A “decent interval” between US withdrawal and Taliban’s return, which the US had hoped for, did not happen leading to a messy withdrawal. Yet, Biden maintained that his decision was the right one.

The Taliban captured Kabul on 15 August almost 20 years after the U.S. launched its global war on terror. The city of roughly 5 million people fell to the Islamist insurgents without even a fight while Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, and the Americans abandoned their Embassy and rushed to Kabul airport.

The Afghan Army soldiers did not fight. Police abandoned their stations. Former Northern Alliance warlords left the country. And the government crumbled like the proverbial house of cards.

The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces — by the US military as well as intelligence agencies — which in some cases chose to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than fight.

President Biden owned up to no mistake in his decision to end the longest war in the history of the United States. But he rued, with a patronising contemplation, that even two decades of support failed to turn the Afghan military into a force capable of securing its own country. “We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries. Provided for the maintenance of their airplanes,” Biden said.

“We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide was the will to fight for that future,” he said. “One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country”, Biden said, justifying his stand seeking to put an end to “an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict”.

It was a war against one of the most resilient fighter forces of the world to secure indemnity from future terrorist attacks and, perhaps, to teach them a hard lesson. A stock-taking in May 2018, however, revealed that not only have the Taliban, the Haqqani network and Al Qaeda made a successful comeback, but also that ISIS has gained a foothold in the country.

Disorderly Evacuation

The incompetence was staggering. Bagram was closed, thus eliminating every possibility of an orderly evacuation. Intelligence assessments were delusional. The evacuation was left to the last day. Visas were not processed or the right people identified. The airport was not prepared.

The whole strategy was an exercise in virtual politics. First, the creation of a virtual Afghan government. It is not surprising that the Taliban moved with such confidence and speed when they were the ones best placed to understand they were not fighting a real army or a real state, but rather a fiction or a ghost projected from Washington on to the screen of Afghanistan.

Even days before the fall of Kabul, the understanding among European ambassadors in the city was that Washington would honour its commitment to provide security for the embassies in the green zone with a residual military force. That commitment had been formally made and people took it seriously. But it too was dropped, and just as suddenly.

America’s Failure

The myth of American impermeability was demolished. For generations, the United States rested on the illusion that it could, when it wanted to, isolate itself from the troublesome world beyond its frontiers.

Unarguably the most powerful military and economic power in history suffered a body blow by a group of individuals attached to a non-state actor, the al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden.

The largest military industrial complex on Earth, with the most powerful intelligence system synergised with real-time information from allies across the world, had failed to recognise the potency of the threat posed by al-Qaeda, and to neutralise it in time.

America’s response was not just swift but ferocious and almost overwhelming in its design, to the point that the use of force seemed to be intended to demonstrate the almost unlimited might of American hegemonic power.

The swift attack on Afghanistan, the dispatching of the Taliban, the building of an almost unprecedented global coalition (“you are with us or you are against us”), a consensus within the UN, the neutralisation of the core of al-Qaeda and ultimately, the killing of Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, demonstrated that America was willing to be unforgiving in dealing with those responsible for 9/11.

There was no terrorist attack of consequence on the US since 9/11. But a wasted war in Iraq (in the futile search for weapons of mass destruction) — and enlarging the mission in Afghanistan, from defeating al-Qaeda to building democracy and civil society to finally handing over power to the Taliban was supremely ironical.

Billions Spent on the Afghan Army

Of the approximately $145 billion the US government spent trying to rebuild Afghanistan, about $83 billion went to developing and sustaining its army and police forces, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a congressionally created watchdog that has tracked the war since 2008. The $145 billion is in addition to $837 billion the United States spent fighting the war, which began with an invasion in October 2001.

But the Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also US-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.

The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend district centers. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft, when the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases with stunning speed, topped by capturing the biggest prize, Kabul.

The US failure to produce a sustainable Afghan army and police force, and the reasons for their collapse, will be studied for years by military analysts. The forces turned out to be hollow, equipped with superior arms but largely missing the crucial ingredient of combat motivation.

What the Afghans received in tangible resources they lacked in the more important intangibles. Morale, discipline, leadership, unit cohesion are more decisive than numbers of forces and equipment.

By contrast, Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, with smaller numbers, less sophisticated weaponry and no air power, proved a superior force. US intelligence agencies largely underestimated the scope of that superiority, and even after President Joe Biden announced in April he was withdrawing all US troops, the intelligence agencies did not foresee a Taliban final offensive that would succeed so spectacularly.

Before April, the Afghan government troops were slowly but steadily losing the war. When they learned that their American partners were going home, an impulse to give up without a fight “spread like wildfire.”

The United States tried to develop a credible Afghan defense establishment on the fly, even as it was fighting the Taliban, attempting to widen the political foundations of the government in Kabul and seeking to establish democracy in a country rife with corruption and cronyism. Year after year, US military leaders downplayed the problems and insisted success was coming. Others saw the handwriting on the wall.

Some elements of the Afghan army did fight hard, including commandos whose heroic efforts are yet to be fully documented. But as a whole the security forces created by the United States and its NATO allies amounted to a “house of cards” whose collapse was driven as much by failures of US civilian leaders as their military partners.

The Afghan force-building exercise was so completely dependent on American largesse that the Pentagon even paid the Afghan troops’ salaries. Too often that money, and untold amounts of fuel, were siphoned off by corrupt officers and government overseers.

President Ashraf Ghani lacked the political dexterity required to navigate political complexities, the political skill and temperament to cohere and glue the mosaic of Afghanistan, including varied Pashtun tribes. In the end, he could not inspire his well-equipped army which was no match to the Taliban, whose ideological inspiration comes from a potent mix of Pashtun nationalism and extremist version of Deobandi Islam.

Failure to Understand Complexities

America failed because of its deep cultural misunderstanding of Afghanistan. Afghanistan has suffered deeply from decades of civil war, religious extremism, drug mafia, neighbouring interference (Pakistani shares 2,500 miles of porous border), poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and the presence of different ethnic, linguistic, sectarian, tribal, and political groups antagonistic to each other for centuries. It was compounded by the fact that the Taliban insurgency was indigenous and from the largest ethnic group (Pashtun) while the Kabul Government was largely being ‘made up of minorities’.

Many Pashtun leaders and intellectuals regret how their lands have been transformed into a staging ground for a global conflict. Pashtun nationalism is a potent force and Pashtuns are not only the predominant ethnic group in much of Afghanistan’s south and east, but are also a major ethnic group in Pakistan’s north and west. The reason for Afghanistan being often monikered as the “land of the Pashtuns” is because Afghan identity has historically been synonymous with “Pashtun” however much the outside world labels its people regardless of ethnic origin and tends to conflate an Afghan national identity with the Pashtun identity.

Phases of the War

Four presidents share responsibility for the missteps in Afghanistan that accumulated over two decades. But only President Joe Biden will be the face of the war’s chaotic, violent conclusion.

Under the command of President George W. Bush, American forces stormed into Afghanistan soon after the terror attacks on a hunt for bin Laden while trying to disrupt al-Qaida’s ability to conduct further assaults on the West. There was immediate success: The Taliban were routed, the terror group disrupted.

But after that came the grinding second phase of the war and a surge of troops from President Barack Obama in 2009. Though Obama later moved to reduce the number of troops, the volume of insurgent attacks and civilian causalities prevented a full drawdown.

Trump mulled meeting the Taliban at Camp David on an earlier Sept. 11 anniversary, only to back away from the idea amid an uproar. But he announced that the U.S. would pull all its forces out by May 2021, an agreement Biden honoured and delayed only slightly.

Biden has argued for more than a decade that Afghanistan was a kind of purgatory for the United States. He found it to be corrupt, addicted to America’s largesse and an unreliable partner that should be made to fend for itself. His goal was to protect Americans from terrorist attacks, not building a country. A majority of Americans favoured bringing troops home.

Casualties and Costs

Over 20 years, the Afghanistan War cost over $2.26 trillion or $ 300 mn per day. 2,500 US soldiers, 4,000 civilians (serving US forces) and 1,145 NATO and coalition troops died. Moere than 20,000 were injured. The medical cost in the long run was $ 300-500 billion.

Since 2001, an estimated 160,000 people had been killed in the war in Afghanistan, of which some 65,000 were Afghan security forces, 44,000 Afghan civilians, 42,500 Taliban fighters and other insurgents, 424 humanitarian aid workers, 67 journalists and media workers are a part.

Comments

An Islamist group with a medieval mindset and modern weapons defeated the world’s most powerful country. The U.S. can say in its defence that its mission was to fight al-Qaeda and that it met its strategic objectives. But in reality, after spending 20 years in Afghanistan to fight terrorism and rebuild the Afghan state, the U.S. ran away from the battlefield, embarrassing itself and leaving its allies helpless.

US President Joe Biden has accused the Afghan government and military of allowing the Taliban to overrun the war-torn country. This unconvincing self-justification cannot conceal the all-pervading sense of betrayal: America simply left Afghanistan in the lurch. By his own admission, the US spent more than $1 trillion in two decades, ostensibly to train and equip the 300,000-strong Afghan military force. So, why did this ‘incredibly well-equipped’ force capitulate so tamely to the Taliban?

Biden’s contention that the US had ‘planned for every contingency’ does not hold water in the light of the chaotic and messy pullout, even as he has deigned to concede that the Taliban takeover happened ‘more quickly’ than anticipated.

America’s unwillingness to take Pakistan to task for helping the Taliban run riot has been plainly visible all along.

Measured by its stated objectives and international consequences, the global war on terror has failed strikingly. Bin Laden’s elimination might have provided a trophy to display, but Islamist terrorism and religious extremism got a tremendous boost with the rise of the Islamic State in parts of Iraq and Syria, and after its elimination, the pronounced spread in Africa of extremist movements affiliated with the al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Islamist terrorism has viciously struck Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and has targeted Southeast Asia. Europe has suffered dramatic terrorist attacks and an influx of refugees, with political and social consequences marked by the rise of anti-Islamic sentiment and right-wing nationalist forces.

The gap between the objectives of America’s war on terror and actual achievement is clear in our region. The terrorists have neither been defeated nor their organisations destroyed, either in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Despite Pakistan’s state sponsorship of terrorism, not only against India but also against US forces in Afghanistan, the US has looked to Pakistan to facilitate its withdrawal from Afghanistan through its Taliban links, allowing it in the process to obtain its longed for “strategic depth” in Afghanistan against India. The US has failed to “abolish terrorist sanctuaries and havens” in Pakistan, or to compel an unwilling Pakistan to act against the Haqqani group, which now controls Afghanistan’s interior ministry. Ironically, whereas the US acted to destroy the Islamic State in West Asia, it has handed over a state to the Taliban, with the new Afghanistan government liberally composed of UN-designated terrorists. Ironically, Islamist extremists and terrorists have taken over a country without any democratic process with the consent of an America committed to democratic values.

The US war on terror has been selective, marred by double standards, equivocations and geopolitical motives. The stated goal was not to make only America safe, but eliminate the terrorist threat globally as part of America’s leadership role. The way it has withdrawn from Afghanistan has created doubts on whether it will honour its commitments elsewhere, leading countries to hedge. Europe sees the withdrawal as a foreign policy disaster for the western alliance. India is less safe with the Taliban-Pakistan takeover of Afghanistan under the accommodating umbrella of the US.

The US must reflect on its inability to successfully see through wars, despite its enormous military capability. This has implications for its west European and East Asian allies, as well as the Arabs, who depend on the US military to protect themselves.

The Kabul fiasco will undoubtedly affect the US ability to mobilise coalitions against a common cause. With a hostile Iran and Afghanistan, the newly proposed US quadrilateral in Central Asia is a non-starter.

The Americans are unlikely to forgo the ability to intervene in such a key region at some future date. But for that you need an America that can learn the right lessons, overcome domestic divisions and avoid the perils of group-think that afflict large parts of Washington.

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1980s and Early 90s: The Genesis

The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was facing resistance from the country’s hardline Islamists. Pakistan, then a firm US ally, was apprehensive of the Soviets stretching their influence further south, or even invading Balochistan.

Pakistan, US and Saudi Arabia, with covert financial and arms support to the hardliner militias, ensured a Soviet withdrawal in 1992.

A power sharing deal between various Afghan parties and warlords was ineffective, and four years of Afghan civil war followed.

In the melee and power vacuum, a group of fighters, predominantly Pashto tribesmen in the south coalesced into the Taliban. It also drew Pashto students from seminaries across the border in Pakistan. Under the leadership of its founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban spread rapidly throughout Afghanistan.

It promised to liberate Afghanistan from corrupt leadership of warlords, and establish a pure Islamic society.

1999: An ‘Unholy Nexus’

The United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1267 linking the Taliban and al-Qaida as terrorist entities and imposing sanctions on their funding.

The move followed a period of ascendancy for al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden.

The Taliban, which rose from the ashes of Afghanistan’s post-Soviet civil war, provided sanctuary to the Osama-led group for its operations.

2001: War on Terror

The Al-Qaida launched the deadliest terror attacks on US soil by crashing passenger planes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Close to three thousand people died in the attacks.

Following the terror strikes, US President George W Bush declared a “war against terrorism” and zeroed in on al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Days after the attack, Bush signed into law a joint resolution authorizing the use of force against those responsible for attacking the United States on 9/11. This resolution was later cited by the Bush administration as legal rationale for its decision to take sweeping measures to combat terrorism, including its invasion of Afghanistan.

A US-led offensive over the next couple of months forced Taliban to cede its key strongholds. However, bin Laden escaped to Pakistan during this period.

After the fall of Kabul in November, Hamid Karzai was installed as interim administration head of Afghanistan. Days later, the Taliban regime surrendered Kandahar with its leader Mullah Omar fleeing the city.

2002-2004: A Move Towards Peace

The US-led forces launched attacks against Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan, including Operation Anaconda.

In April 2002, Bush called for the reconstruction of Afghanistan and announced “Marshall Plan” for the country. Although, the US never came close to Marshall Plan-like reconstruction spending for Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, the US military created a civil affairs framework to coordinate redevelopment with UN and non-governmental organizations and to expand the authority of the Kabul government.

Separately, Pentagon also began shifting military and intelligence resources away from Afghanistan in the direction of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Later that year, Karzai was picked to head the country’s transitional government.

In 2003, the Bush administration announced an end to “major combat” in the country. At this time, there were only 8,000 US soldiers stationed in Afghanistan.

Karzai became the first democratically elected president of Afghanistan in 2014 after voters turned out to cast ballots in large numbers. He won with 55% of the vote. While his election victory was marred by accusations of fraud by his opponents, the democratic process augured well for a nation which had not gone to the polls since 1969.

2006: Bloody Resurgence

Violence increased across the country during the summer months, with intense fighting erupting in the south in July.

The number of suicide attacks quintupled from 27 in 2005 to 139 in 2006, while remotely detonated bombings more than doubled to 1,677. Despite a string of recent election successes, some experts blamed a faltering central government for the spike in attacks.

In 2007, notorious Taliban military commander, Mullah Dadullah, was killed in a joint operation by Afghan, US and Nato forces in the south of Afghanistan.

By 2008, investigations found that errant fire from a US gunship killed dozens of Afghan civilians in Herat, drawing condemnation from President Hamid Karzai and bolstering Taliban claims that coalition forces are unable to protect the population.

2009: Obama’s New Strategy

Months after assuming the Oval Office, President Barack Obama announced a new strategy for the US war effort, linking success in Afghanistan to a stable Pakistan. The core goal of the strategy: disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaida and its safe havens in Pakistan and prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.

He also sanctioned the deployment of additional US forces to the country. President Karzai welcomed the strategy.

In July, nearly four thousand US Marines launched a major offensive in southern Afghanistan in response to a growing Taliban insurgency. The operation focused on restoring government services, bolstering local police forces, and protecting civilians from Taliban incursion. By August 2009, there were about 60,000-68,000 US forces in Afghanistan.

A couple of months later, President Hamid Karzai won another term. However, as concerns over Karzai’s administration grew, the US and other international partners called for improved governance.

In December, President Obama announced a major escalation of the US mission and committed an additional thirty thousand forces to the fight. For the first time in the eight-year war effort, a time frame was put on the US military presence with Obama eyeing troop drawdown by July 2011.

2011: Osama bin Laden Eliminated

Almost 10 years after the deadly 9/11 attacks, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces in Pakistan in May, 2011.

The death of America’s primary target for a war that started ten years ago fueled the long-simmering debate about continuing the Afghanistan war. As President Obama prepared to announce the withdrawal of some or all of the thirty thousand surge troops in July, Congressional lawmakers increasingly called for a hastened drawdown.

2014: US Announces Troop Withdrawal

President Barack Obama announced a timetable for withdrawing most US forces by the end of 2016. He said the drawdown will free resources for counterterrorism priorities elsewhere.

In September, newly-elected president Ashraf Ghani signed a power-sharing agreement with his chief opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, who had mobilized thousands of protestors as he challenged the voting results. The agreement was brokered after intensive diplomacy by US.

Despite the truce, the power struggle between Ghani and Abdullah gave the Taliban strategic heft as it started making gains in the countryside.

In 2015, the Afghanistan government publicly announced that Mullah Omar had died in 2013. Taliban said he died of tuberculosis and his last days were spent in a hideout in Afghanistan.

2017-2018: Trump Hints at Prolonged War

In a policy shift, President Donald Trump said that decisions about US withdrawal will be based on “conditions on the ground” rather than arbitrary timelines.

He also invited India to play a greater role in rebuilding Afghanistan while castigating Pakistan for harboring insurgents.

In the following year, Taliban launched major attacks in Kabul that kill more than 115 people amid a broader upsurge in violence.

The attacks came after the Trump administration stepped up offensive against Taliban with air strikes and troop deployment across rural areas. Simultaneously, the Trump administration cut off security assistance worth billions of dollars to Pakistan for what President Trump called its “lies and deceit” in harboring Taliban terrorists.

2019: Peace Talks Progress

By the end of 2018, the Taliban and US peace talks made major progress with special US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and top Taliban official Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar leading the negotiations.

In 2019, the Taliban sought withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in exchange for a pledge to block international terrorist groups from operating on Afghan soil.

In September, Trump abruptly broke off peace talks a week after Khalilzad announced that an agreement had been reached “in principle” with Taliban leaders. In a tweet, Trump said he canceled a secret meeting with the Taliban and Afghan President Ghani at Camp David after a US soldier was killed in a Taliban attack. Taliban warned that the cancellation will cause an increase in the number of deaths.

2020: Road to Peace

In 2020, US envoy Khalilzad and the Taliban’s Baradar finally signed an agreement to pave the way for a significant drawdown of US troops. It included guarantees from the Taliban that the country will not be used for terrorist activities.

The US-Taliban deal did not call for an immediate ceasefire, and in the days after its signing, Taliban fighters carried out dozens of attacks against Afghan security forces. The US responded with an air strike against the Taliban in the southern province of Helmand.

In September, the Taliban representatives and Afghan government officials met face-to-face for the first time in Doha, Qatar, after nearly twenty years of war. Both sides expressed eagerness to bring peace to Afghanistan and establish a framework for Afghan society after US troop withdrawal.

While the Afghan government pushed for a ceasefire, the Taliban reiterated its call for the country to be governed through an Islamic system.

2021: US Troop Withdrawal and Taliban Takeover

President Biden announced that US will not meet the deadline set under the US-Taliban agreement to withdraw all troops by May 1 and instead released a plan for a full withdrawal by September 11, 2021. “It’s time to end America’s longest war,” he said.

Biden said that Washington will continue to assist Afghan security forces and support the peace process. The Taliban said it will not participate in “any conference” on Afghanistan’s future until all foreign troops leave.

Taliban started capturing territories after Biden’s announcement, beginning with the take over of Nerkh district just outside Kabul.

By August, nearly the entire country, except Kabul, came under Taliban control as its fighters took city after city.

On August 15, Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani left the country for Tajikistan amid an imminent Taliban takeover.

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