Coalition forces leave Afghanistan (Image: AP)

We have officially got tired of the passion of Kabul airport. Hundreds and thousands are still there, trying to get out in the last 24 hours before the US and the UK abandon their missions.

But as with the Afghan war itself, our attention can stay only so long on something that keeps happening. We’ve emoted about our own failure, mourned the future of women and girls, raised the money, and now we’re moving on. 

But it’s not the moving on that matters. What else can we do? Watch the absolute oversupply of images of suffering and destruction from every phone and sat cam? They merely give us the illusion that we could do something, that we are there. Arguably, the roots of the renewed liberal interventionism that began a generation after Vietnam lie in this spread of remote visual presence, and the permanent disjuncture of such. To see is to be present; instantaneous broadcast is a permanent category error.

So one can forgive the hand-wringing, I guess. The West has so little culture remaining — dissolved by US global cultural products and destruction of cultural protection — that we still cannot believe another one cannot be transformed in a generation. But what’s the excuse for the last desperados on the right, and the progressive side, getting all their final takes out on what they know is an epochal moment? 

There was nothing strategic in the 10 days or so of wailing that came from The Australian’s pages as Kabul fell. Since it never liked Donald Trump much anyway, it was happy to acknowledge that he was the one who had basically surrendered to the Taliban last year.

But it couldn’t bring itself to admit the strategic truth: Trump’s rapid ceding of territory to the Taliban — by standing down the US army, hence no casualties for 16 months — made encirclement inevitable. Whatever errors were then made, possibly pretty huge ones, Joe Biden’s only other recourse would have been to resurge with 20,000 troops or so. 

But even acknowledging this, the right prefer a cry of anguish that he no longer had something to believe in, stolen, by Biden. Here’s Paul Kelly:

You’re either a global leader or you’re not. You either have the resilience, cohesion, leadership and self-sacrificing of a great power or you’re just pretending. America recovered so fast, so brilliantly after the 1975 Vietnam debacle.

Really? Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada, which is like invading Gold Coast SeaWorld. When a single suicide bomber killed 200 US troops he withdrew entirely from Lebanon. Because things were still real in the Cold War, that move was not debated as a matter of prestige, but as a question of foreign engagement. 

The fact is that America’s ability to extend any power short of annihilating force — to the tactical nuclear level — has been more projection than real since the end of Vietnam.

Bush Sr invaded Panama. That’s like storming a Miami crack den. Then, with the 1991 Gulf War, it avoided being exposed by leaving Saddam Hussein in place. In the giddy atmosphere of the 21ar century, it made the worst of all poker moves and called its own bluff. The anguish of the Americophiles is because they had been bluffed too. 

Kelly’s enormous Eeyore sigh — I won’t even wade into Greg Sheridan here — has him describe Biden’s withdrawal as “emotional and personal”. Sounds like self-diagnosis on the part of Kelly, and a range of others in The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph UK, The Times and elsewhere.

Biden’s actions look like simple consistency to me. He opposed Obama’s Afghan surge, and wanted to get out in 2009. Now he’s doing it. And being honest with the US people about the dangers and the cost. Seems like leadership to me. 

The last-flight-out right talk about the loss of US prestige, the loss of stable global governance. Today Peter Hartcher quotes Robert Kagan on the stable world of the post-war decades, now returned to anarchy. But those decades were anarchy for hundreds of millions in Indochina, Indonesia, Africa, South America … precisely because of that “stability”, whose twin Cold War forces used those regions as proxy battlefields.

It’s 2021 for god’s sake. You can’t simply look down on the world from the windows of the Brookings Institution and make a judgment any more. The world looks back at you, and there’s a lot more of them than of us remnant First Worlders. Africa and South America are clearly stabilising in ways they could not have in the era of “stability”. What Hartcher and others mean is that they have more options as regards larger allies and investment partners. 

But the last-flight-out right and the Brookings bruthas have good company, as the last of the pro-war feminists mount a rearguard action on behalf of the Afghan mission.

The Afghan and Iraq wars were the first manifestation of what your correspondent dubbed at the time “imperial feminism” — those who thought that women’s rights could be advanced by bombing them. The late Pamela Bone was one, advocating the invasion of Iraq, a secular country where women had very significant rights. What happened after the invasion? The US signed off on a Shiite regime and a sharia constitution that sent them back to the veil and the home and killed them in their thousands.

Columnist Julie Szego was one of the other feminist war-boosters, and she’s not giving up. In The Age and the SMH last week she couldn’t decide whether the war was worth it or not if one Afghan girl tasted freedom. Well, few taste freedom in a peasant society, though some might get some schooling. But the cost has been estimated at 200,000 dead — 70,000 of them civilians, 30%-40% women and children.

We talk of one woman a week killed in domestic violence here; the Afghan war took 30 a week, every week, for 20 years. But yeah, OK, it might have been worth it. That can only be said because they were brown women and girls. The roots of the toxic dimension of white feminism today, its utter inability to really see non-white bodies, was in the imperial feminism two decades ago. 

These people. They’ll do anything to shore up the fragments of their post-’60s politics against the ruin of the present. The Brookings bruthas yearn for an “order” that was simply the extension of imperial dominance.

The imperial feminists want to kill the women of Afghanistan in order to save them; Kelly wants to send other people’s sons to die there, while his own got an entree into a career at News Corp.

And they wonder why the one thing the rest of us can all agree on is what a failed charade it all was. They’re all at the airport now, waiting for the flight, drinking from the sinks, trying the vending machines to see if they can get some last piece of sustenance from the end of the mission.