After 9/11, there was no question that George W was going to hunt down Bin Laden and skewer the dude if he could. As a political matter, considering the popularity bounce that George got from playing the “tough guy” after the 9/11 attack, he may have had no choice. So in the American military went all the way to Kabul.
The question at that moment — and it is a question that no one ever answered — was what then? BTW, George W faced the same question after the US military entered Baghdad. And once again, the question went unanswered.
It was obvious as the nose on your face that America, its allies, the UN and all the other folks who hoped they could change Afghanistan were not going to change Afghanistan. But they had to make the invasion look good (righteous), and so they tried, and tried, and tried again to make Afghanistan a paradise for democracy and human rights. Twenty years later, Joe Biden has pulled the plug on the mess, and will bring the troops (what is left of them) back home.
Why was this mission impossible? The main military problem was that the taliban could always retreat out of the reach of the US military across the border into Pakistan. The US might sporadically go after them there, but could not systematically clear them out without provoking the ire of the Pakistanis (who BTW have nukes). Even after the taliban started killing Pakistani police, the Pakistanis did not reverse course and get rid of them. They just boxed the taliban into the wild lands on the Afghani border. and made it clear to them that their role was to kill Americans, not Pakistanis.
Wait a minute! Isn’t Pakistan an American ally? So why didn’t the Pakistanis get rid of the taliban for the Americans? Sadly, the reason appears to be geopolitical. The Pakistani ruling elite wants to dominate Afghanistan, and they think they can do so by using the taliban. That means that after the US pulls out, the taliban will launch their attack, and with covert Pakistani help, will probably take over Afghanistan once more. Yes, this will be a mess again.
To put this in perspective, you might recall that Pakistan was created in the great partition of 1947 because Muslims in eastern and northwest parts of the Raj wanted their own Muslim state. It is still a Muslim state, and it wants Afghanistan to be its Muslim brother in its eternal struggle against India, that has a huge Muslim population but is not a Muslim state. This religious aspect of geopolitics in that region will not just disappear because Americans don’t like it and don’t understand it.
So BTW, if you are an Afghan who worked with the Americans, you might want to get out while you can. And the Americans who used you should give you a free pass to do so. Will we? Probably only in a very limited fashion.
And what about nation building? You simply cannot do this at gun point. Nation building requires local loyalty, and local loyalties are nurtured by local traditions and understandings. Trying to change these from the top down is at best, a very, very slow moving process. Consider, for example that more than half a century after the Untied States was formed, the southern states still clung to their local “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery. And even more than a century after a horrendous civil war ended slavery, Americans still have a race problem, laws be damned!
The most absurd part of the US adventure in Afghanistan was trying to import US values into a country that not only has not experienced the enlightenment, but that has no interest in it. So US experiments to instill democratic rule, the rule of law, etc. were doomed to failure, and indeed failed. And those training events for Afghani judges on constitutional law? Well, let’s just say that the coffee and pastries served during the coffee breaks were refreshing.
So are there any lessons to be learned from Afghanistan?
I hate to say it, but it is the same lesson that Napoleon should have learned in Spain, and that the US should have learned in Vietnam. It is not that hard for a major power to install a puppet regime in a weak state. It is a lot harder to make that puppet regime legitimate and popular in the eyes of the local public so that it can be sustained by locals in the face of a determined military assault. Are folks prepared to die for that regime? If not, the adventure will sooner or later implode.
In case you are wondering, that is why the US still has a large military presence in Korea nearly70 years after the “peace” deal that supposedly ended the Korean war was done.. And the South Korean government is not even a puppet regime.
What could have been done with less cost and greater impact?
I do believe that after 9/11, the US had to confront Al Queda. But it was a mistake to turn this into an American led global “war against terrorism”. Instead, the US should have said “this is not our war” and sought out allies within the Muslim world to fight off their own terrorist subgroups. In other words, do what could be done, not what makes for a good sound bite on TV. But America was — and I think still is — hooked on its sound bite TV driven politics, and we got policies that sounded good at the time, but that were not very well thought out.
We left the resulting mess to the military to sort out, even though the mess was well beyond what military units are trained to do and can do,. BTW, just like Americans leave the police to sort out inner city problems caused by poverty, even though those problems are beyond what policing can sort out.
Tant pis for everyone who got killed.
BTW, you might be thinking, “what about Iraq?” The US had to go back into Iraq after ISIS reared its ugly head . but the US military had learned a lesson. The US military intervention was largely air based, using local proxies to grind out the battles on the ground (remember the kurds?). The startling thing is that while the kurds did everything that was asked of them by the US (which was also in their own interests to do), the Trump Administration dumped them.
The bottom line here — While the US appears to have learned a lesson from its adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq — to avoid heavy “boots on the ground” military interventions as a precursor to “nation building”. the US appears not to have learned how to manage local alliances that are needed to keep the peace. Ooops!