After 20 Years, What's With All the Surprise?

If you were an Afghan would you have fought to defend a weak and corrupt central government that, after 20 years was an utter failure? Defend what?

For all those with gasps of surprise and tut-tuts, where have you been these past two decades?  What did you think was going on over there?

Maybe you believed the generals, guys like McChrystal and Petraeus, that things inside the government and the Afghan National Army weren't that bad. Sorry but they lied. When was the last time a general was honest and candid? Even our own didn't tell the unvarnished truth.

They were not only dishonest, they were delusional. Here's an oldie but goodie from late 2006 when NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer started pitching the fantasy that the Afghan National Army would be up and running by Spring, 2008.

The NATO Secretary General's remarks about handover are a sop to those who need to tell their constituents that there is light at the end of the tunnel. It would be interesting to know how much damage we need to inflict on the Taliban and rebellious peasants before Afghanistan will be safe to hand over to any Afghan Army. At the end of the day, can we kill enough of them to make a difference?

Say what you may about them but the original Taliban regime did accomplish two things. They brutally suppressed the narco-economy and they punished kid-diddling.  The Talibs cracked down on men coercing "dancing boys." When the Taliban were cleared out, Chai Boys became all the rage again.

In November, 2006, AP's Kathy Gannon looked at how the Taliban rebels were winning over Afghanis who had been abused and neglected by the predators we propped up.

Government help hasn't reached many Afghans, and much of the country has returned to the same 1990s anarchy and lawlessness that gave rise to the Taliban's iron-fisted rule.

"Taliban fighters defend villagers against criminal gangs which often are linked to the government, he said. They don't perform the arbitrary arrests and searches that are conducted by the Western troops who occasionally patrol the region. Also boosting their ranks are Western air strikes that often kill civilians along with combatants.

"If this is all they are going to do for us, is kill us, they should get out," shouted Ghulab Shah, a middle-aged man from Ashogho in southern Kandahar after nine of his neighbors were killed as they slept when a NATO bomb blasted their home.

"The Taliban defeat in 2001 provoked a backlash against their harsh rule and a surge in support for the new government. From Zabul province in southeast Afghanistan, 2,000 young men went to Kabul to sign up for the new national army or police forces.

"All returned, police officials say, frustrated by poor salary or perceived ethnic bias in the new government. All but four joined the Taliban, they said.

"And to the common people, criminal gangs abetted by the police and military are as big a threat in many areas as the fundamentalist militia, said Noor Mohammed Paktin, Zabul's police chief.

"'Many times when they say Taliban attacked cars on the highway, it is thieves, sometimes ... with the help of the police,' Paktin said in his office in Zabul's provincial capital, Qalat.

Shortly after I started blogging in  2006, I began corresponding with Jonathan Landay, then of the Knight Ridder news service. Landay had spent a couple of years running the hills with the Mujahedeen during the Soviet occupation. He knew quite well how the Taliban would defeat us.

It was at this same time I began hearing about Sarah Chayes, a former NPR correspondent until she became an aid worker in Afghanistan during the Taliban years. I asked Jonathan Landay if he knew her and if she was credible. He said she knew Afghanistan as well as any Westerner and she was completely trustworthy.  

After we drove the Talibs out in 2001, the narcotics industry flourished and became the economic engine of the nation. And, as Sarah Chayes pointed out in 2008, all we did was create a criminal enterprise to rule the country.

We're paying a billion dollars a year to Pakistan, which is orchestrating the Taliban insurgency. So, it's actually us-taxpayer money that is paying for the insurgents, who are then killing, at the moment, Canadian troops. Now if I were the government of Germany or France, I'd have a hard time putting my troops in that kind of equation. I would demand from Washington, that Washington require a lot different behavior from Pakistan.

...In this particular metaphor, we're the sheriff, right? We're going go out after the outlaw, Osama bin Laden. We gather this posse of Afghan criminals to gallop off with us. And then we put them in positions of the governor. We make them into the governor, the mayor, the, you know. And we don't ask them anything about how they're governing. We don't demand-- all we say is, we have to support the Afghan government. We have to support the Afghan government. And so we've fed them money, we've fed them arms, and then we say to the people, "okay, you're supposed to hold your government accountable." they're looking at these thugs with the whole power of the entire world, is what it looks like to them, behind them. And the Afghan people say, "you want us to hold them accountable?" So this, I think, is really the root of the problem.

In 2008 Chayes was also interviewed by Scott Taylor, editor of the Espirit de Corps web site about Canada's role in Kandahar.

If NATO wasn’t here, the Karzai regime wouldn’t last five days, or five minutes, because the people are so upset."

"If the Afghan government is a criminal enterprise and Canada’s stated mission is to support the government of Afghanistan, then what the hell are you achieving?" she said. "Is NATO here to make five people happy or to make the whole province happy?"

In addition to NATO cleaning house within the Afghan administration, thereby winning the hearts-and-minds campaign among the local population, Chayes believes even more foreign combat troops are required to stem the flow of insurgents from bases across the Pakistani border.

"Kandahar is the most important province in Afghanistan. Kandahar is where this campaign will be won or lost," she said. "It was a strategic error for the Americans to give up Regional Command South, but NATO must now fill the void. Kandahar is the marrow in Afghanistan’s bones."

In 2006, Chayes spoke of how we sabotaged Afghanistan from Day One.

"..it seemed that U.S. officials were ushering discredited warlords into positions of power, though the Afghan people wanted nothing of them, and gave President Hamid Karzai a resounding mandate to expel them from the body politic. In 2002 and 2003, the U.S. government prevented Mr. Karzai from moving against these warlords, and then he, discouraged, gave up trying. The result is a government that is devoured by corruption, with offices up for sale, and officials whose entire motivation is to extract money and favours from their countrymen."

As early as 2006, our "allies" in Pakistan  had concluded the US and ISAF forces were bound to lose.

"SENIOR Pakistani officials are urging NATO countries to accept the Taliban and work towards a new coalition government in Kabul that might exclude the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai.

"Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Khurshid Kasuri, has said in private briefings to foreign ministers of some NATO member states that the Taliban are winning the war in Afghanistan and NATO is bound to fail. He has advised against sending more troops.

"Western ministers have been stunned. 'Kasuri is basically asking NATO to surrender and to negotiate with the Taliban,' said one Western official who met the minister recently.

We often point fingers at the Pakistanis for their perfidy yet they knew we wouldn't stay because we couldn't. They knew we wouldn't defeat the Taliban because we couldn't. And they knew that, long after we finally packed up and went home, Pakistan would have to deal with the Talibs or some group much like them.

Those who now criticize Biden are either indulging in utter sophistry or are profoundly ignorant. 

As an example of the latter there's Kinsella's post yesterday.

Americans, and the world, expected that the withdrawal would be conducted in an orderly, safe and timely manner. For those countries who sent young men and women to Afghanistan – many of whom would not come back alive – we expected the winding down of the war, as Chuck Hagel put it, to be done right.

It wasn’t.

In recent days, those of us in the West have watched events unfolding in Afghanistan in horror. The total collapse of the Afghan military. Chaos and anarchy everywhere. Terrible tragedies – such as Afghans literally falling off of departing planes, so desperate have they been to get out.

And, most ominously, the Taliban – the biggest and most feared terrorist organization in the world – now runs an entire country. Those who are knowledgeable about the Taliban foresee them returning to what they did so often in the past – repressing women, crushing dissent, and conducting terror attacks in the West.

"The biggest and most feared terrorist organization in the world"? "Conducting terror attacks in the West"?  I'm used to Kinsella's loose grasp of facts but those are whoppers. The collapse of the Afghan military? It was always just a house of cards, nothing more. And it's Biden's fault?  Kinsella understands electioneering. Afghanistan, not so much.

I think these posts from  2006 add a bit of nuanced depth to this farcical blame game.  Perhaps I'll tackle posts from 2007-8 next.