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Are We to Be the World’s Greatest Force for Good or Not?
https://dennisprager.com/column/are-we-to-be-the-worlds-greatest-force-for-good-or-not/
Dennis Prager
Tue, May 11, 2021

(Snip)
I remember the shame I felt as an American when I saw crowds of Vietnamese who had helped America begging to be taken out of Vietnam along with American troops when the last American helicopters left Vietnam. And who were simply abandoned to their fate.

Now America is poised to do in Afghanistan what it did then — abandon the people it defended to the Islamist sadists known as the Taliban. How many Afghan boys and women will be raped when we leave? How many Afghan men will be tortured to death? Only God knows. But you don’t have to be God to know that it will be a large number.

So, why would we do such a thing — again?

Three reasons are given.

One is, “We cannot stay in Afghanistan forever.”

That argument is offered as if it is so self-evident that it needs no explanation. Which is probably why no one seems to offer one. But why can’t we stay there “forever,” if doing so saves a country and tells the world that America sticks to its commitments and protects its allies?

We have stayed in Germany and South Korea “forever.” Is the world better or worse for it?

The second argument is, “We cannot nation-build.” That argument, too, is offered as if it is self-evidently valid. But it’s a phony argument. No one argued that we were in Afghanistan to “nation-build.” We were there because 9/11 was launched against us from there. And there is every reason to assume more terror will be directed from Afghanistan if we leave. And our presence there has kept Pakistan from falling into the control of Islamists.

We were not there, as Bret Stephens recently argued, “to kill Osama bin Laden, who was just one in a succession of terrorist masterminds. It was to prove Bin Laden wrong about America’s long-term commitments, especially overseas. In August 1996, Bin Laden issued his notorious fatwa declaring a war on the United States that he hoped would be long and bloody. He observed that, in one conflict after another, the Americans always cut and run.”

The third argument is that remaining in Afghanistan costs America blood and treasure. The blood argument is emotionally irrefutable. Every American killed in Afghanistan is an immeasurable tragedy. But in the last six years, the U.S. has lost fewer than 20 service members annually in hostile engagements in Afghanistan. Between 2006 and 2018, we lost twice as many service members to training accidents than to all overseas actions. As for treasure, we spend between $50 and $100 billion a year in Afghanistan. That is far more morally justifiable than the trillion or more dollars we have spent in the last year to bail out Democratic governors and mayors and the unions they serve.
For the record, I would have made the identical argument if Donald Trump were president and removed us from Afghanistan. But the actual withdrawal is being conducted in a different administration.

Moral arguments didn’t matter to one Democratic senator in 1975. As he put it in a Senate speech on April 23: “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals … The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.” That senator was Joseph Biden of Delaware.

To Democrats and Republicans who support the retreat from Afghanistan, I have a question: If Afghanistan comes to resemble Cambodia’s killing fields, will you still think it was the right decision? Or, to put it another way: Is there any level of evil, any emboldening of America-hating Islamists, any effect of an American defeat on the world or on America that would make you regret your decision to withdraw?