Afghanistan is another country that should have just been left alone

 

We are being told that the top military brass have been beseeching the Biden administration not to evacuate all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and there are many politicians, like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who second that. It is rather odd that these people are saying this now when they seemed fearful of saying anything that would “cross” Donald Trump, whose “plan” this originally was. The truth of the matter is that the military is likely trying to save face in the matter, since the ever increasing power of the Taliban within Afghanistan shows that is has failed miserably in the one thing it was expected to do, which was to crush the power of the Taliban and keep it from becoming a regional and global threat.

At this point, the Taliban is less threatened by the U.S. military than by its own failure of hindsight.  In a mostly mountainous country, highly tribal and ethnically-diverse, they seem less a cohesive political unit than they once were; many Afghans currently under the control of Taliban forces report weariness over the “tribalization” of the Taliban, meaning that instead of having to pay extortion to one local Taliban authority, they are being extorted from multiple Taliban factions in the same region—which may in the end do what the U.S. military and the Kabul government failed to do: cause the Afghan people themselves to reject the Taliban and their control over them.

A simple reading of the history of Afghanistan tells us that this is another out-of-the-way country that could have benefited from just being left to its own devices and worked things out on its own. Following the collapse of the Persian Empire after its defeat by the newly emerging Islamic tide in 642 AD, the region that constitutes Afghanistan was mostly in the hands of various empire builders who seldom survived long enough to create a lasting dynasty. The boundaries of modern Afghanistan were created by the British and czarist Russia in 1893, with the country merely seen as a “buffer zone” between Russia and British India.

Under the influence of the British, the Afghan royal court of Abd al-Rahman Khan and his successor attempted to introduce Western ideas and technology into the country, but the anti-British faction was strong, and with the assassination of his son following World War I, Afghanistan’s new rulers tied themselves to the Soviet Union, which supplied the country with economic assistance for the next half-century. During the 40-year reign of Mohammad Zahir Shah, attempts to create a “constitutional monarchy” with an elected legislature and relatively “progressive” social reforms under the prime minister, Daud Kahn, were largely unsuccessful, and Daud Kahn led a coup overthrowing the monarchy in 1973, and attempted to disassociate the country from the Soviet Union.

Daud Kahn would become president of Afghanistan, and promulgated a new constitution. But his ruling cabinet was did not include competing voices from the various national ethnic groups, but rather with his sycophants. Opposition and violence to his rule grew, and he was assassinated in 1978. What followed was more disruption until the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the installment of a would-be communist regime, which quickly proved unpopular and led to the revolt by fighters making up the mujahideen, who were supported with arms by the U.S. and other countries.

The Soviets gave up and left in 1989, and the government they left in place found itself still engaged in a civil war with the mujahideen. When that government collapsed in 1992, elements of the mujahideen attempted to form a government, but disparate tribal agendas prevented a unified government, and social and economic order collapsed. Out of the chaos emerged the Taliban, which took advantage a people looking for a strong hand to end the violence, and the Taliban managed to take control over all but a small northern section of the country. 

But the Taliban proved to be a regime without a plan, other than to impose strict sharia law. The country continued to face economic disaster—its economy largely reduced to criminal enterprises like illegal drug production and smuggling, although the Taliban regime remained afloat with aid from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Outside its regional supporters, the Taliban regime was an international pariah because of its aiding and abetting al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and its reactionary religious and social policies.

After 9-11, aerial bombing campaigns supporting ground offensives by the Northern Alliance managed to oust the Taliban from power, but they never really went away. A new democratic government headed by Hamid Karzai controlled little outside the capital of Kabul, and despite the presence of U.S. and NATO forces backing the unreliable Afghan national army, by 2005 the Taliban was launching attacks all over the country, and it never stopped. Even the influx of more U.S. troops failed to halt Taliban attacks, and despite the fact that the Kabul government and the Afghan army have had many years to gain effective control of the country, it is too effected with tribal divisions, has no real economic structure and its mountainous terrain perfectly suited to incubate and conceal anti-government elements for a democratic government to survive unless it has many decades of stability, which is impossible to achieve with so many Taliban fighters and too few reliable troops to effectively rid the country of them.

That is where Afghanistan stands now. The so-called “peace plan” devised by the Trump administration was hastily contrived, and from Trump’s perspective, it was just a “face-saving” device to get out of the country as quickly as possible and hope for “the best.” If that meant the “expectation” that the Taliban would no longer harbor or support terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, that was wishful thinking, and demonstrates that the Trump administration as usual had no plan for what constituted a successful end game. The Taliban knows this, which why they continue to stonewall on agreeing to a power-sharing deal, and continue launching attacks all over the country, which they claim will cease when the U.S. withdraws from the country completely. This was the situation left to the Biden administration.

The U.S. military opposes a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan, and there may be good reasons for that. The military may believe that leaving a token force in Afghanistan is important as a “base of operations” from which it can launch attacks to other “hotspots” in the region. But if so that certainly wasn’t part of Trump’s thinking, and the Biden administration apparently believes that it serves no purpose to remain there. The fact that “only” 2,300 American service members died in nearly 20 year of combat in Afghanistan shows that there never was a concerted ground offensive to bring the Taliban under control, the results of which are plain to see.

The top brass can’t still cling to the fanciful notion that they can actually “win” the war there; that would require a far more massive troop deployment than what Iraq ever saw, and a years longer occupation before it is “safe” to hand over the security of the country to the “native” military, which has been a failed experiment so far. Maintaining a token force in the country can do little but serve as a minor irritant to the Taliban if a “peace” agreement is ever signed, and the way current talks stand now, that might not happen for a while; given that the Taliban already controls much of the countryside despite the presence of just a token number U.S. troops, they may never sign an agreement.

There is thus no reason to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan, if U.S. troops are only there to attract, and occasionally swat away, “mosquitos.” One thing that we do know is that the possibility of “winning” the war in Afghanistan was lost long ago. All the U.S. and its allies did in the initial phase of the “war” was to chase away the pests from the host, but they kept coming back to be chased away again in a never-ending cycle. What’s the point in playing this game unless you do what is necessary to keep them from coming back? You eventually just get tired of swatting them away, and go where they are not.