The month of August was one of chaos, uncertainty and hard decisions as the United States finally made its way out of Afghanistan. The disintegration of the American-backed and-built Afghan democratic government and its military forces came as an abrupt shock to many.
Still reeling with the shock and chaos of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, many are frustrated with how the confusing and sometimes undefined situation was handled from start to finish.
As Biden himself said in his speech on Aug. 16, “We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and make sure al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again — we did that almost a decade ago. Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy.”
With the initial aims of the U.S.’s vengeful incursion into Afghanistan achieved, the country found itself with an ill-defined mission.
Conclusions from the Aug. 16th report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) — created by Congress in 2008 to provide independent and objective oversight of the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan — reveal the crippling faults of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan: “The U.S. government continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy… [it] consistently underestimated the amount of time required to rebuild Afghanistan and created unrealistic timelines and expectations that prioritized spending quickly. These choices increased corruption and reduced the effectiveness of programs.”
The report continues, “Many of the institutions and infrastructure projects the United States built were not sustainable … Billions of reconstruction dollars were wasted as projects went unused or fell into disrepair. Demands to make fast progress incentivized U.S. officials to identify and implement short-term projects with little consideration for host government capacity and long-term sustainability. U.S. agencies were seldom judged by their projects’ continued utility, but by the number of projects completed and dollars spent. Over time, U.S. policies emphasized that all U.S. reconstruction projects must be sustainable, but Afghans often lacked the capacity to take responsibility for projects,” due in part to the U.S. government’s failure to make a patient and continued effort to build the capacity of Afghan institutions rather than turning to channels outside the Afghan government to provide assistance.
This is not to say that there were no tangible successes.
The lives of millions of Afghans were improved by U.S. government efforts. Between 2002 to 2018, life expectancy rose from 56 to 65. Between 2000 and 2019, the mortality rate of children under five decreased by more than 50%. Between 2001 and 2019, Afghanistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita nearly doubled, and overall GDP nearly tripled, even accounting for inflation.
Between 2005 and 2017, literacy among 15- to 24-year-olds rose by 28 percentage points among males and 19 points among females. The tragedy is that even these successes may very well be reversed by the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban’s complete return to power.
And what of the final stages of the withdrawal? The alacrity with which the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan to the resurging Taliban and the humanitarian crisis that followed as thousands of expats and Afghans clamored at Hamid Karzai International Airport to escape the new Taliban regime drew global attention and well-deserved harsh criticism.
The U.S. invaded Afghanistan with impunity two decades ago, and it left with impunity.
Some criticism has been directed toward Afghanistan’s army, which largely dissipated in the face of the Taliban’s retaking of the country, government forces often negotiating surrenders with the Taliban and agreeing to the exchange of army weapons for money.
However, many have called the army’s disappearance completely fair. The Feb. 2020 agreement between the Taliban and the U.S. calling for a full American withdrawal brought Afghan government forces to the realization that they would soon be without the U.S. support they had counted on for 20 years.
The U.S. had been in the process of leaving for a decade. In this time, the Taliban became as powerful as it had ever been before, rapidly reclaiming provinces and controlling highways. In a country rife with corruption and regional forces tenuously loyal to the dubious central government, self-preservation meant capitulation to the power filling the vacuum left by the U.S. — the Taliban.
Beyond this, some in Afghan government forces hadn’t been receiving their salaries. Before the city of Kandahar fell to the Taliban, Afghan police officers on the front lines said they hadn’t been paid in six to nine months.
Concurrently to the agreement with the Taliban, the U.S. announced a joint declaration with the Afghan government for “bringing peace to Afghanistan.” The declaration, comical in hindsight, essentially called on the Afghan government to secure U.S. interests by, again, “prevent[ing] the use of Afghan soil by any international terrorist groups or individuals against the security of the United States and its allies” and to pursue peace with the Taliban, while recognizing the U.S. agreement with the Taliban.
America, with impunity.
Photo courtesy of The Times of Israel