On our minds: The unresolved tension in America's mission in Afghanistan that culminated in this week's announcement of withdrawal. |
The Afghanistan Contradiction |
 | | Traffic last month in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. American intelligence analysts say security in the country may worsen almost immediately after the last U.S. troops are withdrawn.Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times |
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Three days after Christmas, in 1985, President Reagan addressed the nation by radio to discuss "a matter of vital importance to our country and the world: the struggle for a free Afghanistan." |
The Soviet Union, Afghanistan's northern neighbor, had invaded six years earlier to prop up its puppet government. |
He asked the "free world" to galvanize its support for the war that he called "a compelling moral responsibility of all free people" and a battle for "the human spirit." |
That year alone, his administration secretly funneled a quarter of a billion dollars in cash and weapons to the anti-Soviet fighters, equivalent to 7.5 percent of the entire Afghan economy. |
In the search to spend that money, a C.I.A. officer wrote, in a classified memo, "analytically, the best fighters — the best organized fighters — were the fundamentalists." The memo concluded that the best such target for U.S. funding was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a mujahedeen commander known for his brutality. He would, many years later, turn to fight the very Americans who had aided his rise. |
For most of the last 40 years, the United States has been engaged with the cycle of warfare in this remote, distant country. |
And, throughout, it has pursued two aims in grave tension. First, the defeat what Washington deemed to be its enemies in the Afghan hills and valleys, achieved through force. And, second, to see those hills and valleys pacified under a stable, secure state. |
But the United States never succeeded in reconciling those two goals. It poured its wealth and might into destroying its enemies, in the process helping to destroy the potential foundations of any meaningful state, too. Nearly a half-century later, Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, it has one the lowest life expectancies in the world, and thousands of civilians die in fighting every year. |
That contradiction culminated, this week, with President Biden announcing he would withdraw the few remaining American troops, explaining, "our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan have become increasingly unclear." |
I have been writing about that tension in American aims since 2009, when President Obama came into office promising to reconcile it by escalating to what became 100,000 troops. This drastically escalated fighting against the insurgents and warlords that Mr. Obama's strategy called for destroying, but never fully succeeded in installing a top-down and centralized government that was broadly acceptable to most Afghans. |
So, this week, when I asked Frances Z. Brown, an Afghanistan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, whether that contradiction was inherent to the war — predetermined, maybe irreconcilable — I assumed she would say yes. But I was wrong. |
"Key choices that were made that got us to this point," she said, that had set those two aims at greater and greater tension with one another. |
The effort that began with the American-led invasion of 2001, at least, had not been doomed to this outcome from the start, she said, a view I heard from others. The war had come to this point through a series of fateful decisions: some made out of inattention, others from hubris or ambition, others still from good intentions whose outcomes were not initially obvious. |
She highlighted three in particular, each important in its own right as well as illustrative of what had gone wrong. |
First, at the invasion's outset, the United States refused to so much as accept the surrender of the Taliban, much less negotiate its reintegration. |
Civil wars in badly fractured states typically end by reconciling among armed factions, getting each bought into peace with some share of control, while gradually building a new state on the foundation of their local-level rule. The Taliban, Afghanistan's government, since 1996, seemed natural for this. After reconstituting itself from the 2001 invasion, it represented much of the country's rural Pashtun population. Yet Washington was bent on its defeat. |
"There was good reason to exclude the Taliban," Ms. Brown said. The movement had sheltered Al Qaeda, massacred its own people, violently subjugated women. But this approach "set up their exclusion from the get-go." |
Second, Ms. Brown said, was the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which consumed American attention for years. |
"People debate whether that decision was deterministic or not," she wrote in an email after we'd talked. "After all, as we have learned in Afghanistan, more resources and attention doesn't equal better outcomes." |
But this was a "formative" few years for Afghanistan, when "there was a ton of Afghan good will and excitement about democracy" and the Taliban remained mostly in exile abroad. Given that, she wrote, "I'm inclined to think it hurt things at least a fair amount." |
And, like many Afghanistan experts I have spoken to, she put especially heavy blame on Mr. Obama's escalation during his first term. (Ms. Brown was in Afghanistan at the time, for the U.S. Agency for International Development. She later worked on Mr. Obama's National Security Council, and then Mr. Trump's, on democracy issues.) |
His administration had framed the surge as an investment in political, not military, ends. Clearing insurgents and warlords, building good governance in their place, would naturally win over the Afghan people. Support for the insurgents would wither. The war would end. |
"You would often hear, 'We're going to extend the writ of the state into every valley,'" Ms. Brown said. "That was the mind-set." |
But this strategy turned out to be at odds with itself, much as Mr. Reagan's had been. |
In the 1980s, arming rebels and extremists did expel the Soviets, but it also opened a power vacuum. Rather than filled by American-style democracy as Washington expected, it led all those heavily-armed factions to fight among themselves, triggering a grinding civil war that gave rise to the Taliban. |
Thirty years later, the 100,000 American troops deployed across Afghanistan did dislodge insurgent control from much of the country. But, as before, opening power vacuums was easier than filling them. Especially when Washington worked so hard to keep the vacuum open by excluding the local fighters and warlords who mostly aligned with the Taliban. |
Treating the war as "a contest for governance," Ms. Brown said, left "no room for reconciliation." It put the central government irrevocably at odds with local groups who exercised the closest thing much of Afghanistan had to ground-level control. |
It was the same contradiction that had tripped up Washington for 40 years, and for which Afghans had always paid the ultimate cost. The Americans wanted to destroy their adversaries. They wanted to build a functioning state. They assumed the first would help bring about the second, even though it so rarely had. |
You don't hear as much about failed states as you used to. They were a frequent point of discussion in the 2000s, when they were seen as incubators of terrorist groups that might attack the United States. And again in the mid-2010s, when they were seen driving refugee flows that might inspire backlash in Western countries. |
But failed states still exist in our world. They are still a source of suffering and violence for people within them. And, inevitably, for reasons humanitarian or self-interested or both, the United States, as the world's leading military power, will one day again find itself puzzling over how to un-collapse a country. The lessons of Afghanistan, where no amount of violence and escalation delivered Mr. Reagan's hopes for "a free Afghanistan," may be worth remembering. |
The pause on Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccinations has been justified in part as necessary to combat vaccine skepticism. Others argue that it will worsen distrust in the shots. Here's what Govind Persad, a University of Denver bioethicist, said when I asked him about the last round of this debate: |
I feel uneasy about that kind of rationale because if you say, 'We shouldn't let person A have this because what if they get sick and then person B doesn't want to get that treatment.' It seems like a troubling line, to say that one person's access to treatment should be dependent on how that might affect the comfort or psychology of a third party. |
- You may have seen a much-circulated poll this week asking Americans to identify the "best" states. But states with larger populations got polled more, and so got a greater say in the results. What happens when you un-skew those results by population?
- The story of Prince Philip's exile from Greece as a boy turns out to be a pretty revealing lens for understanding the history of the 20th century.
- A new documentary on the life and impact of Eric Hobsbawn, a seminal political theorist quoted many times in this newsletter, is free to watch on YouTube.
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