In the main I agree with Michael Walzer—this is almost invariably the case—but since broad agreement is rarely the stuff of mesmerizing political discussion I’ll declare a few reservations. Among other things, Walzer writes that any loose analogy between the stalemate achieved in Korea and a stalemate we might have achieved in Afghanistan should not be cause for optimism:
Smoler’s comparison with Korea is helpful here, though I don’t think that it supports staying on in Afghanistan. The military stalemate in Korea was followed by a negotiated cease fire; the opposing armies were separated by a demilitarized zone; and after that we kept some 30,000 troops in the South. By contrast, even if we imagine a stalemate on the ground in Afghanistan, there was no prospect of a long-term cease fire or of a division of the country marked by anything like a demilitarized zone; and we would not have been ready to add tens of thousands of soldiers to guarantee the stability of the cease fire, if there was a cease fire. In Korea, it was the end of the fighting that enabled us to stay on (for decades, as it has turned out); in Afghanistan it was the fact that there was no end in sight that made it very hard to stay on.
While I think there are many reasons to doubt the plausibility of the long term survival of the now annihilated and certainly radically flawed Afghan government, the absence of a Korean War-style armistice does not seem to me to be one of them. South Korea, determined to unify the peninsula by force, never signed that armistice, and North Korea, also determined to unify the peninsula by force, signed it very grudgingly and did not observe it particularly scrupulously—I’ve not kept up, but in 2011 South Korea listed 221 North Korean violations of the armistice. A perceived threat of large-scale renewed warfare remained for a very long time, sufficiently vivid that retired American officers set a number of novels in the genre once known as ‘the tale of the next war’ in Korea. Nor do I think the absence of a border, a DMZ and a discrete national territory are reasons the Afghan government could not have survived. Those absences are instead the reason the Afghan government would have had to continue to fight a possibly interminable counterinsurgency campaign against a Taliban possessed of cross-border sanctuaries and the vigorous sponsorship of the Pakistani military.
Counterinsurgency campaigns rarely result in swift and total victories. Such an outcome is least likely against insurgencies enjoying cross-border sanctuaries and significant foreign patronage, but guerilla insurgencies even more rarely achieve total victories. The exceptions are generally when guerilla insurgencies develop into revolutionary civil wars, with re-equipped former guerillas forming and fighting as regular armies. Many states over most of history have fought long-term and often inconclusive counterinsurgency campaigns within their own borders—their guerilla opponents are often described, accurately or otherwise, as bandits, whose victories against states are genuinely rare, and until this one guerilla insurgent victories have been rare in “the War on Terror”. Early on in our war in Afghanistan the Taliban, having disintegrated on the battlefield, offered an armistice and something like a coalition government, an offer we scorned, Sunni Arab insurgencies were twice defeated in Iraq, where well within living memory Shi’ite and Kurdish insurgencies had been defeated several times before. Over the course of its insurgency the Taliban never demonstrated the ability to prevail against either Americans or the Afghan National Army when either or both were backed by significant tactical airpower, and a long stalemate still seemed possible until Trump essentially surrendered to the Taliban, a decision President Biden did nothing to undo. The order of events is illuminating: we did not abandon the Afghan government only after its army disintegrated, its army disintegrated only after we abandoned the Afghan government. The Taliban did not take Kabul after being reformed and re-equipped as a regular army, and only came into their windfall of American heavy equipment after the state and army they had long opposed disintegrated. The American authorities seem to have invited the Taliban into Kabul ‘to preserve order’.
In an alternate world where Biden cancelled an agreement the Taliban seem to have immediately broken, 6000 or so American troops, many perhaps defending an airbase home to their tactical airpower, might not have kept the Afghan National Army from some day disintegrating—Afghan elites were stealing their National Army blind, we had no record of successfully pressuring them to stop, similarly no record of successfully pressuring Pakistan to stop sheltering, assisting and directing them. That army would have taken continuing casualties from IEDs, snipers, and other forms of violence the Taliban practiced with significant skill. But sudden, total collapses of armies facing guerilla insurgents remain extremely rare. In the fight between the Taliban, who seem to have been much less popular in 2019 than in 2021, and a remarkably corrupt Afghan government and a much-abused Afghan National Army, I do not think it is prudent to predict a particular outcome in that alternate world in which our government did not seem to say to the latter Sauve qui peut!, which they began to ever more credibly repeat to one another
Now, a lot of agreement: I certainly agree that ‘War on Terror”, “War on Drugs”, “War on Crime” and for that matter “War on Poverty” are metaphors sometimes dangerously mistaken for useful analogies. The wars on Crime and Drugs militarized the police and significantly expanded what Foucault, with a perhaps imperfect grasp of Stalin’s gulags, called the carceral archipelago. Destructively militarizing something one has recklessly decided to call a war seems a probable hazard of careless language. My intuition is that the particular metaphor of ‘War on X’ is perhaps more dangerous for Americans than for some other cultures of political and historical memory because the two armed conflicts that most durably shaped our sense of war were our Civil War and the Second World War, which outside the Old South and parts of Yorkville were pretty widely understood to be absolutely just, waged until absolute victory, and widely seen as sufficiently virtuous and desperate to justify some pretty savage measures. Even the metaphor of a War on Poverty may have done some harm—American wars are supposed to end in total victory, that one didn’t, which may be one reason it is sometimes remembered as an absolute failure, which it wasn’t. With some but not many exceptions we tend to forget the wars we might be ashamed of—our brilliant military success in the wholly unprovoked Mexican War, or our use of torture during our conquest of the Philippines. We do remember Vietnam, although with imperfect accuracy, e.g. in memory the Tet offensive often remains a North Vietnamese victory, Giap’s greatest triumph, whereas military historians have long tended to understand it as the military catastrophe that shattered the guerilla movement in South Vietnam. The invincible VC did not take Saigon—armored forces supported by MiG 21s took Saigon.
“Real war” too often remains imagined as a desperate moment where we are absolutely in the right, and while most of us no longer say Inter arma enim silent leges—among arms laws are silent—a fair number of of Americans still tend to think “it’s war”, and pardoned Eddie Gallagher shall be, to remarkably small protest outside the armed forces themselves. Inter armes enim silent leges, Mr. Nixon may have at least pretended to think, when he released William Calley to house arrest three days after his conviction, another decision less popular with our officer corps than with some politicians. Michael Walzer is not least famous for reclaiming, clarifying and reviving the practices and doctrines that replaced Inter armes enim silent leges, also for clarifying what is and what looks like (but may not be) terrorism. When he politely points out that the phrase “War on Terror” is a nonsense, he’s surely right. Terror is a tactic, sometimes a strategy, employed by both regimes and n0n-state actors, and one generally makes war with tactics and strategies, not on tactics and strategies. I agree with him again when he says that military force will probably be a part but a fairly small part of effective anti-terrorist policies, and that terror will be with us for the foreseeable future. That last is a sad teaching, and I am sure a wise one.