The US missed its chance in Afghanistan

Michael Rubin
It’s been more than two decades since I made my first trip to Afghanistan: Back in May 1997, I went to the northern shrine city of Mazar-i-Sharif, but was forced to flee back to Uzbekistan as the Taliban broke a truce and suddenly attacked the city. Three years later, I returned, and saw a very different Afghanistan: The Taliban had conquered 90 percent of the country, and I was their guest. At the time, the Clinton administration was deep in dialogue with the group, and Laili Helms, the wife of former CIA Director Richard Helms’ nephew, was lobbying for their recognition. I traveled overland through the Khyber Pass to Jalalabad, Kabul, Ghazni, and Qandahar, interviewing men and women who had, at that time, lived under Taliban rule for between three and six years. In general, Afghans explained they welcomed the Taliban because they craved law-and-order and stability after years of suffering under squabbling mujahedeen factions. However, they complained, the Taliban had become just as vicious and exploitative as the groups they had replaced. The Taliban, I concluded, were a house of cards for they had lost any claim to the hearts and minds of the people.
The Taliban’s governance failure, their corruption, and their wanton cruelty were reasons why, after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, their Islamic Emirate collapsed so quickly. At the December 2001 Bonn Conference, Afghan leaders (encouraged by the United States, Iran, and other outside powers) chose Hamid Karzai to be interim leader; he would subsequently win elections in 2004 and continue to rule for another decade.
Why did Afghanistan fail?
The US strategy, crafted by Zalmay Khalilzad, a Republican foreign policy activist who prior to Sept. 11 ironically did business with the Taliban, sought a strong, top-down presidency to undermine the warlords while the US and its allies built national security structures. Decades of civil war had hollowed out any notion of unified Afghan army and so the US-led coalition needed to build one from scratch. In its formative years, the new Afghanistan national army was not strong enough to take on the warlords directly. But a strong president could appoint governors and ministers and so reward warlords with high-prestige jobs while simultaneously removing them from their powerbase.
In the short-term it worked, but it also antagonized much of the population: Afghans have always had a fractious culture suspicious of central power. They wanted governors who looked like them, prayed like them, and spoke like them; they did not want a transplant from across the country. Indeed, the biggest failure of Khalilzad’s strategy was the dissonance between the bottom-up approach of local governance and top-down approach of Kabul. Karzai’s nepotism and corruption was simply the icing on the cake in terms of antagonizing ordinary Afghans.
Certainly, the United States and NATO made other mistakes as well. NATO members like Germany, for example, were in Afghanistan symbolically, but their national caveats effectively meant their presence did more harm than good. Turkey sought symbolic reward for its role, but trumpeted Islamic solidarity rather than democracy or clean government in its local outreach. Every diplomat from Secretary of State Colin Powell’s calls to engage with “ moderate Taliban” immediately after military operations began to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s similar embrace of diplomacy with the Taliban effectively convinced the Taliban that they were winning and that the US sought to sue for peace. Rather than advance an end to the conflict, their knee-jerk call for talks simply fueled it.
The greatest mistake, however, was President Barack Obama’s timeline. In effect, by announcing in 2009 a withdrawal from Afghanistan beginning two years later, Obama convinced the Taliban they could outlast the US While a small number of US forces ended up remaining, there was no US commitment for victory through the rest of the Obama administration or during the Trump years. Obama’s West Point address should be recognized for what it was: the beginning of a squandered decade.
A succession of US commanders (Joseph Dunford, David Petraeus, and Gen. John Nicholson, most notably) have put far more positive spin on the situation in Afghanistan and their own contributions than was merited, even as an objective view of reality showed the holdings of the Afghan government faltering. Both George W. Bush and then Obama were willing to place diplomatic wishful thinking above reality with regard to Pakistan’s role sponsoring Taliban and al Qaeda terror.
How can Afghanistan be fixed?
Can a new general or commander repair the problem? Alas, no — at least not without a massive change in strategy and commitment to win. There is an arrogance in Washington, D.C., which believes that every administration can start with a tabula rasa. Military analysts conduct war games and craft new plans, and diplomats try to reach out to new partners to find that elusive magic formula. Almost every policymaker passionate about Afghanistan and victory of the Taliban seeks more money.
What is missing in this analysis, however, is a notion of the passage of time and demographic realities. A full 50 percent of Afghans have now been born after Sept. 11 and the fall of the Taliban. While Afghans during my pre-Sept. 11 visits looked at the Taliban as corrupt and sought almost anything as an alternative, today it is the Afghan government and Afghan security forces and army who are seen as corrupt. In some cases, when the Afghan government, NATO partners, or international organizations build new roads, for example, property subject to land-grabbing increases more than 100 percent, meaning the same land is grabbed multiple times, usually by corrupt or connected government or military officials. This in turn means villagers have no one to turn to for recourse but the Taliban. That does not mean the Taliban will be more successful in governing than they were between 1996 and 2001; rather, it is just that they have been able to rebrand their image as the Afghan government has squandered its reputation.
So, what does this mean for the US and those opposed to Taliban tyranny and distrustful of the Taliban’s Pakistan and terrorist connections? Whereas once US officials spoke of functional versus dysfunctional corruption, it is crucial to recognize that diplomats and aid agencies got the formula wrong. There is an irony to recognize that international officials were more tolerant of corruption than Afghans. Not only must the Afghan government clean house, but there must be a full-court information strategy to highlight just how corrupt the Taliban were and are and just how beholden they have become to the Punjabis in Pakistan. Only when Afghans realize that the Taliban are more exploitative and corrupt than those dispensing power and hoarding money in Kabul will they consider turning their back to the group. Soft power is never enough. Even if the Taliban were as despised as warlords like fellow Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the sociopathic leader of Hezb-e Islami, Pakistan is committed to protecting the Taliban’s victory no matter what the cost. There is no substitute for military victory over the Taliban, even if that means fighting not only in Afghanistan itself but collapsing the support structure they enjoy from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.
The US had a unique opportunity to win in Afghanistan in the first years after Sept. 11 but squandered it through poor strategy and diplomatic naivete. Every administration since has paid lip service to victory, but they prioritized cosmetic changes over any real attempt to resolve Afghanistan’s systematic problems. As Nicholson leaves and Lt. Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller replaces him, there is no sign that Washington or its allies are willing to show the 50 percent of Afghans who were born after mujahedeen civil war or Taliban repression that the new Afghanistan offers them a better alternative.