A Frigid Cold Take on Afghanistan
A Frigid Cold Take on Afghanistan
The collapse of the Afghan government is the inevitable outcome of 20 years of misguided US policy.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If someone sent you this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
This Is The End
Though I’m supposed to be on vacation this week, I had a few thoughts I wanted to pass along on the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan. Earlier today, the country’s president, Ashraf Ghani, fled the country, making the Taliban’s takeover a mere formality at this point.
The speed of the Taliban’s military conquest is astonishing. A week ago, the insurgents didn’t control a single one of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals. By the end of the day, they will likely rule the country.
Now the United States is feverishly helicoptering its diplomats from the American embassy in Kabul to the airport for departure from the country. The images are reminiscent of Saigon 1975, and the retreat of US diplomats from Saigon as the North Vietnamese military approached the city.
While it’s always dangerous to make direct historical analogies, one similarity is apparent in both conflicts: the US propped up corrupt governments that lacked broad popular support and collapsed when forced to fight on their own. The US ignored the unique cultural and political dynamics in both places and instead tried to create and sustain governments and militaries styled after an American model. Riven by corruption and incompetent leadership, neither government could elicit the popular support necessary to keep them in power without direct US support.
The US spent years and billions of dollars building up and training the South Vietnamese army. By 1974, it had the sixth-largest air force in the world. Yet, it was little match for a rival military with better leadership and a cause for which rank-and-file soldiers were willing to fight and die. In Afghanistan, the US spent $83 billion on training and arming a supposedly 300,000 man army. Unlike the South Vietnamese, which tried to stop the North Vietnamese offensive in 1975, the Afghan security forces barely bothered to fight.
For those who inveighed against the US war in Vietnam — and those of us who railed against US policy in Afghanistan — the outcome in both conflicts was not surprising. It always felt inevitable. Indeed, I wrote this nearly 11 years ago after traveling to Afghanistan as an election monitor. I’m just surprised it took this long to come to fruition:
It seems clear that President Obama and General Petraeus ought to devise an alternative strategy for Afghanistan centered less on 'winning' and more on doing everything possible to stabilize Afghanistan, preparing for a turnover of power to Afghan security forces and preventing a full national meltdown, before an eventual and certain U.S. withdrawal. And yet from every indication the sheer bleakness of the situation isn’t reflected at all in U.S. military operations and strategy.
…. Two days after the election I sat down with an Afghan TV journalist who said that while it was moving to see Afghans risking their lives to vote, the sight ought not to conceal the worsening insecurity and despair that defines his country nearly nine years after the Americans first arrived.
In an apt description of Afghanistan's predicament and the shrinking set of options facing U.S. policymakers, he said to me, "Afghanistan is a very dark house with only a single flickering candle lighting the inside."
The Afghanistan die was cast years ago. It began in 2001 when Western policymakers and a handful of Afghans gathered in Bonn, Germany, and drafted a new constitution creating a highly centralized central government. The decision was spectacularly ill-attuned to Afghan history and culture, which has long rejected direct rule from Kabul and prized local autonomy. It continued for the next several years as the US rejected pleas from the Taliban to be allowed back in the country if they laid down their arms.
It became more entrenched as President George W. Bush ignored the signs of worsening security and a rising Taliban threat to focus instead on another misbegotten conflict in Iraq.
President Obama picked up the baton in 2009 when he agreed to send another nearly 50,000 troops to fight in Afghanistan, with no clear political strategy for stabilizing the country or ending the civil war and an 18-month timetable for withdrawal that the Taliban could — and did — wait out. Rather than preparing Afghanistan for an eventual US retreat, the US military (supported by much of the DC foreign policy elite) convinced itself that it could wage a successful counterinsurgency against the Taliban. American troops were sent to fight and die in locales like Helmand province, even though it was evident, at the time, that the Afghan government could likely never hold the territory after the US departed. Even until this week, the Afghan government continued to try and maintain its presence in every corner of the country, long after it became clear that it could not sustain such an effort.
President Trump inherited the mess that Obama and Bush had created and made it worse, signing away the last remnants of US leverage with the Doha agreement and cutting the Afghan government off at the knees by leaving them out of the negotiations. But, in fairness, by the time Trump took office, there weren’t many good options left for US policymakers.
When Joe Biden took office in January 2021, he had two choices in Afghanistan: renege on Doha and maintain a US troop presence or finally end America’s longest war. If he had done the former, he would have put US troops directly in harm’s way since one of the key provisions of the Doha agreement is a pledge by the Taliban not to target American soldiers (a promise the insurgent group kept).
Indeed, every armchair pundit arguing today that Joe Biden should not have withdrawn from Afghanistan (whether they realize it or not) is saying they are comfortable with renewed Taliban attacks on US troops. How many more US soldiers needed to die for an ally that didn't want to fight and had little popular support? Considering how quickly the Afghan government has collapsed over the past week, they are also basically asserting that US troops should have never left the country. After all, does anyone think that after 20 years of fighting, another six weeks, six months, or six years would have produced a different outcome than what we see today? Short of a US pledge to never leave Afghanistan, this day was almost certainly coming.
Those pillorying Biden are also arguing for a complete rejection of public opinion, which strongly favors US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
But then again, when has the foreign policy elite ever cared about what the American people think?
Biden’s decision — even if it was the right one — is leading to a tragic and awful outcome. But, make no mistake, the capturing of Kabul and the Taliban’s return to power didn’t just happen. It was years in the making, informed by a military leadership that kept claiming, against all evidence on the ground, that the US was “turning the corner” in Afghanistan; by a US political leadership that treated the war like a proverbial red-headed stepchild; and by a public that stopped caring about Afghanistan a long time ago.
I grieve for the Afghan people and those who signed up to work with US forces and whose lives are now in danger. They deserved a better fate. However, if there is any silver lining from this week’s events, it’s that the Afghan government’s quick collapse will spare the country more deadly fighting. One can only hope now that the Taliban learned a lesson from their disastrous earlier rule and, this time, will adopt a more moderate approach toward leading the country.
I seethe with anger at those who argued against history, culture, and common sense more than a decade ago in claiming that the US military could “outgovern” the Taliban and sway the Afghan people toward their side. They should publicly apologize. And I feel immense sympathy for the families of those American soldiers who gave their last full measure of devotion for a war that its political leaders never believed in and its military leaders were never honest about. They deserved better leadership.
As I wrote earlier this month, the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan “is a quintessentially American failure — a collective one 20 years in the making, the result of American hubris and a misguided belief in what U.S. power can achieve.”
Rather than recriminations, we’d all be better off learning that lesson on this truly awful day.
Great article. In the six hours since you published it, Kabul has fallen and the presidential palace looks like the Capitol on January 6th, or really more like Batista's presidential palace in January 1959 after Castro arrived in Havana. The biggest surprise to me is that anyone at all is surprised. Forget Vietnam. Forget the 1900 Philippines war. Did we learn nothing from the Soviet invasion of this exact same country? Not long ago I was talking with a Marine buddy of mine who saw two tours in Afghanistan and two in Iraq . I asked him about the ol' "hearts and minds" idea of "spreading democracy.
He said, "Yeah, in Iraq it almost makes sense, although most of the people who live there don't consider themselves Iraqi as much as Sunnis, Kurds, or something else. But Afghanistan? You gotta be fucking kidding me. That place is literally in the middle ages. They have zero knowledge of anything outside their local sphere. Outsiders are people from the next valley. Americans and Russians and Chinese might as well be from another planet. They have no idea of democracy, no interest in it. They don't even have words for the concepts it supposedly embodies."
He went on to say that it was typical bullshit dreamed up by people who knew nothing. "My friends died so the Sackler family could flood poor America with cheap opioids." The way he said it broke my heart.
The GOP is trying to pin this on Biden, but the failure is pure Rumsfeld. He was the only Defense Secretary worse than MacNamara. This may hurt Biden's domestic agenda, though that remains to be seen.
Maybe even closer to sixty years of misguided US policy. How long did it take the US government and military to forget Vietnam? Not long at all. Bosnia, Serbia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan? It probably took them about six months to put what we lost in defending South Vietnam in the memory hole.