WE NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE
Crisis in Afghanistan is a mistake 20 years in the making
Let’s start at the beginning: We never should have been there in the first place. The sudden fall of Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government to the Taliban is tragic testament to the recklessness and futility of our rush to invade and then occupy that nation for 20 years. The 2001 invasion was initiated and promoted by the George W. Bush administration as essential to nabbing Sept. 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. But it would be 10 years before U.S. forces, under the Obama administration, captured and killed bin Laden — and then not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan.
Still our troops remained in Afghanistan for another decade. What everyone apparently failed to understand was that the U.S. can’t muscle its way into uprooting an entrenched repressive regime like the Taliban and expect democracy to bloom. After all, we helped spawn the Taliban’s precursors back in the 1980s in our proxy war against the former Soviet Union.
So when President Donald Trump in February 2020 announced a plan negotiated with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces by May 2021, it seemed the right move. But it didn’t include the U.S.-backed Afghan government. And it stipulated freedom for up to 5,000 imprisoned Taliban soldiers when the Taliban were still attacking Afghan government forces.
President Joe Biden properly delayed troop withdrawal until Aug. 31, but even then it was amid signs the Taliban had plans to establish a religious Islamic state. Should that have come as a surprise? Where was our intelligence?
According to The Washington Post’s Afghanistan correspondent Susannah George, the
Taliban had been brokering deals for a yearand-a-half with low-ranking rural Afghan officials to get the latter to surrender their weapons in exchange for pay — i.e. bribes. As those deals extended to broader territory and higher levels of government, some Afghan forces believed an eventual Taliban takeover would be inevitable, George wrote. So they chose to get on their side first.
As Biden characterized it, Afghan political leaders “gave up and fled” and the military collapsed when the Taliban reached the capital.
“We couldn’t provide [them] the will for a fight,” the president said.
But U.S. veterans and Afghan civilians are left wondering if all the perilous years they invested in laying the groundwork for a civilian-led democracy were a waste. Sixty-nine thousand Afghan soldiers and police died along with 3,500 American and international soldiers, according to Rina Amiri, a senior fellow at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs, interviewed by The New Yorker.
Some Republican partisans are now trying to capitalize on the collapse of the Afghan government for political gain.
“It is all on President Biden’s shoulders, this rapid and haphazard withdrawal of American troops,” Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa told media, referring to the Afghans left behind after they helped interpret for U.S. troops.
Actually, Trump wanted to pull out even faster. And Ernst last month said she could do nothing to help Iowa’s Zalmay Niazy, a former translator for U.S. troops in Afghanistan facing deportation.
On the other hand, when Biden referred to the unfolding events as a civil war and said it didn’t serve U.S. interests to be involved there — “when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not” — it hit some Afghans hard. Amiri heard a lack of empathy on the president’s part.
I was disappointed that Biden, who is known for his compassion, limited his stated concern to the U.S. military and didn’t directly address the Afghan people’s plight.
From what I’m hearing on the news, a number of U.S. veterans of the Afghanistan war are deeply concerned about the fate of those they leave behind, some who had helped them do their jobs.
Human and women’s rights activists in Afghanistan have told Amiri, who fled with her parents in the 1970s and previously advised the Obama administration on Afghanistan and Pakistan, that they’re now being targeted by the Taliban. They say the militant group has shown up at their homes and places of work, searched their files, phones and social media and threatened them.
Afghan women especially have much to fear from a fundamentalist Islamic Taliban government. Not only are they barred from going out without covered heads or male chaperones, but there’s also the devastating prospect of girls being kept out of school again and of young women being forcibly married to Taliban members. When NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel asked two Taliban officials about having women in government, both laughed heartily and dismissed it.
It now falls to the world community, chiefly the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations, to support Afghanistan’s women through global diplomacy and with resources, training and media on the ground.
Those at risk must be offered asylum here and their cases expedited.
That’s the least we can do, considering that Bush and his wife, Laura, used the plight of Afghan women to build the case for going into Afghanistan in the first place. We can’t simply abandon them now.
The International Refugee Assistance Project and other organizations are working to evacuate Afghans and petition the U.S. State Department on behalf of some with special circumstances who are not among the evacuees.
It is appropriate for the U.S. to be out of Afghanistan, where it never belonged in the first place. But, as Amiri put it, the West’s desperation to exit caused us to invent an illusory narrative about a peace process that didn’t exist.
Now, she said, is time for accountability as the rights community faces devastation with many of its leaders fleeing.
“Whatever remaining leverage the international community has must be used in a real way, and there have to be consequences,” she said.
Rekha Basu is a columnist for the Des Moines Register. Readers may send her email at rbasu@dmreg. com. ©2021 Des Moines Register. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.