Defeat In Afghanistan. How It Came About.

Flag of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

The pathetic blame game going on regarding the debacle in Afghanistan has me once again stunned, even though I really ought to know better.

My right wing friends were backing withdrawal from Afghanistan fully when Trump launched the current disgrace.  As soon as Biden started what Trump started, they switched to decrying what occurred.  The mess isn't praiseworthy by any means, but this exercise is really a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black.

Let's look at what really occurred leading up to this embarrassing American defeat.

Indeed, we'll go all the way back.

Afghan ambush during the First Anglo Afghan War.

• 1838. The British invade Afghanistan and install King Shah Shujah. The event is termed the First Anglo Afghan War.
• 1842.  King Shah Shujah assassinated and Afghanis rebel, driving the British from Afghanistan.

Horse artillery in the Second Anglo Afghan War.

• 1878  The Second Anglo Afghan War commences resulting in British control of Afghanistan's foreign affairs.
• 1919  Emire Amanullah Khan declares British protectorite status over.
• 1926 to 1929.  Amanullah attemptes to modernize the country, leading to his being driven from teh country.
• 1933  Zahir Shah becomes King of Afghanistan.
• 1953  Gen. Mohammed Daud becomes Prime Minister, turns the country towars the Soviet Union for economic and military aid, and introduces social reforms.
• 1963  Mohammed Daud forced to step down as Prime Minister
• 1964  The country becomes a constitutional monarchy.
• 1973.  Mohammed Daud seizes power in a coup and deposes the monarchy.
• 1978  Mohammed Daud is overthrown in a pro Soviet coup.
• 1978   An anti Communist insurrection begins.
• 1979.  The Soviet Union interevenes to keep the pro Communist government from falling.
• 1980  Babrak Karmal installed as Soviet backed ruler.
• 1980  Western powers, Pakistan, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia start aid the mujahideen.
• 1985  Half of the Afghani population is in exhile.
• 1989.  Red Army pulls out and communist government collapses, followed by civil war.
• 1996  The Taliban, represeting armed Islamic extremist, seize control of Kabul
• 1997  Pakistan, with strong Islamic leaning, and Saudi Arabia, which is also the domain of extreme Islamic sentiments, recongize the Taliban as the legitimate government.
• 1998. The United States, in retaliation for terrorist acts by Al Queada, hits Al Queda basis in Afghanistan with missile strikes
• 1999  The United Nations impose sanctions on Afghanistan due to its harboring Osama bin Laden.
• 2001  Afghanistan based Al Quaeda stages the Twin Towers attack on the the United States.

• 2001  The United States invades Afghanistan in October following air raids, but with limited forces.  The main US effort rapidly turns towards Iraq, which was not involved in the terrorist strike.
• 2001  In December Hamid Karzai is made president.
• 2002   The invasion becomes more substantial with the arrival of NATO forces.
• 2002  Deposed King Zahir Shah returns, but makes no claim to the throne.
• 2003.  NATO takes control of Kabul.
• 2005.  First Afghan election in 30 years.  Most of the seats in parliament are taken by warlords.
• 2006  NATO takes control of security from the United States for the entire country.
• 2007  Afghanistan threatens to intervene against the Taliban in Pakistan, which is harboring them.
• 2008  US increases troop strength by 4,500 men.
• 2009  US increases troop strength by 17,000 men.
• 2009 US troop strength brought up to 100,000 men for "the surge" but President Obama also declares the UW will withdrawal by 2011.
• 2010  The Netherlands pulls out of Afghanistan.
• 2010  NATO declares it will turn security of the country over to Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
• 2013 Afghan army takes control of security of the country from NATO.
• 2014  The United States and United Kingdom end their combat operations.
• 2015  The United States announces it will delay full withdrawal from the country at the request of the Afghan government.
• 2015.  The Afghan government and the Taliban hold informal peace talks.  The Taliban refuses to lay down its arms.
• 2015.  The Taliban briefly takes Kunduz.
• 2015.  President Obama announces that 9,800 US troops will remain in the country.
• 2015. A Taliban splinter group forms but is crushed by the main Taliban.
• 2015. The Afghan National Army defeats a Taliban effort to take Sangin, backed up by US air support.
• 2016  Pakistan forcibly repatriates Afghanis in Pakistan.
• 2016  US air strikes reverse Islamic State advances in eastern Afghanistan.
• 2016  President Obama indicates 8,400 US troops will remain and that NATO will also remain until 2020.
• 2016  The Taliban makes advances in Helmond province.
• 2016  The Islamic State captures Tora Bora.
• 2017  President Trump, contrary to campaign pledges, indicates US troop strength in Afghanistan will be increased to fight the Taliban.
• 2019.  The United States enters negations with the Taliban
• 2020  The Unites States enters into a peace agreement with the Taliban without hte participation of the Afghan government.
• 2020  President Trump, following his election defeat, indicates that he will withdraw from Afghanistan before the inauguration of President Biden.  It doesn't occur, but the wheels for withdrawal are set in motion.
• 2021.  In July, the United States withdraws from Bagram air base overnight.
• 2021  President Biden commits to withdraw Americans forces from Afghanistan by September 11.
• 2021.  In August the Afghan government collapses and its armed forces do as well, the Taliban take the country.

And so that's where we are now. 

Now, what to make of all of this, that's the question.

Well, to start off with, perhaps we can make some conclusions about Afghanistan itself.

This long history of the country, from an American prospective shows that the country has in fact little evolved from what it was at the time of the First Anglo Afghan War.  The country isn't a country, but a collection of tribes, not all of whom are ethnically related, living within a certain border.  It's more defined, in some ways, by what it isn't, than it is.

The Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group, but there are significant numbers of Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Nuristani, Aimak, Turkmen, and Balochs in the country as well.  Indeed, in the far north of the country the native population has a distinctively Asian appearance.  Genetically, if you will, all of these groups are represented as are the genes of those who came through and with the forces of the Mongols in the Middle Ages.  The only really common thread among all of these people are that they are all Islamic.

Now, people are going to be quick to blame Islam on the plight of the Afghans, but the biggest single thing impacting their situation is their extremely tribal nature, and tribal natures are always local.  In this fashion the Afghans resemble the Russian peasantry of the 1910s and 1920s, which overwhelmingly opposed the Communists, but only when they were in the neighborhood.  With no real national identify, Tajikes, for example, from the country's far north have very little desire to go to war against anyone in the far south of the country, but are perfectly willing to fight if people show up in their own valley.  Just as the Russian peasantry didn't like the Reds, almost all Afghans don't really like the Taliban, they just don't identify with any country and therefore so need to fight hundreds of miles away against somebody else.

And this is why, we'd note, the Afghan parliament was a failure.  It was simply a collection of warlords.

We don't need to go through every year from 1839 to the present date to see that, but we can touch upon the highlights.  Afghans always opposed the British presence in the country in the 19th Century, but they never supported their own governments either.  Those governments managed to persevere mostly because they were so weak.  You don't need to worry about a king in Kabul if he really doesn't impact your actual life in your own valley.  That became really evident, in the 1970s, when there was a real effort to form a real national government, with that government being a Communist one.

It's seemingly forgotten by us now, but Communism was a real force throughout the Middle East and Central Asia in the 1950s through the 1980s not because it was reveolutionary per se, but because it was modern.  It offered educated people something the politics of their own countries completely lacked, modernization.  We may, and should, look at the forced modernization of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s with horror, but to educated people living in Middle Eastern and Central Asian backwaters after World War Two, that looked good in comparison to tribalistic village societies.  And no wonder.  Building a dam, for example, for hydroelectric power and increased irrigation may look good to you if you are an engineer, but to a local poppy farmer who has complete domination over his wife and daughters and enough money from heroin to get by, it doesn't look nearly as appetizing.  

This has, we'd note, been the history of forced civilization throughout history, something we very oddly forget even though its the history of our own cultures.  The Romans didn't spread through Europe as they were handing out kittens and greeting cards.  They fought their way through against tribes that bitterly resented their presence. And those tribes weren't "freedom fighters" like we imagine today.  Boadicea's rebelling wasn't about the vote.  It was about keeping civilization out, tribal society in, and all that meant. And that always meant the same thing.  Tribal rights, which may have been very free at the local level, or may not have been, depending upon the culture, but which were violent and often, well weird.

And this is also why 19th Century Colonia endeavors frankly were much more realistic than modern "nation building" endeavors have been.  European countries, when they went into the distant regions of the globe, flatly accepted that the local cultures had no concept of more civilized values and that they had to be forced upon them. If that sounds brutal and racist, and both may be true, our current view has tended to be that the entire world is populated by Jeffersonian democrats, which is both naive and incredibly stupid.

And indeed, while we hate to admit anything of the sort, for the most part colonization was a success in terms of turning tribal societies into countries.  For the most part, European colonial enterprises didn't invade other countries to force them into empire, they invaded tribal regions to do that.  Even examples in Europe, such as when the Anglo-Normans invaded Ireland, provide that example in context. And that's why it was so late in the day before any country attempted to invade and conquer Ethiopia.  It was already a nation.

The key is, however, that for this sort of thing to really work, a long presence is an absolute given, and that presence will be nearly wholly unwelcome.  Vietnam, perhaps, provides a good example. The Vietnamese never wanted the French in Indochina, but by the early 20th Century it had gone from a collection of local tribes of various types to an area with a real national identify.  When nationalism really broke out as a fighting force in the 1940s, due to World War Two, the Vietnamese of all stripes could see themselves as a nation.  When the French first showed up, well, not so much. The same example, in the case of the French, could be given in regard to Algeria.  By 1945, Algerians could identify an Algeria, and their interest with Algeria.  In earlier eras, they were simply local tribesmen.

Afghanistan has never gotten there.  It's made up of local tribesmen.

Taliban flag.

Well, what about the Taliban. They aren't a tribe, now are they?

No, they aren't, although they incorporate Pashtoon norms, and ironically they represent a more modernizing force than their opposition, even though we dare not admire them or regard them as modern.

The Taliban is a Deobandi Islamist movement which seeks to impose a Sunni Deobandi Islamic rule upon the country governed by their interpretation of Sharai law.  Most of its members are Pashtuns and they were educated as students, which is what Talib means, in Pakistan for the most part.  Their movement incorporates Pashtoon social norms with Sharia law.

We noted them as a more "modernizing" force than simple warlordism, but we do not suggest to mean a fully modernizing one. Their goal is to impose Sharai law, in a harsh form, over the entire country. To the extent it's modernizing, it would be simply because it would be based on a unifying national principal, rather than the current Afghan norm of everything really being local and tribal.

But, that principal, provides its own problems, to say the least.

The Taliban has no desire to actually modernize the country in any form. Rather, what it wishes to do is to impose a strict theocracy on the country.  What it will do in the future can be predicted by the past.  Women stand to not only lose their political rights, for example, but to become completely subservient to men.  In essence, what the Taliban intends to do is to put Sharia law combined with the Pashtunwali, the Pashtun social code, into effect as the law of the law of the country.

Traditionally Afghanistan has not only been tribal, and regional, but not extremely strict in the application of Islam. Islam is the religion of the country, both culturally and legally, but a fairly lax variant of that. The Taliban will end that. And it'll suppress all regionalism.

Now, it's tried that before, which lead to a civil war in various part of the country against it. That will repeat as well.  So what the future holds for the country is a retrograde advancement in regard to individual rights, particularly those for women, and a suppression of regional power, which will lead to civil war. 

So, what conclusions can we draw from all of this:

• The Bush neoconservatives who thought that the United States could make the country into a western democracy overnight were naive in the extreme.
• The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan's fundamental problem was tribalism and regionalism.
• The Islamic Republic, however, was making progress in forming a national army, as long as it was backed up by the United States.
• The Taliban isn't popular in the country as a whole.

In short, what the Bush neo cons failed to appreciate is that it was going to take a very long time to make Afghanistan into a modern country.  A country that has no national identity has to form one.  That would have taken at least an additional two decades from the two that have already passed.

Should we have undertaken to do that?

Well, here's the thing, if we weren't going to, we shouldn't have started trying.  We could have simply engaged in a punitive raid in the country and left it.  That would have left it to the Taliban, to be sure, but that's what we've now done after having had an influence on the country and its people for 20 years.  We've done the worst thing possible, which is to go half the way.

Back in 2001 when this was debated, I took the position we could just do a punitive raid, although I did that elsewhere, as this blog wasn't a thing yet.  I thought we should go in, get Al Queada, and leave.  But we didn't.  We didn't even fight the initial war wisely.  

But fight it we did. And at that point, we had an obligation to stay.  There was no excuse for leaving.