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Uncle Sam’s ugly exit from Afghanistan
The TLDR
The Afghans are incorrigible. There is nothing we could do to save them. That’s the defence offered by the Americans to justify the catastrophic withdrawal—and the resounding victory of the Taliban. But the United States spent $2 trillion over 20 years trying to rebuild Afghanistan. So what did they get wrong?
Mistake # 1: Shifting priorities
Soon after winning the Afghan war, the US quickly pivoted to invading Iraq—with little excuse and solely to execute a cherished plan of then Vice President Dick Cheney and his advisors. When the Taliban was at its weakest, America was distracted and uninterested in capitalising on its victory. By the time, the US swerved its attention back to Afghanistan under President Obama, the Taliban had already regrouped on the margins—and remained able to fund and arm themselves, resisting all military attempts to decimate them. And then the strategy shifted again under Donald Trump who just wanted out—and was willing to make whatever concessions required.
Mistake #2: Haphazard military strategy
The US tried to remake the Afghan military in its own image—without taking into consideration Afghan realities and culture. As one former Defense Secretary says:
“We kept changing guys who were in charge of training the Afghan forces, and every time a new guy came in, he changed the way that they were being trained… The one thing they all had in common was they were all trying to train a Western army instead of figuring out the strengths of the Afghans as a fighting people and then building on that.”
And the Pentagon kept throwing money at the problem, continually sending in fresh batches of uninformed advisers, changing generals—all with shifting goals and priorities, each with new acronyms. Mike Jason in The Atlantic writes:
“We didn’t fight a 20-year war in Afghanistan; we fought 20 incoherent wars, one year at a time, without a sense of direction. The U.S. military can and should be blamed for the collapse of security forces in Afghanistan—I hold us responsible… efforts to build and train large-scale conventional security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq have mostly been an aimless, ham-fisted acronym soup of trial and error that never became the true main effort, and we are to blame for that.”
Point to note: That disastrous folly became painfully obvious at the end when the U.S. pulled its air support, intelligence and contractors servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters—after spending 20 years training the Afghan forces in a military strategy that relied wholly on air support. As one US ex-general says:
“When you build an army like that, and it’s meant to be a partner with a sophisticated force like the Americans, you can’t pull the Americans out all of a sudden, because then they lose the day-to-day assistance that they need.”
Mistake #3: No reconstruction to see here!
Let’s be clear. The Americans never really tried to rebuild Afghanistan in any meaningful sense—as a recent US government report makes painfully clear. It reveals that $88.3 billion had been allocated up to March for security-related reconstruction, compared with just $36 billion for governance and development Also: the US doesn’t even know how to rebuild a nation, as a former national security adviser makes clear:
“We just don’t have a postconflict stabilization model that works… Every time we have one of these things, it is a pick-up game. I don’t have confidence that if we did it again, we would do any better.”
All the big plans simply upped the Pentagon budget, expecting the military to figure out everything, including building a local police force. As Quartz notes:
“To build effective institutions for governance and economic development, expert civilian assistance is required. Despite frequent lip service paid to the need for diplomats and development experts to take the lead in Afghanistan, those agencies were both under-resourced and held to a higher level of accountability than the military. Lacking the right tool for the job, ‘U.S. policymakers had no other viable option but to lean on the military and simply pretend [the State Department] holds the reins in such missions. The pretense continues today.’”
Point to note: Some of these mistakes could have been corrected if the Pentagon and US government had been honest about its mistakes. Instead, public statements opted for PR spin over reality—and eventually the generals believed their wishful thinking. Just weeks ago, President Biden himself expressed confidence that the Afghan army will fight hard against the Taliban—even though US intelligence estimates clearly indicated otherwise.
Mistake #4: Cutting out the Afghans
Once Trump took office, the main US aim was to get the hell out of Afghanistan. The first big step: cutting a peace deal with the Taliban that cut out the Afghan government—with an absurdly hasty exit date of May 1. And then the Trump administration leaned on Kabul to release 5,000 hardened terrorists to appease the Taliban further. It was always a bad deal, but Biden—long sceptical about the Afghan war—chose to double down on it. As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria makes bluntly clear:
“Let’s first dispense with the fantasy that the United States was maintaining the peace there with just a few thousand troops, and that the situation could have been managed with this small commitment. For the last couple of years, it sure looked that way to Americans because Washington had made a deal with the Taliban and as a result, the Taliban was deliberately not attacking US and coalition forces. For the Afghans, the war had been intensifying. In the summer of 2019, the Afghan army and police force suffered their worst casualties in the two decades of fighting. It was also the worst period for Afghan civilian casualties in a decade. In 2018, when the United States had four times as many troops as this year, the fighting was so brutal that 282,000 Afghan civilians fled their homes in the countryside.”
So having been cut off at their knees by the Americans, it isn’t all that surprising that the Afghan government and its people just chose to surrender.
Mistake #5: No withdrawal plan
A retired general says of the chaos of the past weeks: “The puzzle for me is the absence of contingency planning: If everyone knew we were headed for the exits, why did we not have a plan over the past two years for making this work?” One damning reason: Biden simply wasn’t interested in expending the time and energy it would have taken to plan and execute a longer but orderly withdrawal:
“While some officials in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House itself pushed quietly for more urgent measures that might have averted catastrophe, Biden resisted—as if he wouldn’t allow Afghanistan to interfere with his priorities, as if he were done with Afghanistan the minute he announced the withdrawal of all remaining U.S. forces.”
The other explanation: He knew and simply didn’t care. One analyst’s assessment: “My takeaway is that they priced this into the decision. It’s regrettable, but it was priced in as a tolerable outcome.”
Point to note: All the US statements—from pundits and leaders alike—defending the withdrawal smell of an underlying racist assumption: Afghans are just too different, too backward to become a stable state—despite the Americans’ best efforts. And that is reflected in Biden’s long-standing view that “the United States had little chance of transforming a largely tribal, undeveloped nation.” But as Steve Coll says in the New Yorker, the critique wilfully ignores much of Afghanistan’s history:
“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 wasn’t 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.”
The bottomline: is perhaps best summed up by George Packer:
“There’s plenty of blame to go around for the 20-year debacle in Afghanistan—enough to fill a library of books. Perhaps the effort to rebuild the country was doomed from the start. But our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, staked their lives on us, is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided. The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency—and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden.”
Reading list
- The Atlantic, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal (paywall) are the best on America’s failed military strategy.
- Quartz has more on the damning US government report on the US failure to rebuild Afghanistan.
- Steve Coll’s eye-opening interview in the New Yorker is a must read.
- An absolute must-watch: Fareed Zakaria’s incisive take over at CNN.
- Washington Post and New York Times have more on US intelligence predictions of a collapse—and why they were ignored.
- The Conversation has a good collection of five key reads on Afghanistan—and it covers a broad range of aspects.
- NPR explains why Biden is sticking to his decision—and is unlikely to change his mind.
- George Packer pens an emotional essay raging against the betrayal of Afghans who fought by the Americans’ side.
- For more context on this defeat: See our explainer on how the Taliban funded and armed itself.