Steve Coll
Early in 2001, scurvy broke out in western Afghanistan. Typhoid and, possibly, cholera spread, along with malnutrition, a crisis exacerbated by three years of drought and five years of Taliban misrule. That May, Ruud Lubbers, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, visited the country and warned of a “humanitarian disaster.” Then Osama bin Laden unleashed the September 11th attacks, and, during the counterstrike, American warplanes dropped almost eighteen thousand bombs. At year’s end, the Taliban fell, but Afghanistan lay destitute; the average life expectancy there, the U.N. estimated, was forty-three years.
It seemed intuitive that fixing Afghanistan’s broken state should be part of the response to 9/11. Yet ambitious reconstruction and humanitarian aid did not figure initially in President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror.” His Administration pivoted to invading Iraq, and it was only in 2006, after the Taliban’s comeback became highly visible, that the United States ramped up aid to strengthen Afghan state institutions and to fight the opium trade. President Barack Obama also made large investments, in Afghanistan’s military and civil society, yet the escalating scale of Western assistance exacerbated corruption, undermining the Kabul government’s credibility. By the time Joe Biden arrived at the White House, achieving Afghan self-sufficiency seemed likely to require many more years, if it was possible at all.
Nation-building in Afghanistan “never made any sense to me,” Biden told ABC News last month, explaining why, in April, he had announced the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the country. His decision precipitated a Taliban takeover of Afghan cities that culminated in the return of their white banners over Kabul. Last week, as Americans prepared to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, Biden delivered a televised address in which he sought to present his choices as a forward-looking doctrine of national security. His decision to withdraw “is not just about Afghanistan,” he said. “It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.”
It hardly needs saying by now that America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were disastrous to U.S. interests and standing. They radicalized jihadists and claimed the lives of nearly seven thousand American service members, and of at least two hundred thousand Iraqi and Afghan civilians. Yet Biden’s decision to withdraw the roughly twenty-five hundred remaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan seems to have been heavily influenced by, in addition to his disdain for state-building, the terms of a deal with the Taliban that he inherited from the Trump Administration, which had committed U.S. forces to depart by May of this year. As Biden assessed it, if he did not pull out the troops as Trump had promised, he would have had to escalate combat against the Taliban, a course he rejected. Even as he ordered the pullout, he promised billions of dollars in additional aid to the Kabul government of President Ashraf Ghani.
Biden’s announcement tipped the balance of the war, however. Ghani’s security forces could foresee defeat, and many flipped to the Taliban’s side. Ghani fled into exile on August 15th. The Biden Administration was plainly unprepared for the Taliban’s entry into Kabul. The scenes that followed—such as those of Afghans falling to their deaths after trying to cling to the wheels of a C-17 transport jet ascending out of the capital—present an iconography of American defeat even more searing than the photos of helicopters evacuating staff from the U.S. Embassy rooftop in Saigon, in 1975. On August 26th, a suicide bomber struck at a crowded airport gate and killed thirteen U.S. service members and at least ninety Afghans. The airlift carried more than a hundred thousand people to safety before it ended, on August 30th, but, by the Administration’s admission, some two hundred American citizens who wanted to leave were left behind, as were, according to refugee advocates, tens of thousands of Afghans eligible for special visas to the U.S. Many thousands of others vulnerable to Taliban reprisals—journalists, activists, judges, and translators—were also left behind.
The collapse of Ghani’s government orphaned a generation of globalized, smartphone-using, urban Afghans, who had been protected for two decades by nato security. Some of those who squeezed onto flights out barely had time to consider their sudden transformation into refugees. “I fought my family, my community and my society to get to where I was a month ago,” Fatima Faizi, a reporter for the Times, tweeted from exile. “Now I live out of a backpack. It feels like you fall off a cliff, all your bones are shattered. But you have no energy to say you are in pain.”
At the end of last week, all of Afghanistan’s airports remained closed to commercial flights. Neighboring countries had shut their borders. Long after the world’s attention turns away, the great majority of the population will “remain inside Afghanistan,” Filippo Grandi, the current U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said. “They need us.” Drought, economic collapse, and covid have left millions of Afghans “marching towards starvation,” David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Programme, warned.
On 9/11, Americans discovered that their security was inseparable from that of Afghans suffering in a distant, shattered country ruled by the Taliban and adopted by bin Laden, the Taliban’s guest. Al Qaeda is still there, although intelligence agencies judge that it is now far less capable of striking the continental United States. Still, the presence of a branch of the Islamic State and the Taliban’s return to power can hardly be comforting. Fawzia Koofi, a women’s-rights activist who escaped to Qatar last week, after earlier surviving an assassination attempt by the Taliban, told the BBC, “If the world thinks that this is not their business . . . trust me, sooner or later this will actually go to their borders again.”
It would be unfortunate if the lesson America draws from its Afghan debacle is that it should forswear large investments in human dignity and health in very poor countries. The climate crisis and the pandemic make plain that we face new border-hopping threats to our collective security. For both moral and practical reasons, the United States has cause to provide substantial humanitarian aid to troubled nations and even, in a supporting role, to strengthen their security—perhaps having fashioned a foreign policy, if it is not too much to hope, informed by a measure of humility and a capacity for self-reflection. ♦
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