Today, in honor of the August 31 withdrawal deadline from Afghanistan, I will be giving my view of the Afghanistan situation. As a result of Biden’s long delayed pullout from Afghanistan, there has been a whole host of obfuscation of the reality of the situation from Biden’s opponents. As an example, I’ll use this video clip for an illustration of these people’s arguments. Much of this was addressed by President Biden in his recent speech, but it serves well to review the situation regardless.
This chart, which has been (wisely) making the rounds on social media, explains the key issue. Other charts are even more illuminating. After the end of the early 2010s Afghanistan surge, the country became increasingly inundated with chaos, with Taliban attacks seeing a steep rise in intensity. The end of major NATO combat operations in Afghanistan in 2014 resulted in a skyrocketing of Afghan army casualties the following year, with the numbers only growing worse in succeeding years. The 2015 Battle of Kunduz was, perhaps, the most iconic symbol of post-surge Afghan government dysfunction. After the election of Trump and his 2017 minor troop surge, the situation grew substantially worse, with the percentage of Afghans claiming to be “suffering” reaching 73% in 2017 and 85% in 2018 and confidence in the military plummeting from 76% in 2016 to 49% in 2018. The number of districts controlled by the Taliban rose from four in 2014 to fourteen in late 2017. By mid-2019, one year after Trump ordered direct talks to begin between the United States and the Taliban, that number rose to more than 25. The situation improved slightly after, but continued to deteriorate during the rest of 2020. Perhaps more important than the districts under full control of the Taliban were those contested by it, inevitably crippling both the Afghan economy and the government’s capability to protect itself. By 2019, these districts constituted half the country, and the government had neither capabilities nor plans to reverse that figure.
As against many prior insurgencies, air superiority had little value in combating this. The United States dropped eight times as many bombs on Afghanistan in 2019 as in 2015. To claim the Afghan government could have held up had it more U.S. military support ignores the inadequacy of air support without uncompromising and able ground forces, which, as the enormous amount of casualties in the Afghan army in the late 2010s and the mass defections from it to the Taliban in 2021 demonstrated, simply did not exist. The claim that the Afghan army was demoralized by the U.S. withdrawal is certainly true, but ignores the fact that even an army as capable as that of South Vietnam would, given the enormous foreign-subsidized materiel advantage the Afghan army had, have been able to put up a decent fight against the Taliban had they the determination and training to use their weapons and money effectively.
Given these skyrocketing casualties, increasing Taliban territorial gains and ability to contest the Kabul government, declining confidence in business, the civilian government, and the Afghan military, and very limited foreign troop presence in the country ever since the end of major NATO combat operations, there was no guarantee that the Taliban would not win the war even without a complete U.S. pullout. Ever since the mid-2010s, it was clear the Afghanization of the war, long desired by America’s generals, had been a failure. The Afghanistan papers released in late 2019 by the Washington Post underlined the dysfunction and aimlessness of the American program to support the country’s non-Taliban institutions. The February 29, 2020 signing of the Afghanistan peace agreement was the product of a clear acknowledgment by the United States that further early 2010s style troop surges would be futile and that existing United States troop presence in Afghanistan had no potential to improve Afghanistan’s security situation.
Ultimately, America left Afghanistan as incompetently and bloodily as it prosecuted the war, in full concordance with its nature. The unexpected nine-day collapse of the Afghan government led to a mad and sudden rush for the airport. Tens of thousands waited days in Taliban-held territory during the confusion. The Americans somehow permitted an Islamic State attack on its own side of the Kabul airport, responding to it by firing into the crowd and droning some schoolchildren. It is abundantly clear the United States had been much less competent at building a strong and independent Afghan military force and in evacuating the country than the Soviet Union in the 1980s, or even the United States in South Vietnam in the 1970s. But Afghanistan, unlike the second world war or even Korea, was simply not a war the U.S. had to win. Thus, its presidents rejected continuing to engage in the sunk cost fallacy. As President Biden said, had al-Qaeda been based in Yemen, rather than Afghanistan, the United States would never have propped up an Afghan puppet government. The American war against the Taliban had, thus, served its purpose.
The dispensing with the idea that Afghanistan was salvageable without increasing military commitment leads us to deal with the second myth of Afghanistan: that this somehow represents any sort of defeat for the American Empire. Just ask the people of Syria, Cuba, or Iran how ridiculous that is. I am sorry, but, not even to mention the Americanization of the global cultural sphere, given the elimination of Saddam, of Gaddafi, of a proud and strong Syria, of an independent and free Ukraine, and with places as distant as Montenegro and North Macedonia part of NATO, America economically gaining on Europe, Mexico, and Japan, and American allies such as Australia and Britain becoming increasingly aligned against China, it is fair to say American power during the Trump administration (China’s vaccine program and the restoration of democracy to Bolivia have slightly made a dent in it since) was at or very near its very peak -the only time which compares is the late 1990s, when Japanese and Latin American stagnation, Chinese poverty, and Eastern European collapse led the United States to become the most powerful country in the history of the world up to that point. The foundations of American power, laid with the fall of the Soviet Union, continue to remain sound. Virtually every rich country is an American ally. In Latin America, the only major country that has decisively moved out of the U.S. sphere during the 21st century has been Venezuela, which is less impressive than the Cuban revolution during the supposed mid-20th century height of American power. Even the rise of China has (at least so far) served to solidify American power as much as undermine it. China was much more independent in the economic sphere under Maoˊ than it is under Xiˊ Jinˋpingˊ. The only place where U.S. power might have declined since the mid-20th century is in Southeast Asia, where the rise of China really has made a dent in the importance of the American market. Ironically, the United States would have much less power over China (and, thus, the world) if the China hawks had their way in the 1990s and early 2000s and China had weaned itself off from economic dependence on the United States, and China had developed internally focused manufacturing, finance, and high technology sectors.
The pullout from Afghanistan may well be an indicator that America will not protect Taiˊwanˉ from a Chinese takeover, but, after 1978, it was likely never going to, and, at least at present, it is clear American influence over the island is far higher than it was a decade ago. Afghanistan might have been a loss for American power, but it was Afghanistan -one fiftieth of German GDP by PPP; the Roman equivalent of the area between the Antonine and Hadrianic walls. ED-209 might have been unable to walk down a flight of stairs and have killed some civilians prior to approval, but it was still approved for use in urban pacification. Thus is the same with the Yankee Empire.