The end of the Afghanistan War - or at least the impending end of the current Afghan government

Juan Cole reflects on the now admitted failure of the US effort in Afghanistan - de facto admission, at least - in The Great Washington Ponzi Scheme in Afghanistan comes Crashing Down Informed Comment 08/13/2021.

It was entirely sensible and necessary for the US to militarily go after al-Qaeda's base in Afghanistan. But Dick Cheney's Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld didn't focus on that. Philip Smucker provided solid reporting on that failure in his 2004 book, Al Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror’s Trail.

The "neoconservative" foreign policy outlook dominant in the Republican Party and in the Cheney-Bush Administration in 2001 was the militarized vision notoriously elaborated by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Key to that assumption was the idea that international terrorism was primarily a matter of state-sponsored terrorism. Part of the attraction of that claim was that PNAC was especially focused on having the US invade Iraq. Jim Lobe wrote about this obsession in Key Officials Used 9/11 As Pretext for Iraq War Inter Press Service 07/15/2003

In Afghanistan, this meant that Cheney and Rummy (Rumsfeld) always saw the Afghanistan War as a necessary sideshow to invade Iraq. It also meant that the military effort in Afghanistan was not focused on targeting al-Qaeda units but on changing the regime in Kabul. At that time, the Pashtun-dominated Taliban of the time controlled the national government and was being opposed by a coalition of other groups under the umbrella of the Northern Alliance.

Cole explains the early moves in the war:

The initial US military action against the Taliban government of Mulla Omar in fall, 2001, was based on the refusal of Kabul to hand over Usama Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks. There is no reason to believe that the Taliban leadership was aware of what al-Qaeda was planning. The Taliban are Pushtuns, al-Qaeda was Arab expatriates. Pushtuns were known to get sick and tired of the Arabs lording it over them and occasionally to stick a shiv between their ribs on the march.

Al-Qaeda was not, however, just a “guest” of the Taliban. It was their 55th Brigade. The al-Qaeda fighters were the best in the country and were the only ones who could take on the Northern Alliance remnants in the country’s northeast with any success. Mulla Omar would never have turned them over to the US. For one thing, he needed them at the home front. But not only the Taliban but many in al-Qaeda felt deeply betrayed by Bin Laden’s use of their hospitality to stage a brazen attack on a superpower, bringing the full weight of the international community down on them.

The US gave the Northern Alliance (fundamentalist Sunni Tajiks, Shiite Hazaras and secular Uzbeks) air support, and enabled them to roll up the Taliban in city after city by taking out the few military vehicles the Taliban had. All the forces were poorly equipped. The Northern Alliance forces took Mazar-i Sharif on horseback, with US special operations guys in tow, painting lasers on Taliban targets for the airstrikes. Some of the spec ops guys didn’t know how to post when riding and boy were they sore the next day. [my emphasis]

The US effort in Afghanistan was never the great humanitarian war of liberation the Cheney Administration pretended. As Cole notes, "The US lost Afghanistan in part by trying to occupy it militarily. In 2005 US troops used flamethrowers to burn poppy crops of Afghan farmers, who had nothing else to live on. One in 7 as a result had to sell a daughter. I doubt they have forgiven the US."

Britain's colonial wars in Afghanistan were exceptionally ugly. So were the Russian and US versions. Cole gives a good brief description of how that worked for the US in Afghanistan. Among other things:

The US was massively bombing the country every year, the only reason that it was still able to be there. ... There was no mission. There was a morass of corruption and incompetence. Many of the regional warlords under the new government were not easier on women or minorities than the Taliban had been, and were fundamentalists of a different stripe.

And the same kind of corruption problem that characterized the US effort in Vietnam appeared in Afghanistan, as well:

Sadly, events like the one Cole describes here are chronic features of such interventions: The Afghanistan National Army had trouble keeping recruits. There was extremely high turnover as soldiers deserted after a few months. Many of those who remained had poor morale and allegedly smoked a lot of pot. The US was sometimes not very serious about training them. It farmed out rifle practice to a private firm that could not improve their accuracy when firing US rifles. It turns out that you have to use the sight, and the firm wasn’t teaching the troops that.

One major factor that has been too little discussed the last 20 years in the US is the fact that Pakistan and India, both nuclear powers, have a long-standing dispute over the Muslim-majority Indian province of Kashmir. Pakistan was always an ally of the Afghan Taliban. We see some grumping about that fact in the reports on the US withdrawal. But it's rarely discussed that Pakistan regards the current pro-American government in Kabul as pro-Indian. And Pakistan sees Afghanistan as a necessary fallback area in a possible war with India. Their perceived interest in having a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul has been a major factor in this situation for longer than the last 20 years.

Aljazeera reports on this factor in Pakistan useful for US only to clean up Afghanistan ‘mess’: Khan 08/12/2021:

The US will pull out its military by August 31, 20 years after toppling the Taliban government in 2001. But as the US leaves, the Taliban today controls more territory than at any point since then.

Kabul and several Western governments say Pakistan’s support for the armed group allowed it to weather the war.

The charge of supporting the Taliban despite being a US ally has long been a sore point between Washington and Islamabad. Pakistan denies supporting the Taliban.

[Pakistani Prime Minister Imran] Khan said Islamabad was not taking sides in Afghanistan.

“I think that the Americans have decided that India is their strategic partner now, and I think that’s why there’s a different way of treating Pakistan now,” Khan said. [my emphasis]

One thing the US and other countries could do to change that situation would be a serious push for a permanent agreement over Kashmir. That would also be something positive in the eyes of much of the Muslim world for the US to undertake. But that's not as easy as moaning and groaning about how the US and NATO didn't pull out some magical military victory after 20 years but providing no feasible alternative approach that could produce a different outcome.