The blame game was intensifying as Afghanistan’s provincial capitals were falling swiftly to the Taliban. And now that Kabul has fallen, working out what went wrong is about all we have left.
Washington’s exit plans are coming in for ferocious criticism. If only the Trump Administration hadn’t signed up to a withdrawal date in exchange for empty promises from the Taliban. If only Joe Biden had seen that withdrawing US air power would embolden the insurgents, undermine the Afghan National Army, and leave America’s allies scrambling. And if only the US intelligence services had decided to wake up and smell the coffee on how quickly the Taliban’s victory would occur.
But some observers also see big problems in the crucial period after the international forces toppled the Taliban nearly 20 years ago. If only the United States had not been distracted by starting a war with Iraq, Helen Clark has insisted, Afghanistan’s fledgling democracy would have had a better chance of prevailing.
As easy as it may be to find fault in American strategy, a broader problem arose after the Cold War had ended: too much confidence among western powers that they could translate initial battlefield achievements into long-term progress in the political affairs of another country. Destroying and degrading an adversary is one thing. Developing self-sustaining institutions of government which deliver public services and ensure that adversaries have no scope for a return has been quite another.
With Afghanistan the United States and its partners (including New Zealand) could hardly have found a more difficult venue to test their strategic optimism. It’s a place where effective national institutions are historically rare. The chances are remote that any government based in Kabul could satisfy Max Weber’s old definition of statehood by maintaining a monopoly on armed force across the country. And Pakistan’s support for the Taliban meant that the immediate neighbourhood was hardly conducive to Afghanistan’s internal stability.
The disenchanting end to the 20-year campaign in Afghanistan brings a final curtain down on an even longer era of often good intentions, which after 9/11 was buttressed by strategic necessity given the threat from Al Qaeda. Yet strategic necessity has a habit of shifting. In 2019 the advice presented by Winston Peters and Ron Mark to Jacinda Ardern’s Cabinet which was deciding on the future of New Zealand’s much reduced mission in Afghanistan held that: “The case for continued international involvement in Afghanistan continues to rest on the imperative to prevent Afghanistan’s re-emergence as a safe haven for extremist groups planning externally-directed terrorist attacks.” But well before that moment New Zealand’s strategic gaze had been shifting to strategic competition between the great powers, which in Washington and Canberra was becoming nothing less than an obsession.
That trend has continued in the Biden era of American foreign policy. Trump’s successor has been trying to recruit NATO allies and European partners for an Indo-Pacific contest with China, not for new commitments to complex internal wars. Hopes for an international community united around the responsibility to protect civilian populations from abusive governments have been on ice since the UN-authorised intervention left Libya in chaos. The US and its regular partners have left it to Russia and Iran to compete for a say over Syria’s future. France is reducing its military footprint in francophone Africa.
The allergy to forever wars is not just an American illness. The bar is now very high for a new Afghanistan-style commitment (which for New Zealand came alongside a simultaneous deployment to East Timor and then another to Solomon Islands). It might take a major transnational attack before New Zealand’s usual military partners decide that renewed engagement was necessary in Afghanistan or elsewhere. But what might be favoured in Washington and other capitals is a quick but violent mission from the air, and from a distance, in an attempt to deal to the transgressors.
Kabul’s fall could be the last echo of a period when western governments believed their armed forces could knit together broken nations. Despite all of today’s talk about democratic values, the message is that we don’t really mind how you govern yourselves, or actually whether you govern yourselves, as long as you don’t harm us.
Robert Ayson is Professor of Strategic Studies at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
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