America’s “longest war” opened on 7 October 2001 with an air campaign, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, and finally ended, in just under twenty years, with the once-vanquished and subsequently regrouped Taliban declaring victory on 15 August 2021. What had started out as an ambitious Western-led mission of retribution, followed by reconstruction, in direct response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ended in a hasty and inglorious retreat from Afghanistan. The rationale behind the original intervention, engineered by US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, included the elimination of Islamist terrorist bases from the country, to be followed by the moral obligation of “nation building” along the lines of a liberal democracy.
With the start of American withdrawal earlier this year, a newly empowered and rejuvenated Taliban, which had only recently engaged in negotiation with the US, rapidly took control over Afghanistan. Multiple border crossings were seized, along with a succession of 34 provincial capitals, starting on 6 August with the capture of Zaranj, in southwest Afghanistan’s Nimruz province. This military operation proceeded at lightning speed, culminating in the encirclement and bloodless takeover of the nation’s capital, Kabul, by 15 August. The US-“trained” and -funded (to the tune of $89 billion) 350,000-strong Afghan National Army and paramilitary forces, unenamoured with the current leadership, failed to live up to expectations and did little to challenge the rapid advance of the Taliban. Notwithstanding allegations of intelligence failure, it seemed that little could actually be done to stop the insurgents from taking control.
According to Forbes magazine, the US spent more than $2 trillion on the war in Afghanistan, averaging out at a daily expenditure of $300 million. According to data provided by Linda Bilmes of the Kennedy School at Harvard University and by the Brown University Costs of War project, 2,448 American service members were killed in Afghanistan up to April 2021, along with 3,846 US contractors, 66,000 Afghan national military and police, and 1,144 other allied service members, including those from other NATO member states. The question now being asked is whether the military effort was indeed worth it and whether people may have died in vain while supporting it.
Afghanistan benefited from a period as democracy, between two different Taliban regimes, when Hamid Karzai became the first democratically elected head of government in Afghanistan, as president, in October 2004. Creeping liberalisation enabled economic growth and several public infrastructure projects, along with the emancipation of girls and women, who were able to attend schools and universities, access better healthcare, and actively seek employment. Unfortunately, a weak, corrupt, and disunited leadership lost touch with the masses, while the Taliban gradually consolidated its position in rural Afghanistan. Along the way, unresolved ethnic conflicts continually threatened national unity.
In mid-August 2021, Kabul witnessed an exodus of diplomats and other foreign nationals, joined by Afghans, including those who had worked for the American and British military forces, seeking to escape Taliban rule. Among those taking an early exit was Ashraf Ghani, successor to Hamid Karzai as president from September 2014.
President Biden defended his decision to withdraw American troops in a broadcast on 16 August, confirming the futility of continued American military presence in the country, while admitting that recent events had moved faster than anticipated. Although criticised by ex-President Trump for the debacle that followed American withdrawal, it was in fact the 2020 US deal with the Taliban in Doha that had allowed this to happen.
The Taliban, which started out as a militia of Pashtun students attending Sunni religious schools (madrassas) in southern Afghanistan’s Kandahar province in the early 1990s, has become a force to be contended with. It is lavishly funded by a system of local taxes, the trappings of the opium poppy/heroin trade, its control of mineral fields in a resource-rich nation, and by well-heeled foreign donors, especially in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. With the recent collapse of the Afghan military, it has also added to its military firepower, acquiring airbases, military camps, weapons, ammunition, specialised equipment, and vehicles, including airplanes.
Afghanistan is to become an Islamic Emirate, under a newer, allegedly more moderate, version of the Taliban-only time will tell us whether a more accommodating version of Islamist rule will emerge. The ability, and indeed desirability, of powerful Western nations to enforce regime change and to then impose Western standards of democracy has one again been called into question in Afghanistan. The Taliban has had its way, and with the backing of certain sympathetic Islamic states, China, and potentially even Russia, can remodel Afghanistan in the way it chooses to do. Thus opens the latest chapter in the history of a nation that has proved so difficult to govern in the past.
Ashis Banerjee