My Millennial daughter wrote me a note, asking about the events occurring in Afghanistan. She didn’t understand what was happening, and hadn’t been hearing much in the news over recent years. None of us have, really. That twenty year war has taken a back seat for quite a while to such headline grabbers as the Presidential election of 2020, the global pandemic, extreme weather events, hundreds of thousands of burning acres of forests, etc.
My response to her was, “It’s complicated. Brace yourself. The tale begins long before you were born.”
The U.S. involvement in Afghanistan goes way back. Russia sent troops there between 1979 and 1989, attempting to change the political structure from Islamist to communist. They thought Afghanistan was a threat to their border security. At that time, the U.S. actually supported the Afghanistan resistance by supplying weapons, training and money. Just like in Vietnam, the U.S. was motivated to limit the spread of communism, which at that time had a goal of going global. President Reagan hosted the Islamic Afghan resistance leaders at a meeting in Washington D.C., with great fanfare and warmth. Russia finally gave up and left in 1989. Afghanistan reverted to a strict Islamist government structure upon their exit, run by the Taliban again.
The Taliban, al-Qaida and other Islamic groups represent a fundamental rift between world views of Western imperialism and the people subjected to those empires. For example, Britain conducted three wars with Afghanistan between 1839 and 1919, in order to exert influence over the region and prevent Russia from doing the same (which was a monarchy until 1917). In the 1990s forward, Afghanistan allowed groups who wanted to bring war to Western countries to train there. One of those groups, al-Qaida, organized attacks on U.S. embassies in other countries (prior to the 2001 attacks on U.S. soil), which caused the U.S. to retaliate with cruise missile strikes to hit the terrorist leaders. Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists hijacked three airplanes flying out of New York, then flew them into the two World Trade towers and the Pentagon. A fourth was hijacked, and was likely to be aimed at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., but the heroic passengers took the plane back long enough to force a crash in a Pennsylvania field instead of the Capitol.
That attack caused then President George Bush to push for the invasion of Afghanistan, to eliminate the threat by taking out the government who supported the terrorist organizations, and by hunting down the leaders of that terrorist group, including Osama Bin Laden. Bush (a Republican) got agreement from Congress and many Western allies, like Great Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Canada, etc. In October of 2001, the war to push the Taliban back began. In less than a year, the Taliban was overthrown, an interim President and legislature were in place and then the long battle with the Taliban insurgents began. Same damn problem the Russians faced and lost in the ten years they were there. And those insurgents were using the training and weapons we gave them when they were fighting the Russians.
Ironic, no? Well, that’s not the first time that’s happened. We did the same thing in Iraq–supporting Sadam Hussein with training, weapons and money because Iraq was at war with Iran, whom we viewed as a grave threat to Western security (and still do). Iraq used those resources to later invade Kuwait in 1990, a buddy of the U.S. and other Western nations. Once again, we found ourselves fighting against a military that we previously trained, equipped and funded in no small portion. Bush later decided to invade Iraq as well in 2003, based on faulty intelligence that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (“WMD”, which purportedly could have been chemical, biological and/or nuclear).
So Bush began the Afghanistan war. Eight years later, Obama inherited the problem. He increased troops as the Taliban re-emerged and began taking territory. In 2014, with the Taliban effectively suppressed, the U.S. and its allies ended military operations, converting to advisors and funders of the democratically elected government and its large standing army. Then in 2016 Trump began his tour of duty overseeing the Afghanistan war. Trump initiated negotiations directly with the Taliban, side-stepping the government in Kabul. Trump committed to withdrawing the remaining troops by May of this year, if he had been re-elected.
So now Biden is President, after 20 years of history of this long war in Afghanistan, brought to you by a Republican President, managed by a Democrat President, then another Republican and now a Democrat has the guts to say, “That’s enough.” Biden was fulfilling what Trump had committed to, but he took longer than May of this year, as he was trying to make sure the preparations were as good as they could be.
Biden’s advisors’ most frequent advice was that when the U.S. pulled out completely, the Afghan government and it’s trained, equipped military would be able to handle their own affairs. What happened was that the Afghan military did not support the current government. The army just stepped aside. There are lots of theories about why that is the case, but corruption in the elected government was likely a big piece of the story. Infighting among the various factions within Afghanistan no doubt also contributed. Tribal rivalries in that country go back literally centuries.
In my opinion, we never should have put troops on the ground in Afghanistan (or Iraq) and attempted a change in government to a Democracy. We should have gone after the sources of terrorist funding (opium production within the country is huge, as one primary source of money, along with funding that comes from other countries and wealthy individuals) and pursued the leadership of al-Qaida individually, without bringing widespread war to every part of Afghanistan. And we should stop propping up one country’s military to fight proxy wars for us with another. That has repeatedly proven to be a good way to punch ourselves in the face.
Anybody who is blaming Biden for where we are right now either doesn’t understand this history, or they do, and they want to use the negative headlines to try to convince people to vote Republican in the mid-term Congressional elections next year. No doubt.