So yet another effort by a foreign power to determine the future of Afghanistan has come to an ignominious end. (See here for a timeline of the US war in that country.) While the speed with which the Taliban finally entered Kabul and took control of the country may have come as a surprise, the end result is surely not. I am struggling (and failing) to think of any time in the post-colonial era where a foreign power invaded a country, overthrew the government, installed a new one more to its liking, and then left, leaving behind a stable society. There are going to be many heated arguments trying to identify who ‘lost’ Afghanistan and pin the blame on them but the reality is that it was always never winnable in the first place. Pouring weapons and soldiers and money into the country just provided an illusion of control.
It may be good to go back to the start of the invasion following the attacks of September 11, 2001 to recall a path not taken, about the talks proposed by the Taliban before the war began, something that was not highly publicized in the media at that time.
The US quickly identified Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda as the people behind the 9/11 atrocity and learned that he was in Afghanistan. Even before that event, al Qaeda had been behind other attacks on US targets and the US had been after them. The Taliban claimed to have offered to hand bin Laden over to an international tribunal even before 9/11 but the US was not interested.
The Taliban government in Afghanistan offered to present Osama bin Laden for a trial long before the attacks of September 11, 2001, but the US government showed no interest, according to a senior aide to the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar.
Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, Taliban’s last foreign minister, told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview that his government had made several proposals to the United States to present the al-Qaeda leader, considered the mastermind of the 2001 attacks, for trial for his involvement in plots targeting US facilities during the 1990s.
“Even before the [9/11] attacks, our Islamic Emirate had tried through various proposals to resolve the Osama issue. One such proposal was to set up a three-nation court, or something under the supervision of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference [OIC],” Muttawakil said.
Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Pakistan at the time of 9/11, confirmed that such proposals had been made to US officials.
Grenier said the US considered the offers to bring in Bin Laden to trial a “ploy”.
“Another idea was that [bin Laden] would be brought to trial before a group of Ulema [religious scholars] in Afghanistan.“No one in the US government took these [offers] seriously because they did not trust the Taliban and their ability to conduct a proper trial.”
The US started bombing that country on October 7th, within a month of the 9/11 attacks, in an effort to pressure the Taliban government to unconditionally hand bin Laden over. The Taliban renewed its offers to hand him over to a neutral body.
The last Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, offered at a secret meeting in Islamabad Oct. 15, 2001 to put bin Laden in the custody of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), to be tried for the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States, Muttawakil told IPS in an interview in Kabul last year.
The OIC is a moderate, Saudi-based organisation representing all Islamic countries. A trial of bin Laden by judges from OIC member countries might have dealt a more serious blow to al Qaeda’s Islamic credentials than anything the United States would have done with bin Laden.
Muttawakil also dropped a condition that the United States provide evidence of bin Laden’s guilt in the 9/11 attacks, which had been raised in late September and reiterated by Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef on Oct. 5 – two days before the U.S. bombing of Taliban targets began.
This offer too was rejected and then-president George W. Bush refused to have any negotiations with the Taliban, though it was clear that they were desperate to avoid being bombed.
President George Bush rejected as “non-negotiable” an offer by the Taliban to discuss turning over Osama bin Laden if the United States ended the bombing in Afghanistan.
Returning to the White House after a weekend at Camp David, the president said the bombing would not stop, unless the ruling Taliban “turn [bin Laden] over, turn his cohorts over, turn any hostages they hold over.” He added, “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty”. In Jalalabad, deputy prime minister Haji Abdul Kabir – the third most powerful figure in the ruling Taliban regime – told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, but added: “we would be ready to hand him over to a third country”.
The US may well have felt that the Taliban were being disingenuous in their offer to hand bin Laden over to a third nation and that they were merely stalling for time or that they would only hand him over to a body that would not hold him accountable. But it is not clear why they could not have called the Taliban’s bluff. The only thing they would have lost would have been some time. The war option was still available. For the US the war option is, sadly, always available. Even more sadly, it is often the first and most favored option.
But you have to have lived in the US at that time to understand the level of white-hot anger that permeated all levels of the country. The feeling of anger that the US had been attacked had created an a raging desire for revenge that could only be satisfied by killing a lot of people and it really did not matter who they were, as long as they were Muslim and brown. Recall the infamous interview given by Thomas Friedman who said that it did not matter whom the US attacked, it just had to demonstrate raw power.
“I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.
…
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?”You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow?
Well, Suck. On. This.
Okay.
That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could’ve hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.”
Or the words of neoconservative Michael Ledeen who was quoted as saying, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business”.
These people did not want a peaceful resolution. They did not even want justice. They wanted blood, lots of blood, and they got it.
There was also the geopolitical strategizing of the neoconservatives who saw the opportunity to mobilize this anger to invade Iraq and then later Iran and even Saudi Arabia. The latter group could not take the chance of getting bin Laden peacefully and putting him on trial and thus squandering what they saw as a golden opportunity to wage a wide-ranging war that would end with the US controlling that entire region.
So here we are twenty years later, with the Taliban back in power and bin Laden gone. Could we have arrived at this same state twenty years ago through negotiations and spared the Afghan people all the death and suffering they have gone through? One will never know. But it is sad that that option was not even tried.
Really Mano, you answered your own question:
and
No, indeed the war was unavoidable, and the ending was inevitable. There was never going to be a way for the US to build a democracy in Afghanistan, and there was never a political will to dig into the kinds of solutions that the people of the country may have actually embraced. The writing was on the wall as soon as the US invaded Iraq.
I remember feeling the anger of 9/11 (I live in NYC and saw the rubble firsthand four days later) and reluctantly supporting the attacks in Afghanistan. But then the focus shifted to Iraq, which as we knew even then had nothing to do with 9/11. There was a report that we knew where bin Laden was, but that he was allowed to escape to prolong the fighting.
I rewatched the Bond film Living Daylights a few years later, and was startled by the historicity in the story: US support for the Mujahudeen in Afghanistan in the 80’s because they opposed the USSR. Bin Laden, of course, was involved with this group.
I remember that time. I was living in the NYC area and was in my office a few blocks from the World Trade Center when the towers were attacked and then collapsed.
I also remember the level of irrational, homocidal anger and islamophobia in particular that was being expressed all around me. People were being attacked and killed (in the USA) if they just sorta looked Middle Eastern. I remember about a Sikh working at a gas station who was killed. I found it really scary, perhaps because it reminds me of what a dangerous species I live among. It’s like having tigers for roommates.
Germany and Japan, post-1945.
IMO, Afghanistan’s destiny was sealed as soon as the twin towers fell. The script could have been written then: the U.S. flexes its military might, takes over the country, then shoots as the rubble for twenty years. While the Afghans didn’t have much before, they had even less after we were through with them. We could have endeared ourselves so much by simply building highways, hospitals, schools, an electrical grid, civilian infrastructure, etc., but we pissed it all away. We could see this coming, because they/we won’t even do those things here. We are clearly more into bombing than building.
Re @#4, I think you may be technically correct, but also that Senator Lindsey Graham would say that when we invaded Germany and Japan in 1945, we NEVER left, and that our troops are still there now. Obviously, they could certainly leave, but that was 75 years ago.
Vietnam 2.0. And America will continue to admonish other nations for their belligerence and international interference, with no trace of self awareness.
Well, it took 20 years, but I think we can now agree that Thomas Friedman is finally right, that within six months, Afghanistan will have a stable government.
A horrible and abusive government selling heroin worldwide, but stable.
Gosh, thanks for the wisdom of your Friedman Unit predictions.
Germany and Japan are the exceptions, both countries had important differences from the way Afghanistan played out. In those countries the US spent the money and invested the manpower to actually control the country and significantly rebuild the damage done. Those countries also had some things that worked in the US’s favor. Both have strong central governments while Afghanistan doesn’t. This means less effort by the US to control the country. Less obviously, the cold war gave both countries good reasons to side with the US. Afghanistan is the reverse, with neighboring countries preferring the US leave and willing to play friendly with the Taliban.
We learned “the” lesson from Vietnam, that our version of nation building was futile and should not be attempted. And when Bush invaded Afghanistan, he promised he would not make the mistake of nation building.
The Bush of 2001 would say: Promises Made, Promises Kept.
Bush indeed did no nation building, even though he used our taxes to do what would be called nation building there if he hadn’t agreed that was a key Vietnam lesson.
But Bush, Cheney, and the other neocons never faced up to the fact that the nation building approach was the best of the bad options we faced, and they chose to “solve” this problem for 20 years by just not facing the issue. In other words, the lesson the Republicans learned from Vietnam was that we could be like an ostrich and bury our head for twenty years successfully, during which they could funnel a lot of taxes to arms sellers.
Ever since about 1949, the US has looked at every conflict like our successful invasion of France in 1944. In every military action, we always expect the friendly partisans to rise up and support us and take over as soon as we arrive. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened since 1945, because we haven’t invaded places where the main population agrees with us and trusts us to respect them. So I’d say we lost Afghanistan in October of 2001, because we refused to notice that it wasn’t France.
But we gave a lot of taxes to Halliburton, so Cheney would say that all’s right with the world.
@Reginald Selkirk(#4):
And the US almost failed with Germany (can’t/won’t comment on Japan, haven’t studied their history). Only reason the US didn’t fail was the rise of the USSR. We’d gotten Versailles II and a crippling bill for the rest of US liberated Europe, if someone hadn’t convinced the powers that be in the US that doing so would have handed the entirety of Europe to the USSR on a golden platter. That same realization also resulted in the US wanting the rebuilding to succeed.
As to the OP; I read an article (can’t find it anymore after almost 20 years) that wrote they’d even suggested shipping him to Turkey, this was pre-Erdogan, when it was still secular but Islamic and most important a member of NATO.
Mano:
Is there any sense at all in not going back to 1979, if not earlier? I mean, that’s not exactly ancient history, although some do treat it that way, and it’s certainly relevant.
Matt G, #2:
Rambo III is worth mentioning too. I suppose it probably had a slightly different flavor for some, when it first came out in 1988.
Holms, #7:
Sort of ironic, given the US plan to get the Soviets bogged down in a “Vietnamese quagmire” of their own:
I sometimes get the feeling that we had to show them (again) how it’s really done. Doesn’t seem to have made a difference that the Soviet government collapsed…. We’re not going to let them upstage us or anything, so everybody needs to know that we’re still the best at what we do.
Reginald Selkirk @#4,
My condition of post-colonial would exclude your Germany and Japan examples since those events took place during the colonial era.. The independence movements in the colonies did not gain steam until after the end of World War II.
Grenada. A rather small exception, but as far as I can tell, a real one.
I think Panama applies too.
But I’m not sure what it does with Puerto Rico, for example. It still looks an awful lot like a colony, even if some of us are too embarrassed with ourselves to use that word. Also, until very recently (1997), Hong Kong was a British one.
So, whenever this new postcolonial era is supposed to have begun, how are we to distinguish it from the previous era? Presumably it’s not by the lack of colonies….
How much do you have to bomb people to get them to love you?
Afghanistan’s fate was sealed in 1997 when the Taliban met with Unocal to negotiate building a pipeline from Tajikstan to Pakistan. Is that cynical enough for you? Do the research.
Oops, forgot to mention that the Taliban did not agree to a deal with Unocal. Coincidence.
I highly recommend Adam Curtis’ documentary Bitter Lake which is about earlier attempts to turn Afghanistan into a western pseudo-democracy. You can find it on the internets. As usual with Curtis, you’ll feel like you stumbled and fell through the thin painted paper stage-setting of the modern world.
“Could the massive tragedy of Afghanistan have been averted?”
Yes, but not anymore after the Bush administration decided to dethrone Saddam Hussein. Until then most muslim countries supported the Afghanistan invasion because of 9/11.
No, because the USA never had a political strategy to stabilize Afhanistan in the first place.
“I am struggling (and failing) to think of any time in the post-colonial era …..”
France (via French Guyana) actively supported the Jungle Commando during the Surinamese civil war of the 1980’s. That resulted in military dictator DD Bouterse temporarily retiring in 1989. He made a comeback in 2010 via democratic elections, won again in 2015 but lost in 2020. Overall handing over power has been peaceful since 1991.
In general the USA could learn a few things from France in this respect. There is no country that got militaritly involved with former colonies (mainly in Africa) more often. Sure that generally hasn’t resulted in political stability, but never in Afhanistan and Iraq-like disasters either.
What you have omitted is that the Afghanistan and Iraq disasters have resulted in the USA losing power and authority in international politics. The EU is not capable of and/or not willing to fill the vacuum. The countries that have benefited most are China (globally) and Iran (locally). The USA since almost 20 years is a superpower in decline. JoeB doesn’t have a strategy to stop this decline. In itself I’m totally OK with this, but not with the consequences. Any reader who doesn’t understand why (last few years is that American liberals are as fond of America First as the Republican war mongers) I recommend to ask the Uyghurs, the Taiwanese, the people from Hongkong and Irani refugees. But because of America First I doubt many will.
It’s typical for the America First attitude of the commenters above that they do not even think of France. Read and learn. Or not.
https://www.okayafrica.com/french-military-in-africa/
The big difference? France does have a strategy beyond conquering.
@mnbo: the French kicked ass in Indochina. Brilliant strategy. Algeria too.
Marcus @17: Why stop there? Maybe the US orchestrated 9/11 to give them an excuse to invade Afghanistan. I’m surprised you haven’t gone there yet (or have you?).
To be clear: I don’t buy the scenario in #23, or the pipeline theory.
@24 well, they wouldn’t need to, would they? When any excuse will do, an excuse will be along shortly without having to manufacture it.
Rob Grigjanis@#13:
Maybe the US orchestrated 9/11 to give them an excuse to invade Afghanistan
Come on. The US had it in for Iraq for a long tike, too, and jumped at the first semi-plausible excuse. Maybe that’s too conspiratorial for you?
The pipeline is not a theory. Whether it was more than a passing consideration is a question. The fact that the puzzle-pieces are as I describe them is not arguable, I think. Meanwhile, the US rejected the Taliban’s offer to turn OBL over to an international court, as if they just really wanted to topple Afghanistan. A military operation in Tora Bora was not an option, either. Why not? Perhaps I am trying to find a rational reason beyond “The US sometimes does dumb shit” -- that is true, too, but following the petrodollars is hardly conspiracy theory.
For wildly distorting my comment I give you a hearty “fuck you”
@21 mnbo
France? Never heard of it. What State is it in?
https://slate.com/culture/2001/12/is-the-afghan-war-about-an-oil-pipeline.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1626889.stm
OK I’m certainly not thinking here of what’s right or wrong, just what would have maybe worked (however you define that) better.
Sending massive armies and all the associated hardware overseas and “invading” a country is very twentieth-century, and of course older. It’s defunct now. A few examples have been mentioned above, but really, Mano is right about sending an army and then not having an end game. That’s because there isn’t one. The reason that used to work with colonizers is that, as with the British empire, a large part of the army was left in the country forever, they actually lived there with their families their whole lives to enforce colonial rule.
That’s not done anymore: it never occurred to the US (I think) to establish a permanent presence in Korea or Vietnam or anywhere and have US military families live there all their lives. And, there’s just no other way to keep a conquered place stable.
Couldn’t they have attacked whomever it was in Afghanistan with more surgical precision? Not covertly, but with smaller teams that are more effective at that sort of thing, or drones, which were just coming it, or just with more intelligence? No, because we’re the US, we have to send an entire army and all the hardware and repeat the stupidity and mass murder of the previous five decades.
Also, in this case, we ignored history. The British, during the empire days, had to admit defeat and withdraw from Afghanistan when they sent an army there to conquer it. The Russians, as mentioned above, had to to the same, just withdraw ignominiously. There is no one in history who has successfully invaded and conquered Afghanistan. Sort of like invading Moscow in winter.
I mean, I’ve known (and certainly a lot of other people knew) for twenty years now that this is how this war would end. Not exactly that the Taliban would take over, but that we would inevitably leave and then someone would. How many times have we seen that happen now?
So, why everyone is so suprised, I don’t know. What other ending was even possible? What other ending could even be imagined? As with so many things, the end was inherent in the beginning.
We never should have been in Afghanistan in the first place!
The US lost because it never sought a worthy objective. The invasion of Afghanistan only occurred, and was maintained as a) a fig leaf for conquering Iraq and b) a sink hole for spending on the military.
The Afghan army failed completely because it never trained to be an Afghan army, merely a U.S proxy -- helpless without U.S assets to supply it.
I’m seeing a number of news stories that basically claim this is the new Taliban, gentler and more reasonable. How they’re probably not gonna be what they are.
Obvious spin, but it’s how we’re gonna cope with the fait accompli.
So it goes.
If nothing else, it’s pretty clear that Biden’s strategy of
1) pulling out our military, then
2) allowing everyone who helped us to get out of the country
may have had some timing problems. We were evacuating the translators and others who helped us, yes, but acting like we had all the time in the world while doing so. Clearly, we should have known that we didn’t.
There was a brief moment when the taliban could have been so crushed they would have found it very hard to rise.
Then Bush sent the troops to a wild goose chase in Iraq.
.
I would like to remind you the Pesh Merga kurds in Syria have been holding their own against militants. So naturally they were abandoned.
USA keeps doing top-down interventions relying on corrupt local allies in South Vietnam, in Lebanon in the 1980s, in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
I think the deal in Lebanon fell through even faster, the army splitting along sectarian lines in a couple of days.
It occurred to me recently that when this all started, we were looking for someone to blame for the terrorist attack on 9/11. It didn’t seem like we were being especially careful about finding who exactly had done it. Which is strange, if the goal was really to stop it from happening again.
Fast forward to the end and… We’re again looking for someone to blame. We aren’t being especially careful this time, either.
Returning to where you started after paying this kind of price* seems like it should be a very big clue that we should really look hard at the whole thing. But not to assign blame. We need to look so we can really, truly never come back here again.
* A price paid by us. Our allies. The Afghanistan people. The meat grinder was not picky, it would eat any one and turn them into money for ghoulish investors.
… any time in the post-colonial era where a foreign power invaded a country, overthrew the government, installed a new one more to its liking, and then left, leaving behind a stable society.
South Korea, maybe? Though SK didn’t really get their act together until they got rid of US puppet Pres. Park Chung-hee in 1979.
As for Afghanistan, that goes back to ~1975. I don’t want to repeat my rant here.
On BBC Radio 4 this morning, we had General Sir Nick Carter, head of UK armed forces, who just a week ago had been blathering about how the Afghan “government forces” were “holding their own”, explaining that they gave in because they had no confidence in their leaders. You’d have thought, given the British army has been in Afghanistan as long as the US forces, that it was his job to know that before the Taliban’s walkover victory happened. How the man has the gall to keep his position, let alone come and bluster on radio, I have no idea.