Let’s start with the country itself.
Afghanistan isn’t a nation; it’s a place, a chunk of real estate, that’s home to some 28 tribes.
The largest of these is the Pashtuns, about 40% of the population, who occupy a large area that straddles the fuzzy border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is important, because the Taliban are Pashtuns and have a sanctuary in Pakistan, making it impossible to militarily defeat them without invading Pakistan — a problem the Soviet invaders also faced and had no solution for.
The Taliban are the orphans of the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-1989), raised and schooled by imams in the madrasses of the sprawling Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. They’re fighting to preserve a thousand-year-old traditional way of life that exists in the countryside disconnected from Afghanistan’s limited urban life.
Males dominate this way of life; women can’t go to school, are hidden from view, wear burkhas and go in public only if accompanied by a male relative, and are forced into arranged marriages. Elopers and adulterers are stoned to death. All this sounds harsh, but it maintains social order in the close confines of rural villages, where the dwellings are little walled fortresses. Life revolves around planting and harvest, and five-times-daily prayer. Social relations are governed by Pashtunwali, the social code that operates in the absence of laws and courts, whose central tenets are hospitality and revenge.
This goes far to explain the Taliban’s social repression and brutality; they didn’t invent either, both have been embedded in Pashtun culture for centuries. But despite concerns about their brutality, they’re not a mob; they’re a disciplined fighting force under control of their commanders, and they appear prepared to allow the Americans to leave their country peacefully.
The Taliban took over Afghanistan in the vacuum left by the USSR’s withdrawal following their failed attempt to impose Soviet-style socialism on a people whose lives are profoundly influenced by Islam. Moscow titularly invaded to prop up a teetering Marxist regime, and dispatch an insubordinate quisling, but their actual motivation more probably was nervousness at having militant Islamists at their southern border. The USSR’s adjoining southern “republics,” now independent states, were formerly Islamic regions violently integrated into the Soviet Union by Stalin in the 1920s, and his successors always worried about potential restiveness there.
The Taliban, then led by the late Mullah Omar, whose son is now its military commander, provoked a U.S. military response by harboring Osama bin Laden and his terrorist training camps. The U.S. invaded shortly after the 9/11 attacks, assisted by Afghans opposed to the Taliban, most notably the so-called Northern Alliance led by the legendary mujahedin commander Ahmad Shah Masud, who was assassinated two days before the al Qaeda attacks against the United States. Masud was a Tajik, not a Pashtun. The Tajiks are Afghanistan’s second-largest ethnic and tribal group.
The U.S.-led alliance never defeated the Taliban, but for the next 20 years held them at bay in conjunction with the Kabul-based government that replaced them. Life, at least in the cities, was liberalized; women could get education, work, and choose their marriage partners. The American strategy was to train and equip the Afghan army and police forces to hold their own, but we’re now seeing that policy didn’t work and an American military presence is needed to prevent a Taliban takeover.
Could this outcome have been prevented? British journalist Christina Lamb, writing (here) in Foreign Affairs magazine, says:
“In 2008, I interviewed the United Kingdom’s then outgoing military commander in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, in a dusty firebase in Helmand Province, where international troops had been battling the Taliban on a daily basis for territory that kept slipping away. The war in Afghanistan could not be won militarily, Carleton-Smith told me. He was the first senior coalition military officer to say so publicly, and the story made the front page of the British Sunday Times. …
“Thirteen years on, U.S. President Joe Biden appears to have reached the same conclusion as the British brigadier. In April, Biden announced that the United States would pull all its remaining troops out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11, ending what he referred to as ‘the forever war.’ But by now, such a withdrawal was all but a foregone conclusion: the Taliban had proved a stubborn enemy that was not going anywhere and that indeed controlled close to half the country’s territory.”
Actually, Biden never supported a continuing U.S. presence; in 2009, as BBC journalist Jon Sopel writes (here), he “advised President Barack Obama not to send more troops … but lost the argument.” Nor was it necessary to win; the U.S. only needed to maintain a presence and play a supporting role to keep the Kabul government in power.
In 2016, Sopel continues, public resistance to staying in Afghanistan “was one of the factors that led to Donald Trump’s election: the weariness of the ‘endless wars’ as candidate Trump would refer to the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq; [and] the wariness of America being able to act as the world’s policeman.”
Expanding on this, Sopel adds that “Americans understandably wanted to pull up the drawbridge, bring the troops home, leave it to the people in those countries to sort out their own problems, and finally give up on the idea that a US model of liberal democracy was an exportable commodity that could be imposed. The liberal interventionist crusade was over.”
Trump, with his “America First” mantra, had different reasons than Biden has; he’s an isolationist, a proselytizer of the discredited notion that the U.S. will be left alone if it goes about its business while ignoring the rest of the world. As Sopel points out,
“It’s worth remembering why the US, UK and others went into Afghanistan. The Taliban had – in effect – become a finishing school for Islamist terrorists wanting to wage jihad against the west. Al-Qaeda wannabes were going into the country to train for holy war. The 9/11 terrorists had honed their skills and hatched their plot there. Removing the Taliban and tackling al-Qaeda became critical for global security.”
But America is tired, bin Laden is dead, al-Qaeda no longer looms as a threat, and Americans are focused on how the Covid-19 pandemic is upending their lives. Looking for a way out, America sought to cut a deal with the Taliban: “They would pull out if the militants agreed not to host terrorist groups.”
Sopel notes that “Trump, if he had won last November, would have pulled out US troops, probably quicker.” Upon taking over, Biden had two options: Stay or leave. Never a supporter of the U.S. occupation, it’s not surprising he decided to leave.
He announced his decision last month. The collapse was immediate, and with the Taliban now in control of the entire country, the U.S. is scrambling to evacuate itspersonnel and as many of its Afghan allies — who will be in deadly danger if they fall into Taliban hands — as quickly as it can, evoking memories of the infamous Saigon helicopter rooftop escape scene.
Why is this happening so quickly and decisively? The reason is the Afghan army, instead of putting up a resistance, simply evaporated. The Taliban are advancing so rapidly because they’re unopposed. The Kabul government is naked, without defenders.
Undoubtedly Biden didn’t expect this, although some will argue it should have been foreseen. And while his decision to pull out our troops is understandable, and merely follows up on what his predecessor started, he will be blamed for “losing Afghanistan.” The political recriminations have already started; for example, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee swiftly pronounced, “They totally blew this one. They completely underestimated the strength of the Taliban.” (See story here.) That’s inaccurate, the Taliban didn’t suddenly become much stronger; rather, they overestimated the strength of the Kabul government and its armed forces, and its sustainability without American military backing.
At this point, it is well to remember the context. What may happen to the Afghan people is concerning to anyone with a conscience, but the U.S. didn’t invade their country to liberate them from the Taliban. We were always there for our self-interest. The Afghanistan invasion was part of the War on Terror, not a policy in itself. About this, Anthony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, is explicit: “[R]emaining in Afghanistan … is not in the national interest,” he said (quoted here).
In that context, the service and sacrifice of our troops wasn’t in vain. Al-Qaeda was driven out of Afghanistan. No more terrorist attacks have come from there. You’d never say our losses (see table here) were “worth it,” but few would argue they weren’t necessary. Our troops were protecting our own nation, and that’s what they were there for.
Afghanistan is by far Biden’s biggest foreign policy decision to date; the BBC‘s headline asks, “will it be his most calamitous?” Is it a blunder? We don’t know yet. If a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan doesn’t create problems for us, the American public probably will be indifferent to the whatever the consequences are for the Afghan people. But if we have to go back, then Biden would face the judgment of voters and historians.
I’ve seen it argued the U.S. maintains forces in South Korea and Europe because of our security interests, and we also have a security interest in Afghanistan of ensuring it does not again become a base for terrorist operations. But our troops in those other places don’t face combat. Being stationed and fighting are two different things.
However, I’m concerned about a couple of things. One is whether our withdrawal from Afghanistan will be interpreted in Beijing as a lack of resolve and embolden China’s dictator to attack Taiwan. Two, if Afghans who worked with us are left behind and slaughtered, who will cooperate with us in the future, if they can’t trust us to keep them safe? Biden is temporarily sending some troops back to Afghanistan to get Americans out, but he also must get those Afghans out. It’s not enough to simply promise them sanctuary in the U.S. if they can make it here; he has to protect them.
To put things into further context, a U.S. withdrawal was a given. America’s voters had no choice; either candidate in the 2020 election would have done that. But it didn’t matter, because the reality of U.S. politics is that a majority of Americans would never see Afghans’ freedom as a cause worth defending with American treasure and blood. Our commitment was always going to end where our self-interest did.
They could be forgiven for thinking we merely used them for our war on terror. If we did, that’s bad policy, but it’s a mistake we made collectively as a people who are, perhaps, too shortsighted when we look out at the horizons beyond our own shores. However, we gave them every chance, and ultimately the failure to defend their country was theirs.
And who wants to do this (video below) in perpetuity? Polls show the American people have had enough (see story here). The most serious questions in life are always shrouded in ambiguity, driven by pragmatism, and right versus wrong seldom has anything to do with it.