My Thoughts on Afghanistan’s Collapse

The United States of America has once again abandoned Afghanistan, hopefully for the last time. In the eyes of some, this is a cowardly circumstance, one that should be thought about in the context of the previous US abandonment of Afghanistan in 1989. When the Berlin Wall came down, and the Soviets retreated from the country, the United States quickly lost all interest in Afghanistan.

The previously celebrated Mujahideen fighters and their supporters, believing in what the Afghans considered a jihad against the invaders, were allowed to continue their paths as Islamic militants or tribal warlords, and the massive covert operation in Afghanistan, mostly run by the CIA, was gone as soon as the Russians were.

Afghanistan quickly devolved into anarchy after the Soviets left, with tribal alliances in the civil war shifting repeatedly as individual groups with distinct ethnic and tribal allegiances jockeyed for power in the country while also trying to prevent any one group from gaining too much power and overwhelming the others. The situation in Afghanistan became unlivable in this state. Warlords would declare ownership of sections of the same road, and each warlord would have their “border guards” extort money from drivers going down the road.

Into this vacuum stepped the religious, ethno-nationalist Taliban movement, formed by conservative, Pashtun Afghans who were tired of the lawlessness, corruption, and bloodshed of the civil war. Led by Mullah Omar, the Taliban were able to gain a strong foothold in the mostly Pashtun south of Afghanistan, and they soon overpowered the other forces and pushed them out of Kabul.

Though the Taliban was in power from 1996 onward, the civil war continued in the northern regions of the country against the Northern Alliance. During this period the Taliban government was completely broke, spending what little state capacity they had on fighting the non-Pashtun forces in the north. While the Taliban struggled to gain access to the Internet, the Al Qaeda operatives down the road were able to get high-speed Internet with ease due to swimming in rivers of money from wealthy Persian Gulf Islamists.

In the minds of some, this is an awful turn of events that was avoidable. In reality, it was no more tragic an event than most of the other events that occur in international politics, and it was most likely completely unavoidable. Those who believe in the cause of defending the US-backed regime in Afghanistan are a minority of Americans, but they occupy a disproportionate share of the foreign policy and media sectors. For the sake of this essay I will call these people “Crusaders.”

These people believe that our critical failure was abandoning Afghanistan to its fate after 1989 without ensuring a peaceful transition to a new regime. Like with South Vietnam, these defenders of America’s overseas quagmires are usually unconcerned, often for years, about the quality of governance that their puppet regimes provide for the people of their countries, and they are almost always delusional about the feasibility of providing “effective governance” to these populations.

That being said, the Crusaders are always outspoken when things like the Afghanistan collapse occur and suddenly a lot of innocent people are going to be injured, killed, and lose many of their rights and freedoms. On a moral level, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be upset about the horrors that plague people in a country like Afghanistan. Setting aside their common hypocrisy, in which they rightfully declare things like the Armenian Genocide or Tiananmen Square as atrocious and shameful national acts while downplaying the genocidal campaigns of the US against Native Americans or the UK against the Irish or Kenyans, they are correct that the Taliban are violent and backwards rulers. There are also many American leaders who are violent and backwards, often to far more horrible degrees than the weak Taliban could ever hope to be.

But beyond the ethical level, there is no rationality whatsoever in the Crusaders’ viewpoint. In the aftermath of 1989, the Crusaders believe the US should have maintained humanitarian support and development in Afghanistan, while also encouraging them to adopt more democratic values. This, they believe, would have prevented the chaos of the civil war to some degree, and it could have prevented the Taliban from taking power at all. Fundamentally, the Crusaders believe that Afghanistan could conceivably, in a single lifetime at most, become a democracy that protects the freedoms and rights of its citizens with equality and rule of law. Considering how poorly the United States does in providing its citizens with democracy, equality, and protected rights, this is quite the dream for a poor nation like Afghanistan.

The Crusaders see Biden’s unceremonious withdrawal from Afghanistan as yet another failure akin to the one in 1989. Much like after 1989, however, there is no way that Afghanistan’s collapse, or its current condition as a poor, conservative country with sharp ethnic divisions could be avoided.

The truth speaks to the lack of knowledge these optimists have about the peoples and nations they dream of “liberating.” The Soviets themselves invaded Afghanistan in order to do exactly what these commentators advocate for the United States to have done. The country was already divided, unstable, and increasingly violent before the Soviets stepped in to prop up their own puppet regime. Some of this is explained by a very common delusion of the political Right in the US, which is so-called American Exceptionalism, the myth that the US is special to the point of being able to avoid objective consequences of the real world that other nations have to face. The historical evidence alone points to the fairytale nature of this idea.

Both in South Vietnam after the US departure, and in Afghanistan in the second half of the 20th century, there was no achievable regime that would satisfy US desires. South Vietnam had an extraordinarily corrupt and unpopular government. Nevermind the fact that the US had already indefinitely delayed the elections that were supposed to occur in Vietnam because the US understood that Ho Chi Minh and the Communists would win the election by a wide margin. Nevermind the fact that the South Vietnamese government was already evidently unstable by 1963, when the brutal dictator Diem was killed in a military coup. From then on South Vietnam was run by a series of decreasingly effective military rulers while endless supplies of money and machinery from the US kept corruption outrageously high.

It should also be noted that the final North Vietnamese offensive that crushed South Vietnam was successful because, unlike in 1972, Congress stepped in to prevent President Ford from doing anything to stop it. It was not a lack of military will, or Presidential weakness, that kept the US from going back into Vietnam to prevent the regime from collapsing, it was the American people, their elected representatives, and the massive unpopularity of the war that gave the North Vietnamese the freedom from air attack which allowed them to pretty much roll right over the South Vietnamese forces, who faced higher and higher rates of desertion, even from oft-corrupt officers, as the North Vietnamese drew closer to Saigon. It was for this reason that the rate of collapse in Afghanistan was not surprising, especially once Biden announced that the US was planning to withdraw on schedule. It is the very nature of such an every-man-for-himself situation, that when people think others aren’t going to commit, they aren’t going to commit either. If the US pulled out of Afghanistan a year from now, or ten years from now, or ten years ago, the collapse would have been the same, because the lack of core support within the US-backed regime made collapse inevitable, and like a house of cards, it didn’t matter if Biden promised not to remove one of the towers of cards. Once the fundamental weakness becomes obvious, the cards all collapse and at best, you’ve got an isolated tower surrounded by collapse. The people of Afghanistan were clearly waiting for any sign of defection before everyone defected to save themselves.

There is also a small but vocal group of commentators who do not believe in American Exceptionalism while still believing that the US could have avoided the current situation in Afghanistan. These people I will call “nation-builders.” They are typically professionals or academics with a close relationship to the US military, intelligence services, or Beltway neoliberalism (e.g. Hillary Clinton, Jake Tapper). They are nearly always highly-educated, wealthy, and either work in the major media outlets or have connections to them.

One such commentator is Ian Bremmer, who like many in the mainstream media, argued that in some way Biden had “bungled” the withdrawal from Afghanistan. While there have been documentable mistakes in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the media and talking heads ignored the larger trend of stories in favor of their usual concern-pandering and virtue signalling in small sound bytes. The horrific videos of people crushed by the landing gear of evacuating aircraft are certainly upsetting, but they are no more upsetting than horrific videos from anywhere else in the world where terrible things are currently happening.

Several things I think are clear from the evidence I’ve seen: 1. Biden’s administration did not bungle the withdrawal any more than any other administration would have 2. There were already assassinations and terrorist attacks prevalent in Afghanistan due to the weak and collapsing regime. And 3. The foreign policy elite of the Western world, particularly the USA, deserve to, as one might say, “have their nose rubbed in it.” I will elaborate on each of these points in turn.

The enmeshment of a major military force in an extended war of occupation is invariably going to create massive dependencies on the state being occupied. In Vietnam, the American presence only made things in South Vietnam worse by funneling ever more money and material into an extraordinarily corrupt system. It also was a totally bungled evacuation in a true sense. Unlike Joe Biden, the ambassador to Vietnam under Ford, Graham Martin, was delusional about the inevitable fall of South Vietnam. As a result, Martin delayed doing what was necessary to evacuate personnel from Saigon. Bremmer, like many other foreign policy experts in the US, see the Saigon evacuation as a national embarrassment and humanitarian catastrophe for the US, and they feel the need to place blame on someone for what they see as a smaller-scale version of the disaster.

The problem with this thinking is that there is nothing that could be done to save the majority of those who were conquered by the North Vietnamese. Just as the CIA had done to Vietnamese peasants caught up in the insurgency war under their Phoenix assassination program, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese death squads executed thousands of suspected collaborators amongst Vietnamese peasants in the countryside. This is sadly an inevitable byproduct in most cases of intensive guerrilla war. The same brutality occurred in the guerrilla fighting of the Eastern Front of WWII. To save their own skins, soldiers will kill any villagers they suspect of collaborating with the enemy, and the other side does the same when they retake the village later. This causes innocent civilians to be caught in the middle of a lethal game of suspicion. This is the type of brutal fact of warfare that should have prevented the launching of the war in Afghanistan in the first place.

To engage in war is to engage in brutality, no matter what Rules of Engagement you abide by. As is self-evident, the nation-states of the world are more than capable of bending any rules of warfare to serve their agenda. In a highly nationalistic state like the US, it should come as no surprise that the deaths of tens of thousands in the aftermath of our reckless intervention in Libya is not even a blip on the American conscience while Benghazi has practically become a soap opera for the Right, even appearing in a Michael Bay movie.

Virtually all of the supposed mistakes of the Biden administration listed by Bremmer are things that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with Biden’s decisions.

“The US intelligence agencies, at the time that Biden first made the announcement that they were going to withdraw all troops by August, September 11th, said that the Afghan defense forces would be able to hold off the Taliban for two to three years. After the Taliban offensive kicked in over the course of the last few days, the intelligence assessment dropped to two to three days. I have never seen that kind of intelligence failure in my career. Two facts here are truly breathtaking. Number one, the United States spent 20 years and nearly $90 billion training an Afghan force that refused to fight. And number two, after two decades of personally training Afghans on the ground, the United States still did not understand, in any way, the morale and the capabilities of the forces that they had trained.”

While I will grant that Biden was delusional or lying when he said that the Afghan forces would be able to hold out for years, it is hard to see how this is a failure of Biden’s intelligence. It was known even before the Trump administration that the Afghan government was unstable and suffering many of the same problems that the South Vietnamese government had, particularly corruption based around exploitation of American-bought resources. It was also clear during the Trump administration that the Taliban was beginning to conquer more and more territory as the Afghan forces consistently failed to fight effectively against them. Yet Biden somehow is responsible for “20 years and nearly $90 billion training an Afghan force that refused to fight.” Presumably, Bremmer is linking Biden to Obama’s administration and the overall legacy of bipartisan approval for the war over twenty years, but it should be noted that Biden was always one of the more anti-intervention members of the Obama administration. Biden, for example, was opposed to the intervention in Libya. Samantha Power, a major proponent of the Libyan intervention, is a part of the Biden administration, so it is not outlandish to suggest that Biden is not that far removed from the foreign policy of Obama. That being said, the discussion of lasting years against the Taliban was either wishful thinking or bluff, something that is understandable when an American president has to face excoriation by the foreign policy elite for doing something enormously sensible and popular: cutting our losses and getting out.

As I stated above, there is an enormous amount of entanglement that occurs in the occupation of a foreign country. These entanglements are very brutally severed in many cases. The best way to avoid these atrocities is to not engage in war. Long before the US pulled out of Afghanistan, there were clear holes starting to form in the stability of the country, as many assassinations of US-allied Afghans instigated many notable military personnel to flee the country. The Afghan air force was recognized as a joke incapable of sustaining itself due to the fact that Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on Earth, and air forces are so expensive to build and maintain that even wealthy, prosperous nations like Finland only maintain very small air forces.

On top of that, the release of secret documents, which essentially amounted to the Afghan War’s version of the Pentagon Papers, put a final nail in the coffin of Americans’ approval of the war. The lack of consideration given to any of these problems by the foreign policy experts of the US prior to launching this war is truly despicable, and shows you exactly how alienated much of the Western elite has become from the bulk of their countries’ populations. That is a very real “communication failure” that is shared by the Biden administration and policy wonks like Bremmer.

As a result, my final point here is simply that the United States and its foreign policy elites deserve to feel ashamed of themselves and to be given the cold shoulder by the American people. The American people were fraudulently led into several unwinnable wars, leading to veterans now asking “what was it worth?” Unfortunately, it was for nothing, and that was the case from the start. As it is taught in “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” the American people are uninterested in listening to foreign policy experts telling them that things will be smoother if the US simply delays its withdrawal a little bit longer. Or if the Biden administration simply communicates better to allies. Or if the Taliban can be forced to accept a deal. And so on and so forth. The American people, just like with Vietnam, are happier to just withdraw entirely and hope for the best. Tender-hearted liberals and others in the foreign policy world love to virtue signal their anger at the Biden administration and the military failing to evacuate people who had collaborated with Coalition forces. Again, this is something that should have been considered as a potential consequence of entanglement in this war in the first place. It is simply impossible for the US to evacuate every Afghan who is at risk of being killed for collaborating, especially because many of the patriotic Americans who have always loved the wars in the Middle East are also extraordinarily racist and xenophobic, causing them to reject refugees regardless of what the cause of their refugee status is. These killings also were occurring, as elucidated above, long before the Biden administration began.

These things added together make the Afghanistan situation an example of something that Western elites should be ashamed of and ridiculed for. For not considering the consequences of their decisions, and then turning to excuses, the “crusaders” and “nation-builders” are both guilty of underestimating the cost of war by allowing themselves to become insulated from the atrocities of war both by their privileged positions in society as well as the fraudulent “humanitarian warfare” concept that has become popular over the last thirty years or so.

Outside of these major media outlets and their Beltway allies, the silence on Afghanistan since the withdrawal has been deafening. Congress didn’t even need to pass a law preventing the President from intervening like they did in the 1970s, because Joe Biden was sensible enough to recognize how unpopular and irrelevant the war was to the American people.

The reason these nation-builders are wrong is not that they are an elite group that is out of touch with the American people’s priorities. Nor are they wrong because they were the ones who lied to and manipulated the American people into supporting regime change in the first place. They are wrong because their solutions are obviously untenable.

What the nation-builders of Afghanistan cannot grasp is that their mythos about Afghanistan, played out in Beltway puppy Aaron Sorkin’s film Charlie Wilson’s War, is exactly that: a delusional myth that appears only in movies for the sheltered and morally confused.

Civil wars can last a long time. The Angolan Civil War lasted for decades and killed half a million people. The Sri Lankan Civil War also lasted for decades, so the very idea that peace at all could be brought to the warring nation of Afghanistan was a hopeful wish. The idea that the peace would be one pleasing to the United States was hopeless from the start.

The bitter pill for the nation-builders to swallow is that the Taliban has come to power twice now in Afghanistan, because the Taliban is quite popular in Afghanistan. Unlike the warlords of the early 90s or the US-supported regime of the last twenty years, the Taliban were able to provide effective governance. They provided proper security so that the people of Afghanistan could live their lives in peace for the first time in years. They stamped out corruption quickly and brutally. They also instituted strict religious rule over everyone’s lives, destroying televisions for their sinful influence, forcing girls out of school, and requiring all women to wear the burka.

They are likely to do these same things now that they have returned to power, and there will be nothing that the US can do about it, because the majority of Afghans support these things. On a religious level, the Pashtuns especially are deeply conservative, but even the more secular governance of the Uzbeks or Tajiks is not LGBT friendly.

The fear of women losing rights after US withdrawal is akin to a cop saying he fears what will happen to all his informants if we end the War on Drugs. Those informants were put into danger in the first place by the futile and self-destructive War on Drugs, which this cop has been happy to fight, and the situation of a poor, possibly drug-dependent informant is made awful by things out of the control of law enforcement. It would be perhaps a better world if the nation-builders were correct that investment in education and development in Afghanistan after 1989 would have gradually changed Afghanistan into a tolerant, freedom-loving democracy, but the world does not mold itself to our vision of what it should be.

The myth peddled by Hillary Clinton in her book Hard Choices that the war in Afghanistan needed to be fought for the sake of overthrowing a brutally misogynistic regime ignores both the ridiculousness of the claim itself (the US, including Clinton herself, did not support invading Afghanistan out of concern for human rights) and the realities of how politics operates.

The Taliban were able to stamp out corruption in a way that the Karzai and Ghani regimes were not because they were not concerned for human rights. The Taliban’s brutal use of force is a relic from days gone by for most of the world today, but it is far from dead. Even in the United States, it is enjoying a potential resurgence. Just a couple years ago we had a President who was very keen on the idea of “just beat[ing] the crap out of” people in order to keep them in line, as well as the killing of women and children related to ISIS fighters. The Taliban basically use a combination of brutal realpolitik and Islamic fundamentalism to balance their control of the country with their Pashtun culture. I will publish another essay in the future on the post-9/11 events which led to the US invasion, and how Pashtun culture was a critical part of that. For now, it suffices to say that there are probably far more women in Afghanistan who reject the idea of women’s rights than there are who support it.

As I wrote earlier in this essay, the situation in Afghanistan is tragic for many people, but not any more tragic than most other events in international politics. There are women being brutally treated all around this world, even in our own country. Yet we do not have the power, certainly not through military means, to change that. When you look at Prohibition for example, you can see the fact that it was the devoutly Christian and progressive Americans who were most supportive of it. Some feminists were strong supporters of Prohibition in many cases, because they believed that alcohol was a major cause of domestic violence against women. Most Americans today recognize that Prohibition was established in a post-World War One moral crusade in which Americans, clinging to the Puritan ideal to cleanse the world of sin, established a destructively wrong-headed policy to outright ban alcohol. The Taliban in many ways repeated this, going on a moral crusade against the remnants of the sinful past after their victory in the war. When you reject the arbitrary differences between Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism, you begin to realize why many nations around the world see Americans as hopelessly arrogant. Rewind the clock a century or so, and the United States is only different from Afghanistan in population and economic prosperity.

Sources/Further Reading:

Ian Bremmer. “Afghanistan: Four key failures.” GZero Media, August 16th, 2021. https://www.gzeromedia.com/quick-take/afghanistan-four-key-failures

Phil Stewart, Idrees Ali, & Hamid Shalizi. “Special Report: Afghan pilots assassinated by Taliban as U.S. withdraws.” Reuters, July 9, 2021. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/afghan-pilots-assassinated-by-taliban-us-withdraws-2021-07-09/

Fergusson, James. Taliban: The Unknown Enemy. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2012.

David Zucchino & Kiana Hayeri. “‘Find him and kill him’: A pilot’s desperate escape from Kabul.” The Irish Times, June 8, 2021. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/find-him-and-kill-him-a-pilot-s-desperate-escape-from-kabul-1.4584531