Once again on Afghanistan – Rory Stewart in TLS:

‘The investment in Afghanistan alone dwarfed in real terms the entire Marshall Plan for Europe after the Second World War. Over one million US servicemen – and more civilian contractors – passed through Afghanistan on tours. Every anthropologist, political scientist, journalist or linguist with the slightest connection to the place, or even to the idea of intervention, was guaranteed generous employment.
In 2008, in a remarkable burst of either self-confidence or self-sabotage, the US government decided it would analyse its successes and failures in Afghanistan, in public and in real time. It created the Special Inspector-General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to investigate US operations in Afghanistan – a $60-million-per-year body with 200 full-time federal employees, based in Washington DC and Afghanistan. SIGAR did not pull its punches. Its paper on poppy production concluded that $8 billion of expenditure on counter-narcotics had had no lasting impact of any kind on the level of opium or heroin production in Afghanistan. Its audit on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) programme for female empowerment concluded that $84 million of expenditure might have helped some fifty-five women to find better jobs. Even that remained unproven.’

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‘The problem becomes worse when the author begins to quote American officers. One says that, while an American soldier is able to shoot straight at a target, Afghans are only able to spray bullets in the air. Of another Whitlock writes: The quality of recruits continued to pose an existential challenge. Some Afghans also had to be taught how to count. “I mean,” said Colonel Jack Kem in an army oral history interview, “you’d ask an Afghan soldier how many brothers and sisters they had, and they couldn’t tell you it was four. They could tell you their names, but they couldn’t go ‘one, two, three, four.’” Neither of these statements is true. Afghans often fire in the air, from triumph or celebration, but that is not because they don’t understand that the bullet comes straight out of the pointy end of the gun. And a four-year-old Afghan can count to four, like a four-year-old American. Why do American officers not start from the assumption that Afghans are not that different from Americans, and wonder whether there might not be a problem in translation? And why does Craig Whitlock report this slander with no context or explanation? Does he also believe that Afghans cannot count to four?’

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‘Should the plan have focused exclusively on counterterrorism (Rumsfeld’s view), or would a focus on counterterrorist operations have alienated the population of southern Afghanistan? Should the US and its allies have planned to do less state-building, or more nation-building? Should they have deployed overwhelming force to fix southern Afghanistan in order to prevent the warlords from taking over? Or did their troop deployments against warlords in southern Afghanistan create a vacuum, thus fuelling an insurgency? Would holding elections too early prevent a stable state from emerging? Or would delaying elections have undermined the legitimacy of the government? Was the problem that the West didn’t put enough development aid into the South, or that it neglected the North? That it tried to create a unity government with the Tajik leaders? Or that it failed to create one with the Taliban? What would it have meant to have a plan to create the rule of law in Uruzgan, establish good governance in Ghor, or bring accountable justice to Badakhshan? Most of the plans were grotesquely unrealistic. But this does not mean, as Whitlock implies, that the US government was conspiring to mislead the American people. The creation of SIGAR itself was an act of heroic transparency – and one that almost amounted to self-harm. Thanks to SIGAR, and some first-rate reporting and writing (from Anand Gopal’s extraordinary No Good Men Among the Living to Mike Martin’s brilliant An Intimate War, both 2014), the failures and humiliations of Afghanistan were painfully obvious to any interested citizen. And Whitlock is wrong to imply that all of SIGAR’s criticisms were muffled in leaden, bureaucratic prose. It would be difficult to be more explicit than John F. Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, in his New York Times interview on the women’s empowerment programme, Promote, which begins, “this is a classic example of hubris and mendacity”.’

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‘Who actually believed the claim of the second post-Taliban Afghan president Ashraf Ghani that every Afghan was committed to a “multi-ethnic, gender-sensitive” centralized state? Or that the West was not trying to nation-build, that no troops had died in vain, or that failure was not an option? Did the public not expect generals to tell their soldiers they were winning, when victory seemed unlikely? Did anyone actually take Obama literally when he said “in order to catch Osama Bin Laden, it is necessary to win in Afghanistan and stabilize Pakistan”? The problem, as so often, is about bearing reality. And Whitlock needs to be clearer about the kind of bureaucratic and political language that he expects. Does he imagine a politician or a general admitting to the public that “if we are lucky, and remain engaged for forty years, we can help Afghanistan be a little more like Pakistan and a little less like the Congo”? Or does he imagine a development strategy stating that “if we remain indefinitely, we can probably help and protect improvements in many lives in the Centre and the North, but conditions for rural women are likely to remain horrifying, Afghanistan will remain a major heroin producer, warlords will continue to operate with impunity in the South, and we are unlikely ever to defeat the Taliban insurgency”? How would he have reported such admissions in the Washington Post? (We can guess. When Rumsfeld says, “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are”, Whitlock does not interpret this as a manager requesting more information but as an admission of negligence.)’

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‘That interventions cannot remove the root causes of conflict, but that they can provide specific protection and relief. That any plans must remain modest, given the absence of reliable data, the unpredictability of local politics, and the influence of external factors (from fluctuations in the global opium price to the intentions of the Pakistani intelligence agencies towards the Taliban). That more developed plans, more resources and more troops tend to make things worse rather than better. And that the failure in Afghanistan is primarily the failure of a US and European political culture that makes complexity, partial progress and long-term patience seem indefensible.
But these are not Whitlock’s conclusions. Instead, he endorses the views of many of his interviewees that Afghanistan “went wrong” because of the illiteracy, incompetence and corruption of the Afghans, the dishonesty of US politicians, and the uselessness of international bureaucrats, who were unable to design the right plan. And he concludes – presumably because the whole country was irredeemably corrupt, backwards and doomed – that President Biden had no alternative other than to leave. This is a curiously comforting illusion.
But what if the interviewees and Craig Whitlock are telling you more about themselves than about Afghanistan? What if there was indeed deep corruption in Afghanistan, but that there were also highly intelligent and dedicated public servants, including President Ghani himself? What if there had never been a conscious conspiracy to conceal the problems of Afghanistan? What if the US could have kept 2,500 troops relatively safely and indefinitely in Afghanistan (as it keeps 25,000 troops, seventy years after the cessation of formal conflict, in South Korea)? What if the sunk costs of the intervention were immense, but the marginal costs of remaining were minimal? What if no magical plan could have existed for Afghanistan but, nevertheless, keeping a very few troops would have saved the country from a Taliban government, protected basic political and civil rights, supported women – at least in urban areas and much of the rural Centre and North – prevented the economy and the health and education systems from collapsing, and kept millions from the edge of starvation?’

Read the article here.

Okay, $84 million dollars in order to help 55 women find better jobs. So far the waste.

Perhaps Biden should have kept 2500 troops in Afghanistan, in order to let’s say protect Kabul from the Taliban. I’m not sure what 2500 troops might have achieved beyond that.
But one attack, think of Beirut 1983, see here, and Biden would have ordered the surviving troops to come home. Or start from the beginning, start from scratch.
The window of opportunity to keep a modest amount of US troops in Afghanistan in order to prevent some bigger cities from falling into the hands of the Taliban closed a long time ago, probably even before Trump became president.