Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
It seems to be the consensus of Monday morning quarterbacks, whether Republicans or Democrats, that President Joe Biden’s decision early this year to pull out of Afghanistan before autumn was a huge blunder.
The withdrawal led to a lightning-fast takeover by Aug. 16 of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, by the radically Muslim Taliban, a sworn U.S. enemy, as Afghanistan’s defenses evaporated like raindrops on a hot sidewalk.
The Taliban’s advance was so fast, the U.S. was caught flat-footed in efforts to rescue stranded Americans or friendly Afghans from what is expected to be brutal revenge.
Some research on Afghanistan leads me to conclude there was no correct decision on Afghanistan, which continues as it has for at least 50 years to be a complicated, tragic mess.
Since 2001, the Afghan war has cost the lives of 6,000 U.S. troops and contractors and over 1,100 allied troops. The war has consumed $2 trillion in U.S. tax dollars
Some 47,000 civilians have died, and an estimated 73,000 Afghan troops and police officers have been killed since 2007. About 50,000 Taliban fighters are also believed to have been killed.
Afghanistan, however, remains, as Winston Churchill described Soviet Russia, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” only then folded over and tied in knots.
Afghanistan is a disjointed patchwork of tribes, different languages and nearly random loyalties isolated by difficult geography. Afghans generally consider themselves first as members of local tribes, then as ethnic Pashtuns, Hazaras and Uzbeks, among other nationalities, before they are Afghans, if they consider themselves Afghans at all.
The concept of Afghanistan for most of its inhabitants is either an abstraction or a bad joke.
About 75% of Afghanistan’s population is rural. Rural Afghans tend to be very conservative in their adherence to ancient tribal values and customs. They are governed almost completely by local authorities and seldom, if ever, respect authority beyond the local.
Rural Afghans disdain better educated, more worldly city dwellers.
Part of the reason is they consider urbanites to be corrupt, with good reason. U.S. inspectors general found a few years ago that of $63 billion the U.S. sent to build up Afghanistan and its army, $19 billion was lost to abuse, waste or outright theft.
U.S. money funded “overnight millionaires” who paraded down city streets in limousines, and entourages of armed bodyguards.
Rural Afghans also find their national government to be non-responsive, irresponsible and corrupt.
The Taliban might find, as Russia and now the U.S. have learned, Afghanistan is nobody’s for the taking. Its geography and people could still be insurmountable obstacles, even to a movement born next door.
The Taliban earned fear and contempt by Afghans in 1996 as they imposed horrors like mass executions, amputations as punishment for minor crimes, and complete humiliation of women and girls.
Three-quarters of the Afghan population is under 25. They don’t remember the Taliban’s excesses but are not expected to give up readily the rights they have enjoyed under the more liberal, U.S.-backed government.
Demonstrations against the Taliban in major Afghan cities have already begun.
Did Biden blunder, though? I still don’t know.
Steve Hansen writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: