How America Failed in Afghanistan | The New Yorker
On Sunday, as the Taliban entered Kabulthe last remaining major Afghan city not under the groups controlthe President of the country, Ashraf Ghani, fled to Tajikistan, making clear that the U.S.-backed Afghan government had collapsed. Five months ago, in April, President Joe Biden announced that all U.S. and NATO troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Critics have accused the Administration of conducting a rushed, poorly planned, and chaotic withdrawal since then. On Thursday, the U.S. government announced that it would be sending in marines and soldiers to help evacuate embassy personnel. But the speed of the Taliban advance has stunned American officials and left desperate Afghans trying to flee the country. Responding to criticism about his plan, Biden has sought to shift blame to the Afghan government and its people, saying, They have got to fight for themselves.
I spoke by phone with my colleague, the New Yorker staff writer Steve Coll, about the situation in Afghanistan. The dean of Columbia Journalism School, Coll is the author of Ghost Wars and Directorate S, which together chronicle much of the history of the past several decades in Afghanistan and Pakistan. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why it has been so hard for the United States to train the Afghan army, the different humanitarian crises facing the country, and the Biden Administrations outrageous callousness toward a situation America played a role in creating.
What about the events of the past few weeks has surprised you, and what was the predictable result of Bidens policy announcement in April?
I think the speed of the political collapse in Afghanistan surprised a lot of people. The pathway of the collapse was predicted and predictable. This has happened in Afghan political and military history a couple of times before. But there was a speed and momentum of people recalculating where their interests lay, and switching sides, and capitulating without violence that I dont think the Biden Administration had expected when it announced its timetable in the spring.
You could argue that this shows the Biden Administrations policy was a mistake, but you could also argue that, if this was going to happen so quickly after two decades of American troops in Afghanistan, there was no way to make this work without pledging to stay forever. How do you think about those two ways of looking at the situation, or do you think that dichotomy isnt helpful?
I think that dichotomy describes two poles that represent the range of choices that the Biden Administration faced, and in between those poles had been, more or less, the policy going back to the second term of the Barack Obama Administrationwhich was a smaller, sustained deployment. There were twenty-five hundred troops there when the Biden Administration came to office. The rate of casualties incurred by NATO forces was almost at the level of traffic accidents for much of the past couple of years. So a sustained, smaller deploymentnot free, but nothing like the expenditures of the pastlinked to a search for some more sustainable political outcome had been visible. The Trump Administration followed that path, too, picking it up from the Obama Administration, and the Trump White House had become quite ambitious about it. It had negotiated with the Taliban an agreement that had a timetable, including regarding American withdrawal. But, until the Trump Administration got to that point, it had been following the same pathway as its predecessor.
I think in between was this question of whether the benefits of a messy degree of stability justified having the small-to-medium deployment that America has in other parts of the world. That is what you are going to hear in Washington. The counter-argument to the Biden Administrations policy is not going to be forever war and the defeat of the Taliban; it is going to be a critique of the haste with which it pulled the plug on what was not a large deployment, and one that was not incurring a lot of casualties.
Why, ultimately, was it so hard to stand up the Afghan military to a greater extent than America did? Was it some lack of political legitimacy? Some problem with the actual training?
I dont know what proportion of the factors, including the ones you listed, to credit. But I think that the one additional reason it didnt work was the sheer scale of the ambition. And this was visible in Iraq as well. Building a standing army of three hundred thousand in a country that has been shattered by more than forty consecutive years of war and whose economy is almost entirely dependent on external aidthat just doesnt work. What did work was what at various stages people thought might be possible, which was to build a stronger, more coherent, better-trained force, which has effectively been the only real fighting force on behalf of the Kabul government over the past few years. This force is referred to as commandos or Special Forces, but it is basically twenty or thirty thousand people. That you can build with a lot of investment and hands-on training. But you cant just create an army of three hundred thousand. I remember talking to the Pakistani generals about this circa 2012. And they all said, You just cant do that. It wont work. They turned out to be right.
The writer Anand Gopal, who has reported extensively from Afghanistan, wrote, The US designed the Afghan state to meet Washingtons counterterrorism interests, not the interests of Afghans, and what we see today is the result. Do you agree?
I assume what that means is that the state-building project, such as it wasand about which there were varying degrees of commitment, including very little at the very beginning, after the fall of the last Taliban governmentwas undermined by the dependence on independent militias and commanders whose role in security was seen as necessary, especially early on, because the main U.S.-led NATO agenda in Afghanistan and the region was counterterrorism. The men under armsthe power brokers or warlordswere seen as essential to that agenda, and it was very difficult to build a normal state when the militias were beyond political accountability (never mind the rule of law) and dominating so many regions of the country.
Over time, there was a recognition that this was not sustainable, and there were efforts to try to fold them into a more normal-looking state and constitutional military, but that project was never accompanied by a push for accountability or an end to the effective independence and corruption associated with those regional militias. I assume you can say that is all the fault of the Western design, but I am not sure I buy that. Afghanistan had these fighting forces on its soil on 9/11 because of the continuous war that had been triggered by the Soviet invasion in 1979, and they didnt require a U.S.-dictated constitutional design to persist. Of course, they persisted. The real complication about the design of the Afghan state that is now collapsing has at least as much to do with Afghans coming into the country from exilethe same dynamic that we saw in Iraq. Often, very talented and committed people who had been forced out of the country by the wars going back to the late nineteen-seventies tried to bargain with the leaders in Afghanistan about what kind of constitutional and power-sharing system should be designed. They were trying to create a system that would accommodate the power of the militias who had never left, in a very centralized constitutional design.
President Bidens attitude toward Afghanistan of late has seemed to be one of annoyance, while hes also putting a strong emphasis on the need for Afghans to stand up and fight for their country. How do you feel about an American President putting that forward after the U.S. has been intimately involved in that country for decades?
I try to tamp down my emotions about it, because I think it is an outrageous critique. I can understand the frustration that American decision-makers have had with their partners in the Kabul government for the past twenty years. It has been a very rocky road, and it isnt all the fault of U.S. Presidents and Vice-Presidents and national-security advisers. But to suggest that the Afghan people havent done their bit is a kind of blame-shifting that I think is not only unjustifiable but outrageous. The Afghans now have suffered generation after generation of not just continuous warfare but humanitarian crises, one after the other, and Americans have to remember that this wasnt a civil war that the Afghans started among themselves that the rest of the world got sucked into. This situation was triggered by an outside invasion, initially by the Soviet Union, during the Cold War, and since then the country has been a battleground for regional and global powers seeking their own security by trying to militarily intervene in Afghanistan, whether it be the United States after 2001, the C.I.A. in the nineteen-eighties, Pakistan through its support first for the mujahideen and later the Taliban, or Iran and its clients. To blame Afghans for not getting their act together in light of that history is just wrong.
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How America Failed in Afghanistan | The New Yorker