By Noah Feldman
(WASHINGTON POST) The fall of Kabul reminds me of an argument I had with my father on Thanksgiving Day of 2001. The U.S. had invaded Afghanistan and swept away the Taliban. The question was what to do next.
My father, who taught international relations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, learned Dari and went to Afghanistan in 1969, had a simple answer: U.S. forces should leave the country immediately.
I thought I knew better. “But then the Taliban will come back,” I objected.
“That’s possible,” my father acknowledged.
“So we need to stay to establish a functioning government,” I continued.
“It can’t be done,” my father explained.
He didn’t just mean that conquerors from Alexander the Great to the British Empire to the Soviet Union had failed.
He meant that even Afghans had never really run their country from the center. When my parents had been there in 1969, the king was effectively little more than the mayor of Kabul. My father remembered him driving around the putative capital city at the wheel of a Volkswagen Beetle.