We set ourselves impossible missions in Afghanistan that were destined to fail.
We set ourselves impossible missions in Afghanistan that were destined to fail.
F ollowing the lead set by Donald Trump, conservatives have tended to scapegoat Joe Biden for last year’s ignominious exit from Afghanistan.
They talk as if there was nothing wrong with America’s longest war that making it a lot longer couldn’t solve. American troops were not dying. We were keeping the Taliban out of power and preventing terrorist groups from using a Taliban-led Afghanistan as a safe haven. We had a “light footprint,” not needing to overcommit our troops and resources. And we had an air base at Bagram that drove the Chinese and Russians crazy and allowed us to operate close to the action, where we could drone-strike high-value targets.
All those facts are true, but they lack the crucial context. American casualties in Afghanistan were low and “sustainable” in our last years there because the casualties suffered by the Afghan National Army were high and unsustainable. We had been demonstrably losing the war in Afghanistan from the moment Obama’s troop surge had ended according to his timeline, rather than by any objective assessment of the viability of the Taliban going forward, or of the national institutions we had set up. Obama, and Trump after him, were unable to bring themselves to confront Pakistan for its safe-haven support of the Taliban. Civilian fatalities skyrocketed in 2013 and 2014, after the surge ended. The strength of the Taliban’s counterattacks was seen in the massive flow of Afghan refugees into the Middle East and into Europe during the fateful year of 2015.
This myth of a successful, light U.S. footprint has been bolstered by the similar myth that the Afghan National Army fell apart only when the Americans finally signaled their plans to withdraw in 2021 and pulled air support. This is not true. The Afghan National Army was plagued by problems from the very beginning. Often, instead of completing its own missions, it was told to stand by while American and NATO troops completed them without help. The last few years, when they had to begin doing their own missions, were especially bloody. There is a reason that the Pentagon stopped publishing its color-coded regional maps of Afghanistan years ago — they were too embarrassing to publicize. There is a reason that the Taliban were able to exclude the Afghan national government from peace negotiations with the United States and get an American president to signal some recognition of the forthcoming Emirate of Afghanistan.
PHOTOS: Afghanistan Evacuation
Just as the Afghan National Army was a hollowed-out shell, unable to act without the U.S. acting for it, so was the Afghan national government. State capacity was provided by thousands of contractors, NGOs, and consultants — the people who were dreaming about coming up with imagined redesigns of the Pashto and Dari languages to help Afghans understand gender equality. Layered on top of this was a simulation of a national government — but it was populated by leaders who were notoriously corrupt. The government had no real-world legitimacy in or beyond Afghanistan. All the legitimacy in the Afghan countryside remained — as it has for centuries — in the tribal and clan structures.
Propping up such a government was an unworthy mission for America. The war in Afghanistan had at one time brought George W. Bush and General Stanley McChrystal to say that America would not be safe until Afghanistan was a liberal democracy. But within a few years we were propping up tribal warlords and a judicial system that required so many bribes to operate that it made the Taliban look like they offered a more just and efficient justice system. In the end, it was Afghanistan that converted the U.S. We began to accept the tribal system as legitimate, and we even accepted that the Afghan practice of child rape, bacha bazi, was ineradicable: The U.S. was left paying for and legitimating groups and tribal leaders whom we knew to be child sexual predators. This was another form of corruption that the Taliban dealt with effectively and roughly.
A liberal democracy in Afghanistan was not possible without ending the practice of cousin marriage that sustains and reproduces a clannish society. This was an unworthy, unworkable morass, and it could not have been sustained without another massive surge to throw back the Taliban to the hinterlands. It was not morally sustainable without confronting the darkest recesses of Afghanistan’s tribal culture. It was not politically sustainable without confronting Pakistan. We left because we set ourselves impossible missions at which we were destined to fail.