This ending to an involvement that goes back 40 years now reveals itself to be what it always was, an impossible situation that was premised on contradictory motives, waging modern state counter-terror against primitive blasphemy. Neither had moral justification, but did prove the fallacy of the clash of civilizations. There was revenge, nation-building, and the military limits of a so-called superpower’s ability to understand corruption and cultural difference.
That failed misunderstanding of the entire enterprise was signified by Trump’s deployment of the MOAB device. What’s worse is that Trump’s clumsy attempts to cut and run complete with a February 2020 promise of leaving in 163 days made the ending even more chaotic since there were no plans for refugees from a pre-apocalyptic tribal civil war. And Trump let this guy out of prison:
The withdrawal has showcased Taliban strength and exposed Afghan state weakness. But both were entrenched long before Biden’s decision. Washington’s inability to adjust to these factors much sooner amounts to a major policy failure.
www.aljazeera.com/...
“Currently, only the embassies of Russia and China are functioning in Afghanistan. Both are being guarded by the Taliban, Russian ambassador to Kabul Dmitry Zhirnov told state TV channel Rossiya-1.”
www.balloon-juice.com/...
One of the things they’re getting wrong is making this all about the US. Even the foreign correspondents like Richard Engel do this. To be really honest and really fair, almost everything we’ve done in Afghanistan since the initial months of the operation to scour the country for bin Laden and reduce the operational capabilities of al Qaeda and the Taliban has actually not been about the US. It has been about Afghanistan. Unfortunately this has all too often occurred through the prism of the US. Yes, it is certainly true that it is in the US’s best interests if there is a stable, small “d” democratic Afghanistan that exists and functions within the socio-cultural context of how all the various ethnic elements in Afghanistan might understand democracy. But that only works if the most senior host country nationals the US is partnering with actually care about all of that.
www.balloon-juice.com/…
Throughout, U.S. policy was guided by a number of myths. One was that the Afghan strongmen, warlords, and militia commanders the United States chose as allies in ousting the Taliban could help to provide security and stability, despite their records of abuses. In fact, the opposite proved to be the case. Persistent human rights abuses by warlords were a source of insecurity, and worse, over time, they fueled widespread resentment, undermined efforts to foster good governance at the local and national levels, and helped the Taliban obtain new support and recruits.
In late 2001, after Northern Alliance forces ousted the Taliban from the north, their militias – some led by men holding office today – carried out systematic attacks on Pashtun villages, raping women, summarily executing civilians, and stealing livestock and land. (Such attacks occurred as late as 2016, when militia forces under the former vice president, Abdul Rashid Dostum, terrorized Pashtun villages in Faryab, accusing them of supporting the Taliban.) The United States was inevitably linked to the abuses of its allies: In November 2001, Dostum’s forces massacred as many as 2,000 Taliban prisoners who were captured or had surrendered outside Kunduz. I visited the mass grave – littered with human hair and clothes – in February 2002, and later interviewed a survivor who had hidden, wounded, under a pile of bodies and escaped before the bulldozers came to bury the bodies. (The area, called Dasht-e Laili, has thousands of graves, including those of Hazara victims massacred by the Taliban in 1998, and Taliban prisoners killed by a Dostum rival in 1997). The United Nations initially refused to support a full investigation, and the United States rejected calls to protect the site. By 2006, local militias had destroyed the gravesite. But the Taliban and the families of those killed have not forgotten.
War crimes against Taliban prisoners also occurred in the south. In early 2002, former Taliban wrote to the new Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, offering to lay down arms and recognize the government. Instead, Gul Agha Sherzai, a powerful tribal leader the United States embraced, later accused of corruption, had them imprisoned and tortured by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the intelligence agency created by the CIA in the months after the Taliban’s collapse. Others accused of Taliban links – whether true or not – also died under torture in NDS prisons or at CIA black sites. Some ended up at Guantanamo Bay. A number who were released or escaped later remobilized and helped lead the Taliban resurgence.
By 2005, Taliban forces were gaining ground and carrying out their own wave of atrocities. Suicide bombings – a new phenomenon for Afghanistan apparently adopted from the war in Iraq – emerged in 2005 with a wave of attacks targeting civilians. Human Rights Watch also documented increasing Taliban attacks on girls’ schools and assassinations of civilian officials.
At this time, another problematic U.S. ally came to prominence. Assadullah Khalid, now Minister of Defense, an important CIA contact after 2001 who was accused of sexual assault while governor of Ghazni, was named governor of Kandahar where he oversaw secret torture cells. A protegé of Khalid and Sherzai, Abdul Raziq, became head of the Kandahar border police, and later chief of police. He gained the support of NATO – who cared more about how his police could protect their forces than about Raziq’s litany of atrocities, including hundreds of enforced disappearances and torture of tribal rivals, civilians, and detainees. With high-level support by the United States and other NATO countries, Raziq escaped justice for his abuses. The Taliban killed him in 2018.
Sherzai became governor of Nangarhar, where he allied with local tribal leaders engaged in land grabbing. The infighting that followed created a vacuum exploited by militant groups from neighboring Pakistan, some of whom later proclaimed allegiance to the Islamic State in 2015. (The Islamic State of Khorasan Province, as it calls itself, has been weakened, but is believed responsible for a series of recent massacres of Hazaras, most recently targeting staff of the HALO Trust, a charity that has been clearing landmine in Afghanistan for decades, on June 9. That day, gunmen, who killed 10 and injured 17, demanded to know who among the deminers were Hazara.)
Abuses by warlords and security officials like Dostum, Sherzai, Khalid, and Raziq did not stop the Taliban from gaining ground or definitively weaken their forces. While it could be argued that the Taliban would have reemerged regardless, there is no doubt these widespread abuses provided fertile ground for new recruitment and alienated local communities caught between predatory U.S.-backed forces and the Taliban.
www.justsecurity.org/…
Biden pushed it back a few months, both because of logistical challenges and because he hoped it would go well enough to have withdrawal folded in a positive way into 20th anniversary stories about 9/11.
The latter was a blunder for which Biden will pay an indeterminate political price. But reneging on the withdrawal was not an option w/o a new surge, because the Taliban would have stopped holding back on attacking American troops. 3,000 soldiers wouldn’t have been nearly enough.
THAT was the option: withdrawal within a few months of May 1 or else celebrate 9/11 with a new round of military deployments to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban some more.
2. All Americans should be furious w Petraeus, Allen, McMaster, and the other generals. They have either been horribly wrong for at least a decade about the state of Afghan forces or lying to the American people for longer. Or both.
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Without the US fighting for them, the Afghan military was worthless, which means it was worthless, full stop. 20 years. 40 years. 100 years. It wouldn’t matter. There was no viable plan to succeed.
3. Plenty of establishment types aren’t bothered by this at all. Just stay, they say, with no viable plan to withdraw. Any day we’re in charge and the Taliban isn’t is a good day. I can’t accept that.
Benignly intended imperialism is still imperialism. That’s bad, but not for the moral reasons adduced by the left. It’s bad b/c it’s governing another nation for them, taking responsibility for their defense, for their order, for their cohesion, for their existence as a nation.
4. It is extremely significant that the US founding period was initiated with a Declaration of Independence. Liberal democracy is not the default condition of the human race. Not remotely so. It is an achievement that is very hard to reach and sustain.
And the achievement isn’t just a function of giving a country certain institutions. The country needs to be an independent, potentially self-governing political community.
And one important way for such a community to be forged is for its citizens to rise up FOR THEMSELVES and declare their independence as a single thing, a single community, a single people acting in concert in defense of its own rights and freedoms.
We cannot give this to another nation like a gift. Providing these background conditions for them may make life better there for a time, but the benefits will be utterly dependent on us. The achievements will therefore be ephemeral, fake. We will be doing freedom for them.
5. America desperately needs to disattach(sic) its thinking about its own interests from nation building. We do not need to make the world into liberal democracies in order to be safe and to thrive economically. Which is good, because it isn’t possible.
The sooner we learn this lesson, the better. But it’s unlikely we will. It may be embedded in our national character to be holy fools for liberal democracy. And we may be uneducable about this, unable to move beyond our perpetual innocence about it.
Graham Greene’s The Quiet American is a good guide to this national trait. Especially this: “Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm." If you don't recognize something in that sentence, I don't know what to tell you.
#endit
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