If Liz Cheneys blames epic failure in Afghanistan, she can start with her father

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Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). (Photo by Samuel Corum / Getty Images)

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It was an epic failure in everything we were going to pay for for years to come, said Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, denouncing Joe Bidens’ decision to complete the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.

Cheney threw up most of his vitriol at Biden. But she didn’t stop there. Dismissing the idea of ​​ending a never-ending war, Cheney complained Sunday on ABCs This Week that Rand Paul, Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Joe Biden’s view of the world here is fundamentally dangerous, irresponsible and wrong.

But the Republican representative neglected to identify the most dangerous, irresponsible and mistaken player of all. She had no criticism of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The US military presence in Afghanistan did not start with Joe Biden, or Donald Trump, or Barack Obama. It all started with the faltering co-presidency of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney. It was the Bush-Cheney administration (for which Liz Cheney was the Nepotist Assistant Under Secretary of State for Middle East Affairs) that responded to the attacks of September 11, 2001 with a boundless war on terrorism that initially targeted Afghanistan, but that quickly evolved into include the Cheney’s main project: the invasion and occupation of oil-rich Iraq.

Through it all, Dick Cheney made some wacky statements about the Afghan project. While he did not don a flight suit and appear in front of a Mission Accomplied banner like an unfortunate Bush did on May 1, 2003, Cheney has regularly made exaggerated statements about the success of the mission. Afghan. As early as November 2001, the vice-president performed a lap of honor on CBS News 60 Minutes. That’s when he announced that we had provided the kind of air support, logistical support, intelligence and so on that was needed to [Afghan forces aligned with the United States] succeed in their campaign against the Taliban.

Recalling the long history of conflict in the region where empires have repeatedly failed to impose their will on Afghanistan, Dick Cheney said: When all is said and done and the dust settles, this one will likely have happened. with less loss of life than in any previous conflict.

Two years later, in September 2003, Cheney appeared on NBCs Meet the Press to tweet about what we have accomplished in terms of taking Afghanistan. as a base to attack the United States. Yes, he admitted, there were casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, Cheney told Tim Russert, the price we had to pay is not exaggerated and certainly wouldn’t lead me to suggest or think the strategy is flawed or needs to be changed. Current problem

Four years later, the supposedly downed Taliban learned that Cheney was visiting Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and targeted it with a suicide bombing. Cheney survived, but, as Craig Whitlock recounts in The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, the explosion killed 20 Afghan workers who came to the base that day in search of work. It also claimed the lives of two Americans and a South Korean assigned to the international military coalition: Army Pfc. Daniel Zizumbo, 27 from Chicago; Geraldine Marquez, an American entrepreneur from Lockheed Martin who had just turned 31; and Master Sgt. Yoon Jang-ho, the first South Korean soldier to die in a foreign conflict since the Vietnam War.

When the Taliban announced that they had targeted Cheney, US officials said it was an absurd claim. But, Whitlock notes, it was US military officials who were hiding the truth.

Cheney was not the only fabricator regarding the success of the longest war in US history. But the steadily expanding mission in Afghanistan as a nation-building exercise began with Cheney and Bush. If the United States had caught and killed Osama bin Laden in December 2001, the American military presence in Afghanistan would have disappeared almost immediately afterwards. I can’t prove it. This is only an opinion from my perspective as one of President George W. Bush’s speech writers in 2001 and 2002, David Frum wrote in a recent essay for The Atlantic. Yet I firmly believe in it. The United States was in Afghanistan for 20 years because first Bush and then his successors found themselves trapped in a scheme of responding to past failures by redoubling future efforts. In the fall of 2001, the US mission in Afghanistan was clear, limited and achievable: find and kill Bin Laden. After bin Laden’s escape, that mission escalated into something fuzzy and incredibly difficult: to rebuild Afghan society and reshape the Afghan state.

In his speech on Monday, Biden said: Our mission in Afghanistan was never meant to build a nation. But that’s what he has become.

Cheney has set the tone when it comes to Afghanistan, and his choice to rebuild it, rebuild it, whatever phrase you want, has claimed the lives of nearly 2,500 US servicemen, nearly 4,000 contractors. Americans and tens of thousands of Afghan and civilian soldiers. It also cost US taxpayers $ 2 trillion. When the military industrial complex makes this kind of commitment, it is difficult to end a nation-building exercise, even if it fails.

Biden knows it. There is never a good time to withdraw US forces, he admitted. What set Biden apart from Cheney and Bush was his willingness to make the difficult choice they had refused to make two decades earlier.

So now Liz Cheney, all the hawk her father was, and all the partisan hack her father was, claims we were able to stop the Taliban from establishing safe havens with 2,500 to 3,500 troops on the ground. .

It’s a classic Cheney distortion of reality. If the Taliban had not established safe havens in Afghanistan, how were they so well prepared, so organized, and so effective when it came to taking power?

This is the kind of unfortunate truth about Afghanistan that the Cheneys have always refused to acknowledge.

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