How the US disaster in giving Afghanistan to the Taliban happened

REGIONAL AFFAIRS: America’s debacle in Afghanistan is a complicated process, and the breakdown has many antecedents.

The harrowing scenes at Kabul airport had been predicted days earlier. Cynics knew that a “Saigon” moment was coming.

US President Joe Biden had promised in July that Kabul would not fall and that the Afghan army, supposedly some 300,000 strong, could fight. In fact, the army was largely a fiction, present on paper only, and the Taliban had been quietly told by negotiators in Doha, and their friends in China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan, that all they had to do was wait.

America’s debacle in Afghanistan is a complicated process, and the breakdown has many antecedents.

In the long term it was fatigue with “endless wars.” This is the term that was used by previous US administrations, officials and experts. Former US President Donald Trump told West Point graduates in 2020 that “we are ending the era of endless wars.” It is not the job of American forces “to solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands,” he told them.
This was a far cry from the notion of America’s positive role in a global, international rules-based order that George H.W. Bush believed in after the Gulf War. It was far from the ideas of the Clinton administration which sought humanitarian intervention to help people from Kosovo to Somalia.

But the US largely agreed, on the Left and Right, that the US needed to leave.

Part of the notions about leaving are often built on ignorance, an ignorance borne of imperial power that the US had after the end of the Cold War.

US Congress member Rashida Tlaib tweeted, as Kabul airport was overrun by desperate Afghans seeking a way out: “That’s what this is: the horrible consequences of endless war and failed US policy going back to the 1980s when we backed the Taliban against the Soviets. Innocent people suffer the horrors of war while political leaders and arms-dealing corporations sit back and make billions.”

In fact, the US had not backed the Taliban, which was created in the 1990s. The US had backed other extremists, called Mujahedin.

Tlaib didn’t need to read a history book to understand that. She could have just watched Charlie Wilson’s War or even Rambo III. But these days the US doesn’t demand that its legislators or officials know much about the world. In fact, ignorance is prized on the Left and the Right. That ignorance and incompetence, alongside lack of any responsibility, are what helped lead to the debacle in Afghanistan.

Trump laid the groundwork for the withdrawal, pushing for peace talks with the Taliban and a ceasefire. The US sent teams to Qatar to meet with the Taliban. By this time the Taliban appeared to hold most of the cards. The US was begging to leave, but, like in Vietnam, it wanted the appearance of “peace with honor.” The idea was that the US would be able to pretend it got a ceasefire and then could leave quietly, not being chased away. Under the ceasefire concept the Taliban almost got an invite to Camp David. The Trump team ignored the Afghan government, which the US had been backing and where billions in US funding had been siphoned off or disappeared.

By the spring of 2020 a deal had been worked out. Trump said it was “time to bring our people back home” after the US signed a deal with the Taliban aimed at bringing peace to Afghanistan, the BBC reported. Five thousand US troops would leave by May 2020, and within 14 months all the Americans and NATO-member troops would be gone. The Taliban was supposed to stop attacks.

From that point on the Taliban began a globe trotting mission to sound out other countries on whether others agreed they could take Kabul. They already had support from Pakistan, which helped create the Taliban and has always supported its far-right brand of Islamist extremism. The Taliban went to Moscow, and by July 2021 it appeared to have Russia’s agreement. Russia and others had waited to see what the Biden administration would do.

Biden, who wanted to show that “America is back,” also wanted to leave. He would keep Trump’s timeline. Moscow met the Taliban in July, and the Taliban then met with top Chinese officials in late July. Beijing appeared on board with the Taliban as well. The Taliban also went to Iran and secured Tehran’s backing. Now it had Qatar, Pakistan, Russia, China and Iran.

Turkey was also angling to work with it. Turkey’s goal was to control Kabul airport so it could deport Afghan refugees, as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had promised to stop Afghan migrants entering Turkey. Turkey had built a large wall on its eastern border to keep Afghans who come through Iran from coming in.

Turkey’s ruling party is rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood, and it likely sees the Taliban as a potential ally. Turkey has tried to carve out a global Islamic world order with Pakistan, Malaysia, Iran and Qatar, promising its own version of Islamic trade and Islamic television.

Turkey’s defense minister traveled to Pakistan in August 2021 as the Taliban offensive gained pace. Erdogan sent out feelers begging to meet the Taliban.

MEANWHILE, IN Kabul, the US was closing up shop. The US has become expert at withdrawing.

It left part of eastern Syria chaotically in October 2019, letting Turkish-backed jihadists attack people the US had been protecting.

In Iraq the US left a dozen facilities in 2020 after pro-Iranian militias began attacking US forces.

Now it would be Afghanistan that would see a US withdrawal. US soldiers left Bagram Air Base at night, not even telling the Afghan commander of the base that they were leaving.

That’s how America wages war these days. It doesn’t even tell its partners, allies, or friends of decades what it is doing. The imperial arrogance of fighting in a country for 20 years and leaving like thieves in the night doesn’t seem to be shameful to US officials, but is rather a normal course of policy.

This is because US officials describe Afghans as “interests,” and when they are no longer in America’s “interest” they don’t matter. Unlike Russia, which backs regimes such as the Syrian regime, the US doesn’t back allies; it has interests, and when the interests don’t profit, then the shop closes. And it’s a going out of business sale in Afghanistan also, because the Taliban gets all the old US equipment.

What’s worse is that the US had already pulled contractors and air support and other key factors that had helped prop up the paper-thin Afghan army. It turned out that despite the trillion dollars spent since 2001 in Afghanistan, almost no infrastructure had been built. The Afghan Air Force was a few propeller planes and helicopters, not a real air force. The US had kept the Afghan army underarmed precisely because of the sense that this way it would be dependent, and if the US left, then US fighter jets would not end up in the hands of US adversaries. Almost nothing was left to show for 20 years of the US role when it was all over.

AMERICA SENT in troops to secure part of the airport to get Americans and Westerners out. It wasn’t exactly apartheid at the airport in the final hours on August 16, but Afghans were left stranded, and mostly white Westerners got on the planes. Where once the US had helped Kosovars and helped Kurds, in 2021 the days of Americans helping were done.
While some compare the US leaving Kabul to the US leaving Saigon, in 1975 the US ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, went to the front to see the debacle himself and struggled to stay to the end to help get Vietnamese out.
He and his wife personally helped get Vietnamese out, and he urged the navy to help Vietnamese who were fleeing.
That was a time when American officials cared about locals. This time the US chargé d’affaires didn’t sit around to wait; he was gone when the chaos unfolded at the airport.

No one will take responsibility. Afghan leaders had all left their people behind, off to comfortable villas in Central Asia, Europe or the Gulf. US troops were left at the airport to fire gunshots in the air as the poor people begged for flights.
Unlike Vietnam, there would be no Americans offshore helping the refugees, no American Afghan version of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act. This century would have no Americans like ambassador Graham Martin, whose steadfastness helped 140,000 Vietnamese flee.