The Daily Escape:
Low tide, Wellfleet, Cape Cod, MA – July 2021 photo by Jennifer O’Leary
Ever since Biden decided to pull out of Afghanistan, the media are filled with stories about how the Taliban are on the march, and how the Afghan government is giving way before them. From the Guardian:
“The Taliban have now overrun six provincial capitals in mere days. On Sunday the group claimed a huge symbolic victory when its fighters seized Kunduz, a strategic city close to the border with Tajikistan and an important political and military hub.”
From the WaPo:
“The recent developments and gains in Afghanistan mark a sharp escalation in the pace of Taliban gains across Afghanistan, which for months had been focused on taking control of districts and increasing pressure on urban areas.“
From the NYT:
“The response from the US military to the Taliban gains was muted, showing clearly that the US’s 20-year war in Afghanistan is over and that it is for the Afghan forces to retake the cities overrun by the Taliban.”
Many politicians and former military have crawled back in front of microphones to pronounce the final withdrawal of US troops a strategic mistake. One retired UK general raised the specter of Afghanistan becoming once again, a base for international terrorism.
The thing these people aren’t saying is that the US had only 2500 troops in Afghanistan just before announcing the pull-out, a number that wasn’t going to provide significant resistance to the Taliban. And it wasn’t sufficient to blunt a return of terrorists.
What we had was a token force with a primary responsibility to protect the US embassy.
Many media outlets are opining on how the Afghan conflict has entered a new, deadlier, and more destructive phase. Foreign Policy reports that the Taliban’s military tactics may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The NYT is saying that the situation on the ground lays bare a difficult predicament for Biden.
It’s clear that for years, most of the fighting with the Taliban happened in the country’s rural areas. Now, the Taliban are pushing into cities, and many more civilians will be injured or killed. The first thing the Taliban do in each city they capture is free Taliban prisoners and seize truckloads of weapons from police and military headquarters before the US can bomb them.
This allows them to increase their numbers, and arm them, despite taking casualties.
All of this, and the looming end of the role of women as near-equal members of Afghan society, has caused a paroxysm of regret in the media for ending our 20-year effort at nation-building in Afghanistan.
But what’s wrong with Biden staying the course, doing what he said he was going to do? He needs to hold firm, even though there will likely be a “fall of Saigon” moment sometime soon.
In less than 20 years after WWII, the US helped to create functioning democracies in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. Each of those successes involved nations with cohesive populations.
That’s not the case in Afghanistan: The Hazara, the Uzbek, the Pashtun, the Tajik all (more or less) detest each other. The Shiite and Sunni factions feel the same. This was never going to be a unified and functioning democracy. That wouldn’t be cured by 20 more years of American occupation.
Adam Tooze, economist at Columbia University, reminds us that our 20-year intervention in Afghanistan has cost the US over $2.2 trillion dollars. In his blog post, “Afghanistan’s economy on the eve of the American exit” he tells us that despite Afghanistan’s huge economic needs, the ratio of military to civilian development spending was in the order of ten to one. But in many years, Western aid spending exceeded the Afghan GDP.
He asks: Where did the money go?
The answer is that tens of $ billions were swallowed by corruption. Wealthy Afghans became large property owners in the Gulf states. Today, Afghanistan’s most valuable crop is opium, which isn’t part of their GDP statistics. And since the early 2000s, opium cultivation has progressively increased.
Tooze points out the two successes: Afghan life expectancy has increased, driven by a rapid fall in infant mortality and big life expectancy gains for women. Women now outlive the men. Second, university enrollment: the number of students enrolled in universities has risen from 30,000 in 2003, to more than 180,000. In 2018, there were 49,000 female students vs. 7,200 in 2003.
Despite the good news, as per capita income increased, so has the poverty rate. Today, over half of Afghanistan’s population are officially counted as poor.
The widespread corruption and failed economic development only make rural Afghanistan a prime recruiting ground for the Taliban. The country is most likely on the verge of civil war. OTOH, it’s been a long time since the Taliban tried to manage a city. Kabul now has about 4 million residents. Let’s leave the closing thought to Tooze:
“What kind of regime could be established by the Taliban over such a city? What kind of future can they deliver for Afghanistan and for their constituency in the countryside? Little wonder that the Taliban have been assiduously courting Beijing. Afghanistan needs all the friends it can get.”
Wrongo has written 48 columns about US policy in Afghanistan. It’s doubtful that this is the last, but let’s hope we’re nearly there.
Leaving Afghanistan should prompt us to rethink our country’s place in the world: Should our military always be the first tool out of the toolbox? What did the US gain from being enmeshed in the Greater Middle East for the past 50 years?
Leaving Afghanistan should lead to a reckoning about these questions, and a consideration about what a more modest and realistic future US foreign policy would look like.
We really never achieved anything remotely like civil society. What we had at best were a few protected cities and a populace that included large numbers of folks who did not accept the notions of rights that we wanted them to accept. War is always terrible and the aftermath can often be as long as the war. In Afghanistan the Taliban would flee to the ungoverned regions of Pakistan and then return after R&R. This made the small victories we achieved even less than meets the eye.
Afghanistan was a mistake – it always was. It is a tragedy too but the mistake was not in our leaving but it believing that military power could change the people.