October 1, 2021

By Mavis Chan

Graphic by Rachel Taylor

The Afghanistan government was the latest addition to the dustbin of failed American diplomatic ventures. As Thomas Meaney said in “The London Review of Books,” the former president Ashraf Ghani “has now joined the ranks of Washington’s failed proxies: Ngô Đình Diêm, Ahmed Chalabi, Nouri al-Maliki, Hamid Karzai.” Why did this happen again?

The Taliban created a successful narrative for themselves while enjoying close access to many ordinary Afghan communities and foreign funding. Meanwhile, the U.S. policy of implementing a whole new political arrangement from above proved to be impractical, while there were also too many contradictions in their interventionist policy.

War, nowadays, is about the confrontation of ideologies. A nation has finite resources, but resources of an ideology can be boundless. The Taliban continuously attracted new members by portraying themselves as the defenders of Islam against the ‘godless imperalist’ American forces. At the same time, they played on the locals’ instinctive dislike of having their country occupied by foreigners. 

In contrast, the U.S. could not spread an effective counter-narrative. Sulaiman Assadullah, an MU graduate student from Afghanistan with experiences in development work in his home country, said that the “dream” U.S. brought into Afghanistan — democratic elections, political freedoms and women’s rights — had never penetrated into the rural areas and provinces. They may have built Kabul into a metropolitan liberal city, but the extent of modernization was far too little. 

The Taliban also operated among the ordinary masses. After getting ousted by the U.S. in December 2001, surviving members of the Taliban simply went back to their villages. They dressed the way ordinary people dressed and lived in houses ordinary people lived in. Patrick Cockburn, a veteran Middle East correspondent, said that throughout the 20-year period, the Taliban commanders were “still in the villages” and remained “very undefeated.” 

Funding is another important factor. The Taliban was nurtured and backed by Pakistan. The country had tolerated religious schools that trained new Taliban recruits; their security service, ISI, was known to send the Taliban military assistance. The porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan meant that Taliban leaders and fighters could simply cross over to Pakistan to bide their time. 

There may be an ethnic factor in Pakistan’s calculation of supporting the Taliban. The Taliban was mostly made up of people from the Pashtun ethnic group, the largest in Afghanistan. The Pashtuns are also the second largest ethnic group in Pakistan. The Americans backed the Northern Alliance, which was largely made up of northern Tajik and Uzbek warlords. Foreign involvement in Afghanistan had led that war to become increasingly ethnocentric. This had the potential effect of decreasing trust in any national government.

The policy of ‘promoting freedom and democracy abroad’ adopted by the U.S. sounded great in theory. However, it wasn’t that easy in practice. Afghanistan was a largely rural and traditional country. Many had never really experienced democracy. Assadullah said the U.S. didn’t educate the Afghan public adequately on running democratic governments. The Afghan government post-2001 was imposed upon from above. It was not something the people had fought for the way Americans and the French did. Assadullah mentioned stories of local government officials leaving their posts before the Taliban came to their areas.

The U.S. also had to balance bringing freedom and democracy with their own national interests. These two considerations often didn’t coincide. Professor Heather Ba, who specializes in international political economy, said that Afghanistan didn’t have much strategic value in America’s foreign policy plans. She said even though there are mineral mines in the country, nobody has ever accessed them. As time passed, people in America started questioning the purpose of going into that country. One ought to remember that the U.S. only toppled the Taliban after the 9/11 attacks. Back in the ‘90s, they were supporting the equally undemocratic mujahideen. 

Assadullah repeatedly pointed out the irony of the War on Terror since the U.S. would not confront Pakistan despite knowing the latter’s role in sponsoring the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Championing freedom and democracy certainly gave the U.S. a moral high ground, but that ground can be quite shaky when they also have close relations with dictatorships such as the Gulf monarchies and the Central Asian states. There are American military forces in Kuwait, Qatar and others; a report from the Department of State said that the country had spent over $50 billion in economic assistance in countries like Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic. It was exactly this kind of hypocrisy that made people lose faith in the U.S. 

The humanitarian work carried out by the U.S. was often unsatisfactory. For instance, Assadullah remembered a time when he worked on an USAID project for upgrading the technology in local universities in Afghanistan. Most of the budget ended up paying for international consultants and the team working on the project, with only a fraction of the original budget going into actually developing the local universities.The ineffectiveness of foreign aid diminished public support for their supposed liberators. A 2019 report from USAID showed that an estimated 43% of the 2,231 USAID awards in fiscal years 2014-2016 only achieved half of the expected results in their projects, but they still got paid in full. Such a military-and-humanitarian-aid complex left even an experienced aid worker like Assadullah disillusioned.

This only touches on the surface of why the U.S.-backed Afghan government fell so quickly when left alone. The causes of this failure are debatable, but the consequences are beyond doubt. Scenes of people hanging onto the wings of airplanes, pouring into refugee camps and women burning their clothes and diplomas were the undeniable results.

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Edited by Cayli Yanagida | cyanagida@maneater.com