Cheryl Benard
What went wrong in Afghanistan? How is it possible that we, a superpower bringing nothing but good things—education, development, democracy, equality—were driven out by a ragtag band with medieval views and hardly any resources? There are, undoubtedly, many factors that went into this debacle, but what killed the project is that it was never grounded in reality. It was a venture launched on a fantasy, conducted on wishful thinking, before ultimately concluding in a head-throbbing, stomach-churning hangover that is now causing us to make even more mistakes.
Almost every single premise that guided our Afghanistan policy was not only incorrect, but for each one, we knew or easily could have known the facts but chose to ignore them. We spent twenty years and two trillion dollars with our finger on the Override button. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), our very own governmental watchdog agency, consistently waved giant red warning flags, documenting all the things that weren’t working, from aid projects to the military effort. We muzzled that watchdog. Did anyone ever read any of the reports? Can’t have. I will never forget the first one I read, expecting a bland government document, finding instead a precise and detailed account of a catastrophic failure unfolding, with names and dates and numbers that could not be ignored. But were.
Below is just a sample of some of the fluffy marshmallow building blocks in an edifice that never was going to stand.
The Afghan National Army is getting steadily stronger and will soon hold its own.
Wrong. U.S. troops and U.S. air power were doing all the heavy lifting, throughout the war. Afghan soldiers were consistently deserting (a huge retention problem) or did not exist at all, except on paper so their superiors could collect extra salaries (the so-called ghost soldiers) or were shooting us in the back in the so-called “green on blue“ attacks.
When this expensively equipped, salaried, trained, advised, and provided-with-intel military collapsed not within years or months, but within days, running away or surrendering to a Taliban militia that had nothing like its weaponry and was less than a third of its size, we expressed surprise. There was nothing surprising about it. This was never an actual, indigenous entity. And that this was a ridiculous idea from Day One should have been obvious.
Who, with even the faintest notion of history, could possibly believe that Afghans of all people need to be taught how to fight? When they want to, they can—for twenty years, even when hunted by drones and air strikes and night raids, provisioned only with tea and bread, having their leaders caught and sent to Pakistani prisons or Guantanamo. If they’re not fighting properly, it’s because they don’t want to, and are only humoring you to get your money.
The U.S. military war (Operation Enduring Freedom) ended with success in 2014. After that, we were merely monitoring and advising (Operation Freedom’s Sentinel).
Hardly. We were heavily engaged in military actions throughout, including a mini-surge as late as 2020.
We created a democracy.
No. We created a kleptocracy made up of old elites and warlords, supplemented by new elites from urban areas who knew how to play on our desires and provide us with adulatory sound bites, and we garnished it with the visuals of democracy as in a Hollywood set. The first election enthroned the president we picked, Hamid Karzai. In his reelection, we overshot the mark a bit, and he ended up being elected by more votes than the country had registered voters.
The last election, in which only an embarrassing 16 percent of the electorate showed up, was intended to re-enthrone our man Ashraf Ghani. When his minuscule majority was shown to be based on fraud, we declared him the winner anyway and placated his rival, Abdullah Abdullah, by inventing a new position and making him co-president. Two years later, Ghani thanked us for our loyalty by running away, taking a reported 168 million dollars with him. He thereby wrecked the deal we had made, that would have kept part of the acting government in power. This deal foresaw that the Taliban would refrain from entering Kabul and would engage in two weeks of moderated negotiations with the government to find a power-sharing formula. At the end of the two weeks, Ghani was supposed to resign and depart in an orderly fashion. He chose to jump ship, the government collapsed, the talks became moot, and the Taliban entered the city—with our express permission, because police and army and palace guards had followed their leader and also fled, and looting and chaos threatened, and someone had to go in and keep order.
All girls were in school on our watch.
This was the favorite fact mentioned at the start of each and every public speech and event on the topic of Afghanistan: that four-fifths of all girls, 3.5 million of them, were attending school. What a triumph over ignorance and discrimination, what a good, warm feeling after the cruel and backward Taliban had banned girls from school.
So, this one was partially true. It was true that the Taliban of yore was cruel and backward and oppressive to everyone and to girls and women in particular, and saw no need for girls’ education, which could only make them uppity.
What isn’t true is that we achieved a turnaround on anything near that scale. The 3.5 million figure was pulled out of thin air. In 2017, Human Rights Watch reported that “Sixteen years after the U.S. led military intervention that ousted the Taliban government, an estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not go to school.” At the conclusion of our twenty-year education blitz, female literacy had not reached even 30 percent.
The propensity to make up happy facts is annoying because on this topic, the actual facts would have been happy enough. What we did achieve qualifies as a legitimate game-changer. Afghan families and communities, even in rural areas, now largely endorse the principle of educating their daughters, whereas twenty years ago, many shared the then-Taliban view that it was at best unnecessary and at worse harmful.
And the “New Taliban” have obviously received the message that the world—and their own population—will not tolerate a ban on girls’ education. They immediately re-opened all the girls’ elementary schools. They have promised to open the high schools as well, sequentially, as soon as they have the logistics in place. High schools have traditionally been single-sex in Afghanistan, but the Taliban also want to assign only male teachers for boys and only female teachers for girls, which is requiring them to move around some of the staff. Their promise is believable because indeed, they have already reopened girls’ high schools in nine provinces so far.
The government we supported was inclusive, and the Taliban need to do the same for international recognition.
Oh, the government we supported was inclusive all right. Inclusive of warlords, murderers, drug dealers, and rapists, several of whom should have been in a courtroom in The Hague and not in the cabinet in Kabul.
We knew who these people were. We knew what they had done and were continuing to do, with impunity, on our watch, with our knowledge. This included, according to a meticulously researched report by Human Rights Watch: “mass killings, murder, rape, torture, beatings, enforced disappearances, theft, and arbitrary detention… many powerful warlords…have been funded by and worked alongside international forces, further entrenching them politically into the fabric of Afghan society.”
We made the Machiavellian decision to not only let these criminals off, but to emplace them in positions of power in the government, because we thought that would prevent ethnic and regional resentments and foster stability. Personally, I believe this poisoned our effort from the start, but I suppose one can debate the tactical logic. What one cannot do, is call this “inclusive” and pretend it’s an element of democracy.
It speaks well for the Taliban that they have, so far, managed to keep the creeps, carpetbaggers, and country-destroyers at bay.
Things were going well for us militarily and with more patience, we would have defeated the Taliban.
I’ll let a general handle this one: General John W. Nicholson, the former commander of Operation Resolute Support. SIGAR’s January 2018–March 2018 report quotes him as stating that “in this quarter the U.S. and Afghan forces were gaining momentum through the new South Asia strategy, and the Taliban was shifting to guerilla tactics and suicide attacks because it was no longer able to carry out attacks to seize cities or districts.”
Well… we all witnessed in the summer of 2021 just how unable the Taliban was to seize districts. They swept across the entire country in a matter of days, taking one district and province after the other as the Afghan National Army surrendered or fled in disarray. The White House knew that the Taliban was getting ever stronger while our guys were being pushed ever further back, even if Congress was still getting happy reports from the U.S. military. The Afghan National Army and the Afghan government were on a steady downward trajectory, unable even to defend Kabul against increasing deadly suicide bombings and attacks. It was precisely this assessment that ultimately led President Barack Obama to decide to withdraw, President Donald Trump to initiate the Doha Talks and set a timeline, and President Joe Biden to implement the exit plan. Three administrations can hardly be described as a “rush to the exits.”
So now we’re out, perhaps not defeated exactly but hardly in triumph, an outcome horribly punctuated by the disorderly mess of our departure. We’re out, and we’re angry, and our various hangers-on are angry too, having lost their sinecures. And our policies have gone from fantasy to vindictiveness. Accompanied by new distortions of reality.
We can’t abandon the Afghans who helped us.
Small correction: they weren’t helping us; we were helping them. Getting rid of Al Qaeda after 9/11 was our goal, yes. But that was accomplished expeditiously, and everything that came after was intended for the benefit of the Afghans. Working with U.S. agencies, the U.S. military, and international NGOs not only meant advancing the goal of a modern and prosperous Afghanistan, it also meant salaries that were many multiples of what anyone else was earning. People didn’t work for us or with us out of the kindness of their hearts.
And the rush to be evacuated? Didn’t that show extreme desperation? In some cases, probably. But name one country in the Third World where, if a free flight to the United States and financial support and housing upon arrival were on offer, mobs of people would not race to the airport. For the first few days, we took anyone, just to clear the runways. After that, you needed a story, but since there was no fact-checking, this was no obstacle.
slice of their society that was supposed to lead them upward—the engineers, the doctors, the administrators, the people who spoke other languages, the people who knew how to manage things and run programs and businesses and media outlets.
I fear we will also discover that it was a terrible thing to do to ourselves. In the mass hysteria of the evacuation, there was no vetting, documents were not required, and retrospective calculations reveal that less than twenty percent of the people we brought were actually entitled to an evacuation. Volunteers helping in the refugee camps tell of grandmothers in their nineties who arrived all by themselves, knowing no one and speaking no English. There are small children who can’t be reunited with anyone because they are too young to know their names. We have taxi drivers who brought evacuees to the airport and seeing the mayhem, decided to ditch their vehicles and join the crowd. These will merely be a burden to social services, but in such chaotic circumstances, it would be a miracle if no ISIS terrorists, no drug dealers, and no other criminals had inserted themselves into the mix. And already, just a few weeks in and one would think, still thrilled by the sudden change in their fortunes, refugees are engaging in crimes against each other, against members of the public, and against the soldiers taking care of them. This will not be an easy integration.
We have to freeze any and all of Afghanistan’s financial assets because the Taliban will use them for terrorist purposes.
Afghanistan has $9 billion in financial assets kept in banks in the United States and Europe. The World Bank manages a $13 billion trust fund that dispenses around $800 million to the country every year for public sector works, salaries, and public programs. The U.S. Department of Treasury has ordered all those assets to be frozen. We’ve essentially turned off the lights and the faucets.
We have no reason to trust the Taliban. And we don’t have to. What we need to do is focus on the 40 million Afghans who didn’t make it to Ft. Bliss. They’re not in a good way, and if the past twenty years were supposedly designed to make their lives better, then I don’t know what the hell we think we’re doing right now. We’ve gone from the marshmallows of fantasy to behaving like those Eastern tyrants who plowed salt into the soil of people who defied them to make sure nothing would ever grow there, and they would starve. The people of Afghanistan, and frankly even the Taliban, as the de facto government, have urgent and legitimate needs, and they have the money to pay for them. It’s even important to feed and provision the soldiers, because hungry armed young men are not what you want roaming about in a crisis. We want the Taliban to fight ISIS, which they won’t be able to do if their government fails. Can anyone possibly want ISIS to advance? Anyone remember Mosul? Those are the people who crucified Christians, enslaved Yezidis, and committed genocide.
Here’s what November 2021 looks like in Afghanistan. Thousands of displaced persons are returning to their home districts with a need to repair their houses and lay in firewood and food for the winter. But an exceptionally long drought has led to a poor harvest; the government will need to deliver supplies. Public sector workers, including sanitation workers and teachers, need their salaries to support what often is an extended family with many dependent members. With the fighting now ended aside from sporadic ISIS attacks, things may improve come spring, but only if farmers can plant, which they can only do if they can buy seeds and material and pay their laborers. The UN classifies over 70 percent of Afghans as poor; they will need help to survive the winter. All of that takes money. And they have money. And it can be released in portions, not all at once, for purposes agreed upon in advance and monitored by an independent agency. Because we aren’t the kind of country that wants to starve 40 million people because we’re miffed that we didn’t win this war.
Since we don’t want the population to starve, we need to raise donor funds from the United States and other governments, and pay international organizations, contractors and NGOs to deliver the necessary goods and services while making sure that not a penny goes to the Taliban.
This is a truly terrible idea. The project to modernize Afghanistan was ruined by exactly the above: fleets of foreigners setting up shop and creating a meta-universe of aid that was disproportionately expensive, intrusive, and did nothing to give Afghans the skills to one day take care of their own needs. Afghanistan was a totally subsidized country, with two-thirds of its government operations paid by other countries, mostly the United States, and nearly all of its social services provided and run by outsiders. It was a huge, self-perpetuating machinery. The U.S. Agency for International Development considered it a big success if overhead was below 70 percent of the total budget, which says it all.
Some of the organizations today vying to be given the donor millions and the assignment of delivering humanitarian aid put themselves forward as especially qualified because they have “decades of multi-programmatic presence in Afghanistan.” This is the opposite of a strong resume. Rather, it is sadly revealing of an industry that thrives on disasters and dependency and has no motivation to make itself obsolete by empowering its subjects. Aid is supposed to be an emergency intervention for a short-term catastrophic event. There is less violence in Afghanistan now than there has been in twenty years. People are returning to their home districts and their land. The country has a chance to develop from the ground up, in small, indigenous, and sustainable ways. We will be destroying this fragile, precious opportunity if we roll in again with expensive foreign experts whose careers are based on making themselves indispensable. The Afghans have survived on their land for thousands of years and can certainly do so again if we would only let them.
We can’t abandon Afghanistan.
For the love of God, yes we must not abandon them, but leave them in peace. We have done enough to these people. Even as we departed, we launched one last faulty drone strike that killed three completely uninvolved non-combatant adults and seven children. The U.S. inspector general investigated the “incident” and termed it an “honest mistake.”
The Costs of War Project estimates a total of 71,000 civilian casualties from direct military action during our little interlude. How many mistakes are forgivable, when they take the lives of people who never asked for us to come and reshape their country and their culture in first place? Were we the best custodians of Afghanistan’s destiny? During the past twenty years, did we know what we were doing? Was our tutelage a success?
We need to let the Afghans make a go of it. We had no right to do most of what we did to that country, and we don’t have the right to withhold their money. We can outline for them the basic rules of membership in the international community: the accords and international laws that must be followed and the prevailing norms for human rights, women’s rights, and minority rights. They have already promised to accept and respect these, and so far, there have been no egregious violations. Before you mention forced marriages, clan disputes, and the reported sale of children, please go back through the files of Human Rights Watch and you will find that the first two are constant across the past decades, unfortunate corollaries of backward Afghan traditions that changed not one iota during the reign of governments we backed.
As for the sale of children, if true, this is a reflection of the economic despair caused by our sanctions. We can release their money in segments and interrupt it again if they don’t use the monies for the benefit of the populace, to whom it rightfully belongs. But we can’t starve and freeze them because we feel insulted, and the last thing they need is for Westerners to go back in and “save” them again.
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