It’s been a few weeks since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, but, like many people, I find myself ruminating on it daily. The avoidable and excruciating human suffering is of course a major factor - I’m haunted by harrowing stories from friends who were desperately scrambling to extract their colleagues and - best case - are now trying to figure out where they will be resettled.

But there’s something else here, a seed that’s not yet germinated, or maybe it’s more a thorn of an idea I haven’t quite dug out.

Maybe part of the reason the withdrawal was so deeply disturbing was that it felt like a constant reminder that all my worst suspicions about U.S. foreign policy are true. Because of course, while it was certainly botched, it’s not the way we withdrew that caused all of this, but the twenty prior years of failure. And if it was so bad in a country deemed high priority, how can it be much better anywhere else? Maybe the perceived stakes in other countries are just lower, or less evident or less urgent.

It all feels like another disaster waiting to happen…a slowly unfolding mistake. 

And, in a selfish way, that hurts because it calls into question everything I do and have done - everything I claim to care about - professionally. All my venting about “aid” and “development,” yet I’m part of the problem. I’m complicit. Of course I’ve known this for years, but the withdrawal moved that knowledge from my head back into my gut and my heart.

It doesn’t look as dramatic as Kabul airport, but over time the death toll from poorly thought out, rushed, or just plain bad policy in so many other countries (some of which I have personally worked in) is greater. A longer, slower, more incremental leak of billions of dollars to corrupt governments, contractors, even well-meaning but misguided (or just poorly equipped) CSOs - for what? To what end? 

As Ezra Klein put it here, “the American foreign policy establishment obsesses over the harms caused by our absence or withdrawal. But there’s no similar culpability for the harms we commit or that our presence creates. We are much quicker to blame ourselves for what we don’t do than what we do…We are not powerful enough to achieve the unachievable. But we are powerful enough to do far more good, and far less harm, than we do now.”

And then there’s Covid, helpfully there to remind us that we refuse to learn and revolutionize the systems and structural inequity that got us here in the first place.

Oh (says Covid), you want to develop a vaccine and then not distribute it fairly? Cool, here’s a Delta variant for you.

Oh, you still haven’t learned and want to give boosters to some people when others haven’t yet had a first jab? Great, here comes the worst variant yet.

Maybe this pandemic really will last until we learn - but who will be left by then?

Anyway…just some sunny and incomplete thoughts for a Tuesday morning,