US Abandons Afghanistan
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.
