Joe Biden's policies in Afghanistan have been so disastrous, so catastrophic. They've imposed so much damage on America and given so much advantage to the Taliban that you have to ask, what really has driven this?
It's almost like you couldn't have planned worse. If you were just careless, if you were just lackadaisical, presumably you'd forget some things, you'd miss some things. But to plan something that causes optimum disaster, leaving thousands of Americans behind, leaving equipment that you could have easily taken with you, to not do any advanced organization for Afghans that you really wanted to get out and are now stranded under Taliban control, how can you be this inept?
Now, you might say, "Well, it's Joe Biden, hello!" But remember that it isn't just Biden who is steering the canoe here. Biden has a whole bunch of Obama leftovers who are advising him, calling the shots. They're the ventriloquist, he's the puppet. And so you can't merely put this down to a kind of senility at the top level because there are all kinds of other people involved. Of course, Biden thinks he's doing an amazing job. He thinks history will look back and see this was a statesman-like withdrawal. Jen Psaki, of course, is parrot-style repeating the same nonsense. But it's still not clear what has driven the Biden decision to be so bad.
Is it the case that these people are just terrible at what they do? Is it a "failure of understanding"? Or is it the case that there is something more invidious? Was it in some sense deliberate? Was it in some sense part of a continuation of the Obama anti-colonial approach?
The "America just doesn't understand" theory is one that most conservatives and Republicans are putting forward. Lee Smith in Tablet Magazine has a very good argument where he talks about the fact that you have two mismatched adversaries. How can a primitive force like the Taliban beat out the most advanced army in the world? Lee Smith states it's easy. The Taliban is united. They have what the Muslim writer Ibn Khaldun called assabiya, which is tribal solidarity. They have a clear sense of purpose. They have a clear understanding of the struggle – "America is the imperialist outsider. We Muslims need to unite and get rid of them." They're willing to fight guerrilla war, and they're willing to take heavy casualties. And they're also willing to be patient.
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Lee Smith is advancing the Ibn Khaldun theory. Ibn Khaldun basically said that the reason why Muslims were so successful in the Middle Ages (they were able to conquer really large parts of Africa, Europe, Asia) is because they had two things. They had the solidarity of the Bedouins (the Taliban has that). And then they had the Muslim faith, which united them in a singular fanaticism. Ibn Khaldun's theory says it's hard to beat people who are unified like that. Now, Lee Smith argues the United States is the opposite. We're divided. We're a divided country. We have a military that is trying to make itself woke. They're focused on domestic adversaries. So, they don't really know what they're doing.
And this is what I would call the "Ignorance Argument." You can see it also in another article in American Greatness by Kyle Shideler, which is divided into two parts. The first being our inability to understand the nature of the enemy. In other words, we Americans, the Biden people, in particular, don't understand how cultures far away work. We don't understand the tribal bases of those societies. We don't understand that you can't just march in there and say, "All the girls are going to get an education!" Or even that we can't put up the rainbow flag, which is actually what the US Embassy in Kabul did. "Hey, guys, we're all for gays around here!" You don't realize Afghans really aren't. They don't see it the same way. So, number one is the failure to understand the enemy.
The second part is the inability to understand ourselves. In other words, to understand the limitations of American power. "We can't fight. We're Americans. We're not the English. We're not going to occupy Afghanistan the way the British occupied India for 150 years. We want to get in and get out," that's the personality stamp that Americans bear. And then not to mention that we are doing all this when American society internally is rent and facing a crisis of identity. We got it wrong, and Biden got it wrong because we don't have a good grasp of who they are or who we are.
This is a theory that I think has something going for it, but it seems incomplete. There is a rival theory that I am going to call the "Machiavellian Theory," which I've advanced before in a different context. I advanced it before in connection with Obama specifically, but I'm going to resurrect it now. Why? Because very clearly, Biden was Obama's vice president.
Obama's people are all around Biden right now. Obama is there in his Kalorama basement making phone calls daily to his own guys, "Yeah, tell him this, Make him do that." Obama's fingerprints are all over Biden's policies. And it could be that what's going on in Afghanistan isn't just a giant blunder, but something that in some ways was an outcome intended by the Biden team.
Listen to Dinesh D'Souza talk about his "Machiavellian Theory" and the rest of his podcast below.
