No One Could Ever Tame Afghanistan, Anyway
Several thoughts on what's happening & what's probably going to happen next in a region that never took kindly to any form of centralized government
Publisher’s Riff
We always knew that Afghanistan was a failed mission from the moment it started 20 years ago. It’s a place notoriously difficult to control, as the Arabs in the 8th century learned, followed by the Mongols in the 13th century, followed by the Mughal empire in the 18th century which loosely controlled it, followed by the British empire which thought it could refine the lessons from the Mughals in the 19th century and there’s the disastrous Soviet invasion in the late 20th century. Swift and decisive American military victories that overran the first Taliban government in the wake of 9/11 gave U.S. military commanders and two Bush administrations a false sense of confidence that they were doing something different. Now in the 2020s, we’re realizing that was never the case.
The unprecedented and remarkable speed at which the Taliban just retook all of Afghanistan, just weeks after American withdrawal, is causing much angst among Americans watching a $2 trillion (and them some) investment go to waste. Many, especially Republicans who are looking for anything that can simply embarrass the Biden administration, are forgetting that much of the American public has been clamoring for a withdrawal from places like Iraq and Afghanistan for over a decade now. On Afghanistan, however, the public was a bit more mixed about that in recent polling (if they were even paying attention to it), according to Brookings …
Americans overall are more likely to support the notion of a longer timeline for withdrawal: The YouGov poll conducted in 2018 looked at a five-year time horizon and found that 42% of respondents were in favor of removing all troops in the next five years — that is, by 2023 — suggesting that the ambivalence we highlighted above manifests in shorter-term time horizons.
But, an April Hill-HarrisX poll showed public sentiment on the impending withdrawal as much more decisive …
Here’s Gallup showing a split on whether Afghanistan overall was a mistake or not …
The past three presidents have all campaigned on some form of promise of American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, including a one-term Republican (Trump) who negotiated the full exit agreement that President Biden is simply abiding by now. One can even argue that winding down wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was, partly, the reason President Obama won his first 2008 campaign.
The problem, of course, is how much of a hot and disorderly mess this American withdrawal seems. It seems even messier and much more dramatic than the final American evacuation from Vietnam in 1975 - that was actually a two-year build up to that final moment. Afghanistan fell just weeks after the final U.S. troops left. Americans can absorb a loss, but it must be a loss on their own terms or the conditions of the loss must be, visually, pleasing and romantic. This isn’t. That sentiment is reflected in a recent Morning Consult/POLITICO poll …
The results reflect the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and a rapid Taliban takeover. Now, amid the U.S. withdrawal from the country, people are crowding the Kabul airport and trying to flee the country. The events in Afghanistan’s capital city have drawn sharp criticism from both sides of the aisle about President Joe Biden’s handling of the withdrawal to end 20 years of military involvement in the country.
Support for withdrawal remained at a partisan divide in the poll, with 69 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of Republicans supporting it. Still, just 38 percent of Democrats and 14 percent of Republicans reported that the withdrawal is going well.
Biden made the right decision by pulling out. His brief and very terse remarks before media - followed by a shrewd mic-drop performance where he walked away from gathered reporters to avoid asking questions - attempted to underscore this. Yet, the current situation clearly demonstrates the administration underestimated or severely discounted the extent to which Afghan government corruption would make it fall so hard and fast and so dramatically. That was an unforced error to put so much confidence in a government corrupted to the core. This here stings: we just spent all that money on training and equipping 300,000 Afghan soldiers who just folded, didn’t even put up a real fight.
In the meantime, Biden is sticking to the decision and even seems LBJ-like in the process: as events unfolded in Afghanistan over the weekend, the White House announced the largest increase in SNAP benefits (aka “food stamps”) in history. This is also happening on the heels of historic investments in infrastructure and the social safety net heralded by Biden and currently passing through Congress.
Bottom line: 1) there was a considerable amount of support for this. 2) Trump campaigned on it, boasted he could end it and negotiated it. 3) Biden is simply sticking to that agreement.
Biden, however, will take hits on mismanaging this - especially since he ran on competence. Neither is he showing any talent for weaving narratives or being on offense with media messaging. As a result, the political opposition is having a field day at framing what’s happening and prompting the American public to forget that it completely asked for this. Perhaps Biden’s remarks help to push back.
Now for more spitballing: China just announced it is formally recognizing the conquering Taliban government as legitimate and that it will keep its embassy there, running normally. So, suddenly, a lot of things start to make sense. Is Biden leaving because China asked or forced him to? No.
But, once again, Trump did negotiate and finalize the American exit from Afghanistan. He also did not know how to manage or handle China and was, also, always looking for diplomatic deals that - on some scale - personally enriched him. We’re just game theory here, but it always useful to speculate on the totally outrageous with anything that has Trump’s finger print on it. It is very likely that Trump allowed China to leverage itself in this deal. He not only made major concessions (including a date) to the Taliban for U.S. troop withdrawal, but he may have cut deals with China, and perhaps Russia, two geopolitical rivals who are hungry to access those massive $1 trillion plus mineral deposits of iron, gold, copper and lithium in Afghanistan that are so far untapped. China, in addition, is much closer to Afghanistan - as Russia is - and they’re both eager to keep a lid on the Taliban as much as possible so Afghanistan does not emerge again as a terrorist super state that threatens their borders. Biden now has little choice but to honor those deals or he risks flaring up present tensions even more. And, who knows, Trump might have carved out a piece of the mineral industry about to explode in Afghanistan for himself.
So, not only does the new Taliban government have diplomatic recognition from a major U.S. rival, but they now have absorbed former Afghan government troops that are U.S. trained and equipped, a vast new territory with rich mineral deposits (including the heavily coveted lithium for future clean energy battery development), and some new infrastructure (roads, buildings, etc.) courtesy of the American taxpayer. Clearly, Biden understands this is such a collosal and epic fail that he’s ready to get the f**k out and just turn the page as quickly as possible.