View from America

By M.R. Josse GAITHERSBURG, MD: Chaotic and poignant scenes were depicted Sunday, 15 August 2021, on countless news videos showing hundreds of Afghans desperately trying to leave their country from Kabul airport, even as the Taliban, in a 10-day military blitz, swept aside all vestiges of power of the U.S./West-supported regime of President Ashraf Ghani who reportedly fled to Uzbekistan.  

Heartbreaking chaos at Kabul Airport. Photo: Internet

As a shell-shocked world attempted to mull the myriad implications – short and long term - of Afghanistan’s ‘Saigon moment’ of 1975, the Taliban quickly took control of the country almost 20 years after being ousted by a U.S.-led military coalition. They tore into shreds roseate earlier official U.S. estimates that Kabul could possibly hold out for between 30 to 90 days even after the fall, just days earlier, of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city.   Among the most puzzling features of the awesome Taliban blitzkrieg was the virtual collapse of the supposedly 300,000 strong Afghan military force which, even until quite recently, was being alluded to in almost glowing terms by their Western, including American, supporters and trainers. In the face of the shock and awe of the Taliban triumph, they simply melted away, refusing to risk their lives in a war which – against the backdrop of America’s much-publicized decision to speedily end its ‘forever war’ – seemed inevitable.    NO RIVERS OF BLOOD Though the multifaceted saga of the Taliban’s second coming in Afghanistan will, for years, be hotly dissected, debated and discussed in world chancelleries, military academies, the media and think-tanks, it is probably fair to assert, as Ghani did in a Facebook post, that he hastily fled his homeland in order, among other considerations, to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. Whatever the validity of that self-righteous claim, rivers of blood have not flown in Kabul – at least, thus far – as it might very well have if Afghan government forces had decided to offer stiff resistance. For the record, as BBC reported, government forces did however stand and fight in a few places. While at the time of writing it is still not clear whether Ghani has resigned from his position as president, it is notable that in a video on Sunday on Facebook, Abdullah Abdullah, leader of the Afghan High Council for National Reconciliation, declared that Ghani “left the nation in this state” and for that “God, would hold him to account.” Before moving on with this forlorn narrative, it may be mentioned that, as per BBC, there was not as much panic on the streets of Kabul on Monday, 16 August, as there was the previous day. “The Taliban were controlling traffic, they were searching cars, and they were searching particularly those vehicles which used to belong to police and the army. They have taken all those vehicles and are using them.” In the United States, a fierce battle of words has, entirely predictably, erupted with President Joe Biden being both excoriated and defended for his decision to militarily withdraw American forces from Afghanistan, even after it was clear that the hurried exit of American troops, diplomats, officials and civilians from that beleaguered country would be far from orderly, since there is, quite simply, no elegant way to lose a war.   VERBAL SLUG-FEST But, before coming to that, allow me to quote some pre-Taliban takeover remarks/observations by a bevy of pundits/public commentators to provide a flavor-of-the-day backdrop to the battle royale between the two main schools of thought currently streaming on the subject. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who led a review of U.S. policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan for President Barack Obama in 2009, said the situation “is bleak, worse than most expected, this quickly. The danger is that the momentum of the Taliban offensive will overwhelm the Afghan government and the defense of Kabul will collapse.” David Sanger, chief White House and National Security Correspondent for the New York Times: “I am surprised, but the Biden administration has been even more surprised. Biden doesn’t believe the 1975 Saigon moment will play out in Afghanistan.” An unnamed former U.S. Afghan veteran, a Lt. Col: “This will hurt for a long time.” Washington Post columnist, Max Boot: “The only thing that can avert an even bigger calamity is the willingness by Biden to rethink a bad decision and send U.S. troops and advisers back to Afghanistan to bolster the government. It is still not too late but time is rapidly running out. Words alone will not stop the Taliban onslaught.” Bradley Bowman, Afghanistan veteran and senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.: “We can expect Chinese and Russian diplomats to ramp up, with new credibility, a whisper campaign in capitals around the world that Washington is an unreliable partner who will abandon friends sooner or later.” Bowman said that the U.S. has explained its current stand, thus: “That its priorities are shifting to rebuilding at home and dealing with Russia and China.” Lisa Curtis, who served as an Afghan policy adviser to former president Donald Trump: “They (the Taliban) are going towards a military solution and anyone who can’t see that is blind, deaf and dumb.” Admiral Mike Mullen (Retd.), former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Agreed with Biden’s decision and “still found it was the right decision”. Yet, he too was “taken aback by the speed of the collapse of the Afghan army”. However, he didn’t “think that the summer was the right time for a withdrawal; that timing favored the Taliban”, in his view. Other former military men and leading statesmen have started to blame Biden for a hasty U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, though he still appears to have the public on his side – for now. As CNN analysts Boer Deng, Sam Farzaneh and Tara McKelvey note, to his critics, the president’s decision to wind down America’s longest conflict has undone 20 years of work and sacrifice, paved the way for a humanitarian catastrophe and called into question American credibility. Former President Donald Trump accused Biden of “weakness, incompetence and total strategic incoherence” but some have pointed to a withdrawal deal his team hatched with the Taliban last year as partly to blame. Yet, many of those closest to the conflict – Afghans, soldiers and statesmen – have long been skeptical of the president’s view that the Kabul government could by itself be expected to maintain the country’s security. They also recall that, as a senator from Delaware in 2001, Biden joined a unanimous vote to approve the use of military force in Afghanistan. But he opposed the deployment of more troops that President Obama authorized in 2009, the so-called ‘surge’. Republican lawmakers and some Democrats have criticized the administration’s handling of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. As NPR reports, criticism of the Biden administration has been bipartisan. “Republicans were scathing about the White House’s actions and Democrats, while acknowledging that Biden was carrying out the policies of his predecessor, criticized the half-hearted manner of the U.S. withdrawal.” What has compounded Biden’s woes in his handling of the latest chapter of Afghanistan’s tortured history of strife and conflict is his apparent failure to prepare for the collapse of that nation’s government. As CNN reports, Biden had remained at the wooded Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland with members of his family over the weekend, and returned Monday ahead of his much-awaited address to the nation.   BIDEN’S TAKE  

US President Joe Biden on the recent Afghan situation. Photo: Internet

Biden’s national address 16 August on the Afghan crisis centred on “standing squarely” behind his decision to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan to conclude the twenty-year-long war – a mess that he basically inherited from the Trump administration in exchange for a commitment not to attack American armed personnel.   A defiant American president added that he would not pass the war on to a fifth American president. He also told his audience that the 20-year mission in Afghanistan was not meant to be about “nation-building” or “creating a unified, central democracy” but essentially designed to prevent a terrorist attack on American soil. Stressing that “there’s never a good time to withdraw” Biden stated that things unraveled “more quickly than anticipated” an occurrence that he blamed on the Afghan leadership which he said basically gave up on the will to fight, although the United States had provided colossal amounts of funds to the Afghan government to build and train a 300,000 strong military, equipping it, paying its salary and providing air support as needed, as well. Biden warned that if American troops are attacked by the Taliban, the United States would “defend our people with devastating force.” Commentators on TV panels, speaking immediately after the speech, mostly decried Biden’s finger-pointing at the Afghans and his failure to admit to a general sloppiness in the way that the withdrawal had been handled by his administration – amply reflected in the chaotic and heart-wrenching scenes playing out at the Kabul airport, even as he was speaking. David Axelrod, an adviser to former president Obama, for one, lamented that Biden did not think it necessary to admit to a failure on that score, reminding his audience how President John F. Kennedy had apologized to the nation for the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba, under his watch, back in the day. DIPLOMATIC, POLITICAL IMPACT However credible or appropriate Biden’s take on Kabul’s ‘Saigon moment’ was, the fast-cascading events of the past 10 days in Afghanistan – climaxed by Ghani’s inglorious desertion and the government’s fall sans resistance – had stoked criticism from America’s European allies represented in the Afghan coalition on the handling of the military withdrawal. And, while none called on Washington to reverse course, neither did any of them offer to contribute their own troops to help out. Instead, what several had done was to seek help in evacuating their embassy personnel should such an eventuality arise. A report in the Wall Street Journal, in fact, before Sunday’s Taliban triumph, had this to say: “The rapid collapse of regular Afghan forces has dismayed allies, including those that have contributed troops to the U.S.-led coalition, and revived worries about the value of American commitments overseas…Some allies, foreign policy specialists and critics of the Biden policy fear that Afghanistan’s chaos will open the door to extremist groups to again flourish there and provide an opportunity for China and Russia to spread their influence.” The respected New York based newspaper also informed that “U.S. allies worry about the consequences of the withdrawal, including the rise of terrorism, a blow to democracy, women’s rights and the erosion of Western influences around the world.” The Wall Street Journal opined that for Saudi Arabia, Israel and the world in general, shifting U.S. priorities compound concerns about how much they can rely on Washington’s support to counter the influence of Iran, China and Russia in the region. Incidentally, the paper reported this comment by Yaacov Amidor, a former national security adviser to the Israeli government and now a fellow at the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security for America: “We cannot be sure that when the Americans will be needed they’ll be there to help.” TAKEAWAYS FOR US Though the shock-waves from Taliban’s swift and bloodless capture of Kabul will be felt far and wide and in diverse ways – in our region, including in India and Pakistan, as well as in China and Russia - there are, I believe, two important geopolitical takeaways for Nepal from that epochal event. The first is: even small and ‘weak’ states can – if conditions are right and people are motivated sufficiently by patriotism – defeat larger and stronger neighbours/hegemons. The second is: In national politics or in international relations generally, questions relating to identity, culture and religion matter greatly. In Nepal, those who have attempted to denigrate her age-old traditions or scuttle her essential Hindu ethos, substituting it by a transplanted artificial ‘secularism’, should see the writing on the wall, in this respect.