Afghanistan: "Texture on a situation."

      "To suggest that the Afghan people haven’t done their bit is a kind of blame-shifting that I think is not only unjustifiable but outrageous." 

         Steve Coll,  Staff writer and Afghan expert, The New Yorker

Biden blamed Afghans. 

There is a quick and intuitive way to understand the past week in Afghanistan. The collapse of the army and government was proof positive that Afghanistan was a giant mistake. They didn't want our liberty, our liberation of women, our incorruptible institutions. We were casting holy pearls before swine, people who didn't appreciate what we were doing for them, so of course they trampled the pearls underfoot. 

That Biden position has traction because Americans know almost nothing of Afghanistan. We don't care about it. We cannot keep track of their government leaders, we have never heard of their celebrities, few restaurants serve their food, and their only real export, heroin, is illegal. Most of us would struggle to find it on an un-labeled map, even when the country boundaries are drawn in. Which one is Afghanistan? Which ones are Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan?  Is Kyrgystan the name of a real country, and if so, is it on the map?  

Of  course, blaming Afghans is oversimple and unfair. This was less an internal Afghan civil war than it was another iteration of outsiders trying to dominate them for the invaders' own purposes. In the early 1980s the Soviets wanted to protect their southern flank amid the tensions of the Cold War--and we armed and nurtured Muslim fundamentalists to confound them. It worked. The fundamentalists never left. Then it was our turn to enter and occupy Afghanistan to protect our security interest in making it less hospitable as a haven and launching spot for terror attacks like 9-11. We were there for us, not them.

The government and army was corrupt by American standards and expectations. Many of the soldiers were recruited and paid by independent tribal chieftains, not the central government, and they were linked by informal bonds of kinship and ethnicity, lubricated by money. It did not look like an American army, but over the decades they fought for their country and 60,000 of them were killed--more than the number of Americans killed in Vietnam. They weren't shirking.  

Napoleon said that in war the moral is to the physical as is ten to one. The United States put the Afghan soldier in an impossible situation. Trump negotiated an end to the American presence by May, 2021, confirmed by Biden's reiteration of the plan to leave this year. The war was lost and  Afghan soldiers faced a postwar world at home. Taliban soldiers sent a time-honored and credible threat in that part of the world, one sent by Mongol armies under Genghis Kahn and then the Central Asian empire under Tamerlane: Submission or death. In this instance it was notice that the soldier and his family would be targeted and killed once the U.S. left, unless they laid down their arms. Choose. The US was leaving; the Taliban was staying. Soldiers made the reasonable choice.

College classmate Jeffrey Laurenti wrote a follow up on his Guest Post of earlier this week. He directed The Century Foundation's international task force on multilateral avenues for ending Afghanistan's decades-long conflict, after serving as director of policy studies at the United Nations Association of the United States. Laurenti called this second post not a reversal of his prior post but "texture on a situation."

Guest Post by Jeffrey Laurenti

Laurenti

We've all justifiably been taking a critical eye to the manifest weakness of Afghanistan's deceased "Islamic republic," but I'd like to point out one small saving grace.

For its 20-year life span, it never rounded up dissenters or protesters and put them before firing squads. Whether under an ever-metamorphosing Hamid Karzai or an irascible Ashraf Ghani, critics who had not taken up arms against it, even the most vocal, weren't tossed in the slammer or executed. 

Contrast that to Mullah Omar's rule in the previous Taliban regime, or during the mujahideen civil wars, or the communist-led regimes of Najibullah, Babrak Karmal, Hafizullah Amin, and Nur Muhammad Taraki (with the exception of Karmal, whom the Soviets whisked away to Moscow, all of these were brutally killed when the wheel turned), or the tough-minded Daoud Khan who overthrew the monarchy (himself killed in the communist coup). Afghans have to go back to the sepia-toned 40-year rule of the last king, Zahir Shah, to recall a previous Afghan government that did not kill political critics.

Its tolerance, plus the growth it fostered of independent and often critical news media, deserve greater mention in history's obituaries about the fallen government. It is striking that there are no accounts of crowds in Kabul or Kandahar or Mazar-i-Sharif pouring into the streets to welcome their heroic Taliban liberators, but rather demonstrators daring to oppose the conquerors' first infringements on their liberty.

The Taliban will have their hands full trying to impose their emirate's controls on Afghan society -- if, indeed, they can even hold their forces together behind whatever "leaders" agree to impose. This is a country awash with guns, and lots of men accustomed to using them.