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President
Biden has announced that he will completely
withdraw
US troops from Afghanistan around September 1. This move will bring
to an end America’s longest war, which still costs $50 billion
a year. Imagine what that money could do for the US if it is invested
in green energy and infrastructure. Worse, a lot of the $50 billion
is wasted or disappears through corruption.
Biden
is being honest. The US has no vital interests in Afghanistan. The
Washington
Post
used the Freedom of Information Act to get hold of documents from
myriads of US officials who worked in Afghanistan over the past two
decades. Virtually none of them believed in the mission, behind the
scenes.
The
US remains in Afghanistan militarily primarily through reliance
airstrikes — enormous tonnages of them annually. In 2019, the
US dropped 7,423 bombs
on the place, more than at any time since 2003. Aerial bombing has
been substituted for the hard diplomacy and infrastructural
investments that might — might — actually put the country
on a positive path forward. Imagine the destruction wrought on the
country by tens of thousands of airstrikes over the years, hitting
villages and sometimes even wedding parties. This is the war people
like Lindsay Graham want to keep going. There is something
pathological about it.
Some
analysts worry that the Taliban will take back over, and will be a
magnet for terrorist groups. I do not think the premise that the
Taliban would gladly host al-Qaeda is correct. The Taliban have been
the fiercest fighters against the tiny ISIL groups in Afghanistan. It
is not clear that the Taliban ever greenlighted Bin Laden for 9/11,
and there is a lot of evidence of al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders being
angry at him for this foreign adventure that brought the full weight
of the US down on them and destroyed the emirate.
The
US does not need troops in Afghanistan to deal with al-Qaeda there,
in any case. US counter-terrorism forces and drone strikes have been
launched against al-Qaeda in places like Yemen and Somalia without
the US having a permanent troop presence there or spending $50
billion a year on it. The al-Qaeda presence in Yemen and Syria is far
bigger and more dangerous.
The
US doesn’t have troops in Yemen. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula (AQAP), which has cells in and around Abyan in southern
Yemen, tried to down a plane over Detroit
in 2009
using a non-metallic powder explosive. Our Saudi supposed ally has
not been very effective against that cell despite its war in Yemen.
The
CIA, at least, is allied in Syria with Muslim Brotherhood groups that
are al-Qaeda-adjacent, and US arms were provided in Syria to Salafi
Jihadis through Saudi Arabia. So in some parts of the world we seem
to be back to the 1980s when there are de facto US-al-Qaeda
alliances. In such a world, why keep an Afghanistan command on the
assumption that there might ultimately be an al-Qaeda threat to the
US from that country?
The
US has been training, arming and funding the Afghanistan National
Army for twenty years. If the small Taliban cells in that country can
defeat them summarily without the presence of 8,000 US troops, then
maybe the Afghanistan National Army just wasn’t meant to be.
Asking the US public to make it a 40 year commitment seems a little
politically ambitious.
Some
American analysts want to stay in Afghanistan in hopes of making it a
democracy. Afghanistan, however, is too complex a nation-building
problem to solve with the kind of resources the US has been willing
to put in. It is desperately poor, typically down near fourth poorest
in the world, and so is the least likely candidate for middle class
democracy in the world. NYU Political Scientist Adam Przeworski found
that the most significant indicator of whether a country would
succeed if it tried to transition to democracy from an authoritarian
government was that it be a middle income country. My guess is that
this works because a rich civil society can overcome a state, whereas
in poor countries the state has most of the resources.
Poor
countries attempting a democratic transition failed at a high rate
and fell back into autocratic ways. Taiwan moved in the late 1990s
from a one-party state under the Kuomintang to multiparty democracy.
Its annual per capita income is $32,000. Egypt’s attempt to
democratize in 2011-2013 crashed and burned. Its annual per capita
income is $3,830. Of course, poor countries can sometimes succeed
(Tunisia), and rich countries can sometimes fail (Hungary is becoming
a dictatorship and its per capita annual income is $18,000. There is
no accounting for tastes.) But if we’re going with the
averages, you put your money on the rich countries to make a
successful transition.
Afghanistan’s
annual per capita income is $592.
Rural
Afghans practice kinship politics, which are not the sort of thing
that makes for national unity. Ethno-linguistic subnationalism also
pulls the country apart, with conflicts among Pushtuns, Tajiks,
Hazaras and Uzbeks.
Afghanistan
is only 26 percent urban, 173rd in the world on this measurement.
Less than half the population is literate.
Poppies
are among the more valuable crops for its farmers, which contributes
to narco-terrorism. US poppy eradication campaigns just drove the
farmers into poverty and forced them to sell a daughter or two. That
made no friends.
As
if the internal dynamics were not bad enough, the external players
are also deadly. Afghanistan is a major arena of Indo-Pak rivalry,
with elements of Pakistani military intelligence backing the Taliban
and the Haqqani group, and India backing the Tajik parties. Iran has
tried without too much success to pick up the Shiite Hazara as
clients; I don’t think it is a big player, and certainly not on
the scale of Pakistan and India.
Among
the external powers, only India really wants the US in Afghanistan,
because the US also backs the Tajiks.
Russia
at least used to argue for a US presence because it is afraid of
Afghani opium flooding the Moscow market and emasculating Russian
young men, but maybe that has changed after the conflict over Crimea.
My
own view is that if the US wanted to withdraw without risking a
security debacle, it would have to do so through diplomacy. In
particular, the US should seek an agreement between India and
Pakistan that Afghanistan will be neutral territory, an agreement to
which Kabul would assent. I have been thinking about the need for
such an agreement for a long time, but recently discovered that
Audrey Cronin, a political scientist at American University, made the
case in a concerted way in 2013:
Audrey
Kurth Cronin (2013) Thinking
Long on Afghanistan: Could it be Neutralized?,
The Washington Quarterly, 36:1, 55-72, DOI:
10.1080/0163660X.2013.751650
What
I would add is that it might be possible to get China on board with
shutting down the support for the Taliban of elements of Pakistani
military intelligence, on the grounds that there are Uighurs among
them and they encourage radicalism in Kashgar. Washington might be
able to use Beijing’s enormous clout with the Pakistani army to
make that stick. The $50 bn Chinese investment in Pakistan (the
China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) should put some weight behind this
push. After all, a resurgent Taliban of the sort some Pakistani
officers favor might spill over into Pakistan and lead to sabotage
against the pipelines and other infrastructure that China is building
to bring oil and Arabian Sea trade to itself. The US has its own
levers in Islamabad.
An
agreement between Pakistan and India on Afghan neutrality. The
British and the Russians managed to come to similar terms about the
country being a buffer zone between them in the 19th and early 20th
century.
It
would also be good for Afghanistan to have someone build it some fast
rail links to its neighbors so that it could cheaply export its
agricultural goods.
It
is long past time, in any case, for the US to exit.
This commentary was originally published
by Informed Comment
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