By: Dr. Milan Zver, MEP
The U.S. military has finally withdrawn from Afghanistan because it is said to have completed its mission. The Taliban say they withdrew as losers. That holds true. But as with any important event, they will also struggle for interpretation, which of course includes finding a culprit.
In the first days of the coup, a global debate erupted, essentially merely personalising the blame for what has happened, and only at the level of U.S. presidents. Is it the fault of Donald Trump, who was the first to find that the Afghanistan project was too expensive (it cost the US alone more than a trillion dollars) and ineffective (Bin Laden’s head was too low a yield). On top of all that, Trump released current Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar from prison. They also blamed President Joe Biden for tackling the withdrawal of Western powers too trivially and putting thousands of people at risk. In addition, he humiliated the CIA in his own way when he sent a director to Kabul to help compile a “killing list” for the new government, as he revealed to them who all these collaborators were who supposedly enjoyed the “security” provided by the Taliban. After the terrorist attacks in this country, the still-living Islamic State organisation, when many civilians and American soldiers were killed in the immediate vicinity of Kabul airport, Biden announced revenge and at least partially fulfilled that promise relatively quickly.
Common sense, however, seeks answers as to what the hell all the intelligence services did that did not anticipate such a rapid military success for the Taliban, and secondly, even more importantly, how they did not anticipate such a rapid collapse of power structures established by Americans for almost two decades and spent a sum of money in the amount of about thirty (!) Slovenian budgets? Therefore, it is not primarily about merit, not the fault of Trump or Biden. It is a question of why American and indirectly Western politics experienced a fiasco?
The official Afghan structures, financially, professionally and materially supported – of course also with European money – apparently channelled a good part of Western “investments” directly or indirectly to the Taliban, who showed appropriate military skills and top equipment in a few days of conquest. Military of course. A striking fact is also that the government army and police, numbering 300,000 men, failed to fire a single bullet in defence of the capital. All good practices that were introduced at this time on the civilian level have disappeared like comets in space. The most damage can be expected in the health and school sectors, not to mention the economy at all. People have come to power who cannot even manage their own central airport (so they are asking the Turkish government to manage it). A government that is not compatible even with its neighbours, let alone with Western societies, has no future. Unless another Islamic State, or even China, “jumps in” and helps maintain that regime.
The overlook of the West in this project was in culture. The social structure of the population, the generally accepted Sharia law, the old ways of decision-making, etc., require a special approach to the modernisation of Afghan society. It is a country with a common religious basis, but in ethnic terms it is a real mosaic. Historic decentralisation will have to be taken into account by all those who will build a new society, not just the state. Some minorities, e.g. Tajiks from the north are even in conflict with the Taliban, who have never been able to defeat them militarily, so it will be interesting in the future how they will regulate inter-ethnic relations. In short, it is not possible to build a unitary state in Afghanistan (as Westerners have wrongly tried), it makes no sense to build British parliamentarism or an American type of democracy there. They also did not accept Soviet communism, as they proved when they defeated the powerful Red Army in the 1980s. However, they need to be helped primarily in a cultural sense. The observation that you can change the political system in three weeks, the economic system in three months, and the cultural system in three generations must not take away the courage of the international community. Slowly, even in Afghanistan, they will realise that all lives, women and men, count the same. That children are also beings who need to be respected and educated in order for the community to survive. In short, a different approach to aid is needed. Rifles are not enough. At this point, Western strategists have failed the exam in the last two decades. Some may still have too many colonial genes in them.
Afghanistan was therefore an expensive but important “school” not only for the United States but for the entire Western world.
Dr Milan Zver is a Slovenian social scientist and politician and a member of the European Parliament.