The US military is withdrawing from Afghanistan as the Taliban take over. On 6 July, US troops left their Bagram air base near Kabul in the middle of the night without informing the Afghan allies. The strange thing in this grim final phase of the war is that everything was predictable from the start. Yet false beliefs have fueled an initiative that has cost untold human lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, leaving Afghanistan worse off than it was before. And you have to understand why it happened.
The United States and its allies had to respond by force to a regime that had directly or indirectly allowed the 9/11 attacks. But a military intelligence operation conducted against those responsible for the attacks on the twin towers and their accomplices would have served to bring justice and better avenge an invasion. Instead the Bush administration chose a colossal military and political restructuring of the country. And she was supported in this desperate task by the political and information establishment. For a few months it seemed that everything was fine. Those who wanted to overthrow the Taliban felt vindicated when dancing crowds welcomed Western liberators in Kabul. But those who knew Afghanistan well knew that the Taliban had also been welcomed as liberators in many parts of the country, especially in the south, where the majority of Pashtuns live.
The Taliban had emerged in the mid-1990s to rid the country of warlords, many of whom were opium traffickers. By 2001, many Afghans had grown tired of the brutality of the Taliban, especially in Kabul, where people were on average freer and more educated thanks to the Soviet regime’s reforms in the 1980s. Women in the capital and in ethnic minority-dominated provinces scorned the Taliban’s dictates of dress and conduct. These strict social norms, however, were nothing new to rural Pashtun women. Even when the Taliban broke up in 2001, the group’s presence in rural Afghan society and its role in the country’s political future were a foregone conclusion.
There was no need to invoke the cliché of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires to understand that the Taliban was a resilient and changing force. They drew their strength from the rural Pashtun area, as well as from sympathizers of that ethnicity and from military and intelligence officers in Pakistan, who saw the Taliban as a barrier against Western and Indian influence in Afghanistan.
In the early 2000s, nearly all Pakistanis and Afghans I respect were convinced that the United States would fail. Western diplomats, military and journalists, however, believed that Western military and economic support would help Washington make Afghanistan a modern democracy. The Soviet Union in Kabul had brutally tried to modernize and centralize a country with many poor linguistic and ethnic communities living in remote areas. Why should the United States have succeeded where the Communists had failed? How could their allies, among whom have always been some of the most evil and corrupt men in Afghanistan, help build democracy and protect women’s rights?
What struck me then was the fact that few people asked these questions to those who wanted to reform the state. The rare Afghan voices heard were almost all from an elite struggling to take over from the Taliban. Afghan journalists, who are numerous today, were unknown. There were some good ones in Peshawar. But their belief that the United States had no choice but to negotiate with the Taliban was not heard. When I was writing for US magazines, I felt urged not to deviate too much from the national consensus (which at first even left-wing magazines like The Nation adhered to) in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan.
This is why that war appears today, more than anything, a huge cultural disaster, a failure to recognize a complex reality. A failure that has produced all the other failures – diplomatic, military and political – both in Iraq and in Afghanistan. It is probably too optimistic to imagine that these disasters, the price of which has been appalling, could have been avoided by less conformist views and an openness to the arguments of those who were against it, including Afghans. However, a lesson can be learned from the defeat of the United States: intellectual diversity, often presented as a moral imperative, is also a practical necessity. Especially if the United States wants to avoid worse mistakes in its foreign policy in the future.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
.