Don't listen to the hawks: We are right to leave Afghanistan
Afghanistan is further proof that institutions and social change cannot be imposed from the top down.
This article featured in our latest issue, Issue XXII, which you may buy here. Subscribe here to receive future print issues by post, or subscribe here to receive online versions of future print issues.
In November 2009, as the security situation in Afghanistan was fast deteriorating, Karl Eikenberry, then-US Ambassador to Kabul, sent a classified diplomatic cable to Hillary Clinton. Himself a Lieutenant General, Eikenberry warned the Secretary of State against deploying an additional 40,000 troops, an action which the Pentagon had been recommending to President Obama.
He wrote that sending extra forces would only deepen dependency among the Afghan army, already crippled by attrition and low requirement rates. Doing so would "make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable". He argued that "more troops won't end the insurgency", as long as the Taliban retain their sanctuaries in Pakistan, a country whose strategic interest would have Afghanistan perpetually consumed by war. He claimed that Hamid Karzai, then-Afghan President, was an inadequate strategic partner who "continues to shun responsibility", and that "sending more combat forces will only strengthen his misconceptions about why we are here".
The Pentagon ultimately won the argument, as it often tends to do, and US troop numbers soon reached 100,000. A mere month after his cable, Eikenberry told congress that he fully supported the President's approach, calling it "the best path to stabilise Afghanistan and to ensure Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups cannot regain a foothold". He was not the first, nor would he be the last senior official to lie about America's longest-ever war.
Much of that lying was catalogued by The Washington Post in 2019 as it published the 'Afghan Papers'. They showed that top generals knew the war to be unwinnable while saying the opposite in public. That the nation-building effort had been a failure. That the Afghan Government had "self-organised into a kleptocracy", that the Afghan army was completely hopeless and the police were filled with thieves and drug addicts – "the bottom of the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel".
In recent weeks, many such former officials have flooded the airways on both sides of the Atlantic. Not to admit their culpability, nor to question twenty years of failed strategy, but to tell the same public they had repeatedly lied to that the real failure lay in the decision to withdraw.
The Taliban's return to power represents a tragedy for Afghanistan and its people, and most who support the withdrawal acknowledge this. We should also recognise that, despite its many failures, the Western intervention had real humanitarian achievements. Most notably, the liberation of Afghan women and girls, who were finally able to attend schools and universities, receive healthcare and enter the workplace. Millions of them are, once again, at the mercy of a medieval ideology that considers them as chattel.
It is a reality which supporters of the withdrawal must contend with. It is not, however, a good argument for staying. Asked about this very issue by ABC News's George Stephanopoulos, Joe Biden responded thus:
"The idea that we're able to deal with the rights of women around the world by military force is not rational. Not rational... there are a lotta places where women are being subjugated. The way to deal with that is not with a military invasion."
He is right. Nato did not go into Afghanistan to fight for feminism. Women and girls are subjugated and discriminated against all around the world, in countries not currently under Western occupation. Among them are places to which we sell tanks and bombs.
We should not be selling arms to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, just as we presumably will not entertain such a relationship with the Taliban. Yet the idea that we can occupy these places, indefinitely, until their people subscribe to our norms and values is, as Biden says, simply not rational.
Afghanistan is further proof that institutions and social change cannot be imposed from the top down. America needed a revolution to establish the basic foundations of democracy. It required a civil war in order to abolish slavery. A further century of strife and struggle just to reach the point where all people are nominally equal before the law. We have means by which to promote social progress overseas. We could start by being considerably tougher on many of our supposed allies. But the American and British armies are not, nor should they be, the armed wing of Amnesty International.
Opponents of withdrawal, from traditional neo-conservatives to typically dovish liberals aghast at the scale of human tragedy, have plenty to say about why we should have stayed, or how we could have left a better way.
Much of it is total nonsense, including the increasingly popular idea that we could have retained a ground presence in Afghanistan, at little cost in blood and treasure, essentially forever. "The West had this very light sustainable presence. US, UK weren't losing casualties, only 2,500 soldiers left, and really they could have stayed for the next twenty, thirty years," said Rory Stewart in one of many recent interviews.
It is an assertion that makes sense only if, like much of our hawkish media, you have followed the war for about three months. The reason why Nato casualties were so low, and why our presence could afford to be so light, was because the Trump administration had cut a deal with the Taliban in February 2020. That deal put a deadline on America's withdrawal (originally May 2021) and required the Taliban to cease attacks on Nato troops. All they had to do was wait for us to leave, which is what they did.
Had Biden reneged upon that deal, it is ludicrous to think that the Taliban would have sat twiddling their thumbs. Equally ludicrous is the idea that 2,500 troops could have held them back when the assault inevitably came. That presence was light but in no way was it sustainable.
The alternative to leaving was not to remain with a limited presence. The alternative was another troop surge, just as in 2009. With many more American and British soldiers dying in a war that their own generals consider a fool's errand. Many more billions spent on training and equipping a hopeless Afghan army, just to see them collapse in a month, as opposed to a week, whenever a future US president finally decides 'enough'.
But the hawks won't say that part out loud. Instead, they will point to America's much longer presence in Germany or South Korea, a comparison so absurd it barely merits a rebuttal.
After all, US Marines stationed in Korea are not preventing the imminent collapse of the Seoul Government, whose own military is more than capable of self-defence. Units at the Ramstein airbase, meanwhile, are not what stands between Germany and the return of Nazi rule. They are there to project American power towards Russia. Or, in the case of Korea, towards China.
Objections to the manner of withdrawal also tend to be misplaced, or deliberately misleading. "The Biden administration was right to bring the war to a close. Yet there was no need for it to end in such chaos," writes the editorial board of The New York Times. As if there is a pleasant, non-chaotic way to lose a war, especially when your enemy is anything like the Taliban.
Perhaps the airlift could have begun earlier, yet not even the most pessimistic observers thought Kabul would fall so quickly. And if the withdrawal was what caused the Afghan army to lose its will to fight, they were hardly going to resist the Taliban as we jetted thousands of their compatriots to safety.
We should have done more to evacuate Afghans who worked with Nato forces. Many of them, including the much-talked-about interpreters, have been trying to leave for years. There is plenty of blame to go around in this regard. It is, however, mostly a failure of the last five years, not the last five months. And when it comes to Westerners living in Afghanistan, from journalists to aid workers, there was no way of forcing them to go until they absolutely had to.
The withdrawal, whenever it came, was therefore bound to be chaotic. The only alternative was to stay, forever, something which the defence contractors now pretending to care about Afghan lives know all too well. It may be difficult to admit that thousands of coalition troops had ultimately died for nothing. That countless more Afghans perished just for the Taliban to regain control. Eventually, we must cut our losses, not engage in a sunk cost fallacy.
Not only did this war have to end, but it was always going to. Biden could have surrendered to the Pentagon, as Obama did, and deployed more troops. He could have kept just enough to prevent a full collapse, as Trump did, and then cowardly passed the issue to another president. At some point, public opinion would have demanded a withdrawal. Their votes, after all, outnumber those who work for pro-war think tanks and sit on the board of Raytheon.
Indeed, despite a relentless media campaign featuring some of the very people responsible for this catastrophe, most Americans still support pulling out the troops. A plurality do so even if it lets Al-Qaeda and other terror groups re-establish operations in the country. This sentiment was only ever going to increase and no amount of grumbling from Anthony Blair could change that.
The Afghanistan withdrawal does not represent, as some would have you think, the end of Nato's security commitments. It does not mean that no war will ever be worth fighting or that no other intervention can be justified. It is an inglorious end to a post-9/11 foreign policy that placed fear and ideology over geo-political reality, a policy that enriched a few and caused untold harm to many. To that, good riddance.
