Withdrawal Symptoms

“Dear doves and hawks and other feathered brethren: It is already over.”

“Tomorrow has broken out today:

Riot in Algeria, in Cyprus, in Alabama;

Aged in wrong, the empires are declining,

And China gathers, soundlessly, like evidence.”

—W.D. Snodgrass, “The Campus on the Hill” (1987)

Nobody has any appetite left for hawkish pomp and humanitarian mumble, but we shall have our fill of both by the end of the year. Should the American mission in Afghanistan be called off? The question assumes there exists an alternative. No, we are not in a position to wonder because withdrawal has not been a choice for quite some time: It is an inevitability, and the little the Biden administration can and should do is to expedite it. The rush to claim credit for ending an endless war, to disown debit for the civil war that follows—and to blame partisan opponents for attempting to do either—has already begun. Reject the premises altogether and watch, calmly, as Lady Liberty Enlightening the World waves goodbye to all that.

The language of “endless” or “forever” war fails twice. (Terms from science fiction should generally stay there.) First, war implies force of the degree and duration necessary to subdue the enemy: The United States has committed to neither in Afghanistan since 2003. Second, setting it apart from other forms of collective violence, war envelops the entire political community: its leadership, the instruments of state, and the general population. The American citizenry has been retired from this venture since at least 2011. Calling the thing in Afghanistan what it is—or, rather, not calling it what it is not—can evacuate from the debate unnecessary reflections on defeat and push us to wrap up this business. Withdrawal should be uncontroversial, a merely logistical matter.

The possibility of permanent violence is intrinsic to war. A state’s effort to induce capitulation requires imposing on the opponent conditions worse than capitulation, and not to allow this imposition to be or appear temporary. The context of war—setting, arms, tactics, norms—is fluid, but its nature is not. In the fourth century B.C. in central Greece, the purpose of the long campaign and even longer spears (a technological edge) of Macedon was the subjection of Athens and her allies. For most of them, the readiness to deliver death, and perhaps a quick demonstration of that, sufficed. Philip II obliterated those for whom no conditions were perceived to be worse than submission, like the elite Sacred Band of Thebes. The fate of each belligerent is a product of what Carl von Clausewitz calls the “sum of available means” and “strength of the Will.” The United States has never been deficient in the first department but, absent the will to escalate the violence until the enemy’s compliance or annihilation, war can neither be won nor lost: It is nonviable.