President Joe Biden can insist all he wants that America embarked upon the Afghan misadventure to combat terror and not to nation-build. It isn’t exactly true. The Bush Doctrine in a nutshell was to export democracy and Western values to hitherto benighted countries whose populace was surely yearning to be free.
Many predicted it would fail, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Interestingly, it failed more in Afghanistan (which is to say, completely). This weekend, the whole thing fell apart as the puppet-like President Ashraf Ghani fled and the Taliban returned to power two decades after being kicked out, with the Americans effecting a panicky retreat reminiscent of the fall of Saigon. Afghanistan will once again be ruled by Islamist fanatics and women can expect the worst.
It is not entirely surprising. The British and Russians also failed in their attempt to change this mountainous and isolated land. One of the challenges is that it suffers a yawning chasm between town and country which is a little like its cousin in the West but more extreme: the periphery is even more religious and even more tribal and it accounts for a larger share of the population. Corruption is perhaps the glue that holds it all together.
The challenge NATO and the US undertook was enormous. Staying on for a bit might have made a difference, but possibly in the long term not. Still, it did not have to end in quite this shameful and shambolic way. There are several reasons why the Taliban has not been crushed by the most formidable military machine in history:
America and NATO allies simply did not lay down the law with the governments they installed in Kabul (meaning that they should be fair, transparent, honest and competent); corruption continued unabated, including under Ghani. They oversaw a force four times larger than the Taliban’s (which has only about 80,000 fighters), but failed to pay them salaries anywhere near on time. The US complained about the corruption, but no riot act was read. The US is strangely reluctant to read riot acts and would be wise to relearn its own mythology: When you have to shoot, shoot.
The Taliban were allowed to amass so much money through protection rackets, mafia-style shakedowns and almost unlimited trade in opium that they could bribe corrupt officials and commanders around the country, and this helped them rout the military in recent days with almost no struggle. Yes, the Taliban outspent the US-backed government where it counted.
America allowed Pakistan, its alleged ally who nonetheless not-so-secretly supported the Taliban, to continue to disrupt its unfortunate neighbor for complex regional-politics calculations that only its crafty leaders truly understand. For decades, it has given the Taliban shelter in its “tribal areas” far from Islamabad (that’s the excuse) and close to the Afghan border (recall that it was in Pakistan that Osama bin Laden was finally found). Pakistan assumed that its nuclear weapons gave it latitude for such shenanigans, and – incredibly – it was right.
After initially routing the Taliban, the US has never really played to win. It never brought the same crushing force to the war against the Taliban that it brought to the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. It was dragged into a war of attrition on the Taliban’s terms, including winter respites and a return each spring to the absurdly-but-precisely named “fighting season” with its regular massacres of civilians and military personnel, local and foreign.
Playing to win would have taken a terrible toll on the lives of civilians, as Islamist radicals always embed in civilian populations. That’s what happened in Mosul, that’s what goes on in Gaza, and that is the way in any place unlucky enough to host their nihilistic jihad.
Can such a price be acceptable? This moral question is only a psychological one: it is a horror that starts to look acceptable to many when they are sufficiently fed up. Fed up with rockets from Gaza, with suicide bombings in Belgium, with beheadings of Western aid workers and the enslavement of Yazidi women.
It started to look OK when enough people were fed up with Japan’s alliance with the Nazis and kamikaze attacks in the Pacific. So the Americans mercilessly firebombed Tokyo and dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and then – unbelievably – did not wait long and dropped a second on Nagasaki. It’s awful, and hard to justify, but in that war the US came to win, and won. There are no perfect historical analogies and there are always differences – but this is the main difference.
Now the credibility of the Americans has been soundly trashed – in terms of planning, intelligence, and diplomacy. And in the Middle East they will take note: Assad had Putin; Ghani had Biden. Which of the two is still in power? This is not great for the future of liberal democracy in the region or the world.
It is easy for Israelis to mock Biden and critique from afar. This is the instinct of many people here: to see Democrats as weak. I suggest they consider a few things.
First, it is former president Donald Trump’s “peace agreement” with the Taliban from last year that started the disintegration by giving the extremist rebels the right to a share of power. It was an extreme case of negotiating with terrorists, it gave them an unjustified and immoral victory and it signaled an abandonment of the Bush Doctrine and of America’s local allies with it. It was the beginning of the end, and the only way Biden could change that was to tear up the agreement (and he had reasons, because the Taliban violated it egregiously).
Second, America has been left mostly alone in the campaign in recent years. No other country has come close to the investment that America has made in the difficult mission in Afghanistan.
And third, how many Israelis are willing to risk their lives to save the women of Afghanistan from barbaric rule? How many Israelis are really even willing to invest treasure without direct interests at stake? A little less hypocrisy and a little more modesty would be well advised. If there are people with such humanitarian instincts, I offer them a formula familiar from the 1990s: Gaza first.
The writer is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. He is also the managing partner of the New York-based communications firm Thunder11. Follow him on Twitter: @perry_dan.