Marking a Year Since U.S. Withdrawal

Disaster: America’s Afghan Legacy

Date: 15 August 2022 - 21:42

News ID: ۱۰۵۷۹۱

KABUL (Dispatches) -- A year ago, the Taliban captured Kabul, capping the dramatic fall of Afghanistan’s fragile U.S.-backed government. America’s longest war ended in ignominy and tragedy. The militants that had been chased from power in 2001 were back in command and the legacy of two decades of U.S.-led occupation that had drained more than $1 trillion from U.S. taxpayers and cost the lives of more than 3,500 U.S. and allied soldiers — and tens of thousands more Afghan troops and civilians — hung excruciatingly in the balance.
Hours after the world watched the chaotic scenes at Kabul airport as thousands of Afghans desperately tried to flee the victorious Taliban advance, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a U.S. government ombudsman, issued a report on 20 years of U.S. efforts in the country. It was grim reading: “If the goal was to rebuild and leave behind a country that can sustain itself and pose little threat to U.S. national security interests, the overall picture is bleak,” the report noted.
Billions of dollars in American and foreign aid may have been siphoned into boondoggles for corrupt Afghan officials and opportunistic U.S. military contractors. While the threat of extremist Al-Qaeda militants operating on Afghan land rose, ordinary Afghan civilians saw their country’s security situation grow more precarious amid constant terrorist bombings and attacks. A branch of the Daesh found fertile soil in Afghanistan’s rugged terrain. And years of American efforts to shore up a puppet Afghan government and train its new army did little to prevent its sudden and total collapse, columnist Ishaan Tharoor wrote in the Washington Post.
Surging poverty has led to impoverished families selling their daughters as child brides. Tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted U.S. and other foreign forces remain stuck in the country, vulnerable to a regime that sees them as having collaborated with foreign occupiers.
In Washington, there’s plenty of lamentation over what went wrong. Some former military

officials believe the United States was out of its depth culturally and could never graft its political system onto Afghanistan’s tribal landscape. Others pin more direct blame on former president Donald Trump, who signed a peace deal with the Taliban that critics argue doomed the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, and President Biden, who executed the full withdrawal even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes to the Taliban.

“Our foundational mistake was our lack of commitment,” wrote David Petraeus, former commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, for the Atlantic. “In essence, we never adopted a sufficient, consistent, overarching approach that we stuck with from administration to administration, or even within individual administrations.”

As reported in 2019, many U.S. officials tasked with carrying out alleged counterinsurgency and reconstruction in Afghanistan privately knew the mission was failing, but in public spun a different message.

Now that the Washington establishment has been robbed of its delusions, Afghanistan has faded from view. Biden has repeatedly insisted the legacy campaigns of the post-9/11 era in Afghanistan and Iraq were obscuring the more important challenges facing U.S. strategists, who are now fully occupied by the Russian military operation in Ukraine and the rising clout of China.

“I have been struck that much of Washington has appeared keen to essentially put Afghanistan in the rearview mirror and try to move on,” Michael Kugelman, an expert on South Asia at the Wilson Center, told Reuters.

Many Afghans, meanwhile, are only looking ahead with despair. The evaporation of international aid to the country, compounded by U.S. sanctions that froze some $7 billion of Afghan foreign reserves, sent Afghanistan’s economy into a tailspin. The country’s banking system is paralyzed and food prices have soared. The majority of the Afghan population is in need of humanitarian assistance. More than half the population is going hungry and more than a million children are severely malnourished. The United Nations estimated that as much as 97 percent of the country may fall below the poverty line by the second half of the year.

“Regardless of the Taliban’s status or credibility with outside governments, international economic restrictions are still driving the country’s catastrophe and hurting the Afghan people,” John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said in an Aug. 4 statement.