The fall of Kabul: why didn’t the Americans leave ten years ago?

On 8 July President Joe Biden was questioned at a press conference about the assessment of his own intelligence experts that the Afghan government would most likely collapse. Biden denied it outright. Yet just a few weeks later the Taliban has taken 20 of the 34 provincial capitals including Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif. On Friday it was thought that it could conquer Kabul in a couple of months. Now, on Sunday, the Taliban are on the outskirts of the capital. President Ashraf Ghani is reported to have fled Kabul, apparently for Tajikistan. After over $1 trillion spent by the US and the loss of more than 2,400 American and 450 British service personnel, many are questioning what this loss of blood and treasure was for.

The withdrawal of US troops was agreed in principle last year by the then US President, Donald Trump, after talks with the Taliban at Doha, in which assurances were given that it would no longer provide a safe haven for terrorists. That decision is now being implemented by his successor Joe Biden, much to the chagrin of his political supporters and opponents alike. Condemnation has come thick and fast. Tom Tugendhat and Tobias Ellwood, who chair the Foreign Affairs and Defence select committees respectively and are both former army officers, lament that the US has made an egregious strategic error by vacating the field. Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, has openly stated that that he does not agree with the US decision and that a redeployment of troops could be required to prevent the country becoming a breeding ground for terrorism, a proposition which has been firmly rejected by Downing Street. The reality of the UK ’ s military impotence without the umbrella of American military support is stark.

The fundamental question is, however, not whether the US was right to pull out its forces after 20 years, but why it did not do so a decade ago. The Bush administration ’ s initial rationale for the invasion of Afghanistan was clear, in marked contrast to the premise offered for the scandalous misadventure in Iraq. After 9/11, the worst atrocity committed on US territory since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, which resulted in almost 3,000 civilians being killed, the US was not simply going sit on its hands.

It demanded that Osama bin Laden, the head of al-Qaeda, who masterminded the attack on the Twin Towers and was being sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan, be handed over. The Taliban — who are ethnically Pashtun and adhere to a strict code of honour in which the hospitality and the protection of guests is sacrosanct and to be paid for with one’s life if necessary — refused to give him up. The US invaded, principally with the support of its key ally the UK, and toppled the Taliban government in short order. It was in May 2011, in an operation authorised by the then President Barack Obama, that bin Laden was found to be hiding in a house in the northern Pakistani town of Abbottabad and killed by US Special Forces. That would have been the optimal time to exit Afghanistan, with the core aim of the mission accomplished.

But hubris is seductive and the Americans succumbed to it. It is with good reason that Afghanistan, which has been the epicentre of great power struggles for centuries, is known as the “ graveyard of empires”. It was a source of tension between the Russian and British empires in the nineteenth century and of Soviet interference for a decade from 1979, during which period it became a frontier in a proxy war between the two superpowers. The Soviet occupation was resisted by the Mujahideen, including one Osama bin Laden, w ho were covertly funded and supported by the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, which in turn received funds from the CIA in line with the Reagan doctrine to subvert Russian influence. The USSR incursion failed and within a couple of years of their departure the puppet regime of Mohammad Najibullah was deposed.

F ar from heeding the lessons from the Soviet humiliation, the US under George Bush engaged in mission creep, with the goal expanded to democratise and reform Afghanistan. This certainly provided security to Afghans and increased education and work opportunities for young girls and women. But the domino-like fall of successive provincial capitals shows that the enterprise of establishing an alternative government was built on sand and has highlighted once again that state-building by outside powers is a fool ’ s errand. Change within a warlord-riven country like Afghanistan, where combat is ingrained, has to be organic. When Biden says that the Afghans must fight for the future of their own country, he is right.

Unfortunately they have not been well-served by the government of Ashraf Ghani, which is notoriously corrupt and has failed to pay swathes of police and army officers for months. Many of them are stationed away from their families in locations they have no affiliation to and faced with a fearsome Taliban have opted to throw in the towel. I met Ghani in 2005 over an elaborate dinner at a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the outskirts of Lisbon. The Columbia University-educated Professor of Anthropology and former World Banker was engaging and thoughtful. But while adept at charming international donors at Davos, he lacks credibility with his own people. His pronouncement on Saturday that remobilising the Afghan National Security forces was a “ top priority” was laughable. The view of the Afghan owner of my local pizza takeaway in East London, who fears for his family and friends on the ground in his erstwhile homeland, is that President Ghani will have already negotiated his own route to exile.  

While the US and UK are hastily sending in forces to help evacuate their consular staff and other nationals, given the gravity of the situation, there remains no appetite on the part of American and British electorates for a prolonged presence in the country. Several Western commentators and politicians, including the former Foreign Secretary, William Hague, and the former International Development Secretary, Rory Stewart, fret about the message it sends potential allies about the West ’ s commitment to its purported interests. In an era of great power competition between the US and China in which the West will need regional supporters in Asia, there is consternation over the reliability of US support.

But this is irrelevant, as the US ’  lack of commitment to its foreign policy pursuits is already priced in. When Pakistan ’ s President General Pervez Musharraf, who himself assumed power in a coup, visited London after the US invasion in 2001, he told me directly that Pakistan was stuck between a rock and a hard place and had no choice but to support the US-led invasion. But he was also unequivocal that Pakistan would extract as much bounty from the Americans as possible before “ they ditch us again”, a reference to the hasty evaporation of support for Pakistan once the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989.

So the US decision is pragmatic and to many of those observing it the message will be a confirmation of what they already know. If you live in a dangerous neighbourhood, you had better pursue a realist foreign policy based on self-interest and a recognition that ultimately you are on your own. The real tragedy is that the people of Afghanistan, who have enjoyed relative peace for two decades, will now be displaced from their homes and have to once again live under a tyrannical and brutal regime that claims to be guided by Islamic theology. Interesting, then, that when the Taliban regime was previously in power, it obtained a significant chunk of its revenue from the taxation of opium, hardly a practice compatible with the religion they claim to follow.

The tragic future of Afghanistan may be that it once again becomes a centre for regional power struggles to be played out by those in relentless pursuit of their own interests including Russia, Iran, China and Pakistan. Provided the Taliban, which craves international recognition, does not provide a breeding ground for terrorists the West will consider its job done. It will be the people of Afghanistan that will have to fight for a more hopeful future. It will be a gruelling, bloody and unenviable task.

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