Afghan House of Cards

     “The events we’re seeing now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure Afghanistan.”

           President Joe Biden

It looks bad, and there are dueling narratives to explain it.

One narrative is that Biden shamed America by showing us to be a weak, gullible military power that failed to plan for the inevitable. The other narrative is that the Afghan government and army were worthless, probably from the get-go, and you can't save people who won't save themselves.

My generation was imprinted by our war in Vietnam and it influences our thinking. In the 50 years since graduation, some of my college classmates had careers as diplomats and as historians of the Near East. They have written me, and I share the thoughts of another classmate today.

Jeffrey Laurenti 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. He lives in Trenton, New Jersey, the hard-scrabble city of his birth.

 Hamid Karzai and Jeff Laurenti, Presidential Palace, 2010

Guest Post by Jeffrey Laurenti

It turns out the Taliban were right all along: just get the highly capable and motivated foreign military forces out, and Afghanistan's painstakingly constructed "Islamic republic" would collapse like a house of cards.

Alan Weisbard posed a provocative question yesterday in his Guest Post here.

He asked, "Why was there so little public opposition to this stupid war?" -- implying a contrast with the swelling opposition to America's war in Vietnam after 1965. (That's when the U.S. directly entered the war so as to prevent the collapse of the project Eisenhower launched of establishing an anticommunist "South" Vietnam.) The answer, essentially, is twofold: the United States was hideously attacked by people the Taliban regime sheltered and sponsored, so Americans -- indeed, virtually the whole world -- felt its ouster was justified; and the U.S. war was small-scale, for most of these two decades with fewer than 30,000 troops, and since Obama's second term under 10,000.

In his 2008 campaign, Obama had carefully distinguished between Bush's "stupid war" (the invasion of Iraq) and the "good war" in Afghanistan. And the seeds of the past week's catastrophe were sown early in the Bush regime, which resolutely rebuffed Hamid Karzai's and the U.N. mission head Lakhdar Brahimi's calls to include the Taliban in the political process to constitute an inclusive post-emirate regime when they were still reeling from their initial defeat and desperate to deal. As the recently-late, and quite unlamented, Donald Rumsfeld explained, there was no room for "dead-enders" in America's plan for Afghanistan.

If Trump had not been so eager to show he was ending "endless wars," the United States could have continued to provide the crucial air support and financial wherewithal to keep the Taliban at bay: U.S. casualties have been very low over the past half-dozen years, and the financial cost has been close to a rounding error in the Pentagon budget. Yet what is striking is that the Afghan "republic" did not become stronger over these years, but instead more brittle and hollowed out. It has had very real accomplishments -- even in the midst of war, Afghans' life expectancy increased by over seven years, and women and girls have had educational opportunities that the Taliban had completely snuffed out in their first regime. But it seems Afghan men in the security forces were not motivated to fight and risk death for the rights and opportunities of Afghan women.

The international community at large supported the U.S. role in Afghanistan, in contrast to Iraq (or, a half century ago, Vietnam). Indeed, the Europeans and Japanese made big financial investments in Afghan development. NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) were active in supporting social welfare and NATO allies also provided troops in various parts of the country. But it never gelled. The politics in Kabul were poisonous, corruption became rampant, and voter turnout over successive presidential and parliamentary elections shrank and shrank -- a sign, surely, of deepening disenchantment even in the cities.

The fact that the regime could unravel in little more than a week, as Afghan provincial capitals toppled like dominoes with scarcely a shot being fired, validates Biden's argument that the U.S. could not have prevented its collapse if it had continued to prop it up another year or five years. On the other hand, there is a more than theoretical possibility that the stunning success of the most retrograde Islamic extremists in Afghanistan will reignite the discouraged jihadi movement elsewhere in the Muslim world.

There is the eerie coincidence that both failed projects of American hubris came to a disastrous end 20 years after their launch -- in Vietnam with Eisenhower's 1955 commitment to preserve an anticommunist regime in defiance of the Geneva accords; in Afghanistan with Bush's insistence on a Taliban-free regime. But Afghanistan is a radically different place than Vietnam was a half-century ago. The Vietnamese forces that defeated those of the Saigon government saw themselves as marching into a bright future, while the Taliban are resolutely marching into a distant past.

The restored Taliban emirate is not likely to find many friends in the international community, unless it behaves dramatically differently than its previous incarnation. But why should it?