The United States has been at war in Afghanistan longer than any other U.S. military conflict and spent more than the Marshall Plan on aid in Afghanistan. Despite three presidencies calling to end the war swiftly, American soldiers are still in Afghanistan with no clear exit strategy. Nearly two decades of hindsight and new insider revelations from The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” form a more coherent explanation of the lengthy and largely unsuccessful war in Afghanistan. Abroad, a lack of consistent U.S. goals, misunderstanding of the local culture, weakness of the Afghan central government, and the Taliban’s elusiveness and lucrative control of the opium industry prolonged the war. At home, the threat of Afghanistan collapsing into a launching pad for terror attacks against the United States forced continued American support for the war.
Convoluted Strategy and Mission Creep
The lack of a long-term strategy was a critical factor that prolonged the war in Afghanistan. With changing objectives, no clear endpoint, and arbitrary timetables, the United States was not positioned for success — however that was redefined throughout the conflict. President George W. Bush stated that the initial goal of the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was “to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.” Within months, the majority of Al-Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks, was either killed or driven into hiding and the ruling Taliban regime was toppled. While the original goal had been completed, Bush’s desire to prevent a terrorist safe-haven would soon be reinterpreted to wipe out all forms of the Taliban and create a new democratic government.
With Al-Qaeda mostly out of the picture, the focus of combat operations turned to fighting the Taliban insurgency, the former ruling party in Afghanistan accused of harboring Al-Qaeda. “The Taliban was shooting back at us so we started shooting at them and they became the enemy,” explained Bush-era State Department spokesman Richard Boucher in a government interview obtained by The Washington Post. The operational goal then became eliminating the Taliban to ensure that they would not regain power and continue to harbor terrorists who posed a threat to the United States.
This Al-Qaeda-to-Taliban shift in military focus put the United States down the path for a drawn-out counterinsurgency operation. “A major mistake we made was treating the Taliban the same as al-Qaeda. Key Taliban leaders were interested in giving the new system a chance, but we didn’t give them a chance,” observed United Nations Afghanistan advisor Barnet Rubin in a confidential Lessons Learned Interview.
The Nation-Building Failure
The new assumption that the Taliban should be completely defeated was paired with the assumption that the United States should build a Western-style democracy and a strong centralized government in Afghanistan. A myriad of operational hurdles such as the Taliban insurgency and deep-rooted economic overdependence on opium made military intervention necessary to prop-up the new government. With this new goal of democratization in mind, the United States and its allies signed the Bonn Agreement (December 2001), establishing the procedures and timeframe for a new Afghan government and national elections, without any plan to include the Taliban in the government. The United States had tasked itself with the immensely optimistic goal of maintaining a democratic government in a rural country previously faced with invasion, civil war, and tribal rule. This nation-building effort required a prolonged campaign of U.S. and NATO troops to defeat Taliban forces, so that the new central government had territory and people to govern.
In addition, the United States financed nearly $133 billion of infrastructure projects to help win the loyalty of the Afghan people from the Taliban. What seemed like a highly ambitious task at first soon became recognized by internal officials as a near-impossible project. “Why did we think providing electricity to communities in Kandahar who had no concept of what to do with it would convince them to abandon the Taliban?” questioned a senior USAID official in 2016 who worked in Afghanistan.
The United States became involved in these continued military and nation-building operations because American leaders subscribed to the idea that the best way to prevent terrorists from threatening the United States was to wipeout the Taliban and create and maintain a new, democractic-style government in Afghanistan. When this premise went unquestioned despite large operational setbacks, the United States doubled down on its military and monetary effort to prevent the collapse of the Afghan government.
Conditions for Corruption
This rapid influx of American aid money, reaching a peak of $13 billion of USAID spending in 2011, paired with a shaky centralized government, bred corruption so deeply rooted within the Afghan government that one expert deemed the country, “the world’s most sophisticated kleptocracy.” Officials all along the Afghan institutional hierarchy, ranging from high-ranking cabinet members to local police chiefs, have been known to purchase their appointments and use their authority for personal gains. Besides posing a massive barrier to efficient governance, this thriving corruption has led many Afghans to resent the central government in Kabul, making them more sympathetic to the Taliban insurgency.
For instance, in 2016 public confidence in Government Ministries and Parliament hit a low of 36% and 37% of the Afghan population respectively, according to the Asia Foundation’s Survey of the Afghan People. Additionally, 81.5% of Afghans in 2019 said that “corruption is a major problem in Afghanistan as a whole.” Simply put, without popular support, democracy will fail. This pervasive corruption has helped fuel popular support for the Taliban and weakened the central government’s control of the Afghan countryside, requiring the United States to further prop up the central government and fight the Taliban.
Poppy Money Fuels Taliban Resurgence
The campaign against the Taliban has been prolonged by the Taliban’s financial ties to a thriving opium industry that countless U.S. and coalition initiatives have failed to stop. Because the most lucrative poppy fields are in the southern provinces where the Taliban has greater control, the terrorist group has used this cash crop to bolster their war chest and pay new recruits.
While Afghanistan has long been one of the world’s top opium producers, in 2007 it skyrocketed to supplying 93% of the world’s illicit heroin supply. According to the BBC, nearly 60% of the Taliban’s revenue comes from the illicit narcotics industry, making the poppy plant the lifeblood of the Taliban. Despite military campaigns to bomb, burn, or replace Afghan poppy fields, opium production is still on the rise due to its centrality to the rural Afghan economy, employing nearly 3.3 million Afghans, 15% of the population. Because of this, government efforts to curb poppy production “alienated the rural population from the Afghan government, and drove the rural population into Taliban hands” according to Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institute.
The Pakistani Dilemma
Additionally, the porous and underregulated nature of the Afghan-Pakistani border has allowed Taliban militants to seek shelter and train in Pakistan, out of the reach of coalition troops. The Pakistani border grants the Taliban “strategic depth” to fall back on, regroup, and wait out coalition forces, thus, prolonging the war effort. While Pakistan is a key U.S. ally and helped in the fight against Al-Qaeda, they consistently support the Taliban with arms and training from the Pakistani Intelligence Service. In the case of a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, “the last thing we want with all of our other problems is to have turned the Taliban into a mortal enemy, so, yes, we’re hedging our bets,” explained Pakistan’s former intelligence chief Ashfaq Kayani to the former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Ryan Crocker. Consequently, the United States has been stuck at a tough strategic crossroads: either the Americans receive vital intelligence and assistance fighting Al-Qaeda, but maintain the Taliban, or lose this vital assistance and completely pursue the Taliban. The Pakistan question has contributed to the Taliban’s resurgence and swamped U.S. military campaigns under three presidents.
Recommendations for the Future
Overall, the United States has adopted a broad and all-encompassing interpretation of how it plans to prevent terrorists from launching U.S.-bound attacks from Afghanistan. This wide-reaching interpretation rests on the premise that nation-building and the complete removal of the Taliban will prevent Afghanistan from becoming a terrorist base camp. Three consecutive U.S. presidents and their advisers have been adamant about their belief in this approach, despite the hefty cost paid in billions of dollars and thousands of lives. With so many operational setbacks to this approach and no end in sight, Americans should consider whether these costs are worth it and find a scaled-back solution. The United States can become disengaged from its endless nation-building effort in Afghanistan while still preventing any terrorist group from using rural Afghanistan to launch an attack on the United States
First, U.S. leadership should acknowledge that the Taliban itself does not pose enough of an imminent threat to the United States to justify a prolonged and costly military campaign to destroy them. The real threat that the Taliban poses, is harboring U.S.-focused terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda, which do pose a significant threat to America.
Secondly, with this new assumption in mind, the withdrawal of most American and coalition troops is feasible, if the U.S. military and intelligence community keep an eye on terrorist activities. If the United States harnesses its rich network of intelligence sources within Afghanistan developed through the Soviet-Afghan War and over the last nineteen years, in combination with a small number of special forces troops, it will be able to foil terrorist plots which directly threaten the United States. This would allow the United States to pull out most of its troops in Afghanistan and prevent an attack on the United States at a much lesser cost. American leaders should question whether propping up the Afghan government against the Taliban is the most efficient way to protect the American people. The next generation of Americans depends on it.
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