Making Sense of the Debacle and Tragedy of Afghanistan

The renowned German economist Rudiger Dornbusch once famously quipped that economic crises tended to arrive far more slowly than commonly thought, yet when they did arrive, these crises tend to strike at a speed and intensity that few thought was ordinarily possible. Much the same can be said for the dramatic events of the week of August 15^th in Kabul. The Taliban’s march into Kabul was long in coming. Yet when it arrived, it transpired at a scale and intensity that few could have previously imagined.

The origins of the West’s failure in Afghanistan date back to the early-to-mid-2000s when the Bush administration, distracted by its war of choice in Iraq, failed to commit the necessary resources to the reconstruction and uplift of the Afghan nation. Sensing this gap in commitment, the Taliban restarted their insurgency, which by the late-2000s had already degenerated into a battlefield stalemate. After the elimination of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011, there was no good reason for the U.S. military to hang on indefinitely in Afghanistan. What the Obama administration lacked however was the political courage to initiate a concerted breakthrough and dialogue with the insurgents for it wasn’t seen to be kosher to be breaking bread with such a revolutionary and repulsive political outfit. And so, the administration pretended to continue to fight, with the eager support of America’s generals in tow who were only too happy to pretend to their political masters that they would bring the Taliban to heel if they were given an additional six-month authorization to continue fighting.

The Trump administration, after an initial reluctance, continued down the same path until, to its credit, it bit the bullet in late-2018 and opted for a political solution and a negotiated drawdown of forces with the Taliban. Yet, by the time the agreement was finally signed in February 2020, the administration could neither summon the political will to make the agreement stick in Congress nor compel the Afghan government to come on board the drawdown timetable. At the heart of this Trump administration failure was its inversion of priorities – a negotiated drawdown of U.S. troops was prioritized over the establishing of a credible and durable power-sharing political dispensation in Kabul. The agreement was in fact violated within two weeks of its signing – and not by the Taliban. For its part, the Afghan government chose to vacillate, hoping that a new administration with a worldview other than ‘America first’ would opt for a different strategy – which was not to be the case. 

Washington and the West’s failure in Afghanistan is an indictment of its post-Vietnam War era generation of foreign policy elites who – having been bred during America’s ‘unipolar moment’ to view foreign affairs through the prism of domestic politics – have never quite fully grasped the nexus and interplay of power and norms in international relations. They could neither forge the political steel to rebuild Afghanistan anew (unlike their predecessors who tore Japan down and rebuilt it from the ground-up) nor display the humility, alternatively, to work through Afghanistan’s decentralized tribal structures to revive the nation’s fortunes. And so, these elites settled rather on imposing a soft and centralized democratic order in Kabul that was neither capable of forcing root-and-branch reform down the throat of the Afghan governance system nor, alternatively, was capable of co-opting the country’s decentralized tribal structure to deliver change and prosperity. 

President Biden’s reputation and the credibility of America’s political and military commitments will no doubt be called into question, going forward, especially during this (temporary) moment of exultation within international and local jihadist, separatist and extremist circles. The claims about a grievous loss of American credibility and image should be consumed with a grain of salt, however. Just as the ‘Saigon moment’ of 1975 had few long-lasting ramifications for the credibility of U.S. deterrent power and commitment in the Asia-Pacific – let alone beyond the region, so also the ‘Kabul moment’ will have even fewer reverberations in external theaters beyond Southwest Asia, including in the Indo-Pacific. Afghanistan was that ‘forever war’ which no Western capital wanted to own; politically, after its moment of handwringing, the West will quietly move on – perhaps even pivoting more concertedly to the Indo-Pacific – while shedding the obligatory crocodile tears for its loyalists left behind as well as the women and children of Afghanistan. And regional states will be left to their own devices to manage the consequences.   

As for the Taliban, they have learnt to their detriment the consequences of harboring international terrorists. And so, while they will exact their ferocious version of Islam on their countrymen and women, they will be far more alert this time around to the spillage of terrorist actors from their soil. This in fact opens up an opportunity for regional states as well as for Russia, China, and even the U.S. (which two Septembers ago had readied itself to host the current head of the Taliban Political Committee, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, at Camp David) to work out arrangements with the new rulers of Kabul to ensure that bad actors either remain muzzled on Afghan soil or alternatively are ejected and forced to ply their trade from beyond Afghanistan’s borders.        

At the end of the day, the anti-climactic irony of the tragedy of post-Cold War Afghanistan is simply this: a once benighted country under prior Taliban rule is once again entering a new era of benightedness, but with far fewer implications and effects on regional and international relations. What happens in Afghanistan will by-and-large stay in Afghanistan. The country will meander towards a more inward-looking and domestic-focused polity – although under harshly regimented rule – after more than four decades of being the plaything of imprudent external actors. And as the country political gaze fitfully shifts inwards, the international community will gradually (and unfortunately) learn to turn a blind eye to Afghanistan’s misfortunes.