Has Biden Made the Right Choice in Afghanistan?

[The Minsky Moment]

AR - Afghans are not fleeing because of the consequences of a natural disaster, they are fleeing because of the consequences of a US policy change.  And there are no UNHCR camps in Kabul to protect them.

[Agelastus]

Anyway, my paralyzed mother, who can do nothing but watch the TV all day, has a more pungent explanation for the collapse, although probably one with a grain of truth to it. "Biden took away their air support".

Yeah we only gave them trillions of dollars and hundreds of American lives. How much air support does the Taliban have?

The Taliban have an army that hasn't been trained to rely on calling in air support; it's already been suggested up-thread that maybe the US Army spent 20 years setting up and training the "wrong" (for want of a better word) type of local Armed Forces in Afghanistan.

[Tonitrus]

There is also the inherent advantage that the "baddies" have over the "good"...and that is their willingness to do things that the "good" will not contemplate...robbery, murder, pillage and brigandage.  It's the same advantage that the criminal gang/mob/drug cartel have over law enforcement and democratic governments.

And that a fighting force like the Taliban will always be willing take fixed points/targets, (cities, towns, villages ,highways, etc.) they never worry about holding them.

[grumbler]

The "friends" here are the individual Afghanis who aided the US - the ones now so frantic to leave the country. Many of whom did so out of sincere conviction that the US pointed the way to a better form of civilized life.

The US didn't abandon those people; there was a program in place to get them visas and bring them to the US.  The fact that there was no Afghan national government to protect them in the meantime is on Afghani shoulders.

The lesson here is: aiding the US is risky.

That lesson was taught long ago (along with: aiding Canada is risky, aiding the UK is risky, aiding Nazi Germany is risky, etc).  Hell, aiding the Romans was risky for Gauls.

[The Minsky Moment]

The Taliban have an army that hasn't been trained to rely on calling in air support; it's already been suggested up-thread that maybe the US Army spent 20 years setting up and training the "wrong" (for want of a better word) type of local Armed Forces in Afghanistan.

The way I'd put it is that the US focused on training local forces to act in conjunction with and in support of a US directed counter-insurgency strategy, because that is what served US interests at the time.

[alfred russel]

AR - Afghans are not fleeing because of the consequences of a natural disaster, they are fleeing because of the consequences of a US policy change.  And there are no UNHCR camps in Kabul to protect them.

There was a civil war in Afghanistan, we intervened on one team's side because we didn't like the other team, and we tried to give them the strength to stand on their own two feet, and apparently they can't. It sucks that they live in a country that is about to be run by the Taliban, but that isn't our fault, and arguably they aren't any worse off than the residents of the eastern DRC that have dozens of lunatic militant groups roaming around (and that you rarely hear about because it just doesn't capture international attention).

[OttoVonBismarck]

I think it's been well covered we built a force too much designed to deal with potential conflicts with neighbors than with counterinsurgency, and too dependent on air power and advanced weapon systems they would struggle to maintain. But none of that explains the handovers with no fighting. The Afghan National Army had 20,000 very well trained and well regarded Special Forces, those guys could have been used to actually go after the Taliban, or to defend key cities. Instead they were largely wasted in dispersed assignments to various provincial capitals that weren't strategically that important, and in such diffuse number that they weren't locally viable. What we missed is that a lot of Afghans were never invested in this war to the same degree we were, they were willing to play both sides for money and even to fight when necessary, but they were also willing to cut deals.

The actual military we left them with, even without Air support, should have been almost impossible for the Taliban to dislodge from key strongholds and urban areas. The communist government of Afghanistan held out for years after the Soviets withdrew (it actually outlasted the USSR itself.) What happened here is a public exposure of a deep level of just uncommitted people trading their country away. This is because these are tribal people who only care about their tribe, and fighting for a country isn't part of that calculation. They were loyal to the central government as long as it was funneling American money to them, not a moment longer.

[OttoVonBismarck]

What's interesting is we chose to stay for 20 years without even trying to address the underlying issues. Afghan government corruption prevented any sort of movement of loyalty from tribal affiliation to the nation itself. The Taliban was largely able to maintain power because it had money to spread around, and we only made half-hearted attempts years ago to understand what sustained the Taliban.

I think looking at how Colombia beat the FARC is kind of instructive, General Carlos Alberto Ospina Ovalle has written that FARC persisted so long because (using Clausewitz's term) the government misunderstood FARC's Center of Gravity. Both the Colombian government and the U.S. government, starting in the 1980s, assessed that because FARC was largely funded by control over coca production, they were really just a big drug cartel, and so the war against FARC was really a war against drugs. That misunderstood the real problem--the real problem is the large rural farming base, from which many FARC members were recruited, and many of those people used FARC to get their crop to market and money to feed their families, had no meaningful alternatives. This was because of a government that lacked legitimacy in rural areas and that offered nothing to their people.

Rural Colombians were not growing coca for the FARC because they wanted to get people high, it was simply their best option, and FARC was the only entity offering these people any kind of life. There's huge parallels to the Taliban and rural Afghanistan that should be obvious. Oddly we never went down the foolish path in Afghanistan that we did in Colombia, where we painted it as a drug war and focused on that (which would also have been a mistake, but frankly would've probably been more effective at battling the Taliban than what we actually did.)

The core issue is the Afghan National Government has zero legitimacy in rural Afghanistan, and a huge amount of money goes to rural Afghanistan from the cultivation and production of opium. It's so pervasive that farming families in rural Afghanistan might have had sons in both the Afghan National Army and the Taliban, who would go home at harvest time to work the farm. Different families would meet socially, discuss business etc even when members of both armed sides of the conflict would be present. For a lot of rural Afghans this was something that was bigger and more important than the armed conflict, because they had never experienced any kind of legitimate government. What they had experienced was poverty and lack of basic needs being met, and opium production helped prevent those from getting too terrible. The Taliban was a major partner in getting opium to market, even if that family might have sons fighting against the Taliban as their "day job."

Quoting General Ospina:

"...we decided to consider legitimacy as our CoG...This changed the whole situation of our war and contributed to the defeat of the FARC...in many Colombian provinces, we considered local security issues, low local economic production and poor people's welfare as overlapping problems...Without local security, legitimacy collapses since nothing can be achieved. Moreover, we can say that the value of local security is a priority to the strength of state legitimacy. Therefore, if you have strong local security, you will have strong legitimacy. Furthermore, you have to consider local security as one of the two basic elements since local economy is also essential. When both elements come together, they provide trust in the State. This trust prevents any popular mobilization in favour of the insurgency due to the acceptance of government policies and the rise of confidence in them among the peasantry."

Colombia built legitimacy through a series of constitutional and military reforms that started in the 1990s. They did not begin to bear fruit until the early 2000s, because such reforms are neither easy or simple to implement. What they ended up with after about a decade was security forces that didn't abuse locals, didn't use their badge to settle personal grievances, and a central government that was promoted large scale economic development in rural areas. FARC could not offer anything like this, and started to lose support. Another big move was the disbanding of the AUC (right wing paramilitaries the government tacitly supported to go after FARC, that frequently abused rural people suspected of "Marxist sympathies", shockingly the existence of these paramilitaries did not win hearts and minds.) There was a whole lot of funneling of money in Afghanistan from the United States to local power brokers friendly with the government, and likely a lot of abuses and settling of scores was occurring.

Back in 2006 when we internally recognized many of the problems with our war effort, we likely needed to start looking really hard at reforming the Afghan government, which we basically never did. Hamid Karzai was likely a big mistake, Karzai is a tribal leader of a specific Pashtun tribe, and was knowingly using his position to enrich himself, his family and his tribe at the expense of creating a legitimate national government. Karzai was an easy option in 2002, but a bad choice, and we should have made the hard choice of finding a different person to lead the government who was not so beholden to local tribal concerns. Arguably Ghani did represent an improvement, but in some ways he came far too late (2014) and he had such minimal legitimacy he had to power share with people who weren't interested in fixing the corrupt status quo. The simple reality is we needed to go in and say the Afghan government and constitution weren't working, remove politicians from power and start over. For domestic political reason we didn't want to do this, likely because it would have been a "bad look" to basically get rid of our hand picked guy and restart the political system. It also likely would have, short term, meant an escalation in fighting--guys like Karzai don't exist in a vacuum, he had alliances that would have probably turned against us after his removal. Fixing Afghanistan likely required a major increase in commitment around the 2006/2007 time, and we just weren't willing.

[Sheilbh]

One hundred percent agree. And I think it also goes to the rebel governance point that the Taliban haven't had this success without the government losing legitimacy and the Taliban appearing to offer an alternative. It wasn't just that they were being more brutal or ruthless.

And of course it takes decades to do that in Colombia and, perhaps, it takes a long time to sort of not fall into the Arrested Development trap: "No of course it didn't work for those people, it never works....but maybe, it might just work for us."

[The Minsky Moment]

2006/07 was around the time the Bush administration retreated from its grand plan to completely reconstruct the Middle East; Rumsfeld left Defense at the end of 2006; Wolfowitz in late 05; Scooter Libby resigned in late 05.  At that point the nation building project in Afghanistan essentially petered out, except for the short-lived surge effort under Obama that had more limited objectives.  The policy became and remained essentially one of pacification and maintaining the status quo. 

I don't see what was so awful about that policy; from 2015 to the present, the US was able to keep it going without extreme resource commitments.  My view is that we let the perfect be the enemy of the acceptably good, and as a consequence now face the bad.

[alfred russel]

2007 was the time of the surge in Iraq. That already stretched the military: not sure you could surge there and in Afghanistan simultaneously.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I have a few issues with the "we just should have stayed."

1. I absolutely believe things had calmed down somewhat in Afghanistan because the Taliban knew we were leaving. This enabled them to start working on all these negotiated deals. If we made it clear via official U.S. policy statements our commitment was open ended, I think the Taliban isn't as able to make some of these deals. But that also means they aren't going to be as content to sit on the sidelines--the military side would ramp up. So our commitment likely could not have been stable at 2500 or even 5000. I think it'd probably have to go up to the average of 40000 or so that was standard before the "end of major combat operations" declaration by the Obama Administration in 2014. This larger commitment carries with it greater financial costs, and frankly greater "strategic costs" of our military being bogged down in that situation.

2. Faith and trust in government are at all time lows, and this is bad for our country and bad for our democracy. We've had political leadership telling us Afghanistan is a "war" that will have an end, not an open-ended permanent commitment. I think staying under this false pretense is not acceptable. If we actually want to stay, we needed political leaders willing to actually take the political risk of saying their goal was to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely to prop up the Kabul regime. I don't think continuing the Obama policy of saying we're leaving but not really doing so is the way to go. I frankly have seen very little actual political will to step up and do this sort of thing.

3. We are actually supposed to be a democracy, with civilian control of the military. A deeply unpopular war, that has polled as an unpopular war for much of its 20 year duration, should not persist. It's one thing for the elected leadership to push into a war that maybe isn't popular for reasons of dire national interest, and for shorter periods of time...but a 20 year war? That seems less acceptable. Again, if we wanted to stay forever, we needed politicians out there beating the drums trying to convince people that staying forever was the way to go, you need American political support to stay forever, which has not generally existed.

4. If our conclusion is that Afghanistan is a largely lawless and ungovernable reason, but there are broad moral or humanitarian reasons that we should stay there forever to keep things from getting too bad there, then to me that isn't solely the moral obligation of the United States. I would want to see major buy in from our NATO allies and other allies. While I appreciate the help we got in Afghanistan from Britain, Germany and Canada, relative to the size of our GDPs and the size of our populations, their commitments never came close to ours in a proportional way. I think our financial investment in Afghanistan was something like 52 times the size of Germany's, and yet I know our GDP is nowhere near 52 times the German GDP. I'm not expecting these NATO allies to become superpowers or the sort of country to deploy troops to the same degree as we do, but if this is a real international issue then it should be internationalized. More troops from NATO, more money. Maybe even build out a UN force or something. I want other countries with skin in the game to a much bigger degree if this is some permanent obligation, I don't see how it's a permanent obligation where the U.S. has to shoulder a disproportionate amount of the burden.

While I've seen some political leaders in Germany and Britain bleating about our withdrawal, what I didn't see is larger financial or military commitments from those countries during the 20 years in country.

[The Minsky Moment]

Otto - I agree with your points 3 and 4.  Withdrawal happened because a political consensus favored it across party lines.  I'm not disputing that, but I understand the question to be soliciting what we think is the best policy and what we would advocate for.   On 4, I've found the NATO response to be as disappointing as Biden: a lot of complaining about how the US acted unilaterally and talk about the need to act independently, but no meaningful steps to create the capacity to take that kind of action.  Non-US NATO members find themselves in the position because they did not take up the US prodding to up their military capacity, letting Uncle Sam shoulder that burden.  I don't believe in the Trump punitive approach on this issue - NATO has great value to the US even when the European allies backslide on military capabilities.  But in the real world you've got to pay to play.

On 1 the troop drawdown is over 5 years old; I don't buy it. The security situation had stalemated with the country split into zones of influence and with the US deploying sufficient power in conjunction with Afghan forces to keep the Taliban contained.  On 2 I am not advocating false pretenses; the hypothetical President who would support this policy (Jeb Bush?) should be honest in explaining the premise and expectations.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I'm seeing a few reports today that don't bode too well. Apparently the Taliban have no money to pay any of the civil service and keep the organs of government functional, all of the country's assets are held in U.S. banks, which Biden has frozen. Ashraf Ghani is saying he is going to return to the country to lead active resistance to the Taliban rule. One of Ghanis' deputies is tweeting out for people to "join the resistance" and supposedly a decent amount of regular army and special forces groups are moving to strongholds in the north (with military equipment) to prepare an active resistance. The Ghani deputy is the son of a former Afghan warlord of sorts.

Meanwhile in Bamyan province it sounds like the Hazara minority which has historically fielded insurgent forces of its own, is angry at Taliban actions since they've taken over and there are agitations towards active resistance.

We'll have to see how it turns out. I don't like the Taliban, obviously. But an actual societal collapse followed by another intractable civil war is likely a much worse outcome than a stable Taliban government.

[Berkut]

Man, tribalism in all its flavors is such a shitty inheritance of our genes.

Obviously had some great utility, but uggh, fucking worse then useless now.