With the “stunning” collapse of the Afghan security forces, the fall of Kabul, the fleeing of the Afghan president, Western diplomatic missions and Afghans who worked with the Western-backed government reacting in terror trying to leave the country, we could all go blue in the face trying “explain” what happened. The speed in which the collapse occurred falls largely at the doorstep of Donald Trump and his foolishly naïve belief that foreign leaders would bend to his “personal magnetism” and do as he wishes, but this was a disaster 20 years in the making.
First some historical perspective. "Modern" Afghanistan is nothing more than an arbitrarily patched up conglomeration of different ethnic tribes thrown together by the British to serve as a buffer state between Russia and British India. Throughout the “modern” period of its history, Afghanistan remained tribal, mostly because of the mountainous terrain kept them separated, and central government authority was maintained in the urban areas, but with only nominal control of the countryside. As long as the government didn’t interfere with the authority of local “headmen,” the government could pass any law it wanted, so long as it didn’t send government officials and security forces to bother them with it.
Political turmoil was generally relegated to the usual power grabs by competing tribal rivals. The royal dynasty that was founded in 1826 provided a fig-leaf of "stability," but it was overthrown by the last king’s cousin in 1973, who established a Marxist-Leninist one-party rule with himself as president, until he was assassinated in 1978.
The next government was more explicitly communist, and its political repression, attempts at land reform and efforts to force their new laws on rural tribesmen led to the rise of the mujahideen before the Soviet invasion to prop-up the regime. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, government forces controlled only major cities and the roads that linked them, with the rest of the country split-up by rival factions which often fought between themselves as well as against the rump communist regime, which was eventually overthrown in 1992 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the suspension of aid to prop up the regime.
Attempts to establish coalition governments by factions of the mujahideen failed and gave rise to a new movement created out of Islamic schools, which sought to take advantage of the “chaos” of secular rule, calling itself the Taliban. This new, fanatical group would eventually gain control of the government in 1996, and a year later Al-Qaeda would be given sanctuary in the Afghanistan. Because of its harsh methods in enforcing sharia law among tribes that disliked being interfered with, the so-called “northern alliance” was formed to oppose it militarily. After 9-11, the Taliban was initially easily forced out of power because of the unpopularity of the regime. But the Taliban regrouped in Pakistan, and continued insurgency operations that were never near completely controlled.
However, bombing campaigns on suspected Taliban positions kept them at bay until 2020, when the Trump administration ordered the ending of all military attacks on the Taliban as a “good faith” gesture toward peace negotiations, but in fact this only allowed the Taliban to infiltrate, reestablish and rearm itself throughout the hinterland in preparation for a rapid military takeover of the entire country—with the only way if could be stopped would be with another major military presence on the ground. By January 20, 2021 only 2,500 U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan, by which time the Taliban had already been in de facto control of most of the country, save for most major cities.
Was there anything the U.S. and its allies could have learned from the Soviet Union’s 9-year adventure in Afghanistan? The Russians, who had a peak presence of 115,000 troops in the country, launched several large scale offensives to wipe out mujahideen resistance in certain regions; while initially successful, when they left to go elsewhere, “control” proved to be a mirage, and the mujahideen merely returned. It should be pointed out that the Russian military suffered twice as many deaths as the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan combined in half the time period; that should tell us one of two things: either of the incompetence of the Russian military, or the U.S.’ relatively “restrained” attempts to pacify the country.
In either case, it was clear that a massive military presence in all regions was needed to establish at least a measure of “pacification” of the country. Pakistan, of course, was not cooperating, allowing its own barely controlled western region—whose Pashtun tribes shares ethnic ties with tribes in a large swath of eastern Afghanistan—to provide a safe haven for insurgents, and later the Taliban as well as Al-Qaeda, where Osama bin Laden was found hiding.
After the Soviet withdrawal, the communist government was propped-up by a massive infusion of economic and military aid, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its economic problems led to a withdrawal of support under Boris Yeltsin, the collapse of the unpopular pro-Russian government was inevitable. But the fact that Afghanistan’s communist government managed to survive for three more years was in part due to the fact that mujahideen were largely not Islamic fanatics, and were often too busy fighting between themselves. The Taliban was a different animal altogether; they were fanatics, and it was “our way or the highway.” The “highway,” of course, was usually meant the way to the torture and execution fields.
Was the collapse of the current Afghan government inevitable, even before the fact that the Trump administration continued to withdraw forces even in the face of a clear lack of good faith in negotiations with the Taliban? The fact that the Taliban has already named the country an “Islamic Emirate” indicates as much. Criticisms of the Joe Biden administration are misplaced; the only way to have saved the situation after the massive bungling by Trump’s incompetent foreign policy would have been a massive surge of forces into the country, and who was prepared to do that?
At the time, many in the media praised Trump’s efforts to gain a “negotiated” peace agreement to get out of Afghanistan, but as usual Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were very naïve and uninformed about their foreign adversaries. While Trump talked a big game about what he would do if the Taliban did not abide by a peace agreement, in fact he merely emboldened the Taliban and allowed it gain strength by doing nothing for a year despite their obvious flouting of any ceasefire agreement.
It is only hindsight that those criticizing Biden are claiming that Trump would have responded differently, especially when despite all the evidence in plain sight, the Taliban was clearly regrouping in 2020 as the U.S. bombing of Taliban military positions ended. Trump, not wanting to admit that he had been made a fool of (again), would do what he always does: refuse to admit his mistake, and double-down on claims that we needed to get out and to leave the country to its own devices, just as he ignored North Korea’s current nuclear build-up after being made a fool by his “friend” Kim Jong-un, and gullibly believed all the lies of his other “friend,” Vladimir Putin.
While it is true that Biden opposed Barack Obama’s surge in Afghanistan, we can see now that even with it, the U.S. military was no more capable than the Soviets of putting them to use in pacifying the country. We have to remember that by the time Biden took office, U.S. troop strength had been reduced to 2,500. The Taliban wasn’t attacking our troops, but by then the Taliban had for all practical purposes infiltrated everywhere there were no U.S. troops—which was mainly almost the entire country, and the U.S. had been doing nothing for a year to stop this.
The only “silver lining” in all of this is that by 2001, because of the Taliban making itself so unpopular with most of the Afghan people because as Islamic fanatics, they had not learned the lesson of previous oppressive regimes in the country. Tribes and their leaders in rural regions prized their autonomy, and the rise of the mujahideen in 1978 was caused the by communist regime’s attempts to impose laws at odds with autonomy, with resistance met with mass arrests and killings. This is what the Taliban had been doing when it was in power, and its missteps led to the insurrection of the “northern alliance,” a remnant of the mujahideen. It was only a matter of time when this would have spread elsewhere, especially with foreign support.
It is too early to know now if the Taliban has learned any lessons, but if they haven’t, Afghanistan may again be reduced to a failed state undermined by insurgency—unless, of course, China decides to advance its international “interests” and prop-up the Taliban. After news that it cheated to add to its gold medal count in the Olympics, China can simply be seen as a bad international actor (accusations of anti-Asian “racism” aside), and so we can expect anything from them.
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