What got me interested in global affairs & politics as a young child was the September 11 attacks. I vividly remember watching the television with my Mom and and being aghast at the sight of hijacked planes flying straight into the Towers of the World Trade Centre. I was 10 years old then, and those images were burned into my mind forever.
What followed was, of course, the Afghan invasion, in late 2001 - launched in response to the Taliban (at the time controlling large swathes of Afghan land) providing a safe haven for Osama Bin Laden (who had publicly announced that he masterminded the attacks) and refusing to turn him over to the US Govt upon its request. Public sentiment at the time was strongly in favour of an invasion (bipartisan support in Congress especially), and emotions were still running high months (and even years) after 9/11. American flags were everywhere, and patriotism hadn’t been so popular since World War II.
I'm not going to ruminate on whether the Afghan Invasion was justified at the end of the day (being a stalwart supporter of a non-interventionist foreign policy myself), but I'm going to focus on the cold practicalities of the USG having pursued that course of action in any event. Having already gone on the offensive, the Afghan Invasion should have been a blitzkrieg operation. The US Army should have quickly obliterated the Taliban forces (to severely punish them for providing Bin Laden with safe refuge and to deter similar instances in the future), and then gotten the eff out right away.
Instead, the US Army decided to stay to ostensibly "liberate" the Afghan people by instituting the Western principles of a liberal democracy and to save them from the oppressive clutches of Sharia Law under warlords. This only infuriated the Taliban further, having been formed out of Madrasahs in Pakistan (where they would have been heavily indoctrinated with hard-line Islamic doctrine - diametrically opposed to Western values).
In Burnhamist parlance, the above is merely the "Formal" reason for why the USA chose stay behind in Afghanistan for so long. The truth is that Afghanistan is & has always been of strategic and vital importance geographically. Empires have greedily eyed Afghan land since the 19th century. The British Empire and the Russian Empire had sour relations over Afghanistan at one point. As Afghanistan is the landmass that bridges Central Asia and India, the Brits had freaked out over the thought of Tsarist control of Afghanistan, and they believed that such control would inevitably lead to a Russian invasion of British India somewhere down the line.
Fast-forward to the 21st century, the US government had its eye on Afghanistan for its own reasons. Aside from being a geographically important location (it borders 6 countries, including China), the US wanted access to oil in the region. In order to effectuate that, the US Gov needed to control 3 key countries - Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. The US Gov got hold of Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003 (under the pretext of the Saddam regime stockpiling WMDs which turned out to be patently false). Because public sentiment with regards to war after Iraq was dispirited and Americans grew more disillusioned with further intervention in the affairs of other countries, it was harder for the US Gov (backed by the Neocons) to agitate for war against Iran. It's not to say they didn't try though. Afghanistan and Iraq were always meant to be bases and launching pads for a full-scale invasion of Iran.
Because the warmongering Neocons in DC lost the moral authority to pursue war further, the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq eventually became one long drawn-out and discombobulated interregnum. The US Army wasn’t even sure why it was still there anymore. Regime-building and introducing a Western-style democracy was always meant to be the pretext for building the American Empire further for its own self-interest. It never cared about the Afghans. Maybe boots on the grounds did, but the higher-ups never gave a rat's ass.
In spite of having lost the moral authority to pursue further intervention, the US was already in too deep. The second the USG sunk its claws into matters of governance, it got stuck and couldn't easily get out. The USG viewed itself as having a moral obligation to stay and to continue protecting the Afghan people and propping up a US-friendly but completely ineffectual regime (at the cost of nearly $3 trillion in US taxpayers' dollars). Obama, who inherited Bush's mess, after being elected in 2008 - simply put - didn't have the balls to put an end to this drawn-out and decaying problem that was rotting further and further. Instead, he called for a surge of Afghan troops in 2009 to combat the rising tide of vengeful Taliban forces and to keep up the illusion of the USG‘s self-imposed honorific title of "world policeman". In reality, Obama didn't want the bad publicity that would come along with scaling down US forces in Afghanistan, or ordering an all-out withdrawal.
For what it's worth, Trump was the first president who didn't really give a shit about bad press. He wanted to scale down government spending in the USA among other things, and he had begun to recognize what a bloated mess Afghanistan had become in terms of spending and how things had transpired when he was elected president in 2016. As such, he engineered the withdrawal of US forces in Afghanistan by negotiating with the Taliban to cease fighting in 2020.
Over the past few days, Biden (having come into power in late 2020) finally executed Trump's plan to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan. The result is that despite 20 years of regime-building and $3 trillion injected to prop up a US-backed government, this very same government capitulated to Taliban forces in just a week.
Horrific pictures and videos of Afghan civilians desperately attempting to flee along with US Army forces are being shared across Social Media platforms and emotions are at an all-time high again. Some Afghan civilians were so desperate that they even tried to cling on to the sides of Military airplanes taking off - the result being that they fell to their deaths as the planes picked up speed. Many are asking how the US Army could leave these poor Afghan civilians behind to be ruled over by the ruthless Taliban forces. Some blame Trump, some blame Biden. What then? Should the US Army have continued to maintain a presence there indefinitely?
Biden finally took responsibility in a speech he gave this morning, despite being relatively quiet within the first few hours of the Taliban seizing the presidential palace, and as much as I dislike the sod to begin with - credit where credit's due - he was right to say "there was no right time to withdraw from Afghanistan". It simply had to be done, despite how painful, because Afghanistan is not the USA's problem.
Who should really be blamed, though? I'd say the US Army Generals. They blatantly lied about the situation on the ground for years. General John Allen, in 2012, said "Afghan security forces are increasing in number and quantity every day". General John Campbell, in 2016, exclaimed "The Afghan security forces keep getting better and better." General John Nicholson, a bronze-star medal recipient, said in 2017 that "The special forces, the special police.. have all continued to grow in capability." If all these Generals were telling the truth, the US-backed govt wouldn't have folded and capitulated to the Taliban forces in just a week without much fighting at all.
What incentive did the Generals have to lie? Money. Because the US Army was stuck in Afghanistan, its Generals decided to profit off being there. They lined their coffers and helped to enrich the Military Industrial Complex greatly.
As reported by Andrew Cockburn.
"A 2018 investigation by Mandy Smithberger of the Washington watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, for example, found that from 2008 to 2018 at least 380 high-ranking department officials and military officers became lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for defense contractors within two years of taking off their uniforms. James Mattis, to take one prominent example, retired as a four-star Marine general, ascended to the board of leading defense contractor General Dynamics where he served for three years, taking home $900,000 in compensation, then spent two years as Trump’s defense secretary, after which he returned to the General Dynamics board. Lloyd Austin, the current secretary of defense, garnered as much as $1.7 million worth of stock as a director of Raytheon, the nation’s second-largest defense contractor, in the four years between retiring from the army and assuming his current august post, along with other lucrative positions in the defense business."
The above provided an incentive for the US Army to stay, even though it had no reason to and should have left a long time ago.
Did the US know that the Taliban would defeat the US-backed forces after withdrawing? I'm sure they did. Based on everything already mentioned above - it was really no surprise at all. The USG probably thought that the Afghan government wouldn't fall within a week, however. Perhaps, they thought the Afghan forces would put up a fight, at least for several months or a year before falling; that way, the USG could wash its hands off any obligations to the civilians of Afghanistan and shed accountability. No. It happened overnight.
The Taliban was always going to win because their resolve and will has always been much stronger than the ineffectual democratic Afghan government. The Taliban is fundamentalist at its very core, and its members are literally willing to die for their cause. The Afghan forces might have had better weapons and technology, but they would have never been able to stand a chance against the Taliban for this reason alone. Another advantage the Taliban had was luxury of time and patience. Because most members were Afghan natives, it was already home to them. They waited 20 years to come back into power (Pre-invasion, the Taliban was mostly in control but it was mostly scattered warlordism in different regions) and the wait has paid off for them.
For centuries, empire after empire has had its eye on Afghanistan, and all of them either failed to capture it, or if they did capture it - failed to hold on to it. The British Empire, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, the United States - it is no wonder that Afghanistan is frequently referred to as the Graveyard of Empires. Its history, its people, its culture - are all too complex for the Western mind to comprehend.
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