On one hand, Israel’s defenders are tempted to find important warnings and lessons in the Biden administration’s disastrous exit from Afghanistan. However, on deeper consideration, Israel has long ago been exposed to the lessons now being revisited.
The United States is a generous country, and she does stand by worthy allies. During the prior century she went to war in Europe once, and then again, to stand with allies like England and France. She maintains military strong points all over the world, including but not limited to 4,000 military personnel stationed in Bahrain; 12,000 in Italy; 35,000 in Germany; 26,000 in South Korea; and 54,000 in Japan. America does not simply cut and run.
However, America operates on the basis of enlightened self interest. She does not want a megalomaniacal Germany or Japan resurrected to pull her into a third world war. She wants soldiers stationed in Europe as part of NATO’s deterrence against Russian aggression, and soldiers in Asia to block Chinese designs on Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. She does not want Shi’ite Iran overrunning or even destabilizing Sunni Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, or other perceived American quasi-allies.
Afghanistan never enticed America. There is no oil or gas to protect, no like-minded civilization to defend. Rather, America entered Afghanistan only because Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda had taken down the World Trade Center. As a world superpower so brutally gut-punched, the United States could not afford not to act with severity. So she entered, mercilessly – bombed the Tora Bora mountain range where Bin Laden hid, and ousted the Taliban government that enabled al-Qaeda’s anti-West crusade. But America never had a long-range interest in being there.
In a sense, it is remarkable that America remained in Kabul as long as it did – for 20 years. Like the citizens in all democracies where people live good lives and awake each day with many wonderful dreams to pursue, Americans simply got tired of Afghanistan. Inasmuch as a Republican Party president had entered, eventually a Democrat president would opt to leave. That is how democracies work. And Israelis know this first-hand:
Likud prime minister Menachem Begin and defense minister Ariel Sharon entered Southern Lebanon in Milchemet Shalom HaGalil (War for Peace in Galilee) in 1982. The enlightened national self-interest was manifest: to eradicate Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization from the insufferable Fatahland he had created on Israel’s northern border. Once Israel achieved that primary objective comparatively swiftly, much as America rapidly dislodged Bin Laden and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, secondary purposes unfolded in Lebanon. Soon, Israel was protecting the security and civilization of the Christian Phalangists based there, creating a security zone, and settling in. These protected Maronite Christians were our friends and allies, standing as a buffer from less-friendly Lebanese Muslims.
In time, the psychological cost of remaining in South Lebanon wore on Israel. It meant boys being stationed for endless years in a horrifically dangerous place where 256 died in combat between 1985 and 2000. On the Left, some argued that Israel’s very presence there inflamed Muslim hostility. In time a new Israeli government arose under a prime minister from the other leading party, Ehud Barak of Labor, and Israel left just as the Americans now have done – with no considered exit plan, just a unilateral overnight abandonment of the territory and of the local denizens who had risked their lives and security by being supporters, translators and sources of critical intelligence. Israel’s time in South Lebanon extended from June 1982 until June 2000, the date when the UN secretary-general declared that Israel had left pursuant to Security Council Resolution 425. Compare those 18 years to America’s two decades in Afghanistan – almost identical.
Israel is a fabulous place to live. Its citizens lost interest in being entrenched in Southern Lebanon, even though Ehud Barak’s ill-devised hasty evacuation gave rise to the nightmare that now sees Hezbollah and its 130,000 rockets, fierce anti-tank missiles, and expanding anti-air missile arsenal. That is how democracies with high living standards operate. In time, they simply tire of 20-year-long extended troop commitments overseas when citizens back home do not any longer perceive the urgency and, in fact, when a whole new generation has arisen who did not even experience the circumstances that gave rise to the initial commitment.
Israel surely has known this about America. The entire world witnessed the 1975 fall of Saigon. Israel became a heroic player during that tragedy when on June 10, 1977, an Israeli cargo ship encountered a refugee boat holding 66 Vietnamese survivors. Their boat was leaking, and they had no more food or water. Other countries’ vessels – including those of Norway, Panama, and Japan – had passed them by. It was only the Israeli vessel that saved them and brought them to safety. By 1979 Israel had welcomed some 300 such Vietnamese survivors, whom prime minister Begin likened to Jewish refugees on the waters who had survived Hitler.
THUS, ISRAEL never has asked America to station soldiers on the ground to protect the country from falling to insurgents, as Saigon fell to the Viet Cong and as Kabul has fallen to the Afghan Taliban. Even as Israel has turned to the United States for military-weapons support, advice and training, she has reciprocated by enhancing those weapons with her own intellectual genius and expertise, presenting America with more effective armaments than originally conceived. Israel values her relationship with America but recognizes that, in crisis, she cannot rely on any polity in the world except herself. Afghanistan has changed nothing. Iran, China, North Korea, Hamas, and Hezbollah all know this about the staying power of democracies.
If there is any lesson for Israel to draw from the tragic mess unfolding in Afghanistan it is that America does not understand the Middle East. US intelligence in the region consistently has been profoundly wrong. America completely misread Saudi intentions in 1973 during the Arab oil boycott. The US proved utterly blind to what awaited Iran as the Khomeini revolution built steam to oust the Shah. When Israel bombed Saddam’s nuclear reactor in June 1981, America condemned it. After the 1982 war, America thought it could police South Lebanon better than Israel could, and 241 US. Marines got blown up there in October 1983, prompting America to hightail. Under Obama, America bungled the “Arab Spring,” repeatedly betting on wrong horses like the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt while completely botching Libya. Afghanistan is only the latest such chapter. The US State Department has no clue in the Middle East.
Israel therefore must recognize that she does not need “well-meaning friends” – whether Obama and Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, or J Street and its ilk – to advise her on “two-state solutions” and on other steps to take for her own national security. Israel lives in the region, has nowhere to run when others’ intelligence and advice prove faulty, and her people have no option to get bored and leave after 20 years. Afghanistan offers no new lesson for Israel but to continue the steady course of building and living in Judea and Samaria as she deems appropriate, continuing to develop and upgrade offensive and defensive weapons as needed, remaining a start-up nation engineering mesmerizing life-enhancing inventions that even her determined boycotters cannot resist buying, and continuing to just live the good life.
The writer, a law professor and Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, is a congregational rabbi and senior contributing editor at The American Spectator. His book, General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine, explores the 1982 war in Lebanon and the libel trial that followed.