“When you move on in life, you always leave behind some things, some myths and some mysteries, that cannot be fathomed by the heart without going back to the past and visiting yourself again in that time, at that place. You can only understand such things and solve such riddles if, in your imagination, you can live the life again and be in that place again where you left a part of you.”
- M. Sidd
A lot has happened in the last few days, and a lot more may take shape in the coming times which may significantly alter the way people have been seeing Afghanistan and the region in the past. This may even impact their understanding of the United States, its policies and the myth of its invincibility in an unalterable manner.
The speed with which the resistance to the Taliban collapsed within a matter of days makes for fictional stuff. In this instance, it was all real, unfolding moment by moment in front of all those who had an interest in our neighbour to the West. District after district surrendered together with their caches of the most sophisticated weaponry without a bullet fired. I am sure even the Taliban would have been surprised, if not shocked, at the speed with which they were able to achieve their ultimate objective of overpowering the government in Kabul.
The story of Afghanistan has just begun to unfurl. There is so much more that will adorn the pages in the months and years to come. The objectives forgotten, the absence of strategy and tactics, the shifting of the poles, rampant corruption, and absence of motivation – all of these constituents will be much debated, and much contested
But this did not come about in a day or two. It has taken long, almost two decades of relentless fighting, of the blood of hundreds of thousands of people being spilt on both sides. Endless reams of paper will be compiled in a desperate effort to evaluate the reasons why the world’s lone superpower was not able to achieve the desired military objectives in an operation that commenced in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA.
The confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle has much to decipher. In interviews, more than 400 insiders offered their input into what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the USA became mired in nearly two decades of frustrating warfare. According to many, lack of understanding of the land, its people, their deeply-entrenched faith and how they worked constituted one major reason for the ultimate debacle that took shape. Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told the interviewers: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing”. He went on to add: “Fundamentally, the war fighting strategies employed were fatally flawed”. To make matters worse, “enormous amounts of money were wasted in trying to make Afghanistan into a modern state”.
There were differences regarding some fundamental issues which went unresolved: “Some US officials wanted to use the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy, this for a country that was “accustomed to tribalism, monarchism and Islamic law”. Others wanted to transform Afghan culture and elevate women’s rights. Still others wanted to reshape the regional balance of power among Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia”. With time, and with increasing setbacks, the focus drifted away from the basic objective – that of winning the war– and incorporated ever new priorities for Afghanistan and the region.
A large number of people who were interviewed described “explicit and sustained efforts by the US government to deliberately mislead the public”. They said that “it was common at military headquarters in Kabul, and at the White House, to distort statistics to make it appear that the United States was winning the war when that was not the case”.
The other reason why Afghanistan could not be transformed was the endemic corruption in all echelons of the government. Christopher Kolenda, an Army colonel deployed in Afghanistan who advised three US generals in charge of the war, said that the Afghan government had “self organised into a kleptocracy”. He went on to say that “the US officials failed to recognise the lethal threat it posed to their strategy”. This was further certified by Ryan Crocker, the top US diplomat in Kabul in 2002 and again from 2011 to 2012: “Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, may have been the development of mass corruption. Once it gets to the level I saw when I was there, it is somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix”. To compound matters further, US military trainers described the Afghan security forces as “incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters”. They also accused Afghan commanders of “pocketing salaries, paid by the US taxpayers, for tens and thousands of ghost soldiers”.
In the same stride, a US military officer estimated that “one-third of police recruits were drug addicts or Taliban”. Another called them “stealing fools” who looted so much fuel from the US bases that they perpetually smelt of gasoline”. There was the case of touting statistics routinely to make things look good. These were grossly “distorted, spurious and downright false”.
There were no answers to a number of questions asked. The willingness was absent. Various initiatives were pursued without any definitive objective in mind. It was, as if, all these would combine in the end automatically to yield the desired results. It did not happen as it was never meant to. Investments were made in building schools, but there was no awareness where this would lead them to, and whether this would be an evidence of success, or just an effort that was made for doing a good thing.
The whole war thing came across as a disjointed and loosely-knit effort whose end was never clearly delineated. Also missing was a coherent strategy and mechanism to get there. It was like a shot in the blind. If it strikes, you claim victory. If it does not, you pile up a plethora of false and fabricated reasons why it missed the target. So, all one has now after two decades of a deadly entanglement in Afghanistan are loads of excuses for not achieving success. In his piece, Steve Inskeep comes up with a damning observation: “Eventually the war with the Taliban continued so long that Afghan democracy was no longer the issue. American democracy was”.
The story of Afghanistan has just begun to unfurl. There is so much more that will adorn the pages in the months and years to come. The objectives forgotten, the absence of strategy and tactics, the shifting of the poles, rampant corruption, and absence of motivation – all of these constituents will be much debated, and much contested. With the military chapter coming to an end, it is the political cost which may have to be paid that carries a real-time danger for the incumbents of the White House and the operatives at Pentagon.
The focus is now going to be on Afghanistan where the Taliban are well entrenched in the saddle. They don’t come across as what they were when they last ruled more than two decades ago. Initially, they are showing a distinct willingness to compromise. They have announced a general amnesty for all their adversaries, including members of the previous government. They have also agreed to constitute an inclusive government and have promised to uphold human rights and the rights of women in the educational institutions and at work. In fact, they have requested them to continue with jobs that they were engaged in doing during the previous dispensation. These are encouraging initial signs and one hopes that these values are incorporated as abiding constituents of the system.
Afghanistan is faced with daunting times. This is where Pakistan and other countries of the region and the international community come in. With the war over, there is the challenge of rebuilding the country anew when everyone will have to play a role: that of putting Afghanistan on the road to progress and inclusivity that would augur well for all its stakeholders, ethnic groups and beliefs. It should be an Afghanistan that is free of terror and that would serve its people, sans discrimination and differentiation.
