US abandons Afghanistan to totalitarian hell

Those Afghans have been put in peril by President Joe Biden’s announcement that all US forces would be withdrawn by September 11. This week it was revealed the US had already deserted Bagram, its biggest air base in the country, reportedly without informing the Afghan military. How this will end remains to be seen, but it is timely to reflect on the dangers; both for Afghans and for their erstwhile supporters in the wider world.

While the US committed vast sums to Afghanistan — and by 2021 it had become popular in the US to refer to Afghanistan as “America’s longest war” — for much of the preceding two decades, the attention the US paid to Afghanistan was fitful and prone to drift.

The US had great difficulty in developing a coherent strategic narrative to animate its various activities in Afghanistan, and tended to rely on propaganda to project an aura of success. And from 2002 onwards, US leaders became preoccupied with Iraq, at the expense of the Afghan theatre of operations.

This problem was compounded by the dysfunctional features of the post-2001 Afghan state, and of Afghan politics more broadly. Politics took a neopatrimonial turn, with the power of state institutions increasingly being used for market purposes behind the scenes by select networks of individuals and private organisations.

However, the most critical factor of all was the resumption of Pakistan’s active support for the Taliban, and specifically the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate of the Pakistan Armed Forces (ISI). This allowed the Taliban to embark on a campaign of violent attacks in Afghanistan, with civilians often the victims of terrorist strikes.

Pakistan feared any possible expansion of Indian influence in Afghanistan, and a disordered Afghanistan, from ISI’s perspective, was preferable to a stable, pro-Indian neighbour to Pakistan’s west.

To understand the nature of the threat the Taliban poses for a pluralist and liberal future for Afghanistan, it is important to appreciate that the Taliban is not simply a reflection of traditional Afghan social and political structures. Its ideological disposition is pathogenic and rigid, quite different from the pragmatic, if conservative, values associated with traditional communities.

Probably the best term to capture its orientation is totalitarian. The Taliban has never been prepared to concede that there is any sphere of social life into which it cannot legitimately intrude. It views its version of Islam as the solution to the problems of the world, as well as the means by which oppression can be overcome.

It is occasionally suggested that if the Taliban were to acquire state power, it would be obliged to moderate its behaviour, either to secure aid or to obtain international recognition.

We have been here before: in 1996, when the Taliban first seized Kabul, Afghan-American diplomat Dr Zalmay Khalilzad wrote that “once order is established, concerns such as good government, economic reconstruction and education will rise to the fore”. This did not happen, and the lesson is that what matters to the Taliban is not necessarily what optimistic foreign observers might wish.

Unfortunately, the willingness of the US to defer to the Taliban may well have left its leadership with the impression that they can expect recognition from Washington even if their behaviour proves extreme. Moreover, an important recent study suggests that the Taliban obtains substantial revenues extracted at “chokepoints” from traders in fuel and transit goods, which it could use to sustain its coercive capacity even in the absence of substantial aid.

The likelihood that the Taliban in power would act as a theocratic autocracy points towards an equally alarming scenario: civil war. This is a matter of mounting concern. As British analyst Anatol Lieven has put it: “To achieve a stable and lasting hegemony over Afghanistan as a whole, the Taliban … would have to reach an accommodation with Afghanistan’s other main ethnic groups — Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks — guaranteeing them autonomy and safety in their own areas. Without this, Afghanistan will be doomed to a future of unending civil war fuelled by outside backers.”

However, there is nothing to suggest the Taliban is interested in granting autonomy to anyone, and already groups are mobilising to resist the Taliban should the Afghan National Security Forces begin to fragment.

The US-Taliban agreement provided that the Taliban movement would “not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qa’ida, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies”, that it would instruct its members “not to co-operate with groups or individuals threatening the security of the United States and its allies”, and that it would not “host” them.

However, the reality on the ground in Afghanistan belies this … and highlights the perils of relying on Taliban promises; according to the UN’s most recent Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team report: “The Taliban and al-Qa’ida remain closely aligned and show no indication of breaking ties.”

The US withdrawal thus leaves critical issues relating to terrorism and radicalisation hanging in the air. It has the inevitable effect of increasing the distance between US assets such as fighter aircraft or drones, and any potential terrorist targets in Afghanistan that the US might wish to eliminate; in turn, this increases the likelihood that if the US attempts a strike, its intended target will no longer be in situ.

Furthermore, Afghanistan is a landlocked country and its immediate neighbours to its east and west are totally unreliable as partners in the gathering of counterterrorist intelligence; not for nothing did the US keep Pakistan completely in the dark before its May 2011 raid that killed al-Qa’ida leader Osama bin Laden in his refuge in Abbottabad, virtually on the doorstep of the Pakistan Military Academy.

The US, in its haste to exit Afghanistan, has shown little concern for any interests other than its own. But that said, other countries, likely soon to be confronted with the challenge of major Afghan refugee flows, have an opportunity to prove they can do better.

William Maley is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, where he was Professor of Diplomacy from 2003-21. He is author of the Centre for Independent Studies paper Afghanistan on the Brink of an Abyss (published last week), Rescuing Afghanistan (2006), What is a Refugee? (2016), Transition in Afghanistan: Hope, Despair and the Limits of Statebuilding (2018), The Afghanistan Wars (2021) and Diplomacy, Communication, and Peace: Selected Essays (2021).