Afghanistan: The Road Not Taken

By Benjamin Welton

The War in Afghanistan will soon become the longest military engagement in US history (the US Marines occupied Haiti 1915–34), and even though the administration of President Donald Trump recently signed a peace deal with the Taliban, a small cadre of US servicemen will remain in Afghanistan past 2020. There are some other nasty parts of that agreement, as the Kabul government will release up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange for only 1,000 captives from the Afghan national forces.[1] Furthermore, the peace deal leaves open the possibility that the Taliban could return to central power in Afghanistan within a year or two.

We have seen this movie before. The American experience in Afghanistan closely mirrors the prior experiences of the British and the Soviets. We failed to learn many important lessons. Most of these failures come not from incompetency (although that is a large problem), but from a flawed worldview. Until this worldview is corrected, there is nothing to stop the mistakes of Afghanistan from being repeated down the road.

The first section will look at Afghanistan’s history with outside forces, specifically conquerors like Alexander the Great of Macedon and Tamerlane. The next three will discuss Great Britain’s wars in the country, which began in 1839 and lasted until 1919. The fifth section will discuss the Soviet-Afghan War and why the USSR felt the need to back an unpopular and inefficient Communist government in Kabul. The final section will discuss how the United States botched its own war in Afghanistan and what might have been done differently under a more competent ruling elite.

Pre-Modern and Early Modern History

Afghanistan is a rugged land dominated by frigid mountains in the north and deserts in the south. The majority Pashtuns are a fierce and warlike people who are prone to blood feuds. From the perspective of the outside world, Afghanistan has no strategic value—it is a “poor and landlocked country with no resources except opium.”[2]

Despite this, Afghanistan has been invaded by outside powers numerous times. Alexander the Great and his fearsome Macedonian army conquered parts of Afghanistan and established the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom in the city of Bactria (today’s Balkh). When ethnically Greek kings ruled Afghanistan, the country enjoyed a period of unprecedented civilization. Several cities were either built or expanded, such as Alexandria Ariana (Herat), Alexandria Arachosia (Kandahar), and Bactria itself. The kingdom became a crossroads of Hellenic and Eastern culture, with Buddhism, Greek religion, and Persian learning mixing and mingling.[3]

Macedonian Greek power in Central Asia came at a terrible cost. The later Greco-Roman historian Plutarch described Alexander’s conquest of Afghanistan as a desperate fight against a “hydra-headed monster.” Even before the birth of Christ, the tribes of Afghanistan made for terrifying enemies that could mobilize into roving guerrilla bands with ease. After Greek power faded from Central Asia, it was replaced by the Turco-Mongol states of the Timurid and Mughal Empires. The Chagatai Turkic ruler Babur (1483–1530) made Kabul his capital. From there, this descendant of both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane conquered the Punjab and captured the city of Delhi, the cities of the Rajput Confederacy, and the remaining Afghan states that were not loyal to him. Babur’s empire, the Mughal Empire, would rule India until the coming of the British.[4]

The modern state of Afghanistan began with Ahmad Shah Abdali (1722–72). Elected as king (“shah”) in 1747, Ahmad Shah Abdali was an ethnic Pashtun who ruled from the southern city of Kandahar. Ahmad Shah Abdali managed to carve out a royal state from a patchwork of tribal entities, and by the time of his death, “he had reconciled the turbulent Pushtun [sic] tribes, subdued most of present-day Afghanistan, extended his empire to Delhi and into Persia, and earned the name of Father of his People.”[5]

Subsequent rulers failed to maintain unity over the ethnically-mixed state. For much of Afghanistan’s history, Pashtuns have been in control and this rarely has sat well with the country’s ethnic minorities (Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras). Another problem that continues to bedevil Afghanistan is its geography. Given the horrific violence of Tamerlane and Babur, India has a vested interest in keeping Afghanistan as weak as possible. Pakistan, with its own terrorism problem, has an interest in keeping the violence contained in Afghanistan rather than in its own North-Western frontier.[6] Iran, like its predecessor Persia, remains interested in the city of Herat.

The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–42)

In the nineteenth century, Afghanistan’s geography mattered to the British Empire. The Honourable East India Company (HEIC) was always worried that Afghanistan would fall into the orbit of the Russian Empire. This was perfectly rational; during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725), 6,000 Russian troops under the command of Alexander Bekovich (a Christian convert from the Caucasus) were sent to the Amu Darya. Peter believed that the river, which today separates Afghanistan from Tajikistan, contained gold. His men did not find gold, but they did find battle with the Khan of Kiva, who “treacherously slaughtered him [Bekovich] and his men, stuffed his [Bekovich] head with straw, and sent it to the Khan of Bukhara.”[7] Not to be deterred, the Russian Empire continued its march through Central Asia during the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1800, Russian troops took Georgia away from Persia, and in 1836, Russia encouraged the shah of Persia to pay his country’s war debts by conquering the city of Herat.[8] These moves convinced East India Company officials that Russia’s ultimate goal was the conquest of India.

The First Anglo-Afghan War began against this backdrop. In May 1838, George Eden, 1st Earl of Auckland, came to the conclusion that it was in Britain’s best interest to form an alliance with the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh and invaded Afghanistan in order to prevent a Russo-Persian invasion from the north and west. Despite “the opposition of experienced politicals like Claude Wade,”[9] the East India Company also decided to overthrow Dost Mohammad Khan, the emir of Kabul, with Shah Shujah Durrani, the unpopular ruler of Kabul from 1803–09.

The 10,000-man Army of the Indus, which included East India Company troops and British regulars, fought well and successfully accomplished their objectives in Afghanistan. Kabul fell on August 6, 1839, and Shah Shujah was named the new emir. Lord Auckland wanted the Army of the Indus returned to India, but ultimately British and India troops were kept in Afghanistan in order to prop up Shah Shuja’s regime. These men were placed into small garrisons scattered throughout the country, while most were kept in Kabul. Late in 1839, British troops were moved from the ancient Bala Hissar fortress in Kabul to a much less secure and defensible location.[10]

The insanity of this move became apparent in 1841. In that year, Conservative Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel demanded that the HEIC, which had long been in debt, cut costs where it could. One of the expenditures axed by the Peel government was the £8,000 annual subsidy to Ghilzai tribesmen of eastern Afghanistan. In October 1840, Sir Robert Sale’s brigade, who were due to leave Afghanistan, were mobilized to fight the rebelling Ghilzais. Sale’s small army was forced to seek refuge in the village of Gandamak after taking a licking from the Ghilzai tribesmen.[11]

In Kabul, a city-wide insurrection against the British and Shah Shujah turned into a nation-wide insurgency. Dost Mohamed and other Pashtun chiefs led the rebellion. Soon enough, British leaders like William Hay Macnaghten and General William Elphinstone were under siege. Supporting them were just 4,500 British and Indian troops and 12,000 camp followers in the entire cantonment around Kabul.[12] The conflict saw plenty of open battle, but for the most part Afghan tribesmen preferred to snipe at British positions from the high ground. They also resorted to time-tested treachery, as in the case of the murder of Macnaghten who tried to negotiate a ceasefire with Wazir Akbar Khan, an Afghan prince and future emir of Kabul. During the meeting, Macnaghten was seized and stabbed. His severed head and hands were paraded in front of captured British officials in Kabul, while the corpse of Captain Robert Trevor was hung from a meat hook in Kabul’s Great Bazaar.[13]

Realizing that the British position was hopeless, General Elphinstone ordered all British and Indian troops to return to India. These soldiers and their camp followers (which included wives and children) undertook the so-called “Retreat from Kabul” in January 1842. The group’s path took them across the snow-capped mountains of the country. Here they were exposed to sniping attacks and skirmishing. In a few days, approximately 16,500 soldiers and civilians were either dead or captured. The surviving women were taken into harems by Pashtun chiefs, while the men and children were slaughtered outright. Only Assistant Surgeon William Brydon was left alive to tell the tale when he reached British lines at Jalalabad.[14]

The HEIC got some measure of revenge for this massacre in the fall of 1842. Major-General George Pollock, an East India Company officer, led the “Army of Retribution: into Afghanistan. Pollock’s forces won victories at Jugdulluk Pass and Tezeen, and they blew up the Great Bazaar. Angered at the sight of their dead comrades, Pollock’s men engaged in murder and rape in southern Afghanistan, and in almost every village they executed all men over the age of fourteen.[15] By December 1842, the Army of Retribution crossed back into India. The HEIC had gotten their revenge, but London agreed that Afghanistan was not worth anything more. The new policy was that British and Indian troops would continue to police the restive border between India and Afghanistan, but would not cross the line and get mixed up in Kabul’s affairs.[16]

The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80)

The Russian threat to British India did not subside in 1842. Indeed, Anglo-Russian hostility increased following the end of the First Anglo-Afghan War. The British in India watched the Russian juggernaut conquer much of Central Asia, including the modern states of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. With millions more Turkic Muslim subjects, British pundits feared that Russia was on the verge of inspiring India’s Muslims to revolt against their Anglican overlords. After all, Russian imperialism in Central Asia was “less burdensome than the British regime in India: the Russians were more corrupt and less efficient; the British taxed more heavily and were prone to impose their will through violence.”[17]

Despite defeating the Russians in Crimea, the British military establishment still feared that St. Petersburg wanted to conquer India. So, when Sher Ali Khan hosted a Russian delegation in Kabul in 1878, the British demanded that the emir also accept a British delegation. Sher Ali refused, so the British invaded. The invasion force left India in three columns totaling about 40,000 men. Rather than East India Company soldiers, these men were crown troops, both British and Indian. Much like the first war, British troops overcame early resistance and occupied most of Afghanistan by 1879. This was not accomplished without blood however, as several battles in and around Kabul included thousands of combatants. The Battle of Kabul in 1879 alone saw 7,000 British and Indian troops against Afghan tribesmen numbering as many as 50,000. The war officially ended when Major Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, an Italian-Irish soldier raised in India, signed the Treaty of Gandamak with Mohammad Yaqub Khan, the new emir.[18]

As in the first war, the second conflict reignited after a massacre. Major Cavagnari and most of the British cavalrymen protecting him in Kabul were killed during an uprising of Afghan troops in September 1879. Yaqub Khan was almost murdered himself. A new army of revenge was sent to Kabul led by the brilliant General Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts. This army fought its way from India to Kabul, and once they were in control of the city they began hanging the mutineers and their supporters. Roberts’ next move was controversial: he announced that Yaqub Khan had abdicated. Roberts then named himself the military governor of Afghanistan, and his claim was backed by 6,500 British and Indian troops. Fearing a repeat of the 1842 disaster, Roberts and his men dug in near Kabul for the winter of 1879–80.[18]

Roberts and his men were relieved by General Sir Donald Stewart, 1st Baronet. However, this joyous occasion was overshadowed by the news that British troops in the city of Kandahar were under attack. Roberts responded to this by marching 10,000 men over 300 miles in twenty days.[18] The resulting Battle of Kandahar ended in a resounding British victory which not only won the war, but also erased the shame of British defeat at the Battle of Maiwand, which is best known today as the battle which wounded the fictional Dr. John Watson in Sherlock Holmes.[19]

The Second Anglo-Afghan War ended in victory for London. Rather than annex Afghanistan outright, the British decided to turn the state into a protectorate of British India. The British would make foreign policy decisions for Afghanistan, while Kabul agreed to respect the border between their state and India. One final move was the installation of Abdur Rahman Khan as the new emir. Before dying in 1901, Abdur Rahman “created an Afghanistan that had recognized international boundaries, was politically unified, and governed directly by a centralized authority, within the framework of a fairly well-defined and universally applied administrative and judiciary rules and regulations.”[20]

Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919)

Border skirmishes between British India and Afghanistan continued throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although Kabul recognized the boundary line between India and Afghanistan, the Pashtun tribes did not. Therefore, many well-armed tribesmen made a habit of attacking isolated British forts in the northwestern corner of what is today Pakistan. The British ability to combat these raids was disrupted by the First World War. The small, professional British Indian Army were sent to Europe, Mesopotamia, Africa, and beyond. The only reason why Anglo-Afghan relations remained calm during the war was because Emir Habibullah Khan in Kabul refused to heed the call to jihad proclaimed by the Ottoman Empire in 1914.

This peace would be shattered in 1919. The British Empire had been weakened after four terrible years of total war, while the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was spread a contagion of communist “liberation” throughout the Third World. The new leader of Afghanistan, Amanullah Khan, who came to the throne after Habibullah was assassinated during a hunting party, realized that a war-weary Britain provided him with the opportunity gain his country’s full independence. Amanullah’s plan was simple: he would send agents into British India and inspire Muslim subjects to revolt. At the same time he mobilized the Afghan Army near the Khyber Pass. This latter move convinced the Indian Army to mobilize in May 1919. Within the month, an Anglo-Indian force occupied the Afghan city of Dacca, while British planes bombed Jalalabad and Kabul. This swift response convinced Amanullah to sue for peace. In the end, Afghanistan and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Rawalpindi. The agreement recognized Afghanistan’s complete independence from the British Empire. This was exactly what Kabul wanted. As for the British, they got Afghanistan to recognize the Durand Line separating Afghanistan from British India, but the Third Anglo-Afghan War effectively ended British influence in Afghanistan.[21]

The Soviet-Afghan War (1979–89)

It is incorrect to call Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.” After all, not only did Alexander the Great conquer it, but the British Empire ruled the state from 1880 until 1919. That said, following the collapse of British power in India in 1947, controlling Afghanistan became much, much harder. This is because the Islamist state of Pakistan has a vested interest in keeping Afghanistan weak and disorganized. As a result, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has long funded Islamist and other radical groups in the country. The ISI still remains one of the biggest supporters of the Taliban to this day.[22] The Soviets learned in the 1980s that fighting a war in Afghanistan is nearly impossible because insurgents can easily slipped across the border into Pakistan, especially its lawless northwest. America had to learn this lesson as well—a lesson made all the more painful because Pakistan is a nominal ally.

Soviet involvement in Afghanistan began in 1921. Amanullah Khan’s Afghanistan was the first state to officially recognize the Soviet Union. In that same year, Afghanistan signed a Treaty of Friendship with the Bolshevik state. Under this agreement, “the Russians agreed to give Afghanistan financial support, to build a telegraph line between Moscow and Kabul, and to supply military specialists, weapons, and aircraft.”[23] It did not take long for this friendship to be put to the test, as a civil war broke out in Afghanistan in 1928. This coincided with the Basmachi Revolt in Central Asia, which saw Islam-inspired insurgents take up arms against the Soviet Red Army. The Basmachi insurgency would last until the 1930s, and often Basmachi rebels sought and gained refuge in Afghanistan, especially in the north where Tajiks and Uzbeks dominated.[24]

Joseph Stalin sent the Red Army into Afghanistan in the spring of 1929 “in an attempt to restore Amanullah Khan to his tottering throne.” The Red Army captured Balkh and Mazar-i Sharif, but lost the favor of the Afghan populace. Stalin pulled his men out of the country in 1929.[25] Soviet-Afghan relations were warm throughout this period. At the same time, the United States also fostered good relations with Kabul in the hopes that Afghanistan and other Muslim states in Central Asia “would act as a barrier to Soviet Communism.”[23] The US tried and failed to get Kabul to sign on to the Baghdad Pact of 1955, constructed Afghanistan’s first concrete highway, and promoted educational and irrigation programs in Helmand Province. President Dwight Eisenhower visited the country in 1955. This visit was followed by two visits from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1974 and 1976.

During most of this time, the ruler of Afghanistan was Mohammed Zahir Shah, the King of Afghanistan. Zahir Shah’s reign would last until 1973. Among Afghans and others, Zahir Shah’s reign is thought of as a golden age in which Afghanistan modernized. Under Zahir Shah’s rule, speech protections were put into law, women were encouraged to participate in civil society, and economic liberalization led to the creation of new industries. Zahir Shah was also a wise ruler who did his best to not antagonize Afghanistan’s tribes or its conservative Islamic traditions. Under the king’s constitution, Zahir Shah’s family members were prohibited from holding positions in the government.[26]

Sadly, the good king’s loosening of social restrictions led to the formation of the Afghanistan Communist Party, or the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The earliest members of the PDPA were students at Kabul University, which was also home to several Islamist student groups that would later feed men to the mujaheddin of the 1980s. The PDPA was a fractious group, and by the early 1970s it had two rival factions: the Parcham (Banner) set and the Khalq (People) set. Parcham’s support came from the cities, especially Kabul. The Khalq’s support was drawn from the rural areas and tribes. Parcham members tended to be “scientific socialists” inspired by orthodox Marxist-Leninism. The Khalq took a more Maoist position.[27]

In 1973, Zahir Shah was deposed in a bloodless coup led by Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan. Khan, a member of the National Revolutionary Party of Afghanistan, which supported an authoritarian state based on Pashtun nationalism, declared himself president and formed a new republic. President Daoud denounced the king for promoting “false democracy,” and his government quickly embraced the PDPA. Daoud’s reign was a brutal one: there were hundreds of arrests and five political executions, the first in more than forty years. Also, in 1977, Daoud issued a new constitution which declared Afghanistan a one-party state where the only legal party was Daoud’s own National Revolutionary Party.[25]

Daoud’s reign managed to anger both the Communists and the Islamists. In 1975, Islamic radicals launched an uprising with the explicit support of the ISI and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s Prime Minister.[28] This uprising failed, but it did significant damage to the state. A weakened Afghanistan succumbed to a second uprising, this time a Communist coup in 1978. On April 27, the PDPA pulled off what they called the “April Revolution” in Kabul. It is believed that the KGB directed the PDPA’s revolution in the hopes of turning Afghanistan into a more reliable Soviet client. Whatever the case, the coup touched off a new round of political instability in the country. Daoud and his family were murdered in cold blood by Communist soldiers. Next, a series of tit-for-tat retribution murders rocked the PDPA itself, as the Parcham and Khalq factions fought among each other for absolute control. The first leader of Communist Afghanistan, Nur Muhammad Taraki, was assassinated on the orders of Hafizullah Amin, a fellow Communist. Under Khan’s brief reign, the Khalq faction was in the ascendancy and used this power to murder or imprison their Parcham enemies.[29]

Watching Afghanistan deteriorate, the Soviet Union contemplated intervention. According to historian and former British Ambassador to Afghanistan Rodric Braithwaite, the decision to send Soviet soldiers into Afghanistan was a highly controversial one.[30] In fact, many high-ranking army generals and members of the GRU, or Soviet military intelligence, were against the move. These objections were ultimately overruled, and on December 27, 1979, a Soviet force including the KGB, GRU, and paratroopers stormed the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and killed Amin. They replaced him with the Parcham leader, Babrak Karmal.[31] This action, known as Operation Storm-333, more or less achieved the main Soviet objective, which was the installation of a pro-Soviet government in Kabul. However, as the American military experienced in 2001–02, “mission creep” set in and the Soviet 40th Army remained in Afghanistan into to both prop up Karmal and put down the Islamist-led military mutinies that had first begun in Herat during Amin’s government.[32].

The Soviet-Afghan War would last until February 1989. In that time the Soviets lost almost 15,000 men in vicious counter-insurgency warfare. In many ways the Soviet experience presaged the current NATO/American predicament. Moscow tried to carry out a nation-building effort with a lackluster partner (the Afghan Communists) and against a well-funded enemy (the mujaheddin received weapons and support from Pakistan, China, the UK, France, and the USA).[33] The Soviets fought like tigers, often outmatching the much-vaunted mujaheddin despite being outnumbered. (See, for instance, the Battle of Hill 3234) the 40th Army never lost a battle, but their overall strategy was nothing more than a pipe dream. Because Soviet advisors were so involved in the day-to-day decisions in Kabul, the PDPA government often did nothing more than let Soviet bureaucrats run their country. Not helping matters was the fact that the Soviets unilaterally removed Karmal from power and replaced him with Mohammad Najibullah in 1987. Najibullah pursued a policy that he called “National Reconciliation,” wherein Islamist, democratic, and anti-Communist parties were allowed to operate in Afghanistan. It was too little and too late.[34]

Braithwaite’s chronicle of the war, Afgantsy, shows just how poor Soviet strategy was. For the most part, the Soviet 40th Army would occupy villages by day, but abandon them to the mujaheddin at night. The Soviets also used their superior artillery and air power to pound insurgent positions, but more often than not this resulted in hollow victories. In sum, the Soviets dominated the battlespace, but were defeated in political warfare. The last member of the 40th Army left Afghanistan in February 1989. Many were forced to stay in Tajikistan when that country erupted in civil war, while others returned to the Soviet Union just as it began its collapse.[35]

Najibullah’s government hung on in Kabul until 1992. After the Soviets left, Afghanistan returned to a state of civil war. In the spring of 1989, the ISI and the Seven-Party Union in Peshawar, which represented the seven most powerful warlords of the mujaheddin, attempted to capture Jalalabad. The Battle of Jalalabad ended in a victory for the Kabul government and cost the Pakistan-based mujaheddin several thousand casualties. For a brief time, Najibullah’s victory convinced the West and the USSR that Communism could continue in Afghanistan. This turned out to be an Indian summer. Kabul fell to the mujaheddin in 1992, and Najibullah sought refuge in the city’s UN command. He would remain there until the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 1996. Taliban members stormed the compound, captured Najibullah, then castrated and decapitated him. Oddly enough, they discovered that the former Communist leader of Afghanistan was spending his last days translating Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game, a history of Anglo-Russian relations in Central Asia, into Pashto.[36]

America’s Missed Opportunity

Nobody can deny that that the US has accomplished much in Afghanistan. Under American occupation, Afghanistan’s GDP has increased tenfold in 20 years.[2] US servicemen and their Afghan allies have managed to stop the Taliban from capturing any of Afghanistan’s 34 regional capitals. US heroics have been shown to the world throughout the war: the Battle of Takur Ghar, the Battle of Kamdesh, Operation Red Wings, the Battle of Ganjgal, and the pursuit and killing of Osama bin Laden.

Sadly, one cannot call the US-led War in Afghanistan (2001–) a victory. Yes, US forces removed the Taliban from power in 2001 and established a pro-American government in Kabul. However, a significant chance at a lasting peace was lost in 2001. As chronicled in Doug Stanton’s 2009 book 12 Strong, the original US strategy focused on maintaining a “small footprint” in the country mostly made up of US Special Forces soldiers. This, in the context of Afghanistan, is a superior policy. As the British and Russians learned, the Afghan people, regardless of their ethnicity or sect, loathe outsiders. Had the US kept to a smaller, elite forces-focused counter-insurgency campaign, then thousands of American and Afghan lives could have been saved.

Other mistakes have been made. Former Green Beret Major Jim Gant found during his deployments in Afghanistan that the tribes remain the locus of all power in the country. Gant and his team of Special Forces soldiers and regular infantrymen from a regular Kansas-based unit successfully embedded with a Pashtun tribe for months. This hard work paid off when the tribesmen united with the Americans whenever Taliban insurgents tried to attack one of their compounds or infiltrate their community. Again, Gant’s experience proved that winning Afghanistan means winning the tribes and doing so with as few foreign soldiers as possible.[37] In the end Gant was undone by a West Point officer who disagreed with Gant’s more unconventional methods (use of alcohol, the presence of an American female correspondent, etc.).[38]

Overall, the biggest American mistake of the War in Afghanistan is its blind adherence to Wilsonian interventionism. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama maintained US troops in the country under the inchoate beliefs of “protecting democracy” and “protecting civil rights.” The US government and various NGOs believe and are given billions of dollars to believe that a Western-style democracy can exist in Afghanistan. This will never be true, especially since the “Afghanistan Papers” report by the Washington Post revealed the incredible depths of ignorance of American military leaders. Not only do our generals know next to nothing about Afghanistan, but they have repeatedly lied to our government and have created rosy scenarios about eventual victory in order to justify further funding.

Because of all of this, when the US eventually pulls out of Afghanistan, the Taliban will likely either establish a government or be a part of a government. If not them, then an anti-American government of some kind will enjoy some time controlling the levers of power in Kabul. Much of this could have been avoided had the US abandoned Wilsonian interventionism a long time ago. Wilsonian interventionism has the look and feel of colonialism, but mouths the platitudes of liberalism. This does not work.

A better solution for Afghanistan and future US military operations would include: 1) a smaller footprint, 2) no nation-building, and 3) the creation of more culturally appropriate governments. In Afghanistan, the US should have installed a monarch. After all, Afghanistan’s great age of prosperity and peace was under Zahir Shah. American policymakers would never support the establishment of kingdoms simply because of knee-jerk republicanism in American culture and politics. This mentality is stupid because Western-style liberalism and democracy are neither inherent nor natural to the entire world. US military planners and leaders need to better understand foreign nations and cultures if they want to see a more peaceful world. Simply put, spreading democracy spreads violence and instability. Most countries do not have a history of democracy, therefore forcing them to accept a Western important is never going to go well.

Most maddeningly of all, the Barakzai Dynasty established by Zahir Shah is still alive and well. Ahmad Shah Khan, Crown Prince of Afghanistan, although 85 years old, could easily be called upon to rule his country. Other members of Barakzai tribe would be suitable, although knowing America’s “deep state,” they would prefer Barakzai member Shukria Barakzai, a journalist and feminist who formerly served as Afghanistan’s Ambassador to Norway. Any member of the Barakzai family has more legitimacy in terms of ruling Afghanistan than any bandit chieftain or democratic politician.

If nothing else, America’s long quagmire in Afghanistan should teach our leaders to avoid counter-insurgencies at all costs. American imperial power can be maintained better through local proxies and air power. The American Empire also needs a trimming and a reassessment. Too many of our troops are in Africa and Europe when they would serve American foreign and national policy better by being deployed to Asia and Latin America. Specifically, the US military should be training in order to counter the threat of the Chinese Communist Party and the long-term threat of social collapse and attendant migration coming from Mexico, Central America, and South America. As for jihadist terrorism, it is best countered through espionage, law enforcement, and restrictive immigration policies, not through military occupations. American foreign policy needs new thinking and new brains. We should never let another Afghanistan waste our national vitality.

References

  1. Hirsh, Michael (2020, Mar. 13). “Did Trump Cave to the Taliban?”. Foreign Policy.
  2. Black, Conrad (2020, Feb. 26). “Trump Ready to Keep Promise to Get Out of Afghanistan”. The Epoch Times.
  3. Holt, Frank (2012). Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan. University of California Press. p. 100.
  4. Singh, Sneh (2017, Aug. 14). “How the British East India Company managed to colonise India for nearly 200 years”. Your Story.
  5. Braithwaite, Rodric (2013). Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89. Oxford University Press. p. 14.
  6. Farooq, Umar (2013, Feb. 11). “Civilians bear brunt of Pakistan’s war in the northwest”. Foreign Policy.
  7. Braithwaite, p. 19.
  8. David, Saul (2006). Victoria’s Wars: The Rise of Empire. Penguin Books. p. 17.
  9. Ibid., p. 19.
  10. Ibid., p. 34.
  11. Ibid., p. 45.
  12. Ibid., p. 48.
  13. Ibid., p. 54.
  14. Ibid., p. 67.
  15. Ibid., p. 71.
  16. Ibid., p. 72.
  17. Braithwaite, p. 24.
  18. McNamara, Robert (2019, May 15). “The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880)”. Thought Co.
  19. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (2003). A Study in Scarlet. The Modern Library. p. 124.
  20. Rahimi, Mujib Rahman (2017). State Formation in Afghanistan: A Theoretical and Political History. Bloomsbury. p. 186.
  21. Foschini, Fabrizio (2019, Sep. 21). “The 1919 War of Independence (or third Anglo-Afghan War): a conflict the Afghans started (and ended)”. Afghanistan Analysts Network.
  22. Coll, Steve (2018). Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Penguin Books. p. 421.
  23. Braithwaite, p. 29.
  24. Tucker, Spencer C., Ed. (2017). Modern Conflict in the Greater Middle East: A Country-by-Country Guide. ABC-CLIO. p. 4.
  25. Braithwaite., p. 30.
  26. Ibid., p. 31.
  27. Ibid., p. 32.
  28. Ibid., p. 123.
  29. Ibid., p. 64.
  30. Ibid., p. 48–53.
  31. Ibid., p. 103.
  32. Ibid., p. 44.
  33. Ibid., p. 114–5.
  34. Ibid., p. 275–6.
  35. Ibid., p. 305–6.
  36. Burns, John F (1996, Oct. 6). “Afghanistan Reels Back Into View”. New York Times.
  37. Gant, Jim (2009). One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan. Nine Sisters Imports. p. 31–42.
  38. Tyson, Ann Scott (2014). American Spartan: The Promise, The Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant. William Morrow. p. 296–7.

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