A shock-and-awe outcome, an absurd Taliban charm offensive and predictions of a new war on terror mark the apparent endgame of Afghanistan’s post-9/11 narrative.

The Taliban in Afghanistan’s presidential palace on August 15/AP

Lisa Van Dusen

August 16, 2021

If America’s trajectory as a force multiplier for the 21^st-century degradation of democracy were the plot of a Marvel geopolitical drama or a neo-noir Mafia-heist blockbuster, nobody would believe it, even in this era of stratospherically suspended disbelief.

With the exception of the relatively calm interlude of Barack Obama’s two terms, America’s national drama for the past two decades has been a storyboard of man-made dumpster fires, rolling bollocks operas and systemic catastrophes — from the 2000 presidential election circus to the trauma of 9/11 to the presidency-calibrating 2008 financial cataclysm to the presidency-degrading tenure of Donald Trump to the preposterous Big Lie propaganda extravaganza.

President Joe Biden is currently living through the latest shock-and-awe, previously unthinkable American narrative. As it happens, this one is the epilogue to the attack on September 11, 2001 that rationalized America’s expedition — along with Canada and other NATO allies — into a country conveniently listed under G for “graveyard of empires” in the Dictionary of Geopolitical Cautionary Tales.

As existential plot twists go, the whirlwind Vietnamization of Afghanistan over the past week has everything any America-afflicting, democracy-disdaining, new world order-aspiring, “Westlessness” amplifying supervillain could want: The potential delegitimization of US foreign policy; the leverageable depletion of American credibility; the propaganda cannonballing of a president whose first six months in office represented a net gain for the post-Trumpian rehabilitation of US sanity and stature; and the unfurling of a daily regression of human rights, women’s rights, hope and freedom for the Afghan people.

But whose fault is it?

“I am the president of the United States,” Biden, who first entered the US Senate at 29 in 1973, two years before the fall of Saigon, and whose views on pulling out of Afghanistan have been known for years, said on Monday. “The buck stops with me.” The real answer — after 20 years, 2,448 American service members and 3,846 contractors killed; 1,144 NATO service members, including 148 Canadians, killed; 66,000 Afghan military and police killed; and $2.26 trillion USD, $18 billion CAD spent — is likely more complicated.

Is it the fault of the US intelligence community — the most generously funded surveillance, hacking and narrative engineering behemoth in history, whose overwhelming operational presence in Afghanistan over two decades was inexplicably outmatched by the tactical and strategic masterminds of the Taliban?

At this writing, the circular firing squad — as retired General Wesley Clark politely put it — of blame-laying over the developments of the past week is well underway in Washington. Is it Biden’s fault because he specifically predicted that the scenes now unfolding in Kabul would not come to pass,  and who assured him of that? Is it the fault of the Afghan government because of the endemic corruption that seemed a chronic suppressor of transformative competence in the past decade? Is it the fault of the Afghan army because it was prevailed upon to be otherwise engaged for the reported price of $150-a-deserter? Is it the fault of Donald Trump, whose farcical withdrawal agreement with the Taliban was the limburger cheese left in the bottom drawer of the Resolute desk? Does the fact that the Republican party has deleted the web page celebrating that deal betray at least an inkling of belated self-awareness?

Is it the fault of the US intelligence community — the most generously funded surveillance, hacking and narrative engineering behemoth in history, whose overwhelming operational presence in Afghanistan over two decades was inexplicably outmatched by the tactical and strategic masterminds of the Taliban?

If it is the fault of the intelligence community, chances are that the awesome fault-covering — to politely put it — capabilities of that intelligence community will pre-empt such a conclusion being reached publicly, at least until the fullness of time can allow for it to be labelled another generic “intelligence failure” without significant repercussions.

The list of 21^st-century disasters already labelled — in some cases, self-labelled — “intelligence failures” since the fourth industrial revolution globally revolutionized intelligence capabilities, narrative disruption capabilities and corruption capabilities includes: 9/11 itself; the contrived casus belli for the Iraq invasion; the intelligence community’s self-described “sleeping” through China’s two-decade industrial, economic and geopolitical rise since 2000; the CIA hacking of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture; the CIA’s internal 2016 hack of its own top-secret anti-hacking tools; the massive hack of the US government during the post-election transition in 2020; and, the January 6th ransacking of the US Capitol. Perhaps it’s time to redefine “intelligence failure” for a new, murkier century.

Whomever ultimately bears the brunt of the conventional-wisdom blame for the Taliban’s presidential palace photo-op and declaration of victory on seizing Kabul months or weeks before intelligence assessments predicted they would, the presidential decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was not taken in a vacuum. “I’m deeply saddened by the facts we now face, but I do not regret my decision to end America’s warfighting in Afghanistan,” Biden said Monday. “I cannot and will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another country’s civil war.”

For the people, especially the women, of Afghanistan, the return of a Taliban government is a terrifying prospect, notwithstanding the group’s recent, patently absurd charm offensive. For America’s geopolitical rivals, the abrupt return of Afghanistan from the “fragile democracy” column to the “non-democracy” column in the global war on democracy is a geostrategic win as well as a psychological warfare one. As the Guardian reported on Monday, China, Pakistan and Russia are already circling.

For the intelligence community, the Taliban resurgence is being framed as a rationale for a reconstitution of Afghanistan as a base for global terrorism, which will presumably necessitate a whole new war on terror.

And the new Great Game goes on.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.