By Kenneth Tiven in Washington
Events in Afghanistan amount to a trillion dollar mirror, reflecting the impact of the 9/11 terrorist attack 20 years ago on America and its political leadership. The first terrifying attack killed 3,000 Americans, causing hundreds of thousands to lose family and friends. The World Trade Center was destroyed, the Pentagon damaged, but the impact went much further. America’s sense of invincibility was shattered. Demands for retribution came from all corners of the political spectrum. Within a month, the US military invaded Afghanistan, blaming the fundamentalist Taliban for providing support to Al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked America.
Americans generally trust the military leadership. Post 9/11, the Congress ceded war powers to the president without requiring an official “Declaration of War” as required by the Congress in the US Constitution. The military action can be paid for on credit as no official budget authorisation is required. Getting into a quagmire without considering exit strategies is easy. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan make it clear, wrote Mort Rosenblum, a former AP foreign correspondent, that, “societies react badly to uninvited foreign saviours. However noble your intentions, you can’t deliver democracy at gunpoint”.
The chaos in Kabul resembles the evacuation of American citizens 46 years ago from Saigon rooftops: losers flee by helicopters, winners arrive by truck. No matter the transportation, no great power has ever prevailed in Afghanistan. Charles Pierce a decade ago wrote that, “they never can overcome the Afghan genius for self-slaughter, their seemingly limitless capacity to make civil war on each other and guerrilla war on the invaders, all at the same time. It is not unkind—nor culturally insensitive—to point out that this kind of thing has been going on for centuries. Sooner or later, the Afghans have to decide to govern each other or not.”
Seen in that light, the blame game for who “lost” Afghanistan is absurd. The real issue is why was America there in the first place. It needed someone to blame for 9/11 and in part because for many Americans, the belief is the US—“single handedly”—won two World Wars, making it easy to ask, “How did we lose this time”. While the US rebuilt Germany and Japan after World War II, the ability to transfer support for its form of government is not a sure thing.
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For example, in 1949, the US-backed Nationalist government in China, clearly not a democracy, lost a civil war with the Communist party led by Mao Tse Tung. That event animated post-war political behaviour by the conservative political side of US politics, endlessly fear mongering about China and the then Soviet Union’s Communist position on everything.
After World War II, America built up a huge and expensive military capability on the premise that protecting and expanding democracy would help it win any indigenous conflict. The defense industry profited handsomely, but nation-building was unsuccessful in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
In fact, Iraq and Afghanistan are linked here because the Bush Administration in 2003 defocussed its efforts in Afghanistan to mount another Iraq invasion based on unproven arguments about weapons of mass-destruction. This allowed the Taliban to re-emerge as a military force. They demonstrated this in 2007 when US Vice-President Dick Cheney on a secret visit to Kabul barely escaped a Taliban suicide bomber. The insurgents knew where he was, said Captain Shawn Dalrymple, responsible then for base security. In a recently published book, he added, “That opened up a lot of eyes into the fact that the Bagram airbase was not a safe place.”
However, these facts were strenuously denied by the US military at the time. With that lie, the US military adopted the many facets of the war, from discrete events to the big picture with the initial self-serving assessment expanding to willful distortions if not flat-out fabrications.
In 2009, the newly-elected President Barack Obama inherited the problem and surged troops into Afghanistan. At a high point, the Americans and NATO had 1,40,000 soldiers there. In 2011, US Special Forces captured and killed Osama Bin Laden, hiding in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Weeks later, Obama announced that he would begin bringing troops home, with the US out of Afghanistan by 2014. Immediately, violence increased there, so the US arranged a deal with the Afghan government to stay and train their soldiers and police.
There was a fictional aspect to all of this. Desertion rates were high because corruption and incompetence meant the Afghan security forces were often not paid for months at a time. With America’s intention known, the Taliban could sit back and plan for later. In 2020, then President Donald Trump made a deal with the Taliban to withdraw, ignoring the Afghan government. The Trump administration celebrated the agreement before the presidential election. In September 2000, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted, “A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for forever war in the Middle East. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to finally bring our troops home.”
The then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested that the US would have “zero” troops left in Afghanistan by spring 2021. The Pentagon’s inspector general noted six months ago that “the Taliban intends to stall the negotiations until the US and coalition forces withdraw so that it can seek a decisive military victory over the Afghan government.”
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As the US and NATO troops left Afghanistan, that nation’s military left their battlefield positions. President Ashraf Ghani fled Afghanistan to Tajikistan on August 15. Having been deceptively positive on their training mission, it is disingenuous of the American military to claim they are surprised by how fast the Taliban swept through the cities and villages of Afghanistan.
Before the presidential elections, Biden had made it no secret that he was not comfortable with the seemingly endless engagement in Afghanistan. This April, Biden announced that he would honour Trump’s agreement—“an agreement made by the United States government…means something,” In July, 73 percent of Americans agreed that the US should withdraw. Biden said withdrawal would be finished before September 11, the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. He stressed that the US had accomplished what it set out to do in Afghanistan—kill Osama Bin Laden and destroy a haven for international terrorists—and had no business continuing to influence the future of the Afghan people. But he suggested that US humanitarian aid would continue.
The US stayed in Afghanistan because no president wanted to be the one who “lost Afghanistan”. Who is to blame for the obviously disastrous collapse of the Afghan military and the rushed evacuation of US personnel? Republicans will blame Biden. The Republican National has already erased from its website a section celebrating the deal that the Trump administration had cut with the Taliban and praising Trump for taking “the lead in peace talks as he signed a historic peace agreement with the Taliban which would end America’s longest war.”
Even some Democrats and policy experts are critical, as well as NGOs worried about the treatment of women by the Taliban. However, the real issue lies with the US military. Generally, they were never able to carry out their training mission because the Afghan military was so disorganised and administratively corrupt. Specifically, they gave consistently bad advice to Biden once he entered office. How long would it take the Taliban to take over once the drawdown was in progress? At least six months, they said, and they acted accordingly. In reality, it took weeks, not months, and the result is the panicked evacuation we’re now seeing.
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Despite desperate images from Kabul, President Biden has defended his decision, saying in a national speech that “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.” Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger, an air force pilot, served in Afghanistan and opposed Biden’s plan for withdrawal. He is at odds with the Trump side of the GOP and has been highlighting pro-exit Republicans who are now attacking the president. “Do not let my party pretend to be outraged by this,” he tweeted. “Both the Republicans and Democrats failed here: a time for Americans to put their country over their party.”
In Afgantsy, a lucid history of the Russian catastrophe in Afghanistan in the decade of 1979-1989, Rodric Braithwaite quotes an old aphorism of which the guerrilla fighters in that country were fond: The foreigners have the watches, but the locals have the time.
It should not be forgotten that the Afghan “Freedom Fighters” of that war had the backing of the US government with CIA supplied weapons, including Stinger missiles to use against Russian helicopters.
—The writer has worked in senior positions at The Washington Post, NBC, ABC and CNN and also consults for several Indian channels