Lessons learned from Afghanistan

In 2010, I spent six months in Kabul, Afghanistan, as an employee of the American University of Afghanistan, an institution founded by Afghan educators with financial support from the U.S. Agency for International Development and backing from the George W. Bush administration in general and first lady Laura Bush in particular.

The goal was to offer the best possible American-style education to young men and women who would become the leaders of Afghanistan as it recovered from the devastation of the Soviet occupation, a long civil war, and the relatively brief period of misrule by the Taliban that followed that civil war.

A new, more democratic and progressive Afghanistan, it was hoped, one less dangerous to U.S. interests, would be ushered in under their leadership and the watchful eye of Uncle Sam.

Eleven years later, at the end of August 2021, no one knows what will happen in Afghanistan once the military forces of the United States and our allies complete their withdrawal.

Almost certainly there will be a horrifying humanitarian and economic catastrophe regardless of who ends up controlling the government yet to be formed. Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest countries and has for the past 20 years depended largely upon the flow of U.S. dollars into the country through the expenditures of the U.S. armed forces, their allies, and various governmental and private aid agencies for its meager existence.

About the only cash crop has been opium production, and little of that income trickled down to the Afghan people. Just as bad, much—probably most—of the well-intended U.S. expenditures ended up in the pockets of corrupt government and business elites and their dependents, who stashed as much as they could outside the country.

In the current chaos, one scenario is as likely as the other. The Taliban very well may establish a reasonably stable government consistent with its fundamentalist Islamist views, wiping out the advances that women have made in the past two decades and imposing an Islamist theocracy on the country.

However, it is possible that the Taliban will favor the taste of power over ideological purity and accept some form of coalition government capable of gaining international recognition. Under this scenario, the Taliban might gradually moderate its fundamentalist religious viewpoints and, like Vietnam after the American defeat there in the 1970s, gradually integrate into the world economy, becoming in time a tourist destination for American soldiers who endured hell there a few decades earlier.

More ominously for the United States, the country may very well descend into another civil war and become a haven for terrorists, raising the prospect of another American intervention.

With this range of outcomes before us, it is inevitable that blame for the fiasco will be cast far and wide—to the Bush administration for its assumption that it could export democracy, to the Obama administration for failing to execute its promise to focus upon Afghanistan rather than Iraq, to the Trump administration for negotiating with the Taliban behind the back of the Afghan government, such as it was, and to the Biden administration for the catastrophic withdrawal scenes before us.

A prominent thread running through all these criticisms will be the view that once again, as in Vietnam, as in Iraq, the United States embarked on a nation-building venture that was doomed to failure from the beginning, whether from the impossibility of the project, flaws in execution, or from the impatience of the American people, which made these nation-building efforts, however laudable, ultimately unsustainable.

This is a valid critique so far as it goes, and I largely subscribe to it. The United States should have learned a bitter and costly lesson from its interventions in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: however tempting involvement may appear in its early days, the results are unlikely to justify the sacrifice.

But there is another lesson to be learned by the Vietnams, Iraqs and Afghanistans of the future—in any place where the government may come to depend upon U.S. intervention to secure their tenuous grips on power: The United States will spend enormous treasure, perhaps foolishly, to try to establish stable, reasonably friendly governments in troubled areas of the world when it perceives that to be in its own national interest. But its patience with client governments is not endless.

If, after years of effort, those governments remain corrupt, ineffective, and lack the support of the people they are intended to serve, the American people will ultimately leave those governments to their deserved doom.

That has been the tragedy of Afghanistan as it was in Vietnam, and— arguably to a lesser extent—in Iraq. The local governments and military organization became leeches, sucking on American blood and treasure while betraying obligations to their own people in favor of the self-interests of their corrupt members and dependents.

The challenge for the United States, when a similar temptation for intervention arises in the future, as it surely will, is to get the client government to understand that from the beginning, and to act upon that knowledge.

The withdrawal of the United States from Kabul has been an ugly fiasco, and the aftermath may very well be even worse for the long-suffering people of Afghanistan. During my six months there, in what now seems the distant past, I saw the beauty as well as the tragedy of the people. I shall never forget the little family bakery where my colleague and I stopped on the way to work in the morning to buy chocolate croissants. Or the hopeful faces of our students at the American University. Or the stunning beauty of the roses that added such unexpected dashes of color to the generally brown landscape. Or the flashes of lightning in the heavens during thunderstorms over the barren mountains surrounding Kabul.

But however wrenching the tragedy befalling that country, and however much I may mourn the tragedies that have befallen my friends there, Biden was right to pull the plug on a corrupt government and an incompetent military establishment that had become leeches on the American taxpayer as well as its own citizens.

A heavy price will be paid by people like those who had the noble dream of an American University of Afghanistan and the students who believed those dreams and followed them. And the family who every morning made those wonderful croissants.