The sobering reality surrounding the Afghan debacle

The West's 20-year failure reflects a regional impotence, not just an Afghan one. But the manner of America's exit from Kabul will still haunt the Biden administration and damage the whole of the West

There is only one good thing about the fact that the 20th anniversary of 9/11 will take place less than a month after the Taliban have re-established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan: it is that it will serve as a reminder that there was a reason to have invaded the country and toppled the Taliban government two decades ago. When nearly 3,000 people are suddenly slaughtered on your soil, one sunny weekday morning, in an atrocity planned and ordered by a known terrorist group residing in a country whose government refuses to co-operate in bringing that group and its leader to justice, options are, let us say, limited. This was, let us also recall, the sole occasion on which Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, the article under which signatories agree to consider an attack on one as an attack on all, has been invoked. The US-led invasion was widely supported, and was condemned or opposed by only a very few countries, unlike the one two years later in Iraq.

Other than that, the 20th anniversary will be an even more sombre occasion than usual, for alongside the terrible memories of that day will now stand a powerful sense of two decades of failure in Afghanistan, of the betrayal of all those Afghans who had become convinced that they could live in a freer and somewhat more prosperous country than hitherto, and of a major blow to the credibility of America, of NATO and of President Joe Biden personally in international affairs. Most of the recriminations currently under way are focused on what has and has not been done in Afghanistan, now and over the past two decades. Whether or not such criticisms are justified, I am not really able to judge. But in any case my belief is that this focus is too narrow. The real failure since September 2001 has been a regional failure, not just or even mainly an Afghan one. That failure centres on Pakistan.

David Frum, who was writing President George W. Bush’s foreign affairs speeches in 2001-02, has commented in The Atlantic that if the US-led invasion had achieved its primary goal of the killing or capture of Osama bin Laden in December 2001, the moment when he slipped away in the hills of Tora Bora, the story of America’s intervention in Afghanistan would have ended very differently, with a faster withdrawal, a faster handover to some sort of new Afghan government and no long-term commitment. We can’t know whether this is true — it is hard to imagine that full withdrawal following that military victory would have been considered wise, given the then US views about having left Saddam Hussein in place following the first Gulf War in 1991 — but his point nevertheless does lead us to somewhere important and which is being somewhat overlooked in the immediate aftermath of the debacle in Afghanistan itself.

Where did Osama bin Laden hide out for the next decade, until he was killed by US forces in that famous raid in 2011? Pakistan, and not simply the ungoverned ‘tribal areas’ where the government’s writ hardly runs. He was in Abbottabad, a mid-sized city just 120 km from the capital Islamabad and home, among other institutions, to the Pakistan Military Academy. Where have the Taliban been basing themselves these past two decades, since their defeat? Well, some of the leaders may have been in Qatar but mainly they have been in Pakistan, with the backing and apparently blessing of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency. The fact that the Taliban still existed as an opposition group with whom the Trump administration chose to negotiate its exit deal last year is largely due to Pakistani support, though Qatar and other Gulf Sunni states must presumably also take some of the credit.

What this tells us, or perhaps simply reminds us, is that the big failure in and after 2001 was the failure to secure real, long-term support from the front-line states surrounding Afghanistan: Iran, China, Russia, the five ‘Stans’ and India, but above all Pakistan. From some of those, support would never have been forthcoming. But Pakistan had long been a recipient of American aid, military and otherwise, and was considered a US ally during the Cold War. The fact that it was meanwhile also snuggling close to China however ought to have been a clue as to the mountain that would have to be climbed to bring it at all firmly into the American camp. As is the fact that Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons programme benefited from Chinese support and technology, especially during the 1990s.

With that starting point, then, it may never have been likely that the US could achieve sufficient leverage over Pakistan after 2001 for it to stand a chance of really securing the long-term stability of Afghanistan, absent a permanent semi-colonial or protectorate status. This was especially so at a time when Pakistan and India were themselves engaged in a military confrontation, in a huge standoff in 2001-02 which led to plausible fears of a nuclear war between the two. And it was a period when a big target of US foreign policy was the establishment of a closer relationship with India, one which led to the US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement of 2005, in large part as the beginning of an offset against China’s rising power in the Indo-Pacific, and can now be seen as a centre-piece of the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy, through an enhanced role for the ‘Quad’ of India, Japan, Australia and the US.

So now, with hindsight, we ought to see that the key mistake — or perhaps in truth it was an admission of this impossibility — of the period lay in George W Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address when, using David Frum’s words, he described America’s enemies as the “axis of evil”, namely Iran, Iraq and North Korea, three countries who he accused of being state sponsors of terrorism as well as seekers and users of weapons of mass destruction.

As we now see, none of those three has been responsible for America’s failure in Afghanistan and for the return to power of the Taliban. That honour lies largely in Pakistan’s hands, and the big failure in the region of these decades has been the inability to bring Pakistan on-side. Even if the US had not diverted its attention and resources to the fateful invasion of Iraq in 2003, that failure would ultimately have doomed its policy in Afghanistan too.

To say this is not at all to divert attention from the more immediate and tragic failures, especially moral ones but also terrible indications of a mixture of incompetent and insouciant planning, one that is not, unfortunately, a new feature of American attitudes to international engagement. As Gideon Rachman has written in the FT there can now be no real doubt that we are living in a post-American world. Fareed Zakaria’s book with that name appeared in 2008, a moment when, until the financial crash happened, many believed his judgement to be premature. Now it looks highly prescient.