While many people descend from a father, most don't believe that they are qualified to comment on issues of global importance by virtue of having a father. Meghan McCain is not one of those people.
Recently, McCain reacted to Taliban forces in Afghanistan overrunning their U.S. allies in government by doing what she has done to forge a career for herself in media: by reminding everyone that her father was late U.S. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.).
“Democrats like to wax poetic a lot about what my dad would have done and said,” McCain tweeted on August 13th. “Let me tell you one god damn thing - he would be raging in public and to President Biden about this withdrawal in Afghanistan. Raging.”
While impossible to prove, it is a fair assumption. The issue for McCain and other critics of the military withdrawal—pundits like CNN's Jake Tapper, who quote-tweeted McCain with an approving “accurate”—is that there were few problems Sen. McCain wanted to resolve without U.S. government violence. Between the end of the Cold War and his death, the influential Republican lawmaker advocated for the U.S. military to intervene in almost every region on the Eurasian landmass and in African countries on both sides of the Sahara. He was also a fan of waging economic warfare to push for regime change in the Caribbean and Latin America, making him a supporter of exacerbating conflicts on every continent in the world. When presidents happened to agree with Sen. McCain, the results were disastrous, as they were in Iraq and Libya, after wars launched by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. When presidents treated Sen. McCain like the crank he was, military entanglements with Russia, Syria, North Korea and Iran were avoided alongside the heightened probability of another World War.
In one anecdote illustrating why few should care what John McCain would say about Afghanistan: the late senator once fumed at President Obama for not being sufficiently supportive of what would lead to some of the worst atrocities in recent history, the brutal campaign in Yemen waged by a coalition of countries led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In March 2015, hours after the operation started, Sen. McCain berated then-Gen. Lloyd Austin, the current Secretary of Defense, because the U.S. military was only informed of the Saudi war plans on the day that the mission was launched. “Some people think it’s better to be an enemy of the United States than a friend,” McCain growled.
The U.S. did, however, give the Saudi military intelligence, logistics, and planning assistance, as Austin noted. The support enabled a campaign of airstrikes and a blockade, both of which are still ongoing and have put millions of Yemenis on the brink of starvation. In December, the U.N. estimated that 233,000 Yemenis had already died since the start of coalition operations, with 131,000 deaths coming from “indirect causes such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure.”
The point is that hypothetical criticism from a man who was constantly enthusiastic for military action does little to prove that President Biden made the wrong decision by ordering U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. There isn't much that Biden could have done to avoid Kabul being sacked by the Taliban at this juncture. The two-decade-old mission had become increasingly unpopular among U.S. voters, and the legitimacy of the U.S. government’s allies in Afghanistan had dropped precipitously. In April, the Special Inspector General of Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) warned that “endemic corruption” in Kabul posed an “ongoing threat...to Afghanistan’s stability.” The problem was nothing new under U.S. occupation, but its effects had been magnified in recent years. Droughts caused by climate change had decimated Afghanistan's agricultural sector since 2018, as SIGAR also noted, and millions of Afghans were practically starving. “In February 2021, the International Organization for Migration warned that as many as 17 million Afghans, or approximately 42% of the estimated population, will likely face famine conditions during the upcoming year as a result of drought,” the watchdog said.
“As a result of COVID19 and rising urban poverty levels, 16.9 million people are facing 'crisis' and 'emergency' levels of food insecurity, including 5.5 million people experiencing 'emergency' levels—the second highest in the world after the Democratic Republic of Congo—with almost half of children under five years old projected to face acute malnutrition in 2021,” SIGAR also remarked. The failure of the U.S. and its Afghan allies to make any meaningful effort to alleviate this suffering has gone completely ignored by enraged armchair militarists like Meghan McCain, Jake Tapper, and other cable TV personalities.
One can better understand the immediate cause of the Afghan government's collapse when considering how widespread this deprivation was, as U.S. allies plundered the country. President Ashraf Ghani reportedly fled Afghanistan “with four cars and a helicopter full of cash.” Videos on social media showed Taliban fighters enjoying themselves in the lavish home of Abdul Rashid Dostum, a strongman and ally of the U.S.-backed Afghan National Defense and Security Forces who fled to Uzbekistan. At the same time these men lived in opulence, Afghan forces on the frontlines went for long periods without pay and basic supplies, with their ranks overstated by “ghost soldiers” whose salaries financed the lifestyle of corrupt officials.
The only surprising thing about the collapse of the Afghan government is that it didn’t happen sooner. As the New York Times reported, the nationwide Taliban takeover:
“…began with individual outposts in rural areas where starving and ammunition-depleted soldiers and police units were surrounded by Taliban fighters and promised safe passage if they surrendered and left behind their equipment, slowly giving the insurgents more and more control of roads, then entire districts. As positions collapsed, the complaint was almost always the same: There was no air support or they had run out of supplies and food.”
Meanwhile, those at the top of the pyramid were strip-mining the country with help from the U.S. military—in one case, quite literally. The brother of ex-President Ghani, Hashmat Ghani, owned 20 percent of a Pentagon cutout's mining venture, which had its origins in an illegal mining operation pushed by U.S. Special Forces operations and provincial warlords, according to a report published in April by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). President Ghani had long been a booster of Afghan's mineral resource sector, using the prospect of extraction rights for U.S. companies to convince then-President Donald Trump in 2017 to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan. (Trump told his counterpart that he wanted to help Afghanistan develop its “tremendous natural resources,” which the Pentagon valued at $1 trillion.) In 2019, after sidestepping the authority of Afghanistan's Minister of Mines, President Ghani personally oversaw the approval of the Pentagon-linked venture with his brother's involvement.
The U.S. military-tied company, SOS International (SOSi) appears to have made connections with President Ghani's family through Hashmat's son, Sultan, who had a SOSi internship in 2013. The nephew of the president currently runs the Ghani Group, an entity that the OCCRP described as the Ghani family's “privately owned conglomerate with interests that include mining and military contracting.”
Since Kabul fell to the Taliban, Sultan attracted criticism for a recent Instagram post captioning a photograph of himself boarding a private jet: "Moving from one crisis to the other as elegantly as I can." The ex-President's nephew reacted angrily on Twitter, saying that the photo was several weeks old (as if the Afghan government wasn't on the verge of collapse in June). He also fumed at his uncle for absconding, before deleting the tweets and locking his account.
But before scrubbing his social media, at least Sultan managed to drum up the courage to briefly criticize his powerful family member. That's more than can ever be said for Meghan McCain.