Editorial | No good time to exit Afghanistan

The United States spent more than US$2.6 trillion on its two-decade war in Afghanistan. Out of this, US$83 billion went to training and equipping the Afghan armed forces, who were intended to defend a Western-style democracy. Around 2,300 American soldiers were killed in the 20 years of conflict. Over 20,000 were injured. It will cost the US hundreds of billions more in benefits and medical care for veterans of the war.

On Sunday, mere weeks after US President Joe Biden reaffirmed that all American combat troops would leave Afghanistan by the end of August, the expensively built Afghan army disintegrated. The government, shorn of its American military prop, collapsed – President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. The Taliban, conservative Islamists, previously overthrown by the Americans in 2001, re-entered Kabul, the Afghan capital, culminating an unexpectedly swift route of government.

The speed of the collapse, the chaotic evacuation of American embassy personnel at the Kabul airport and images of desperate Afghans clinging to, and falling from, US military aircraft as they took off, have intensified recrimination of Mr Biden’s extrication of America from its “forever war”, or at least the timing of the disengagement.

There are questions about America’s moral obligation to the Afghans who believed in its mission and those who helped in its prosecution of the war. Perhaps a few more months would have given the Afghan military time to regroup.

Mr Biden had no good choices. There was, for this president, no right time to leave Afghanistan. To have done so with dignity, with America claiming to have “won” the war, would have required that they leave a long time ago, before it was so absolutely clear that the war was unwinnable.

In the event, Mr Biden was faced with his predecessor Donald Trump’s agreement with the Taliban that the United States would leave by May. He could have ignored the deal. Mr Biden, instead, extended the deadline by months.

Mr Biden, however, made two compelling observations in his speech on Monday. He could either have followed through on the Trump agreement or stay, “sending thousands of more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into a third decade of conflict”.

NO WILL TO FIGHT

Mr Biden’s more fundamental point, though, highlights the failure of what was supposedly the centrepiece of America’s Afghan experiment. They couldn’t establish a liberal democracy in which Afghans were invested and ready to defend – exemplified by just how quickly Mr Ghani’s government crumbled.

“We could not provide them with the will to fight for their future,” Mr Biden said. “Americans cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”

That the United States continued to do so two decades after Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 attacks, and a decade after bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, was because America and its partners were willing to shore up inept and corrupt regimes that had little legitimacy among Afghans. Having dislodged the Taliban and deprived bin Laden of a safe haven, the United States ought to have known that it didn’t need long-term military presence in Afghanistan to run a successful counterterrorism operation.

Two interrelated factors are likely to account for America’s miscalculation and the embarrassment of Kabul. One is that US policymakers of the last two decades failed to learn, or internalise, the real lessons from America’s debacle in Vietnam and the ignominy in the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan a decade and a half later: that it is usually best, but in exceptional situations, to avoid direct intervention in other country’s internal conflicts.

Second is the confidence, often raised to the level of arrogance, of most people, policymakers included, that they will do better at the things at which others failed. So, having helped to engineer the Soviet defeat by Afghan Mujahideen, the Americans not only felt they could escape the history of foreign armies in Afghanistan, but deliver a showpiece liberal democracy.

THE LESSON

There is a new, or renewed, lesson in all this for the United States – and other powerful nations who feel it is their mission to make other countries into their image. Last month, Pat Buchanan, the US conservative and former presidential candidate, reprised, as we noted, John F. Kennedy’s pragmatic offering, of more than half a century ago, on how the United States should approach foreign policy, in the context of the East-West divide. While ideological rivals may not, Mr Kennedy said, “end our differences now, at least we can make the world safe for diversity”.

Mr Buchanan noted: “Kennedy was willing to put our political model on offer to the world, but not to impose it on anyone.” Pat Buchanan’s fear was that Mr Biden’s edgy rhetoric about China could lead the world into a new Cold War. The observation, however, may be relevant in other circumstances, including how America engages Afghanistan. Afghans may indeed have been enticed by the US political model, in which case the Taliban may fashion new ideas on how to govern.