Fire the military and intelligence bigs who bungled Afghanistan — now

There are many lessons to learn from the disastrous US pullout from Afghanistan, but there is one that we should take home right now: Failure must be punished.

The United States has been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years. It has been obvious for the last few years that we would be leaving soon. Former President Donald Trump wanted to leave Afghanistan, but the generals managed to slow him down and wait him out. Instead of making plans, they stonewalled.

When President Joe Biden ordered them to get out, there wasn’t a lot of time for planning, but they managed to get what they did wrong.  

US forces fled Bagram under cover of darkness, with no warning to anyone. (But botched even that, turning off the lights as they left, which gave looters free rein for many hours before Afghan officials showed up.)

Not only did that midnight skedaddle deprive us of a valuable resource (we could use a secure airfield about now), it signaled weakness to the Afghans on both sides of that country’s civil war. When the Soviets left Afghanistan, they were defeated, but they left in order; we snuck out like a guilty lover with a husband approaching the front door.

Our efforts were marked by institutional failure at every level, from the lack of planning at the top to the spooks who told us, last Thursday, that the Afghan army might hold out for more than 90 days (it lasted fewer than 90 hours). These are the same intelligence agencies, by the way, that spent four years promoting the exploded “Russian-collusion” fable.

Meanwhile, over the past few months, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been jabbering about “white rage” and helping our soldiers master the subtle dialectics of Ibram X. Kendi. We would have been better off if he had read Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, though Milley did inform us that he has read Karl Marx.

This is the biggest foreign failure in most Americans’ lifetimes, and there needs to be an accounting. The normal course of business after government bungling nowadays is that everyone involved tut-tuts a bit, then gets a raise and a promotion, while the government goes back to business as usual.

But in a sane nation, failure would be punished.

To begin with, Milley must resign or be fired. And the same for our triple-masking defense secretary, Lloyd Austin. This was a failure that happened on their watch, and it happened through bad management. We could have pulled out without nearly the level of chaos, confusion and terror. 

But Milley and Austin weren’t on top of their jobs. They may feel that firing is unfair, but they’d be getting off light by the standards of military history: In the 18th century, the British executed an admiral, John Byng, for failing to “do his utmost” in combat. It was harsh, but the Royal Navy became more aggressive.

Likewise, the intel agencies and officers who provided the bad, er, intelligence need to go. Many others who failed, from contractors to lower-level officers and bureaucrats, need to go, too. You punish a bureaucracy by shrinking its staff and cutting its budget. That needs to happen here.

The brass and agencies will complain that it was Biden who ultimately made the call. Indeed, they are already furiously leaking to that effect to the press. Maybe they’re right. But it’s up to voters to fire the president at the ballot box. If they thought what Biden planned was disastrous, they should have resigned in protest. But they didn’t.

Meanwhile, we also need a probe, with independent investigators with strong powers. That should be followed by deep structural changes in a military that hasn’t really won a war since well before I was born. Bottom line: Our military must be disciplined to win wars, rather than promote gender ideology and postmodern race theories (at home or abroad).

None of this will transpire, of course. Our society is run by a technocratic-managerial class that never pays a price for failure. Democracy is a glossy finish over an unelected administrative state that isn’t really accountable to anyone and measures success or failure in terms of budgets, p.r. and power, not results.

The excuse for this is that the experts at the top are good at what they do, and ordinary Americans would make a hash of things if they had too much say. That excuse, however, has now been decisively buried in Afghanistan’s harsh soil.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.