Responsibility to post-pullout
Absent a drastic change in the battlefield or an unlikely contingency, the 20-year US-led campaign in Afghanistan has been declared over. The remaining 2,500 US troops will be pulled out by September 11, 2021, President Joe Biden has declared. NATO countries with forces in the country are following suit.
Some media commentators have long anticipated this moment. Barring ill-considered schadenfreude or devil-may-care chutzpah, two broad strands can be discerned.
According to one, the US presence in Afghanistan amounted to an unnecessary human and financial cost that could no longer be justified. According to the other, the post-2001 "war on terror" represented another military campaign by the US war machine that was condemnable from the start and is better to end now.
The first of these narratives is primarily conscious of the war's burden on the US military and the economy, while the second objects to it as militarist adventurism. Closer examination, however, exposes the largely self-interested nature of both perspectives.
It is fair to say that regardless of which perspective one follows, the effects of Biden's decision on millions of Afghan civilians who aren't party to the ongoing war will be a rising threat of violence and widespread hunger, and they must now also contemplate the daunting prospects of reduced international support.
The nearly 10,000-strong USled NATO contingent was already disengaged from active battle according to the terms of a USTaliban accord reached last year in Doha, Qatar. Pulling them out can only mean a deeper disengagement that might pave the way for humanitarian support.
The narrative on the "war on terror" must take adequate account of the larger war the US has been fighting in Afghanistan since the early 1980s, originally as the leader of the Western camp against the Soviet Union's expansionism. The multi-pronged effort to give the Soviets their own "Vietnam" began even before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
Then-US president Jimmy Carter's national security adviser,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, masterminded a strategy to drag the Soviets into Afghanistan, persuading the Carter administration to lend support to the Afghan Islamist groups who were fighting against the pro-Soviet Afghan government and were hosted by the Pakistani military dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.
Later, when the Soviet Army did invade Afghanistan, partly to fend off the threats by jihadist groups in the Muslim-majority Central Asian republics, but also to save the Soviets' client regime in Afghanistan, the military quagmire US strategists had in mind put millions of Afghans and their country's fledgling infrastructure in the crossfire, resulting in massive casualties and reducing much of the country to uninhabitable rubble.
In a larger sense, this campaign was consequential in building a front line in Afghanistan that effectively halted Soviet-style communism's global expansion and contributed to its ultimate collapse. To this end, weapons and funding to Pakistan-based jihadist groups poured in, particularly to those who proved most effective in killing Afghan and Soviet soldiers, meaning those more fervently fundamentalist.
Responsibility for handling the effort on the ground was given to the Pakistani military, notably its notorious intelligence arm, Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI). In this heated frenzy, little regard was given to Afghanistan's chances of returning to some form of viability if the Soviets withdrew and cut their financial support to the Kabul government.
This disregard was witnessed when the eventual withdrawal of the Soviet army in early 1989 took place, an event followed by absence of any concerted effort by the US and its allies to ensure Afghanistan's return to a somewhat viable state.
The ensuing tragedy due to a power vacuum in Kabul and infighting among the jihadist groups was left to sort itself out now that the anti-Soviet ideological battle was over. But this was soon forgotten; when US president George H W Bush was briefed.