The flaw at the heart of humanitarian intervention

One of the most interesting aspects of President Biden’s speech on the American withdrawal from Afghanistan is that it shows he suffers from faulty memory syndrome. Like many of the rest of us, I suspect.

Today Biden says that the mission of the allies in Afghanistan ‘was never supposed to have been nation-building’. But back in the early years of the conflict then Senator Biden was all for this now dirty phrase. ‘Our hope is that we will see a relatively stable government in Afghanistan,’ he said in 2001. One that ‘provides the foundation for future reconstruction of that country’. He was still holding to this line in 2003 when he said that the only alternative to nation building was ‘a chaos that churns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug traffickers and terrorists’.

Over the years that followed, the reasons for being in Afghanistan seductively changed. After the al Qaeda justification, these other justifications all got bundled up into the same Afghan war package.