After the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, US president Joe Biden now wants to ‘lead with our diplomacy, our international influence, and our humanitarian aid’. The Taliban, and the Chinese, must be quaking in their boots.
‘We’ll continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability. We’ll continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people – of women and girls – just as we speak out all over the world.’
Thus spake Biden the Great, after the Fall of Kabul.
I’m sure Afghan women and girls are delighted to hear that they have not been abandoned to the brutal theocratic misogynists of the Taliban, and are – with their husbands’ permission – cheering Joe’s name from behind their liberating burqas.
Or, perhaps not. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who escaped radical religious oppression in Somalia to become a politician and women’s rights activist in the Netherlands, and is now a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, calls it Biden’s most heartless betrayal.
‘Do you seriously expect anyone to believe that American diplomacy will make the Taliban treat women fairly?’ she asks. ‘Is “rallying the world” remotely likely to keep Afghan girls in schools, or allow women to walk down the streets of Kabul with their faces uncovered? Do you take us all for fools?’
The Fall of Kabul on 15 August 2021 will go into the annals of history as a tragedy, a disgrace, a failure and a humiliation akin to the Fall of Saigon when the US surrendered Vietnam to the communists 46 years ago.
Already, China has warned Taiwan to take heed how the US abandons its allies. The defeat in Afghanistan has done immeasurable damage to the global standing of the US, and Western liberal democracies in general.
There is no doubt that major powers that oppose liberal principles will exploit this defeat to expand their repressive ideologies.
Orderly and safe
Only a day earlier, Biden announced that he had authorised the deployment of troops ‘to make sure we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of US personnel and other allied personnel, and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance’.
Of all the things we witnessed on the 15th, nothing was ‘orderly and safe’.
We saw the Afghan president flee the country in a helicopter stuffed with $169 million in cash. We saw crowds mob a US transport plane, with several people clinging on as it took off, only to fall, harrowingly, to their deaths. We saw the US lose control of its own embassy, and watched the evacuation descend into chaos before it even got off the ground.
The day after the Fall of Kabul, Biden was forced to make a humiliating speech in which he blamed the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan government, the feckless Afghan military, and former president Donald Trump, who made the decision to fully withdraw from Afghanistan in the first place.
Voters aren’t buying it. A majority blame Biden for the humiliating exit. Neither is Congress, whose anger has united opposing parties as they have not been since 9/11, almost 20 years ago.
Thousands of Afghans, millions, even, who either are part of vulnerable groups such as women and gays, or who worked with the Americans, are now in mortal danger.
The Taliban, for its part, has promised to be nice and moderate. In its reconquest of the country, its fighters have been going door to door, capturing girls as young as 12 as sex slaves, and telling women they cannot work, study, or leave the house without a male escort. Advertising images featuring women have been covered over with paint. There’s nothing to suggest the theocrats have any intention of moderating their vicious interpretation of sharia law.
Even the US president’s own allies aren’t believing the Taliban promises.
Efforts to extract Americans and their Afghan allies are continuing. Even as it cannot guarantee the safety of anyone on the way to the Kabul airport, the Pentagon is at pains to assure us that the success of its evacuation is not dependent upon the goodwill of the Taliban.
Fast and hard
In the decades since the end of the Vietnam War, one has to question whether it is even possible for modern liberal democracies to win a major war. Other than a few ‘splendid little wars’, as Peter Huchthausen once called them, the US has not had much success in satisfactorily ending foreign military engagements, or leaving countries better off than they found them.
It left Vietnam in the hands of the communists. It left Libya leaderless but in civil war. It left Iraq at the mercy of vicious jihadists that have since spread to some 18 countries worldwide. It left Syria in an ongoing civil war now primarily in the Russian sphere of influence. Now it has left Afghanistan to suffer once again under the Taliban that it had once toppled.
The US, and other liberal democracies, are highly constrained by their own rules of engagement. Noble though they are, this makes them impotent against enemies that do not share such a high-minded attitude to war, even if they are far weaker. It has proved virtually impossible to defeat enemies that look civilian, hide among civilians, and use terror tactics to enforce the support of civilians.
As Jonathan Katzenellenbogen wrote in his excellent analysis of the defeat in Afghanistan: ‘Ultimately, winning wars of counter-insurgency also requires a degree of ruthlessness that Americans were unable to muster.’
‘After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces’, said Biden. So he promptly withdrew US forces.
If there hasn’t been a good time to withdraw US forces since the war set out to take out Al Qaeda and topple the Taliban regime for giving the terrorist group safe harbour, why withdraw them?
For 20 long years, the US has poured vast amounts of money into the country, creating in the process not an effective military or a capable government, but a corrupt and lazy bureaucratic class, which was far less motivated to take bullets for the country than it was to score dollar-denominated contracts.
One alternative would have been to go in hard and fast, dropping in special forces and private mercenaries given only limited military objectives, and leave the Taliban regime in place to continue its theocratic repression, its vicious whippings, its sexual abuse, and its public executions for transgressing draconian laws.
Overwhelming force comes with collateral damage, however. It also would have left the country dangerously unstable, as Hillary Clinton’s invasion of Libya did, and vulnerable to a resurgence of the enemy, to civil wars, or to foreign invasions.
Katzenellenbogen expects, as do I, ‘fewer and more limited interventions from the US and greater reliance on targeted killings through drone attacks and bombings’.
The alternative
There is an alternative, however, and that is to revisit the concept of nation-building. The US went at it half-heartedly and reluctantly, believing that simply pouring money into the country would be enough to establish and sustain a credible government with a loyal and effective military.
Iraq and Afghanistan will have taught them that this does not work. First, the enemy really does need to be rooted out. The Taliban has only about 70 000 fighting men, all poorly trained, poorly led, and poorly equipped, without even an air force to cover them in combat.
It took a mere 2 500 troops to topple the Taliban government in 2001, yet even with 100 000 troops and the best-resourced military in the world, the US was unable to eradicate the Taliban. The US trained and paid 300 000 Afghan troops, who for years maintained a fragile control over part of the country, before they surrendered it entirely without firing a shot.
The alternative involves taking lessons from South Korea, post-war Japan, and even Europe.
South Korea still hosts 23 500 American troops, as part of the United Nations Command that has secured its independence and safety from foreign aggression. Japan was occupied for only a few years, but still hosts some 50 000 US troops to this day. Europe, after perhaps the greatest nation-building exercise in history, also still hosts many thousands of US troops; the last US tanks were only withdrawn from Europe in 2013.
So, instead of 20 years, a commitment to a country such as Afghanistan should last much longer. Give the young generation, which only just got to know freedom and opportunity, a chance to grow into positions of leadership, and give the old leaders, riven by blood feuds and theocratic impulses, a chance to die off.
Biden noted that almost $1 trillion had been spent on Afghanistan, but if it became a bastion of peace, democracy and free trade in the region, that money could have been repaid many times over. Sustaining democracy in South Korea, Japan or Europe were net gains to the American, or world, economy, not losses.
The death of liberal democracy
Building a nation into a free, peaceful and prosperous democracy takes long. Sustaining freedom requires a formidable defence and constant vigilance. It took Western countries centuries to crawl out of the dark ages of tyrannical kings and theocratic priests, and into the enlightenment of liberal democracy.
No violently repressive theocracy can be turned into a liberal democracy in just 20 years. This is true for the US, just as much as it is for its Western allies and indeed for the United Nations.
They must be prepared to fight wars boldly, on terms that effectively and rapidly neutralise the enemy. They must then follow this with a long-term – and perhaps permanent – commitment to building peaceful, prosperous nations to replace the old order.
If not, they’ll be doomed to repeat failures like Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and now, Afghanistan. The standing of liberal democracies in the world will dwindle, until both moral and military authority has been surrendered to rising authoritarian powers such as China. When that happens, liberal democracy itself will die.
[Photo: Sohaib Ghyasi on Unsplash]