Last Afghan
2021-08-21
So we’re done with Afghanistan, and it’s a mess. I’m here to argue that there was really no "politically" good way to go.
It was never going well
In 2010, Wikileaks disclosed extensive and damning reports from within the USM (military) that indicated that Afghanistan was not going well. Corruption, civilian casualties, wasted money, blind eyes being turned towards ANA / the provisional government - the military was not optimistic about the country. There was not much to suggest that we were close to a resolution that anyone but the Taliban would find satisfactory.
In 2019, SIGAR released The Afghanistan Papers, which held that nothing much had changed. The government we had propped up was corrupt, the ANA soldiers were cowards only in it for a paycheck and to blow shit up, and that 40% of the aid we had sent to the country (hundreds of billions of dollars) had simply been pocketed by the government officials it was given to (this is normally what happens with international aid - it is pocketed and controlled by the officials it is given to).
At no point was Afghanistan in good condition. If we ended the war at any time in the last decade it would’ve looked about like this.
Our goals and motive
Initially, our cassus belli for Afghanistan was to punish the Taliban for housing AQ. This is a bit ludicrous, since the Taliban had nothing to do with 9⁄11, but I don’t remember any Americans really giving a shit. We’d just been hit as hard as we were at Midway, and we were out for blood. We’d invade Canada if it turned out they’d harbored militants.
After the invasion, the Bush policy of regime change begun. With both Iraq and Afghanistan, the stated political goal has been to prop up western-democratic governments friendly to us, that give us a foothold in the region and a permanent ally with which to base ourselves. Afghanistan, on paper, makes great sense for this - it borders Iran and Pakistan, it’s not far from Russia, and it’s a good foothold on the west side of India. It’s a bit of a dark spot in our empire, and filling that was a prime motivator - lest we forget just how crucial Bagram was to all of our middle eastern efforts.
This is where i have to place blame. We should have never invaded, and once we had, we should have never stayed. Everything happening today would’ve happened at any point after that. If we are to blame anyone for this, it’s not really Biden, it’s Bush W. He changed American policy from a position of international strength (as strong as one could be, post-Vietnam and post-Bosnia) into international laughingstock by moving the goalpost to this unattainable future of Arab Democracy.
We didn’t understand the tribes, the language, the religion, the region, anything. Even after learning more, our political goals were at odds with Afghani goals, and right up until the end our vaunted intelligence agencies (which have a checkered track record recently, when it comes to actually presenting genuine and legitimate intelligence) believed that the ANA would last six months.
They didn’t even last a week.
There’s a worse outcome
I’m here to say, I don’t think this is the worst possible outcome. Sure, seeing Taliban wearing American uniforms and driving Humvees is pretty bad - the abject failure of American strategists to understand that the ANA/gov were strictly in it for the money, and would never have fought for us after the drip stopped, is pretty embarassing.
But let’s consider the other way.
Let’s say we pulled everyone out of the embassy, everyone out of the city, all westerners gone, before the military left. This is a complete vote of no-confidence for the ANA, which looks bad. The only reason you would do such a thing is if you truly believed the ANA would not last a week against the Taliban - which we (erroneously) didn’t.
Pulling out completely signifies a complete defeat of Americans in Afghanistan, it signals that we had no ability to exert any influence in the region, not even enough to keep our embassy safe. That’s a pretty bad look, and i’d argue that no politician would have ordered it.
I mean imagine you’re in the room when the DNC decides what to do with this. Do you pull out completely, and admit you lost? Or do you hope the ANA can hold on for a few months, enough time that you can blame them for failing? The intelligence says we’d get around six months of lead time, that’s plenty to organize an evacuation. Sure the optics would still be bad, but worse than us just admitting defeat and taking all the blame? No way.
Of course you’re going to trot Biden out and say that nothing bad is going to happen, of course you’re going to try to spread the blame, leverage the media to muddy the waters. After all, Trump forced your hand by agreeing to withdraw from Afghanistan - staying in has virtually no public support, and maybe you can actually pull a win out of this by having your spokesman (Biden) be the one who got us out of the war! What did Trump ever do anyway, he sure didn’t get us out of any wars! And if it goes south, we can blame Trump for ever making an agreement with the Taliban in the first place; it’s a lucrative name to talk about.
Ultimately, the ANA was not going to fight, and the Taliban were. There was no coming out of this looking good.
More terrorism?
There’s rampant speculation that the Taliban are going to let Afghanistan be a breeding ground for terrorists, that AQ- and even ISIS-aligned groups will have free reign to run through Afghanistan and use it as a base. Attacks will be up, Europe will get hammered.
Wouldn’t that have happened during the time when the Taliban was actively fighting us?
They had control over significant parts of the country, we couldn’t root them out, they had territory for the whole war. Sure, they can hide in caves, bury their guns during the day, hide shit in trees and all sorts of stuff so that we can’t precisely locate them. They still recruited, organized, supplied, and trained a force tens of thousands strong. You’re telling me they couldn’t have hosted some AQ guys too?
The Taliban have never attacked us, and (while I’m not sure how much you can trust them) have publicly stated they have very little interest in doing so. Sure, they’ll chant "Death to America", but you’d probably say shit like that if you spent 20 years fighting a foreign occupation force holding up an illegitmate government that actively tried to hunt you down.
They are a strictly national force, interested in governing Afghanistan, but especially the Pashtun areas. They’re focused on Islamic schools, the place of women, establishing Sharia courts, and levying theocratic taxes. They want the old ways.
AQ, ISIS, and others are much more radical. They don’t just want an Islamic government, they want that real shit. They want to stop pretending Islam is peaceful (see: Dabiq), they want to kill and conquer. They recognize that Islam is the religion of the warlord Muhammed, who conquered straight across North Africa into Spain. They want that back, they want to be the eternal badasses that take the region from being the world’s armpit between Europe and east Asia, into being a real force.
The Taliban are not super into that. They’re more tolerant of it than most, but this idea that Afghanistan will become the international breeding ground for Islam seems a bit of a stretch to me.
Atrocities
There’s much ado about war crimes the Taliban have been committing during their march across the country. And, yeah, they are being real savage. They’re torturing and mutilating their enemies as they go through, and mass executions of surrendered soldiers aren’t false advertising or anything. But the Taliban is big, there’s a lot of guys, some of whom have been fighting for years. I don’t see evidence that there is a top-down approach to slaughtering and raping, the way ISIS had. The new government seems very focused on making a nation, not just revenge-killing anyone they can find in an ANA uniform.
I expect that in the future we’ll see this as just another fearmongering attempt by the DNC, trying to get us to either go back in or not complain about having been there. The stuff we know about is probably close to the totality of war crimes in the country.
Was there any other way?
NO.
This is why anti-war people have been so strident about it, because while divining the future is impossible, every piece of evidence, every testimony from vets, everything has said that this was precisely the outcome we were going to have - Taliban victory. Staying in longer just makes it worse for us. This set of dominos was set in motion by Bush W, and we were never going to come out of it looking good.
I’m trying to figure out a term for this, but "unavoidable damage" comes to mind. An action is taken in the past that directly leads to delayed future damage. We wring our hands and ask "how can we stop this damage?" without realizing that you can’t stop it - the die was cast when we made these shitty decisions in the first place.
I’m glad we’re out. I don’t think it’ll be very bad that we’re out. I wish it didn’t look so bad, but I don’t realistically think it could have gone any other way. Good riddance, I hope they get the country they want - they’ve earned it.
