archive site is getting hammered today capturing the myriad hot-takes out there on Afghanistan, but for posterity this article is archived at: https://archive.is/l5IPA
> How did a government with 350,000 soldiers, trained and equipped by the best armies in the world, collapse so quickly?
A better question: how did the (arguably at this point) most powerful country on earth fail to understand even the most basic principles of life in Afghanistan and why any counterinsurgency effort, no matter how well-funded and armed, must ultimately end where it has? And even worse, why did this country not learn exactly the same lesson 50 years ago?
The agreement with the Taliban includes the assumption they'll be running the country. It requires them to do the sorts of things governments do like issuing visas and being responsible for the whole place.
Now, after the agreement made months ago, and unanimously supported by the UN security council, everyone wants to pretend this wasn't part of the plan.
Reading between the lines, the USA is shifting focus to 'containing China', and now the USA and China are competing over who the Taliban will have better relations with given that Afghanistan shares a 47-mile border with China that leads into Uygur Xinjiang where the Communist Chinese are putting Uygur Muslims in "Re-education through labor"[1] camps. Thus China has already been courting the Taliban[2] in hopes of preventing, say, the CIA from supporting the Taliban in a proxy-insurgency along the Xinjiang border, just as the CIA supported the pre-Taliban Mujahedeen against the Soviets in the 1980s.
Having soldiers deployed to a country for 20 years, yet barely any interest in learning the local language and customs just shows arrogance. The kind that leads to hate i presume since day one they left all tribes turned against the us.
Sending illiterate midwest boys to fight illiterate mideast boys doesn't win wars it would appear, nor do pompous speeches about democracy and equal rights when at home the wrong race can get you killed.
Instead, sending hordes of goats, agriculture tools, building irrigation systems, and generally speaking showing them what the alternative to their current lifestyle is may have won the war.
But you know, deluding one selves with statements such as “the most powerful country on earth” show an utter lack of understanding of one’s position. Richest? Yes, for now. Most powerful? Well, recent events in ag, a failed coup in the us, a barely winning fight against a pandemic and the many examples of rampant corruption puts some serious questions over that tag.
Certainly the us cant protect those working for them, such as translators and local allies, let alone defend the status of “mOsT pOwErFuL” country. The us needs to spend some time reflecting over its past decades because other than debt and wall street shares not much is going up - not its reputation nor its ability to actually win wars.
There is no mention of any failures of the occupation, atrocities committed by NATO forces or the old Afghan government, just an axiomatic belief that imperialism is good. Very on brand for the Economist.
So you prefer a data-driven belief, don't you? Let's see, this ICC probe [1] (ICC = International Criminal Court, a court that the US does not recognize, and also a court that it not known to be US-friendly) alleges:
>> Taliban actions are believed to have resulted in tens of thousands of civilian casualties [...] The Afghan security forces are being investigated for several war crimes against hundreds of civilians [...] The U.S. armed forces and CIA are now under investigation for war crimes against around eighty victims
So, the Taliban made tens of thousands of victims, the Afghan security forces hundreds, and the US armed forces "around 80".
Whatever valid criticisms exist, they’re simply incomparable to the insanely evil human rights abomination that is the Taliban.
It’d be like asking after the Nazi invasion of France “why is nobody talking about the human rights abuses in Algeria?”
EDIT: Downvotes for the very controversial opinion of... checks notes... saying the Taliban has less respect for human rights abuses than the United States.
You’re not wrong about the Taliban, but it is also untenable for American forces to remain in a country after trillions of dollars, two decades, and so many lives were lost when Afghans were never going to fight for themselves. Evacuate everyone who wants out, leave behind those who choose to exist under Taliban rule. Treat it like Cuba but with more support for those who intend to flee (arranged safe passage through diplomatic and military supply chains, for example).
I completely agree. But I object to OP’s characterization of “both sides are bad”. This is very much a case of evil triumphing over good. Not saying there are any other options at this point, but it’s stupid to celebrate a victory by the Taliban
According to the United Nations, the Taliban and its allies were responsible for 76% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009, 75% in 2010 and 80% in 2011
To use one of your examples, the occupation of Japan was from 1945 to 1952, less than 10 years. Allied occupation of Germany was even shorter, at less than 5 years.
It has been established that the German and Japanese cultures are a lot more compatible with "western" ideologies, compared to the more culturally diverse system in Afghanistan.
At the risk of coming off rather callous, it is believed that the sustained conflicted has created a significant amount of value for the stakeholders at varies millitary contractors, as well as provided invaluable experience for the US millitary to trial out their latest weapons and doctrines.
Is it really a loss in the grand scheme of things though?
I would really love to have someone summarize how we "oversaw" Japan and Germany as opposed to Afghanistan. I wonder if we built more or less schools (or any at all) and invested in different ways in the past or now.
I always lament the trillions spent on war machines and (bad assumption?) very little spent on improving society through education.
People in the US lament the high cost of education here, but I really wonder what would have happened if we had just taken all that money and handed it to the Afghan government with an expectation it needed to be spent on infrastructure or education instead of our military bases. Am I totally wrong to think that's how it went down?
I might say "you've been lied to" rather than "you're totally wrong", but basically yeah. The US followed precisely the strategy you're suggesting for most of the occupation, the Afghani government could not or would not reliably channel the funding towards real schools, and the US found it expedient to avoid pushing too hard for accountability. (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/azmatkhan/the-big-lie-t...)
The book author Sarah Chayes argues that corruption leads to insurgencies or at least normal civilians turning a blind eye to them, why help the government/police when they've been grafting all over the place.
To me it's also clear why the Afghani army gave up, (if it even existed, it's probably like the ghost schools and students): a leader that was (or appeared) clean and inspirational might've been able to generate a sense of national pride, which the soldiers would've fought and died for. But the soldiers probably knew the elites were corrupt scumbags, who wants to die for that? (Unless the embezzled riches tricked down to them...).
Edit: reading your article makes me think of "reality must take precedence over public relations". It's disgusting to see how the US institutions deluded their way into reporting success, it's almost comparable to the legend that said Saddam Hussein probably thought he had a great WMD program, because all his subordinates were too afraid to bring him bad news..
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for improving my understanding of the last twenty years. I'm happy to hear we (as an American) at least tried to do the right thing and it wasn't entirely as my cynical mind thought.
> I would really love to have someone summarize how we "oversaw" Japan and Germany as opposed to Afghanistan.
Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, bad as they were, still had traditions associated with modern civilization. After the war, the infrastructure was devastated, but they had what economists refer to as "human capital"-- experienced engineers, miners, farmers, architects, people in all construction trades, etc. They had the knowledge and the desire to rebuild, and with the Marshall Plan, the money to do it.
The Taliban doesn't want to build/rebuild Afganistan. They want it to remain firmly in the 7th century, albeit with modern weapons. There is certainly human capital in Afganistan, but they face a real uphill battle.
Germany/Korea/Japan had a sense of shared identity dating back centuries (or more). Also two of them just lost a total war they started themselves, so arguably not in a position to complain too much. So, very different situations.
> America doesn’t have the patience to oversee Afghanistan like was done with Germany, South Korea, Japan, etc.
In what way are a loose collection of tribesmen dwelling in the hill country in Afghanistan comparable to Germany, among whose exports to the US are the most brilliant minds of humankind?
You didn't mention that before the post-war occupation, there were functioning institutions in Germany, South Korea, and Japan. This is different from building a state from scratch. Can't do "nation-building" when a nation is not there to begin with.
Seeing these comparisons is frustrating and makes it easy to understand why Afghanistan continues to be an enigma to westerners who think they know and understand the realities there on the ground.
Something we shouldn't overlook is that Afghanistan is land-locked, Germany and Japan are not. The lack of coastline is a serious impediment to economic and civil development. Without any opportunity to build serious industry in Afghanistan, the effort would at least take far longer than Japan and Germany, both of which also had an existing culture of manufacturing and industry to build upon.
One may say that Afghanistan is also doomed to forever be a "developing" nation given this constraint. How many first-world landlocked nations can you name? Great, now how many outside the EU trade and border alliances? Right.
Interesting to me is that the only landlocked countries with higher populations are Ethiopia and Uganda. Also, their only escape from this state of affairs would be a trade/border alliance with a neighboring country that does have coastline. Prospects look pretty dismal in that candidate list.
The "land-locked idea" sounds weird. There are other third-world-countries on the same level of Afghanistan that have direct access to the sea, and as you mentioned yourself, there are land-locked countries in Europe (that have been doing well even before the EU).
World trade tends to happen via oceans. If you have a cost with a decent port, you can trade with a lot of countries at low cost. If you don't, you'll have to make arrangements to get your goods through neighboring countries to get to the port and that adds costs.
Wikipedia says Afghanistan has rail links to neighboring Uzbekistan and Terkmenistan, which are also landlocked; if planned rail lines to Iran and Pakistan are constructed, that would certainly help with access to ports.
Land-locked, Jared Diamond's East-west theory, tropical vs seasonal, people have been going through gyrations forever to refuse to accept that just maybe different cultures have different outcomes.
In this case, the differences are quantifiable and consistent. Different cultures do have different outcomes. But two similar cultures, one living in a landlocked state and the other having coastline, will have different development speeds.
Having coastal access doesn’t guarantee you become first-world. That’s a bad take-away.
Not having coastal access virtually guarantees a country will stay in second/third world status unless part of an empire or trade federation that can provide such access (as the only examples of first-world landlocked nations are).
So this seems a pretty determinate factor, all else being equal. And one that has been known since day one. The question is, what are you expecting to build the nation into if coastline dictates its access to markets?
Take Switzerland, for instance, or Austria. They were first-world countries before they were part of a trade federation. And, in fact, they were invited into the trade federation because they were first-world countries.
(Yes, Austria was part of an empire. No, Switzerland wasn't.)
Defining countries as "first world" wasn't even a thing until after Switzerland had joined the League of Nations.
And Switzerland was, in fact, part of (and [charitably] aligned with) a few different empires in its day, to say the least possible about that. They are (and in modern history always were) dependent upon other nations for their trade routes which is determinate in their first-world status.
What argument are you trying to advance? That because Switzerland is first-world and landlocked - one of a few exceptions to the rule, surrounded by and allied with some of the planet's most powerful first-world nations - that Afghanistan could be expected to become one of the exceptions too?
The fact that the word "miracle" accompanies any explanation of Swiss economics ("The Swiss Miracle") should tell you that the odds of replicating their circumstances are long. Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic are all exceptions because they're unusual. They benefit immensely from being small populations with developed and friendly neighbors.
Afghanistan is thirty million people occupying a country whose borders are notoriously unsafe, whose regions are partly characterized by their ruling warlord, and whose chief product is agricultural. Who are Afghanistan's neighbors with coastal access? China, Iran, and Pakistan.
What are the prospects, as you build up industrialized resource development (mining, wells) in Afghanistan, for leveraging your coastal access rights with friends and borders like that? Coastal access is not just about exports, either.
Switzerland's geography, population of 8m, and history in Western Europe are hardly a useful roadmap for Afghanistan because the circumstances of each country are quite different.
The League of Nations wasn't a trade federation, so that's kind of beside the point.
What argument am I trying to advance? That your geographic determinism is flawed. There are a few first-world landlocked countries; there are many third-world countries with ocean access. Trying to say that Afghanistan is doomed because it's landlocked is unsupported by the available evidence.
Afghanistan is doomed, but it's doomed by the culture of the people (and, as you say, by their neighbors). If you took the same people and put them in Pakistan instead, would the ocean access really improve things? Maybe, a little, but not enough to fundamentally change the situation.
It's not a coincidence that Pakistan is more developed than Afghanistan.
> there are many third-world countries with ocean access
Think about it like this - the vast majority of people that manage to improve their station in life are smart. Not everyone is smart, and not everyone who is smart improves their station in life. Being blessed with natural gifts doesn't determine a nation's fate, but it damn sure helps. Critically, the absence of those natural gifts puts a country at a severe disadvantage when trying to develop (in this case safe, economical access to global markets via maritime trade - a very concrete and measurable asset).
It is not the whole answer, sure. As my original comment and your replies have point out, there are exceptions. Those exceptions are by definition unusual. Some other factor(s) needs to be working overtime to offset the natural handicap. In the case of these exceptional first-world countries we're looking at, their handicap is balanced by having good prosperous neighbors that provide cheap, secure access to maritime trade routes. Afghanistan does not have these compensatory advantages.
Insofar as LoN is concerned, I'll leave that to you to contemplate the very origin of the designator "first world" and what being part of the right "club" means for a nation's prosperity. It is impossible to separate the landlocked exceptions' success from the compensating "gifts" of their neighborhood, as explained by the UN info below.
"High prices have hit many countries around the world, but landlocked developing countries bear an extra burden.
Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Burundi, and other countries without a port pay more and wait longer for imported oil, food, and other goods. And they have an equally hard time exporting, with the result that they trade less and grow more slowly than their coastal neighbors."
"The United Nations term "Landlocked Developing Countries" describes countries with serious constraints on the overall socio-economic development. Due to lack of territorial access to the sea and therefore remoteness and isolation from world markets causing high transit and transportation costs. These countries are among the poorest of the developing countries."
"For LLDCs, their seaborne trade almost always must transit through other countries, mostly also developing countries—a process which involves dealing with cumbersome border-crossing procedures and inadequate transit transport infrastructure. Thus, although LLDCs already face other development challenges, they also face substantially increased costs for trade and transport because of their geographic location. Moreover, of the 32 LLDCs 17 are classified as least developed.
Their remoteness from major world markets is the principal reason why many LLDCs have had less success in mitigating consequences caused by their geographical handicap as compared to landlocked countries in Europe. Landlocked developed countries of Europe are surrounded by major developed markets and their seaborne trade accounts for a relatively small part of their external trade. Their export is mainly high value added products and their distance from seaports is comparatively short.
The distances involved in most cases of LLDCs are excessive. Kazakhstan has the longest distance from the sea (3,750 km), followed by Afghanistan, Chad, Niger, Zambia and Zimbabwe with distances from the nearest seacoast in excess of 2,000 km. Transit time for goods of LLDCs is extremely long because of their remoteness, difficult terrain, road and railway conditions and inefficiency of transit transport."
Make sense? This is not "my" geographic determinism. It's a pretty well-established way to interpret the world.
> Who are Afghanistan's neighbors with coastal access? China, Iran, and Pakistan.
Adding to your point, it's a long way across China, and the border with Afghanistan is far away from populations and ports. I don't think it's great for trade, even though trade with China is certainly important.
Yes, I could see China hoovering out resources from Afghanistan, but I think they have to be concerned about the Taliban. Maybe cash for gas/oil/REM/etc is a way to keep them from finding common cause with their Muslim brethren across the border (the whole Uighur thing). I honestly wouldn't be surprised if we started funding the Taliban again at some point in the near future, as much as it make me facepalm. I don't let good sense be an impediment to my cynicism.
China certainly loves resources, but transporting them from west to east is going to be expensive. It's probably cheaper to get them elsewhere and send them by sea.
Unless they think developing the resources and transportation will keep any trouble from crossing their borders.
I think it would be beneficial for the Afghans, assuming it wasn't too exploitive, more access to trade is usually a good thing, and exporting resources would generate net income.
Even if you don't care, there are enough stories/videos/message of Afghans in tears at losing the little bits of freedoms that western military and billions could grant.
About the economic exploitation argument: I fail to see any scenario in which any of coalition countries could have hoped to gain even a tenth of a percent back of the money the war in Afghanistan has cost them.
It's right next to China and Iran. So it represented a geopolitical pincer attack on Iran to get to their oil. Which, you know, mattered about twenty years ago.
Afghanistan has a ton of natural resources that the West wanted to exploit.
And of course, China was right next door, so yet another geopolitical game of ta thorn in their side.
I think since the beginning the Taliban taking over was inevitable, as Afghanistan is not really a cohesive nation and any army assembled will behave as such. That said, the way this retreat has been executed is horrifically bad. It’s mind-boggling that this is the best the pentagon and Biden admin could come up with.
Biden is recalibrating towards taking on the CCP. Afghanistan was a waste. Never was gonna work and besides the rare earth metals they don’t have anything we need. Waste of soldiers and logistical support and air power.
We need to take on CCP head on. Give nukes to SK and Japan and then declare that if any sovereignty of them or Taiwan is violated, we will instantly nuke all known military bases in CCP-land.
Fine, let's leave. But wild idea, maybe we should have evacuated Afghans who helped us and American citizens first, before having our soldiers leave. Instead Biden just blamed Afghans for not getting out sooner before going back to his vacation. Especially considering there's a 18,000 backlog on visa's for translators and other at risk Afghans, plus 54,000 for their families.
Actually that's not what he did. He blamed the Afghan government and army for literally dissolving in 1 week to 10 days. Within 10 days they gave up like 17 of the largest cities, eventually Kabul, a city of 4.5 million people literally in a couple of hours.
It was absurd. Who would've predicted that? And what would Trump have done differently, since I'm sure that's your guy. He wanted to pull out by May.
Obviously from your vacation comment (he was at Camp David which is like 30 mins by heli from the White House)... you're just being partisan and a troll.
He said that Afghans visa applicants didn't want to leave. I'm not talking about the ANA here, I'm talking about interpreters who for three years have been trying to get out of Afghanistan because they and their families are targets for assassination. He blatantly lied. The backlog is enormous and the process has been incredibly slow.
>Obviously from your vacation comment (he was at Camp David which is like 30 mins by heli from the White House)... you're just being partisan and a troll.
It doesn't matter where he spends his vacation, just that he went back on vacation. 10,000 Americans and nearly 80,000 Afghans who worked with the US against the Taliban are now in the hands of the Taliban.
Your comment is identical in its deflection to Biden's retort to being asked about Afghans falling to their deaths. "That was four days ago, five days" he said, (incorrectly by the way as it was the day before), as though when they were falling was issue and not that they were falling.
> It was absurd. Who would've predicted that? And what would Trump have done differently, since I'm sure that's your guy. He wanted to pull out by May.
In April, an NPR article [1] has a predictive quotes:
> Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that if the U.S. does not provide Afghanistan's security forces "with some support, they certainly will collapse."
There's also a quote from Secretary of State Antony Blinken that a Taliban takeover is a possible scenario.
Personally, I'm not surprised that the Taliban took over, although I thought it would take a bit longer. It's also bipartisan (although, usually one side at a time) to complain that the President is on vacation.
That's what I'm saying. Nobody, literally not one person, thought they would go from capturing their first provincial capital to capturing ALL 18, including Kabul, within 10 DAYS.
How is a vague predication of collapse "predictive"? Everybody knew they would collapse. Most thought at least several weeks, at most 6 months.
How is it "bipartisan" to complain he's on vacation when Camp David is a 30 min heli ride from the White House. It's not like some extravagant trip.
Trump would be golfing in Mar a Lago in Florida and you probably wouldn't have made the same issue about it.
Literally anyone except Americans would predict that.
See, from the American point of view, war is not much more than GTA. They don’t risk anything. American casualties are insignificant compared to the number of their victims. Compare this to the situation of people who actually live there, and have to choose between fighting a war they cannot win, and surviving.
Really, so you and a bunch of people predicted that the Taliban would take over all the prov capitals including Kabul within ~10 days? Interesting.
Your last two sentences are such an oversimplification of the situation... it shows how sophomoric your post is and most likely your understanding of the world.
Perhaps Kabul fell so fast because the CIA is actually helping the Taliban to ultimately harass China across the 47-mile long China Afghanistan border[1], which leads right into Xinjian province where Chinese communists are putting Uygur Muslims in concentration re-education camps.
The CIA aided the proto-Taliban insurgency against Russia in the 1980s in what made Afghanistan become Russia's own "Vietnam." During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s the USA aided Saddam Hussein's Iraq against Islamist Iran while at the same time the CIA was secretly selling weapons to Iran to get money to fund anti-socialist rebels in Nicaragua, in what became called the Iran-Contra Affair[2].
So the USA has a history of playing both sides, and it's not tinfoil-hat conspiracy-theory crankery to conjecture that the CIA told the Taliban how to crush the Afghan government troops in exchange for an understanding that the Taliban would soon be orchestrating a rebel insurgency across the Chinese border to liberate their oppressed Muslim brothers, because the Taliban is now more valuable as a proxy-war partner against rising China than the corrupt incompetent Afghan government was.
US has energy independance due to Fracking so it's pulling out and leaving behind all sorts of toys while handing the Taliban a political victory. China is dependant on ME energy imports and Russia due to its collapsing demographics only cares about taking the Carpathanian mountains and a chunk of Turkey to have a defensible border.
The Chinese need to take Taiwan to break out of the first island chain to secure energy Imports, but even if they take Taiwan this year or next, they now have to deal with a Taliban 3-5 years down the road that have American training and arms and all of whom have experience fighting Americans for the last 20 years. So if they take Taiwan they'll end in a direct conflict with Japan, Indonesia and India while the world shifts it supply chain to India whom has healthier demographics than China, and even if China manages to maintain its energy supply chain, it has to deal with disruption in the middle east and has to ship troops over to fight an arguably better equipped and more experienced adversary.
Should be interesting to see how this one plays out.
The Russia take makes no sense. They already have physical defense. They’re just trying to re-carve their sphere that they had.
China has no need for invading Afghanistan. They’re just gonna make clever minimalistic deals with the Taliban to extract rare metals and such. That’s all they need there.
China’s Achilles heel is their burning desire for Taiwan and to always save face, as well as their imports of oil. Other than that they’re a tough enemy.
I’m glad Biden recalibrated towards taking on the CCP since they’re clearly our largest threat and also the free worlds.
