Americans are expressing disgust and amazement that the Taliban managed to recapture control of Kabul, Afghanistan overnight after the Afghan "government" and military forces literally evaporated. It's damning enough that America wasn't smart enough to avoid this morass in the first place after having a front row seat to watch the Soviets fail to control the country from 1979 to 1989. It's worse that we didn't figure out we were dealing with dishonest allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan when Osama bin Laden managed to escape from caves in Tora Bora and (eventually, as we found out) live in Pakistan for almost ten years. To not understand how the collapse came so quickly? You're really not paying attention.
Afghanistan is perhaps uniquely suited to serving as a cauldron for brewing up problems in a modernized industrial world. It all starts with one obvious physical reality.
IT'S A LANDLOCKED, MOUNTAINOUS DESERT. There are no ocean beaches to draw tourism. There are a few lakes and rivers but temperatures range from -11 degrees (F) in the winter to 122 degrees (F) in the summer. Sure, some say it may have a trillion dollars worth of gold, copper, uranium, etc. but logistical problems abound. It's tough to power mining and refining equipment when Taliban insurgents bomb high voltage power lines, dropping a third of the country into darkness. Tougher still to get output to markets when the 10,000 miles of roads the US spent $3 billion to build have also been pitted with bomb craters, making ninety five percent of those miles undriveable. (I guess 10,000 miles of bombed out roads are better than what the country had in 2001 -- a total of 50 miles of paved roads). Of course, there's one reliable sector of the economy that delivers consistently... Poppy farming, which feeds a worldwide narcotics supply chain and provides billions in cash to bad actors across the globe. Poppy farming is thought to generate $2.1 billion in revenue per year, in a national economy of roughly $19.3 billion. That's 10.9 percent of the economy traced to illicit drugs. (Incidentally, $19.3 billion dollars doesn't even put you on the Fortune 500.)
In short, it is a location which more closely resembles the moon than any traditionally habitable place on earth. No one from any "civilized" society is going to want to live in such a hell-hole and the biggest source of economic activity is linked to highly organized, extremely violent narcotics traffickers. Unfortunately, the same factors making the country economic and social kryptonite to most on the planet creates something else... Lots of open space for bad actors to assemble, indoctrinate, train and plan.
The Russians entered Afghanistan in 1979 attempting to prop up a communist regime that took power in 1978 then failed to stifle unrest from various mujahideen tribal sects. After those sects banded together to chase the Soviets out by 1989, they continued fighting amongst themselves with the Taliban as one of those sects eventually gaining the upper hand. By 1995-1996, the Taliban gained complete control, began bombing ancient historical sites as an affront to Islam, disbanded schools for children and generally took the country back to 700 AD. No rational person on the planet wanted to spend time in Afghanistan.
But al-Queda adherents had no qualms about residing in Afghanistan. The Taliban were just as crazy as AQ was. The country provided them the space they needed to recruit and indoctrinate future terrorists and a place to draw in key strategic leaders from across the globe for planning. Fly into an adjacent country, come in via the mountains, return the same way. Untraceable. Completely off the radar.
And because there is so little in the country of "value" to a traditional western industrial economy, attempting any war in such a country inevitably produces asymmetric warfare. We have fighters and smart bombs but what exists of conventional tactical or strategic value that can be blown up to change behavior? Nothing. Go ahead. Drop a $500,000 bunker buster bomb on me. You know how much I spent on the cave I was hiding in? Nothing. And since the society is so corrupt, I was tipped off that you were tipped off so us bad guys got out way ahead of you. You just spent $500k to kill a few women and children and bounce some rubble around.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to win a war in this environment. Unless you are willing to drop nuclear weapons on the entire country and wipe everyone out leaving a big Mr. Yuck sticker on the entire country for the next 300 years (I'm not making that argument, just setting a rhetorical extreme for context…), it is virtually impossible to change this dynamic using ANY traditional definition of war. America didn't lose the Afghan war when it ended. America lost the war the day we declared it. It was lost when Bush failed to focus on rooting out bin Laden in the caves at Tora Bora, letting him escape to Pakistan, and instead decided to establish a democracy in Afghanistan.
In 2001, few American leaders asked why we suddenly became fixated on nation building without accomplishing the primary missing of killing bin Laden.
In March 2003, few American leaders asked why we were ramping up a SECOND war in Iraq when Mission #1 (Kill bin Laden) was still not accomplished and we had not yet made the streets of Kandahar safe for Starbucks and Costco.
In December 2003, no one seemed to be doubting the nation building rationale in Afghanistan, despite the fact that the capture of Saddam Hussein and unraveling of Iraqi society was proving Americans were lied to by our government about the entire rationale for the war (weapons of mass destruction and / or manufacturing facilities for them) and the immediate conversion of Iraq into another beacon of democracy overnight.
In 2006, no one seemed to second guess the continued slog in Afghanistan, despite a resurgence in Taliban attacks throughout the country.
It turns out, people IN the military WERE asking questions and raising concerns but, as reported today in The Washington Post, those concerns were not communicated at top leadership levels.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/afghan-security-forces-capabilities/2021/08/15/052a45e2-fdc7-11eb-a664-4f6de3e17ff0_story.htmlIn fact, according to documents obtained for the forthcoming Washington Post book "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War," U.S. military officials privately harbored fundamental doubts for the duration of the war that the Afghan security forces could ever become competent or shed their dependency on U.S. money and firepower. "Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane," an unnamed former U.S. official told government interviewers in 2016.
So what is the $2 trillion dollar political, military and moral question that isn't being asked now?
What can and should a civil, global world do to address the horrific abuses that will arise again from the Taliban? What should be done
- knowing women are going back to the 700s?
- knowing thousands will be murdered for collaborating with outsiders?
- knowing children's education will be virtually eliminated?
- knowing Afghanistan may return to acting as a haven for nationless terrorist organizations?
- knowing one country (or two or three) cannot go it alone and achieve victory?
- knowing military strategists have a 60-year track record of dishonesty?
- knowing the military-industrial complex wins even when the house loses big?
Answering that question is difficult because there are MANY situations where the "right" thing to do can't result in a net-positive improvement, only a "least-worst" scenario where the best action may be to do NOTHING. The Afghan war killed 2448 American service personnel, 3846 (mostly) American contractors, 66,000 Afghan forces, and 47,245 Afghan civilians -- not counting 51,191 Taliban fighters. Would staying out of Afghanistan entirely since 2001 still have resulted in the Taliban killing 113,000 innocent Afghani people? We'll never know but the answer seems likely to be yes. If the answer was yes, American might have been better off staying out entirely, keeping $2 trillion in our taxpayer pockets and keeping 6200 Americans alive.
Suppose the argument is that societies with power have an obligation to TRY to halt these slow-motion human atrocities. If so, what is the tipping point in the ratio between these numbers?
- local good guys killed by local bad guys without intervention
- local good guys killed in the fog of a war launched by foreign good guys trying to kill local bad guys
If trying is a moral obligation, who should be making that decision? The leaders of the foreign good guys or the actual foreign good guys who might also do some of the dying?
The biggest problem is that no politicians are even publicly ASKING these questions to trigger legitimate debate, much less attempting to answer them. At this point, it is very clear our political and military leaders are 0 for 3 in the last sixty years at answering any of these questions correctly.
Perhaps the first thing America should focus on is killing the open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force enacted in 2001 that led to these catastrophes. No President should have the power to commit trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives without concrete limits on time, place and enemy. No Senator or Representative should escape their responsibility of holding a President in check regarding war powers.
And as with everything else, the American public ultimately owns all of this. We voted these liars into office, repeatedly.
WTH
