The current debacle unfolding in Afghanistan is a bipartisan disaster at least two decades in the making made much worse by the feckless incompetence of the Biden Administration.
Defeat has long been baked into the Afghan pie by the failure of every Administration since Bush43 to grapple with the fact that Taliban has been armed and run by the Pakistani ISI essentially since their inception:
The Pakistan government has repeatedly denied that it provides any military support to the Taliban in its diplomacy regarding its extensive operations in Afghanistan. Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and manipulate the ongoing fighting, Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support as the Taliban’s virtual emissaries abroad, arranging training for Taliban fighters, recruiting skilled and unskilled manpower to serve in Taliban armies, planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and on several occasions apparently directly providing combat support. In April and May 2001 Human Rights Watch sources reported that as many as thirty trucks a day were crossing the Pakistan border; sources inside Afghanistan reported that some of these convoys were carrying artillery shells, tank rounds, and rocket-propelled grenades. Such deliveries are in direct violation of U.N. sanctions. Pakistani landmines have been found in Afghanistan; they include both antipersonnel and antivehicle mines. Pakistan’s army and intelligence services, principally the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), contribute to making the Taliban a highly effective military force. While these Pakistani agencies do not direct the policies of the IEA, senior Pakistani military and intelligence officers help plan and execute major military operations. In addition, private-sector actors in Pakistan provide financial assistance to the Taliban.
As if Osama Bin Laden being caught in Abbottabad and in regular contact with the ISI and Pakistani military officials just weren’t enough of a hint. In addition to jihadist sympathies by the Muslim government, Pakistans deep state regards Afghanistan as “strategic depth” against India. But for 20 years Washington has looked the other way while Pakistan continued that support and killed our troops because we let them obtain nuclear weapons (another spectacular failure from our craptacular CIA), and confronting them would be “inconvenient.”
The United States could have declared victory and gone home after routing the Taliban in 2001, or after the first Presidential election in 2004, or the first parliamentary election in 2005. But our political elites deluded themselves into thinking that “nation building” could be accomplished in the land known as “The Grave of Empires,” that we could succeed where The British Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union all failed. Thus a great deal of lives and treasure were lost propping up various weak leaders to govern a nation that’s historically ungovernable.
This was a bipartisan disaster, and another black eye for national security agencies that made mistake after mistake in the region, from backing jihadist idiots like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar over Ahmad Shah Massoud, to missing Pakistan’s nuclear program, to being unable to figure out how Pakistan is backing the Taliban despite over 20 years of evidence. One has to wonder if it’s mere incompetence, or if the ISI has one or more moles in the CIA. (It also wouldn’t surprise me if China has been financially backing the Taliban as well.),
Like Vietnam, training native armies to fight for themselves (“Vietnamization”) has been a tremendous failure, and like Vietnam, the best and the brightest among our chattering elites fought the war in a way to make us stay in and lose. The result has been the headlong rout of the Afghan national army because evidently 20 years of time, blood and money isn’t enough to mold non-Jihadist Afghans into an effective fighting force.
Yet all that said, the Biden Administration has made things immeasurably worse.
Instead of a quiet orderly withdrawal behind the scenes, Biden precipitously announced a September 11 withdrawal, presumably as an giant “Fuck You” to everyone with an American flag on their pickup truck.
Now the ostensible Afghan army is melting before the Taliban advance and leaving possibly billions of dollars of modern U.S. military equipment behind. And just as in Vietnam, we’ve had to rush to evacuate the U.S. embassy, burn secret documents and leave American allies to the tender mercies of our enemies. It’s almost as though ex-Obama Administration official wanted to see American prestige abjectly humiliated on the world stage as punishment for Americans who dared vote against them.
The fact that we’ve achieved something like successful nation building in Iraq is a topic for another time. But in Iraq and Syria, President Trump announced we were going to be withdrawing U.S. troops, and then proceeded to bomb the snot out of Jihadist enemies and whacked Qassem Suleimani. And whoever was in charge of turning the Kurds into an effective fighting forces succeeded where those training the Afghans abjectly failed.
If there’s any grim consolation in all this is the fact that the Taliban will likely have little better success in ruling Afghanistan’s various tribal factions than America has had. Funding functioning guerrilla armies is relatively easy, but turning Afghanistan into a functional country is probably impossible, and now the Taliban and their masters in Pakistani are stuck with that tar-baby.