The US withdrawal from Afghanistan: A lose-lose situation?
Yesterday’s announcement that the US would fully withdraw its forces from Afghanistan marks the official end of the 20-year US military engagement in the country. However, it is unlikely to bring an end to Afghanistan’s decades long state of conflict. The Taliban remain entrenched in many rural parts of the country and the Afghan Government is yet to convince anyone that it can successfully manage the situation without outside help.
The reasons for the US withdrawal are many, though most surround the fact that after 20 years the world is a very different place to the one where President George W Bush sent troops into Afghanistan, in response to the Taliban’s sheltering of the Al-Qaeda group responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks. As the attacks have faded in the public memory, and with Bush long gone, there is a sense that the war in Afghanistan has suffered from a lack of purpose. The US has moved on from the War on Terror and from the neoconservatism of the Bush administration. At the same time, changing global security dynamics have pushed the war down the list of US priorities.
Thus, forced into a decision by Donald Trump’s disastrous peace deal with the Taliban, which promised withdrawal by 1st May, it is unsurprising that President Biden decided to finally extract America from the endless quagmire. However, his decision will not be without consequences.
What are the consequences of withdrawing?
The main issue is that the Taliban are not defeated. Trump’s deal has been an unmitigated failure. Negotiating with the Taliban was never likely to yield much success, yet Trump’s rapid troop ‘drawdown’ exacerbated the situation. The ‘drawdown’ left the Afghan Government without the support it needed to keep the Taliban at bay, allowing them to re-establish footholds across many parts of the country. Consequently, the Taliban are the strongest they have been since 2001, and increasingly appear in the ascendancy.
This means they have no incentive to stick to the peace deal. And they haven’t. Taliban attacks have continued intermittently since the peace deal, and it is an open secret that they have been preparing to launch a Spring offensive against Afghan Government positions. Worse still, in reacting to the planned withdrawal, Taliban fighters appear triumphant. After 20 years, it is the Taliban that sense victory, not the US or Afghan Government. The result is that the people of Afghanistan now face the prospect of prolonged conflict, which may very well end in a Taliban victory.
For the Biden administration such a scenario would be highly embarrassing. Some commentators have already raised the spectre of the fall of Saigon, the catastrophic result of America’s last negotiated withdrawal from a military quagmire. Any repeat would prove highly damaging both to America’s prestige and standing in the world, and to the Biden administration’s foreign policy credentials. It could also create a political headache for Biden. Polls have suggested that support for withdrawal is by no extent unanimous, and therefore, if any withdrawal goes wrong, it could hurt the administration domestically. Republican lawmakers, who unlike Trump are largely against such a move, would seize upon the opportunity.
It should be stated that such an outcome is far from guaranteed, however the risk of it occurring increases significantly in the event of a withdrawal.
So, would staying be better?
Yes and no. Despite all the issues which will inevitably stem from the withdrawal, remaining in Afghanistan would not have been much better. For a combination of reasons, the war has effectively become unwinnable for the US. Chief among them is the general failure of the initial state building approach, due in part to the prioritisation of the ‘War on Terror’, but more so to the lack of understanding of Afghan society, which led to a misguided focus on building a strong central state in a country where this was not the norm and so was never able to gain legitimacy. The one foot in one foot out approach of the past decade has also hampered any chance of achieving a stable peace in the country.
To say the war has become effectively unwinnable does not mean the war could not be won. It could be. The key to a successful US withdrawal is the same as it has always been — create an Afghan Government capable enough to manage the country’s security considerations itself.
Unfortunately, achieving this would require a whole new strategy, one which fixes the mistakes of the last 20 years. Such a strategy would involve a large increase in troop numbers, a sustained political commitment, and a totally new engagement with the Afghan people and Afghan society. As a result, the chances of it ever gaining enough political support in Washington, or amongst the US public, are between 0 and 0. Therefore, the war remains effectively unwinnable and it would appear that from the US’s perspective, there is little to be gained from maintaining a half-hearted commitment.
On the other hand, the prospects for Afghanistan and its people look grim. The continued US presence may have prevented the country from moving on from its long conflict, and withdrawal could bring about a renewed opportunity for peace, but it is more likely that it will bring the Taliban.
As discussed above, Taliban control has spread back across large swathes of the country, and there is little to suggest that life under their rule has become considerably more pleasant since they were in power in the late 1990s. They remain committed to implementing a restrictive form of Sharia law, and their level of respect for women’s rights remains questionable to say the least. Since the Taliban are unlikely to just go away, there are few good outcomes for Afghanistan. If they decide to continue fighting, then the Afghan people will either be faced with the return of Taliban rule or a long and bloody conflict. If they choose peace, then what conditions are they going to insist upon and what happens to the people already living under their rule?
The sad truth is that realities in Afghanistan and the US mean that neither ending nor extending the war is likely to bring about much success. The Biden administration perhaps recognises this. The pushing back of the planned withdrawal date until September appears to be a strategic fudge, aimed at avoiding the likelihood of a swift Taliban takeover once US troops pull out, while still guaranteeing an end to US military involvement. In this it may prove successful. Even so, in the long run it is likely that both the Biden administration, and more tragically the Afghan people, will lose out.
