Afghanistan Withdraw: Podcast Discussion, 12 Years Worth of OT Writing, and Discussion

There are a couple of issues that have been constants since the founding of Ordinary Times as a website, but it is truly remarkable to see the amount of writing over the last 12 years our contributors have dedicated to Afghanistan. With the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban underway and the on-going Afghanistan withdraw by US and allied forces — which is now a full blown evacuation — this is a good time to review and reflect.

This Little Jaunts short from Dennis Sanders En Route podcast was recorded back in June with Ordinary Time’s Andrew Donaldson, but with the breaking developments related to the Afghanistan withdraw Dennis has reupped it, and we share it here.

Ordinary Times has a vast amount of writing going back to the founding of the website on the topic of Afghanistan, and you can search through them here:

Let’s go all the way back to November of 2009, and How Do You Solve a Problem Like Afghanistan? By Chris Dierks here at Ordinary Times:

All of the discussion of an Afghanistan surge and COIN strategies simply dances around the edges and never gets what to what I believe is the core question: what is the political endgame if the state-led operation has failed?

Here follows a list of many of the key native political actors in Afghanistan:

–Drugs and Warlords

–The Taliban

Consisting of both The Quetta Shura (i.e. Mullah Omar and the old Taliban leadership) and newer Taliban 2.0 factions on the ground. This includes the all-important Pakistan sanctuary.

–The Official Government

–The Tribes

Some eventual deal has to be worked out between all those groups. A surge may bring one or more of these groups to a bargaining position. But a centralized state that becomes transparently non-corrupt, modern and democratic which governs in a non-sectarian fashion over the entirety of the country is not going to happen.

Afghanistan has seen 30 years of horrific war and is home to a pervasive drug trade. It’s a country without a strong resource base kept afloat by volatile money flows: drugs, international aid, the weapons trade, etc. In that context, corruption IS the reality. It’s the way to make money–which is why, as I’ve said before, I actually think corruption is the wrong word.

When capital runs that loose through a country without a system to soften it, invest in it, regularize it, then it’s headed to where it is now.

The “high-point” of state functioning in Afgahnistan was an extremely weak central state that had essentially no control in the countryside prior to the Soviet invasion.

Kilcullen’s make or break logic is predicated on the central-ity of a state. It is the key flaw in his theory. If you don’t assume the centrality of a consolidaated state, if you don’t assume the necessity of and ability to construct such a state from the ground floor, then other options are on the table.

But whatever option is chosen, nothing can be done by the West about Afghanistan’s corruption. Not in the kind of time frame the US can logically support (both in terms of troop numbers and cash). It will take decades (if ever) for that country to recover and reach a modicum of stability and economic progress. The difference between 20,000 and 40,000 US troops is not the deciding factor.

I have no idea what endgame in Afghanistan looks like. I only know what won’t happen. In Iraq, I could tell you some likely outcomes–there were only so many options given the country’s history. But Afghanistan’s history over the last three decades has so wrecked the country, it is really impossible to predict anything.

Andrew wrote about Afghanistan back in April when President Biden first announced his changed withdraw date:

To point, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden ran on promises of bringing the troops home from Afghanistan, a rare point of agreement by two politicians who couldn’t be more different. There is no good way to surrender. No good way to abandon a country that never moved past being spoon fed their current government and security by outside support. No good way to leave allies and partners hanging because we’ve had enough.

But the crux of it: Everybody loses in regard to Afghanistan. The situation is worse than when we started, and we as a country have nothing but the black eye of a failed campaign and the loss and scars of the service members who bore the brunt of this two-decade exercise in futility to show for it. The humanitarian disaster and bloodbath that will be a united Taliban Afghanistan will be a menace to the people there and the world again soon enough, and probably be scarcely noticed by the wider world. History will judge it, and many folks will eternally wonder what was the point of it all. Hopefully, there was at least some small moments of good in the overarching, two decade mess the latest Afghanistan war was, that some small better something can come from. But that’s a fool’s hope that is going under the wheels of the Taliban in short order, and for the foreseeable future.

Hopefully, the generation that has come up since we went into Afghanistan will do better next time, will commit military forces with more purpose, focus, and resilience. That they do so while also keeping the money skim to a more acceptable level and the politics better in hand. Hopefully, the long suffering people of Afghanistan get a better future against all the odds that they won’t.

Hopefully.

Twenty years and all we can do is hope. What a sad epitaph. And perhaps worst of all, judging from how it’s ending for America but once again restarting for Afghanistan, we didn’t learn a damn thing from any of it.

More recently, Vikram wrote about the Afghanistan Withdraw here:

I supported the war in Afghanistan. I thought the Iraq War was a mistake that distracted the United States. The US underestimated how difficult it would be to secure Afghanistan’s future. It continues to treat Pakistan as a necessary ally even though they literally harbored Osama Bin Laden next to a military base, an inconvenient fact that everyone seems to have memory-holed.

This isn’t to say there are better options for what to do or that they are known to me. I would love to have a solution to present that says, “here’s how to win,” but I don’t think the US military has failed for a lack of trying or a lack of intelligence applied to solving the problem. Nevertheless, we have failed. Thus ends the Afghan-US War.

And just a few weeks ago, Eric Medlin wrote about President Biden’s role in finishing the Afghanistan Withdraw:

There was a clear reason that the war in Afghanistan dragged on for as long as it did. The chances of victory remained slim. Afghanistan’s central government was always weak, and its main opponent, the Taliban, continued to grow in strength and occupy more territory. But Afghanistan was able to retain a single leader, Hamid Karzai, for thirteen years, which pointed to some stability. Even though he was corrupt, Karzai left office voluntarily like presidents do in a stable democracy. Obama held out hope that more troops and a different mission would change conditions on the ground. In addition, the possibility of a treaty between the central government and the Taliban kept hope alive for a resilient, non-Islamist Afghan state.

At the same time, both Obama and Trump knew that withdrawal from Afghanistan could lead to a tragic, total, and well-publicized defeat of the Afghan government. The fall would be interpreted, like the fall of Saigon or the rise of ISIS, as an ultimate failure of the American government and the American military. Like most other politicians, Obama and Trump decided to prioritize short-term considerations and extend the war indefinitely. They could always point to the possibility of either an eventual victory or a peace treaty to justify continued American involvement.

Joe Biden has rejected this mindset entirely. He has been a supporter of withdrawal from Afghanistan for years. With this decision, he is prioritizing the safety of American troops over his own political considerations. There would be no punishment for keeping American troops in the country for years with the vain hope of defeating the Taliban or forming a robust Afghan state. Instead, Biden is risking a Saigon moment. He is placing an ideal prized by the left over the considerations of the foreign policy establishment. In effect, Biden is taking the responsibility for ending America’s longest war entirely on himself. He is acting like we think every president should act.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan should be praised by the entirety of the American political media. Politicians on the right and the left have criticized what is known as the blob, the all-consuming group of bipartisan consultants and politicians who have thwarted any attempt at narrowing down American influence abroad. They have criticized the money spent on foreign wars, the worsening of America’s reputation abroad, and the human and social toll of decades of war. Those on the left frequently praise Barbara Lee as the only member of Congress to vote against the war in Afghanistan. They propelled Barack Obama to the presidency partially because of his opposition to the Iraq War. Joe Biden’s decision on withdrawal from Afghanistan is just as admirable as those previous actions and should be treated accordingly.