, before the November mid-term elections.

A second point of departure could and should be that memories of the catastrophic final evacuation of Westerners and Pro-westerners from the Kabul airport those days in August 2021, and sad memories of all those that dramatically needed evacuation but on whose behalf evacuation failed – as well as all those Afghans that were evacuated but whom receiving countries later failed to honor – need to be drawn upon now that the US is again, despite Trump’s campaign pledges, struggling with a major war, Iran, and with similarly demanding challenges concerning how to achieve a credible “victory” and how to prevent it from becoming a new “forever war”.

Both these points of departure, incidentally, have an important alliance aspect. For both the Afghanistan cut-and-run departure and the current Iran war situation took and takes its toll on NATO solidarity. So the big question, or reflection, on this subject pertains to whether lessons are cumulatively learned, e.g., in this case learning lessons from Afghanistan with analyzing and dealing with the current Iran/Middle East quagmire. The background is whether and to what extent the US’ “war on terror” (as prolonged into the current Iran-US-Israel crisis) can be said in retrospect to have been worth the enormous costs, in lives and treasure.

We can expect the 9/11 tragic anniversary to give rise to an acrimonious debate on this sensitive theme. What gains – other than the fact that the war on terror has achieved zero Islamist attacks on US soil since 9/11 – as a result of the (“forever”) wars can be said to justify the trillions of dollars, the hundreds of thousands of recipient countries deaths, the perhaps up to 100 000 US soldiers wounded, the perhaps 10 000 dead US soldiers and contractors, and other benchmarks? Including, notably, significant numbers of dead and wounded soldiers of other NATO countries who had listened to NATO chief Lord Robertson’s calling (“Afghanistan is make or break for NATO”) and delivered troops in solidarity with the US in the 9/11 context?

The decision to leave Afghanistan, as prepared by Trump I, as negotiated by former US Afghanistan Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad in Doha and as inherited for operationalization by Joe Biden, left the other NATO countries with the question of whether – in view of all the time spent and investments made – they should leave, too, in solidarity, as they hade joined in solidarity, or stay on, if so in the belief that even a small “NATO-European” continued presence could make a difference and prevent chaos. But even if this was for some time seriously considered by them, the chaotic, fast accelerating events during that summer should have discouraged any alternative strategy; any hope, long held by Khalilzad, of an orderly exit and a negotiated outcome negotiated directly between the fast advancing Taliban and the crumbling Ghani government in Kabul proved to be overtaken by events, culminating in the dramatic scenes at the Kabul airport, the suicide bombing and the mistaken US missile attack killing an innocent family.

So the US/Biden evacuation was extraordinarily badly handled, diplomatically and militarily, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say, in retrospect, that it is almost a miracle that NATO survived the shock effect of the Biden administrations flimsy appreciation of the solidarity shown by fellow NATO countries. NATO, in spite of Lord Robertson’s prognosis, did not “break”. Just as, in all probability, it will not break over current serious transatlantic disagreements over the Iran war, Trump’s war of choice which European NATO leaders are hesitating both to help legitimize and help provide an offramp. Strains and challenges and uncertainties, yes, but not break. Not now.

Going back to the points of departure and the reference to the upcoming 9/11 anniversary, the lessons to be learned from Americas “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, apart from the fact that these wars had to be fought simultaneously and that such simultanousness needs to be avoided, even for mighty US, are (simply) that wars generally are easier, much easier, to start than to end, a “forever” truth. This should apply especially if the case in point is a war of choice, difficult or impossible to justify as a war of necessity and hence difficult both to mobilize support for among allies and to end “victoriously”, while at the same time a war of choice may make declaring “victory” as politically necessary domestically as militarily elusive. So if Trump’s current Iran war dilemma drags out in time, perhaps even beyond the mid-term elections, and hence becoming comparable to the “forever wars”, it could be useful to remember the chaotic scenes from Kabul 2021. Repeating cut-and-run is hardly an option. Nor is regretting that you started the war in the first place.

In view of the disheartening fact that 5 years after the 2021 evacuation disaster and 25 years after 9/11 and the ensuing “forever wars” shooting wars are still ongoing, both in Ukraine and in the Middle East and elsewhere, we are left with the jury being still out on whether lessons from earlier wars, how to avoid them, how to conduct them legitimately and how to end them, can ever be learned.

Michael Sahlin