The US debacle in Afghanistan

THE United States withdrew from Afghanistan in August after 20 years of occupation, signalling the failure of its experiment in nation building in the country. Over $2 trillion has been expended on the project with human and civilian casualties on both sides. The journey to Afghanistan began in 2001 when Al-Qaeda operatives hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC. Another plane crashed onto a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. About 3,000 people were reported to have died in the attacks. Although Afghanistan provided the base for the al-Qaeda operatives, none of the 19 hijackers were Afghan nationals. Nonetheless, President George W. Bush declared a global war on terror, assuring that he would overwhelm terrorism. He pointed at al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and called on the Taliban regime to “deliver to the United States authorities all the leaders of al-Qaeda who hid in Afghanistan or share their fate.”

On October 7, 2001, the United States military, with British support, began a bombing campaign against Taliban forces under the name of “Operation Enduring Freedom”. Canada, Australia, Germany, and France pledged support. In November 2001, Kabul, the Afghan capital, fell. On December 5, 2001, the United Nations invited major Afghan factions to a conference in Bonn, Germany, where an agreement was reached to install Hamid Karzai as head of an interim administration, and to create an international peacekeeping force to maintain security in Kabul. This was followed by the UN Security Council Resolution 1386 on December 20 that established  the International Security Assistance Force ( ISAF), marking the end of the Taliban regime. Contrary to previous US hesitancy in embarking on a nation building mission, President Bush opted for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, arguing that “by helping to build an Afghanistan that is free from this evil and is a better place in which to live”, the United States would be taking a cue from the post-World War II Marshall Plan that revived Western Europe.

The United States Congress appropriated over $38 billion in humanitarian and reconstruction assistance to Afghanistan from 2001 to 2009. The United States, working in concert with NATO and the UN, helped to produce a constitution for Afghanistan, creating a presidential system intended to unite the country’s various ethnic groups. It eventually conducted elections that marked the entrance of Afghanistan into the class of democratic countries. However, over the years, suicide attacks, remotely detonated bombings, kidnapping of Westerners and violence continued to characterise governance in Afghanistan.

When Barack Obama became president in 2009, he promised to send additional troops to Afghanistan to ensure stability, and to train Afghan troops and police in order to draw down most combat forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2011. Osama Bin Laden was killed that year. A long transition eventually commenced following the Lisbon conference of 2010 with the intention to ensure complete withdrawal in 2014. However, by 2018, the resilience of the Taliban became visible with the attack on Kabul in which 115 people were killed. The United States had no choice but to engage in peace talks with the Taliban. On February 29 2020, an agreement was reached to pave the way for a significant drawdown of U.S troops in Afghanistan, with a guarantee from the Taliban that the country would not be used for terrorist activities, together with a deal to commence intra-Afghan negotiations.

President Joe Biden, in April this year, announced the withdrawal of the remaining 3,500 troops in Afghanistan regardless of the question whether or not progress was made in the intra-Afghan peace talks, and whether or not the Taliban reduced its attacks on Afghan security forces and citizens. By mid-August, it had become obvious that the Taliban was gradually taking over spaces vacated by the US military. Thus, Taliban fighters overrun the capital, Kabul, and took over the presidential palace hours after President Ghani left the country, facing little resistance.

Twenty years after the war began, the United States left Afghanistan unconditionally, and without fulfilling the mission of building it into a thriving democracy. The Taliban are back in power. What this tells us is that only the people can build their own nation in whatever fashion they choose. A foreign power cannot impose it from without. Furthermore, the global war on terror cannot be fought by rash use of military might alone. As former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, puts it, it requires creative diplomacy or what Harvard scholar, Joseph Nye, calls soft power.  It requires reconciling nations who have divergent interests in Afghanistan, such as India, China, Russia and Pakistan  through creative diplomacy that can lead to the adoption of common measures to address terrorism in Afghanistan.

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