Sarah Chayes has published a valuable article (8/15/21) about Afghanistan -- The Ides of August. The author of two books, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (2007) and Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (2015), she discusses two factors in what she calls “the climax of a two-decade long fiasco.”
But first she introduces herself as an adoptive Kandahari and a former senior U.S. government official:
I covered the fall of the Taliban for NPR, making my way into their former capital, Kandahar, in December 2001, a few days after the collapse of their regime….. I reported for a month or so, ….then within another couple of months, I was back, not as a reporter this time, but to try actually to do something. I stayed for a decade. I ran two non-profits in Kandahar, living in an ordinary house and speaking Pashtu, and eventually went to work for two commanders of the international troops, and then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Chayes discusses in detail what she sees as the two factors leading to the current situation. First:
Afghan government corruption, and the U.S. role enabling and reinforcing it. The last speaker of the Afghan parliament... is a multimillionaire, thanks to monopoly contracts to provide fuel and security to U.S. forces at their main base, Bagram. Is this the type of government people are likely to risk their lives to defend?...Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were….
Here is Chayes’ description of corruption and the citizens’ reaction:
Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with U.S. fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints. By 2007, delegations of elders would visit me — the only American whose door was open and who spoke Pashtu so there would be no intermediaries to distort or report their words. Over candied almonds and glasses of green tea, they would get to some version of this: “The Taliban hit us on this cheek, and the government hits us on that cheek.” The old man serving as the group’s spokesman would physically smack himself in the face.
The second factor Chayes discusses at length:
Pakistan. You may have heard that the Taliban first emerged in the early 1990s, in Kandahar. That is incorrect. ….the Taliban first emerged in Pakistan…..The Taliban were a strategic project of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency].
Chayes notes that Usama bin Laden was found “in a safe house... practically on the grounds of the Pakistani military academy” and says that by 2011, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Taliban were a “virtual arm of the ISI.”
Chayes asks:
Do we really suppose the Taliban, a rag-tag, disjointed militia hiding out in the hills, as we’ve so long been told, was able to execute such a sophisticated campaign plan with no international backing? Where do we suppose that campaign plan came from? Who gave the orders? Where did all those men, all that materiel, the endless supply of money to buy off local Afghan army and police commanders, come from? How is it that new officials were appointed in Kandahar within a day of the city’s fall? ….Who are these new officials?
In conclusion, Chayes holds “U.S. civilian leadership, across four administrations, largely responsible for today’s outcome.”
the two primary problems — corruption and Pakistan — are civilian issues. They are not problems men and women in uniform can solve. But faced with calls to do so, no top civilian decision-maker was willing to take either of these problems on. The political risk, for them, was too high.