Has the U.S. orchestrated a 'decent interval' in Afghanistan?

Great Debates
41

Also frankly, if we keep around 5,000 soldiers in Afghanistan essentially forever it makes it highly unlikely a group like the Taliban could ever seriously grow anywhere close to its previous power. It’s difficult to stamp out popular movements like that, but when it’s devolved to the point where it isn’t really a popular movement any longer but more of a marginalized criminal gang traditional military power can fairly realistic keep them under control.

There’s a big difference between “keep them under control” and “eliminate them”, but it’s also worth noting there’s a big difference between that and “Taliban rolling into Kabul.” Think about the huge cartels in Mexico, the government may never stamp them out completely, but that doesn’t mean Mexico city is about to “fall” to them.

I think I had underestimate the difficulties that would be caused in Iraq due to the Shia and Sunni divisions back in 2005 or so, because back in 2005 I would’ve said between Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraq had the best long run chance at stability. This was at least based on the fact that Iraq had been a stable country at some point in its history while Afghanistan hadn’t been for a long time. But here in 2015 Afghanistan is actually in a far better place right now than I think Iraq is likely to be for a generation.

42

Not according to the NYT. From yesterday:

43

The Taliban’s popularity is inversely proportional to the popularity of the Kabul government. It’s not unlike the so-called Islamic State in Iraq. People don’t really like them, but they may be perceived as a better alternative than the federal or local government, which is often corrupt and unresponsive to the needs of the people.

44

I’m guessing you would say the Kunduz takeover was a last gasp effort that doesn’t mean much in the long run. Is that about right?

45

Those maps are not realistic, and have not been realistic for large portions of the war. Many of those “red” districts have Afghan army bases in them that are still there. A few years ago maps would always show Helmand province as “red” too, even though a large U.S. base was there the entire time. I’m not sure when/why the media started reporting insurgent groups as being “in control” of an entire “district” based on some vague level of “presence” in said district, when there are still significant non-insurgent conventional forces stationed in said district that are not being driven out. It’d be like saying the Free French “controlled” large swathes of France during WWII despite the Germans controlling all the cities and the Free French being largely unable to do anything but blow stuff up and hide in the countryside.

The Taliban claims control of some 35 districts out of 398, which it appears the NYT repeats uncritically, for reasons I do not clearly understand.

46

That isn’t actually true. The Taliban has always had a certain base of popular support, they were one of many of the post-Soviet War Mujahideen groups that laid out a specific philosophy and had specific goals that a certain portion of the Afghan population supported. Their ability to take over the country was based on a large number of the Afghan warlords ultimately “converting” to their side and essentially becoming vassalized by them. The Taliban will never control Afghanistan without something similar happening in the future. Due to the fact these other warlords are now much better equipped, financed, and have larger numbers of soldiers they would have no reason to go that route. They would instead largely fight for their own piece of the pie if the government in Kabul breaks down.

47

For a more realistic picture of the strength of the Taliban, recognize that its #2 leader had kept Mullah Omar’s death secret for over two years, and was trying to negotiate a peace with the Kabul government. When it was found out Omar was dead, his position as the de facto leader was unmasked, and he feared for his position so he had to back out of peace negotiations and start fighting again. If you’re in a position of power you don’t try to negotiate peace, under the facade it is what the (years dead) leader wants. Nor do you react so desperately to save yourself when it is found you’ve been keeping his death secret for two years.

Islamic State is very different from the Taliban because Iraq and Syria are very different than Afghanistan. Iraq has a huge Sunni population that prior to Saddam’s fall were used to running the country, and they have largely always felt disenchanted with the Shiite lead post-U.S. occupation government. While some of the Sunni tribes haven’t wanted to join ISIS, the Shiite Iraqi Army doesn’t care to protect them and these tribes aren’t super willing to fight ISIS themselves because many young Sunnis are joining enthusiastically and they specifically target for extreme massacres any of the Sunni tribes that drag their feet on paying tribute to ISIS.

Afghanistan is not very divided in a religious sense, over 90% of the population are Sunni Muslim. It is very ethnically divided, the Pashtun are the largest ethnic group at around 40% of the population. Despite its long attempts to broaden its appeal as a general Islamist group, the overwhelming majority of the Taliban has always been made up of Pashtun tribesmen. The 60% of the country that is not Pashtun has largely never joined the Taliban in any meaningful way. So even if the Taliban had 100% support among the Pashtun, it’d be a scenario similar to Saddam era Iraq where a group that only represents about 40% of the country dominates the other 60%. That’s difficult to set up without significant outside help (that’s what it took to create these minority-rule states in the Middle East), but maybe not impossible if things are destabilized enough that large numbers of the various warlords sign on like they did during the civil war.

However, right now the President of Afghanistan is also a Pashtun, and the tribe he is from have long fought against the Taliban in this current war. There are many Pashtun tribes like this–they basically are never going to join the Taliban. With the Pashtun people so fractured with some of the tribes die hard anti-Taliban, I do not see a scenario where the Taliban ever has significant popular support to take over. Especially since the Afghan Army is legitimately far better armed and cohesive and stable than the Iraqi Army. That isn’t saying much, the Iraqi Army is barely an army at all, but it is what it is. The Afghan Army is fighting against a group they hate to protect their country, they have as much resolve as any insurgent group. This is a stark contrast to the Iraqi Army which largely is being asked to fight to protect people they hate and would probably like to be killing.

Abdullah Abdullah who received 30% of the vote and is enough of a political power that Ghani has had to enter into a power-sharing arrangement with him is of mixed ethnic background but identifies as a Tajik. The Tajiks are almost 30% of the country–and they will never join the Taliban or submit to them as long as they have bullets to shoot at them. That’s a permanent ethnic bloc that, unless we and the international community just 100% stopped supporting them, would never stop fighting. Again, the Taliban’s efforts against them would be similar to our efforts to “stamp out” anti-American sentiment in Vietnam during the war. That didn’t work so well, did it?

The Taliban were able to take over Afghanistan for two major reasons:

  1. Afghanistan was extremely fractured, with most of the country being ran tribally, the post-Soviet central government was a complete farce and most of t he country was lawless. Large areas of the country were held by local warlords who usually had the support of local tribes. Many places when the Taliban came to town local leaders immediately joined with no resistance whatsoever, because they had no meaningful allegiance to anyone.

  2. The Taliban’s earliest large numbers came from madrassas in Pakistan. The Taliban was actively supported by Pakistan’s ISI, at its height there were over 100,000 Pakistani Taliban in Afghanistan fighting to help them take control. There was a continually funnel of manpower from Pakistani madrassas to the Afghan Taliban, facilitated by ISI.

However this is not really the case any longer. During the long American war in Afghanistan, Pakistan eventually stopped supporting the Taliban in this way. They did continue to turn a blind eye to them. Further, not only is ISI no longer actively funneling men and resources to the Taliban, the recent Peshawar school massacre perpetuated by the Pakistani Taliban, (which is a different group entirely but that has occasionally assisted the Afghan Taliban) actually has Islamabad forces out in the tribal regions of Pakistan in large force for the first time really in ages. Pakistan’s default position to these lawless regions on its border that have little economic value and lots of terrorists has been to either ignore them or exploit the terrorist groups for their own geopolitical goals. With the massacre of the school children this position fundamentally changed, and now Pakistan has been engaged in sustained military activities targeted against terrorist groups on the border. So not only are the Taliban no longer receiving constant replenishment of men and materiel from ISI as they did during the Afghan civil war, the people across the border that might have been friendly to their goals and willing to cross over to fight with them are fighting their own war of survival now and are not going to run across the border to fight when they have a war to fight in their own back yard.

48

Yes, and ISIL has a “certain base of popular support” in Sunni Arab Iraq. I’ll concede that I oversimplified by saying “people don’t really like them”, and should have said “most people…”. But we’re talking about a country that isn’t a nation in the usual sense of the word, and people who are largely illiterate and generally owe no allegiance to the central government. The Taliban may not be able to literally topple the Kabul Government, but they are more than capable of holding control over large parts of the country.

49

Yes, but they’re the portions where no one lives. This is similar to the uncontrolled areas of Pakistan. In areas of extremely low development, where there are genuine comparisons to middle age society in terms of economic, social, educational etc development, it is always going to be extremely difficult for a central government to exercise functional control. But the parts of Afghanistan that matter the most are its cities and towns where people actually live (most of the population) and its various important agricultural regions. I’ve never said the Taliban is likely to be stamped out soon–in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. But I do not see without the massive outside support they had during the Afghan Civil War, and the likely long term support we will be giving the Kabul government, a realistic scenario where the Taliban take multiple cities, let alone the whole country. Hell, even at the “end” of the Afghan Civil War the Taliban’s control was always somewhat fictional. Around 10% of the country was controlled by the Northern Alliance, and the Taliban was never able to take that away. Additionally, in much of the Pashtun tribal areas, Taliban control had always been shaky. Many of these tribal areas, during the war when the Taliban rolled in, the local leaders swore allegiance, and the Taliban left. With them went their effective rule of the region.

Unlike oilfields and major Iraqi cities that ISIS for example is keen to keep under their control, the truth is there is almost nothing of value in much of the land controlled by some of these Pashtun tribes. So the Taliban was cool keeping them “colored in” on the map, as long as said tribes didn’t actively rebel against them, but their effective control of them was always limited. The Taliban’s control of the major cities was more firm.

I mean hell, the reality is ISIS is never going to take Baghdad for example, and the Iraqi Army is arguably in worse shape than the Afghan Army, and ISIS is in better shape than the Taliban. So it’s a pretty big stretch that we’re going to see a Saigon replay in Afghanistan. There isn’t a realistic scenario where that happens.

50

I should add, I’m not painting a fantastical, rosy picture of Afghanistan. Afghanistan isn’t a stable country and needs decades of development. There’s always going to be violence there, at least for the foreseeable future. I just don’t see a Saigon II in the cards here. There’s a big difference between “Afghanistan remains fairly unpleasant” and “the Taliban captures Kabul and takes control of the entire country.”

It’s also worth noting how quickly the Afghans were able to retake Kunduz when it fell, when ISIS has taken cities in Iraq it’s largely held them for very long periods of time, if it ever loses them, and some it has obviously been able to hold largely uncontested.

51

I agree that the Vietnam analogy is a poor one, but it’s only 3 or so people making that argument in this thread, and I’m not one of them.

52

Hang on, the analogy goes only so far as US intentions to treat its local ally (The Afghan government) and what lengths it would do to distance itself from the disaster if that should occur.

Yeah, but the Taliban voluntarily withdrew from Kunduz.

http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2015/10/13/taliban-withdraw-from-northern-afghan-city

53

I am very confused as to why you’re taking the word at face value of a Taliban spokesperson. Especially when he’s saying they made a withdrawal to avoid further civilian casualties, the Taliban is responsible for 75-80% of all civilian casualties in the current Afghan war, so I find this claim to be in the category of “extraordinary.”

I think there’s a greater likelihood that their withdrawal corresponded with the heavy ANA ground assault on their position combined with extensive coalition aerial bombing.

54

“Voluntary withdrawal” is something you do only when holding ground is untenable. All it means is that the Taliban were smart enough to know when they couldn’t win.

The other reason the Vietnam analogy doesn’t hold is because we were directly attacked and will be attacked again from that source if we allow the Taliban to come back into power. A nation can decide to voluntarily withdraw from an elective war. Nations cannot voluntarily withdraw from wars started by others. I realize we’re not used to the concept anymore because the last such war like that was 70 years ago, but no, we do not get to leave Afghanistan unless:

a) Local Afghan forces can do our fighting for us.
b) The Taliban and Al Qaeda are defeated or so weakened as to be non-factors.
c) We decide that it’s okay to suffer mass casualty attacks on our territory without responding.

55

[bolding added]

This strikes me as a very questionable assertion. What possible interest would the Taliban have in attacking us, or harboring those who would attack us, if we were to withdraw and then leave them alone? Do they want us to come in and overthrow and kill them all over again?

Aside from the question of intent, there is also the issue of capability. How exactly would the Taliban or a bunch of ragtag porn-addicted terrorists pose a serious threat to any US interest? Using a commercial airplane as a missile was diabolically clever, but let’s be frank: as far as wreaking low-tech mass destruction goes, that was the low hanging fruit and it was a one shot deal. The odds of terrorists flying a plane into a building in the post-9/11 world are IMO approximately zero.

When we were attacked, we had to strike back at the Taliban. But the mission should never have been more than a punitive raid, albeit a devastating one. Committing ourselves to dictating the long-term political outcome in Afghanistan is unnecessary and bound for failure.

56

Whether we leave or not we won’t see a situation like the pre-9/11 Afghanistan in which terrorist training camps are allowed to operate in open air again. We would simply bomb them. Prior to 9/11 we knew of lots of terrorist training camps all over the globe, but weren’t bombing them due to a desire to avoid the geopolitical repercussions of bombing targets in other State’s territory.

While camps in places like Iran or another country where we can’t get away with bombing could operate with impunity, a country like Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, etc we’d simply bomb such camps in the future.

57

I could not agree more with BOTH of those posts. Well said, guys!

58

It’s not like radicals need Afghanistan for training, even live fire training - there are terrorist camps all over the place - East Africa, Gulf States, Middle East/Persia. Every year the map gets bigger; the returnees get more numerous.

The world has moved on a very long way since the US invasion of Afghanistan.

59

If they were going to change, they would have done it. Al Qaeda are their allies. If they are allies by necessity because they need the fighters, then they aren’t going to turn on them when they get power back. If they are allies out of mutual respect and common goals, then of course we’re right back to pre-2001.

In Sep 2001 when we demanded they hand Al Qaeda members over to us, they refused, either because they didn’t have the power or because they didn’t want to. Nothing has changed in that regard.

Not zero, but yes, that trick has been done. It won’t happen again, mainly because passengers aren’t going to cooperate anymore, not because TSA is particularly effective. The main risk now is shootings and bombings, and of course the biggest mass casualty risk is chemical, biological, or dirty bomb. It seems to me that the risk is high enough though that our return to Afghanistan is pretty likely. Best to just prevent the Taliban from coming back. Besides, if Al Qaeda and the Taliban returned to power, Al Qaeda’s recruiting would boom. Nothing recruits like victory.

I agree about punitive raids, but the nature of punitive raids is that they have to do more damage to the enemy and the enemy’s interests than they are willing to accept. I’m not sure what we can do to al qaeda that dissuades them from attacking us.

Obviously we can’t build a nation out of Afghanistan, but we can keep the Taliban out of power. And at this point our casualties are really low due to our small footprint. If what we have there is enough to keep the Taliban out, and it seems to be, then there’s no reason to not keep them there for the next 100 years. The military brass could even make that deployment volunteer only for really gung ho types or those who want to accelerate their career.

60

You cannot do any damage whatsoever to terrorist interests by bombing their training camps. You kill a small number, you break their jungle gyms, and you’ve accomplished less than you did by bombing North Vietnamese bridges. It’ll all be rebuilt a few days later. Air power is a very limited tool and completely insufficient for this kind of war.

Now if you’re talking special forces raids on terrorist training camps, then you’re onto something. Although we’d probably have to massively expand the special forces to make that viable.