The Situation in Afghanistan Is Much Worse Than You Realize

The U.S. military is downplaying the Taliban’s gains, and the U.S. and U.N. are pretending there is a viable peace process.

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Just two weeks after President Biden announced on April 14 his decision to withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan by September 11, the Taliban launched a massive offensive. Since May 1, the jihadists have captured a large swath of the country, laying the groundwork for the resurrection of their Islamic emirate. America and its allies have remained mostly indifferent—retreating from the battlefield as the jihadists advance. 

This is what a lost war looks like. 

Here are four takeaways from recent events.

The U.S. military is downplaying the Taliban’s gains.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Jason Gibson

    we will rue the day we engaged in the endless wars rhetoric.

    It seems that Biden is just going to continue the ongoing attempts begun by Obama and continued by Trump to disengage with a world that badly needs true american leadership

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  2. Chris S.

    I don't know why any foreign national would ever cooperate with the United States in the future. Our history of abandoning those we pledged to help - and those who have risked everything to help our cause - is truly nauseating. Absolutely shameful. To the isolationists out there who think we can abandon the world to its own devices without severe consequences here, you are deluding yourselves. It is time to accept the world as it is, not as you wish it to be. That means a US presence. And I don't say that lightly, with a son and daughter-in-law deployed abroad.

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    O.M.G. calling from Vaudeville, AZ

    So long as there are millions of armed and dangerous males on Gods Green Earth east of Israel that believe with all there heart and soul that the Koran and the Hadith are based on a true story….there will never be peace in the Middle East….until it is destroyed….or someone goes on Carbon Bigfoot’s Al Jazerra and declares: Allah is not God. Muhammad was a war profiteer. Death to Jihadists…. Al K K K da of southwest Asia is and its hordes of wasted dumb masses are taking over Afghanistan, again, you say….no worries, I need a new IPAD, brought to me by the Corona Chinese Communist Party (CCCP). Gotta run on. Peace through superior mental firepower.

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    cheerio

    I am resigned to the fact we have to end our involvement there and it is like a situation in which we have to release our ties, and admit our losses... it makes me think of having to amputate an infected part of the body that despite extensive treatment, is resistant to antibiotics and surgical intervention. It is going to be a painful and permanent change.

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  5. Mary Stine

    My hubby, a decorated Vietnam vet, has always said our getting militarily involved in the Middle East was futile. I cannot disagree. The political, religious and philosophical sentiment there for centuries has been the same: tribal. No amount of Western military force can overcome this. It will take the majority of the people themselves to decide that they want something very different and are willing to make sacrifices to have that. There are indeed right now many Afghanis, mostly women, who yearn for a better, different life.
    We would have been better off to have sent factories, teachers and agricultural aid. The primary source of soldiers for all the Taliban and Isis are impoverished or socially inept young men, "educated" in the fundamentalist madrassas or indoctrinated online.
    Nothing will change that until there are job opportunities better than soldiering, and farms that can produce more than opium poppies.

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    1. Avatar photo
      WKDawson

      I still think if Bush had focused on Afghanistan instead of getting inebriated with his (very apparent and ephemeral) success there and turning his ambitions to Iraq, there might have been a chance. Ironically, it seems like Iraq may actually be going somewhere ... ... maybe.

      The other thing is there should have been a real plan. I think Bush and his cohorts just somehow assumed that it would simply become a democracy.

      I keep hoping against hope that this is just an effort to get the current Afghan government to get serious. They are corrupt, which is why they lost a lot of the territory. Of course, we didn't have a decent plan for how to build a real economy either. So there is always the game of chicken here. Biden and the UN are in a better bargaining position right now. [They look up the road at the Taliban, and then they look at their corrupt politicians, then they look up the road at the Taliban, then they look at their sinking bucket of slime politicians and bottom feeders.] They make no concessions to clean up their garbage, we just keep walking. If they are not serious, why should we be? Hopefully, that is the way this is being played.

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    2. Laura Crowder

      Never start a land war in Asia.--Fezzini

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      1. Mary Stine

        Or try to win a war against entrenched native guerrillas, especially when none of the soldiers you are sending in can easily blend in, either physically or linguistically. Vietnam should have been a warning in that regard.

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  6. Avatar photo
    wri

    Milley should be fired for outright lying to Congress.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Narwhal

      Lying about what what? Fired by whom?

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  7. Avatar photo
    Victor Clairmont

    This is no surprise.

    Many of us know that once we are gone, insurgents will sweep Afghanistan. That is the inevitable outcome of two decades of failed direction in what we should do with Afghanistan.

    Ever since Osama Bin Ladin was killed, the military and our elected leaders have failed to make the case for staying beyond saying it is protecting us from more 9-11’s. Every moral outrage, and moral outcry about what is happening, while tragic, will not change the trajectory of us leaving.

    The current Afghanistan government and army has had two decades to prepare itself to be its own sovereign nation. Ever since former President Hamas Karzai spoke out of both sides of his mouth, undermining the US on the world stage and trying to play both sides, the Afghanistan nation building effort was basically doomed from the start.

    They didn’t want democracy originally. This isn’t Germany, or Japan, or South Korea. And Afghanistan cannot be looked at alone as a single entity. The entire Middle East has been a cesspool of tribalism, civil wars, terrors, etc.

    People say if we keep a small amount of troops there, it will solve the problem.

    Absolutely doubtful, because for 20 years we have gone through eb’s and flows of insurgent attacks. What is was quiet earlier merely will become loudly rampant later, as terrorists coalesce outside Afghanistan’s borders to hit it again later.

    Afghanistan is not facing invasion from India. Nor is it facing invasion from other nearby countries. It is facing lunatic Islamic terrorists, funded by Iran and other terrorist states, and if their own populace in that country again after 20 years, billions in aid, thousands in American deaths, do not have the stomachs to defend their own country, I am sorry it’s on them.

    The Biden administration is evacuating translators that aided us and other personal. The desert sands of terrorism will have their dead mountains and drug fields once again.

    Perhaps the military and politicians will finally learn that Vietnam, and now Afghanistan, cannot be indefinitely held when a populace will not stand on its own two feet for its own nation. Freedom isn’t free.

    May God have mercy on Afghanistan, because much more blood is about to flow.

    But that is no longer our fault, or our problem (for now).

    Blame the politicians that got us into this long mess. Not the American people that want out, and have put up with two decades of this mess.

    We have other dragons to fight, namely China, 28 trillion in debt, and a culture war sadly.

    Afghanistan will be the least of our problems now, even if it is tragic.

    Beef up our homeland security against foreign terrorist threats, but the wind swept sands of Afghanistan will continue to blow the winds of death.

    Not more for American soldiers, but for the people left behind.

    Afghanistan will return to the way it has been for the last half a century. That is a tragedy in itself.

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  8. jmk789

    - This was the most likely outcome since 2003 after the Bush administration tried to win the war "on the cheap" initially and then promptly ignored Afghanistan while it ran off to throw away all the gains from the end of the Cold War on the ill-considered venture in Iraq. Attempting the permanent installation of democratic, centralized governance in Afghanistan was a stupendously difficult task in the first place that received astonishingly little attention from the Bush admin. Couple that with the Bush administration's refusal to seriously deal with the Taliban sanctuaries in Afghanistan at any time, and this war was essentially lost by 2008. Obama's bizarre idea of a surge with a deadline didn't help, but the situation was already degrading past the point of no return by then.
    - Even during the Trump administration, the Taliban were slowly taking over more parts of Afghanistan and the American troops were increasingly isolated. The current astonishment about the truth of the situation only underscores how fragile and misleading the relative "peace" that reigned for the past few years was; such quick offensive successes would not be possible without a huge amount of planning and preparation by the Taliban. This was not a sustainable situation where only a tiny number of American troops could have held back the tide or even where a return of combat brigades would have saved the war. Unlike in Iraq, where ISIS was pursued into Syria, the US would never have pursued the Taliban into Pakistan. And the Afghan war would thus have continued, indefinitely, thanks to Pakistan.
    - Pakistan has been the key player in America's defeat in Afghanistan. Staying in Afghanistan--including trying to hold Bagram or another massive air base that would keep close-in air support in-country rather than being based from carriers--requires cutting deals with Pakistan to secure the resupply routes. This gives Pakistan a huge amount of veto power over American policy and has hamstrung the American war effort since the beginning. The whole reason the Taliban were able to survive was because of the safe havens given to them within Pakistan. Getting out of Afghanistan will actually increase the leverage the US can exert on the Pakistani government.
    - The Dispatch really should bring on more smart critics of US Foreign Policy and do more to acknowledge and address the Bush-era hubris that led to this situation in the first place. It certainly seems like the editors, outside of Isgur, have not learned much.

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  9. Gary

    What is your solution/advice? This war was never going to be won. We always knew we would fail and are just now acknowledging that fact. Very easy to criticize our lack of success. Much harder to propose a solution to an insoluble problem.

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  10. Sergio C

    This is such a well-written and well done piece, Vital Interests lives up to its name without fail. Great work!

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