Advance ticket sales have ended but plenty of additional tickets will remain available at the door.
Profs and Pints presents: “How We Lost Afghanistan," with Christine Fair, professor in Georgetown University’s Securities Studies Program, former political officer for the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, and author of several books on political and military affairs in South Asia.
[Under current District of Columbia regulations attendees will be required to wear a mask except while eating or drinking. The Bier Baron will be requiring proof of Covid-19 vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test from the previous 72 hours for entry. It also will be requiring ticketed event attendees to purchase a minimum of two items, which can be food or beverages, including soft drinks.]
The recent U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan—and the chaos associated with it and the rapid return of the Taliban to power—has raised a host of troubling questions about how our nation handled its dealings with that nation. Had we truly fulfilled our mission there? How could we have so badly misjudged how quickly the Afghan security forces we had trained and equipped would fall? Why did things there go so badly in the end? Are we truly done with Afghanistan? Or will need to go back—and run the risk of repeating the same mistakes?
Come hear such questions tackled by Christine Fair, a professor in Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service who has been on the ground in Afghanistan as a U.N. officer and has written several books on the political and military affairs in South Asia, a region she has studied for 30 years.
Dr. Fair will argue that the United States basically “lost Afghanistan on the installment plan.” It and its partners never understood the fundamental drivers of their eventual defeat, much less developed policy measures that would make this loss less likely.
She’ll discuss how the seeds of failure were planted in the earliest weeks of the conflict, when the United States entered Afghanistan under the aegis of “Operation Enduring Freedom.” On October 7, 2001, a small group of special operators went into Afghanistan from Tajikistan with the goal of shoring up the Northern Alliance. Its leader, a murderous warlord known as Ahmad Shah Massoud, had been grievously injured in a suicide attack the month before.
The Americans had not expected that the Taliban would fall quickly, but it did. Nor were the Americans able to deter the Northern Alliance from storming Kabul, which they did. And, in these fateful weeks, the United States ensured its eventual defeat in a war that would stretch out for nearly twenty years, and which would become the longest war in America’s history.
The speaker plans to donate her proceeds from the talk to a program of the Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area devoted to resettling Afghan refugees who are coming into our region on special immigrant visas.(Advance tickets: $12 plus sales tax and service charge. Door: $15, or $13 with a student ID.)