The Long War

by David Loyn

  Understandably, Ghani was not going to be bounced into releasing prisoners without further guarantees, and from the next day, the ambitious timetable set in Doha of talks beginning in March began to slip. But the clock was ticking in Washington. Patience for the Ghani government was in short supply. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had been twisting Ghani’s arm once again to accept a national unity government, giving Abdullah half the posts.

  On March 9, with no deal agreed, and with opposition from his closest Western allies, Ghani went ahead with his second inauguration. The talks to try to broker a compromise with Abdullah went on all night, pushing the event from 9:00 a.m., through 11:00, finally taking place at 3:00 in the afternoon. The setting was the beautiful inner garden of the Arg, the Harem Serai, the scene the week before of the signing of the deal with the U.S. The event developed along characteristically Afghan lines—formal, but with haphazard improvisation. Interruptions by individuals leaping to their feet and shouting a chant or lines of poetry are welcomed and respected at such gatherings. Groups of men, wearing the distinctive northern Afghan rolled woolen hat, the pakhool, climbed up into the lower branches of giant plane trees for a better view. There were blocks of dignitaries—ministers, MPs, senators, the supreme court judges who would administer the oath, in black robes with gold trim, and at the back, the orange hats of a representative group of street cleaners. At the front were some 1980s warlords, but more attended a parallel event close by where, in what felt like a very dangerous moment, Abdullah too was inaugurated as president by his supporters.

  There is a military saying that the “enemy has a vote,” and that day, it was exercised by the firing of four rockets from the back of a car close to the events while Ghani was speaking. One fell inside the Arg compound, although no one was injured. The sound of the explosions crashed across the small garden area, full of people with only one narrow exit, causing momentary panic. But these people had heard many explosions before and did not run away. Security guards tried to hustle out Zalmay Khalilzad and General Miller, sitting in the front of the diplomatic section, but they stayed as Ghani remained on the podium. Pushing off his security guards, Ghani opened his jacket and pointed to his white shirt, saying, “This is not body armor. This is just a shirt. This body is ready to be sacrificed for the Afghan people.” Standing firm may have given him some political breathing space. Immediately, there were thousands of pictures on social media of people opening their jackets, with #belikeghani.11

  In further negotiations after the parallel inaugurations, Ghani was forced to accept Abdullah as a partner again, giving him 50 percent of the posts in government. But this time, it was not a national unity government. Instead, Abdullah was given the role of supervising the peace process. Like everything in the world in 2020, movement forward on this was affected by COVID-19, but the prisoners were released, and the Afghan government finally put together a credible, representative, tightly focused group of negotiators, led by the former minister Muhammad Masoom Stanekzai—the best-qualified person for the job. Time was not on their side. American patience, on both sides of the aisle, was running out.

  STANDING ALONE?

  The Arg has been the seat of Afghan power for 140 years and has seen foreign supporters come and go. Unable to bring Afghanistan into the British Empire after two wars in the nineteenth century, Britain gave subsidies of both cash and guns to the amir who built the Arg, Abdur Rahman,to keep him on their side against Russian intervention in British India. In 1893, they cut the weapons supply, restoring it only when he agreed to the Durand Line, the contested border with what later became Pakistan. After a third war with Britain in 1919, the subsidies stopped, and King Amanullah’s need to raise taxes in the 1920s was one of the reasons for his downfall in a revolution against his reforms. Germany, Italy, and France began long relationships with the country then.

  In the early days of the Cold War, the Afghan defence minister Daoud Khan went to Washington and failed in his request for military support. The alternative, he told them, was for him to seek it from Moscow. But Afghanistan was not a concern for the U.S., who had decided their regional ally was Pakistan. So from 1954 onward, Afghan troops went to the Soviet Union for training, and their forces were armed with Soviet weapons. Not supporting Afghanistan had consequences for long-term U.S. interests. When Daoud Khan replaced his cousin as the king in a coup in 1973, it set the stage for the gathering storm that would lead to his death in a more violent coup and closer Soviet involvement, culminating in the Christmas invasion in 1979.12

  The U.S. then backed the mujahideen in their ten-year campaign against the invasion until Soviet troops pulled out, and that aid continued for a further three years to help the mujahideen combat the Afghan government the Soviet Union had left behind. When the aid from both sides dried up with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, Afghanistan entered nine years of darkness, civil war between the mujahideen, and then rule by the Taliban.

  Afghans feared a return to chaos and fighting between the Taliban and warlords if the U.S. pulled out. Some of those voting in September 2019 were not even born on 9/11 and owe their lives and education to the American-led intervention, but after all the blood and treasure expended, their fragile democracy still depends on international support.

  The warlords responsible for the civil war in 1992 have not gone away. When in August 2020 Ghani finally announced the reconciliation council who would oversee the peace process with the Taliban, most of the names were those warlords. At some point, they need to be retired with honor to make way for a new generation. Ghani wanted them in the tent, while standing up his more reformist administration, with the aim of ultimately replacing the old guard. Five years on that reformist agenda was still a work in progress, now also challenged by new corrupt elites who did not draw their power from the time of the mujahideen.

  American military intervention in Afghanistan after 9/11 was inevitable after a grievous wound on the homeland. But twenty years on, more than three thousand American and other international lives lost, many, many more Afghan casualties, and $1 trillion spent, no one could argue that the policy was managed well.

  At the start, President Bush held two contradictory views that ran on parallel tracks. One was the idea of a quick strike against the Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, the second his more whimsical sense of America spreading the fruits of democracy. Bush directly invoked the postwar reconstruction of Germany. “We did not leave behind occupying armies; we left constitutions and parliaments.” He forgot the painstaking preparations made in the years before 1945 for the postwar phase. In Afghanistan after 2001, there was a rush to a constitution and elections. In contrast, post-1945 German institutions were rebuilt from the bottom up, with local and regional institutions prioritized over national elections. “Throughout history this has been the best approach to building states,” according to army historian Dr. Conrad C. Crane. There were also far more forces available in postwar Germany than in Afghanistan, and a willingness to stay the course. “The United States,” Crane wrote, “has rarely accomplished long-term goals after any conflict without an extended American military presence to ensure proper results from the peace.”13

  Were the mistakes all at the beginning? There is no doubt that the light-footprint approach did not bring all the capacity the U.S. had at its disposal to leave a stable country. The lack of military power on the ground let even the main prey, Osama bin Laden, escape, and sowed the seeds for a long bitter harvest of war. American (and wider international) unwillingness to properly prepare for complex interventions like Afghanistan, the wars they mostly fight, meant that the Afghan war was improvised from the start. After the Afghan experience, and with the bloodbaths of Libya and Iraq along the way, there will be no appetite for the foreseeable future for military intervention. But not harvesting the lessons of a twenty-year campaign would be a dangerous act of amnesia, dishonoring the sacrifice of those who died.

  The key lessons are to understand the context of the c
ountry itself, coordinate development with military force from the beginning, and put in enough troops to stabilize the situation—alongside forces configured to manage policing, customs collection, border controls, power, water, and the other basic necessities of a state. And successful intervention takes time. The veteran nation-builder Jim Dobbins divides people involved in intervention into three groups.

  First are the regional experts, those who understand how the society in conflict currently operates. This group often finds it hard to envisage substantial change and is consequently pessimistic about the degree of reform that may be possible. The second category is made up of experienced nation-builders. These individuals may know little of the society in question but do understand the process by which its transformation is to be attempted. These individuals are likely to advise that fundamental reforms are possible, but time consuming and expensive to effectuate. The last group is composed of those who know little of the society in question or of the nationbuilding process. People in this third category are most prone to believe that change can be achieved quickly and easily. It is also the members of this last category who are normally in charge.14

  Joe Biden, the fourth president to be faced with the dilemma of Afghanistan, entered the White House with more knowledge than his predecessors, from his years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and as vice president when he was the strongest opponent of increased troops in the Obama administration.

  His leading foreign advisers, in particular Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, were steeped in the debates during the Obama years, when they had been in Biden’s vice-presidential office. Blinken kept Khalilzad in post in January 2020, and had sight of the secret annexes to the peace deal that Khalilzad the Taliban for the first time. Under the secret annexes the Taliban were not attacked by U.S. forces in the Afghan countryside as long as they did not attack international troops or provincial capitals. General Miller was impotent to act as the Taliban steadily took ground. The administration faced a strong lobby to keep the troops in Afghanistan for longer. Less than two weeks after the inauguration, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Afghan commander, General Joe Dunford, in a Congress-mandated review of policy, argued that the final troop withdrawal date should be based on conditions on the ground, not an arbitrary timetable.15 Pulling troops out before the country was stable risked Afghanistan once again turning into a haven for global terrorists.

  Biden had heard the same argument in 2009 and was not persuaded by it then or in 2021. And now he was in a position to act decisively. On April 13, speaking from the Treaty Room of the White House, where President Bush had announced the start of the campaign on October 7 2001, he signalled the end of the long war. All troops would be out by September, the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. “We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal, and expecting a different result.” After speaking Biden went to Section 60 at Arlington cemetery and walked alone among graves of the fallen from Afghanistan and Iraq. He carried a furled umbrella but did not raise it despite pouring rain. In remarks to reporters he said Afghanistan had never been united.16 It was not the first or last time that he would make this entirely inaccurate statement both about Afghan history and its status until the fall of Kabul. The comment angered a generation who had pride in what their country had become since the fall of the Taliban twenty years earlier.

  The decision to withdraw was greeted with dismay in Afghanistan. The Taliban had not negotiated in good faith since securing the release of thousands of their fighters from Afghan jails in 2020. Talks with the Afghan government side in Doha had made no progress. Instead of negotiating, since the beginning of 2021 they had engaged in a campaign of intimidation against journalists, women’s rights campaigners, and others working for a new country—killing dozens of people in targeted assassinations. A prominent women’s group, Equality for Peace and Democracy, said that Afghans were “being deserted at a time when violence is at an all-time high.” The international troop presence may have been small, but provided them reassurance.

  The timetabled exit was also opposed by many in the military, and earned a rare note of public dissent from the head of Britain’s armed forces, General Sir Nick Carter, who said it was “not a decision we had hoped for.” There were many more troops from other NATO countries than America on the ground in Afghanistan, and they were not consulted on the decision.

  The Taliban launched an all-out assault on several provincial capitals while international troops were still in Afghanistan. The sight of U.S. troops abandoning positions such as the Bagram air base ahead of the swift Taliban advance added to the sense of a humiliating defeat. Biden stuck to his arbitrary withdrawal deadline of the end of August, convinced that history would prove him right, and would not allow the remaining American forces to attack the Taliban. Lieutenant General Sami Sadat, one of the most capable officers in the Afghan army, led a defiant last stand in Helmand, where he described “surreal” moments in intense battles as U.S. planes circled overhead—his troops listening as the pilots asked their base why they could not attack the Taliban.17 Afghan forces felt abandoned as their own air force and other technical systems became less operable with the withdrawal of U.S. maintenance contractors, along with the loss of helicopter missile-defense systems and vital software. The final collapse was faster than was generally predicted, as morale drained quickly from Afghan armed forces hollowed out by corruption. President Ghani lost the last vestiges of any respect he had by fleeing along with his two most trusted advisers, precipitating chaos in Kabul.

  There was a final humiliation for the U.S. as they coordinated a huge airlift to take out American citizens and others who were vulnerable. The death of thirteen marines at the hands of a suicide bomber, along with more than one hundred Afghans in the stench and chaos of the crowds lining up in an open sewer outside the base, marked the end of the long war.

  Could it have been different? What if Karzai’s deal with the Taliban in December 2001 had been pursued, or the Taliban leaders who continued to approach the U.S. through 2002 had been listened to, rather than imprisoned? What if ISAF troops had garrisoned Kabul more quickly ahead of Fahim’s Northern Alliance forces in 2001, and been reinforced across the country with a large enough force of troops trained for the task? What if aid had followed Afghan direction from the start, building infrastructure and human capacity, not a parallel system? What if the Bush administration had not gone to war in Iraq? Afghanistan was always second best, the other war. What if General Dave McKiernan had the troops he wanted when he asked for them in 2008? What if the ash cloud had not delayed General Stan McChrystal in Europe in 2010 and he had done another year? Might counterinsurgency in his hands have been really different from what General Dave Petraeus adopted? What if CIA and SOF activities were fully coordinated so that night raids did not destabilize other operations, and their local militias brought under more conventional command?

  What if General John Allen had been able to keep his surge troops for longer, out on a gentler glide path rather than on President Obama’s calendar in 2011? And when international ground combat ended in 2014, what if General John “JC” Campbell had retained more offensive capability in air operations from the beginning?

  On the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, the Taliban were back in power in Kabul. Fighters bearing American weapons sat at the desk in the Arg, made by King Amanullah a century before, which President Ghani had restored, as another reformist chapter in the Afghan story was brutally cut short. But in those twenty years a new generation saw a different opportunity, and will not easily let it go.

  December 3, 2001. Hamid Karzai with Special Forces Unit ODA 574. Jason Amerine is on the right of Karzai in light-colored combat fatigues and a boonie hat. Jefferson Davis (standing right) and Dan Petithory (kneeling front right) were killed by an American bomb two days later.


  December 6, 2001. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected the Taliban surrender deal negotiated by Karzai.

  “Make damned sure they’re wearing turbans,” the instruction of the Islamabad CIA Chief Robert Grenier, backing the warlord Gul Agha Sherzai to be reinstalled as Governor of Kandahar in 2001.

  December 14, 2001. Journalists outnumbered international troops at the battle of Tora Bora. Local forces under Hazrat Ali, interviewed here, were used instead of the 4,500 marines who were available, commanded by Major General Jim Mattis. Osama bin Laden escaped. Peter Jouvenal (standing left) went on to found the longest-running guest house in Kabul, Gandamack Lodge.

  May 6, 2002. Five months after the battle, Canadian troops exhume al-Qaeda graves to extract DNA for identification.

  September 9, 2004. Shaded by an army camouflage tent, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad at the ground-breaking ceremony for a new road from Kabul to Kandahar, which became known as “the most expensive road in the world.”

  February 4, 2007. Change of command ceremony in Kabul. President Hamid Karzai sits between incoming American general Dan McNeill (left) and outgoing British general David Richards (right).

  June 9, 2008. General David McKiernan talking to marines in Helmand.

  January 10, 2009. Incoming vice president Joe Biden, meeting the Afghan president, on the evening of the “dinner to remember.”

  January 2, 2010. General Stanley McChrystal talking with Karzai in a public meeting in Helmand before the Marjah offensive.