Michael McDowell: Fall of Afghan government may have merely brought forward inevitable

Before we rush to judgment on Joe Biden’s US military evacuation of Afghanistan, it is worthwhile putting in context what has happened.

In particular, the US and Taliban had concluded a formal agreement in February 2020 at Doha, during Donald Trump’s presidency, which embodied a clear US commitment to withdraw all Nato forces from Afghanistan in exchange for a Taliban guarantee that Afghan territory would never be used to undermine the security of the US and its allies.

These two commitments were to come first in a four-part agreement; the latter two parts were an immediate guarantee of US security and an agreement for intra-Afghan dialogue and negotiations on the future of Afghanistan in which an agenda item would be a general ceasefire. The full text of this agreement is available online and rewards reading.

The Kabul government had at its command, on paper at least, its own security forces of 300,000 personnel with a very considerable armoury

Trump later announced that US troops would depart by May 2021. Biden stated this April that the US withdrawal would commence in May and be completed by September 11th, the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaeda aircraft attack on Washington and New York. So any suggestion that US troops would not be withdrawn or that the Kabul government did not know that it would have to stand – as far as forces were concerned – on its own feet is not sustainable.

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Government forces

The Kabul government had at its command, on paper at least, its own security forces of 300,000 personnel with a very considerable armoury. What has happened is that those forces did not turn up to confront and counter the Taliban forces of about a quarter of their strength.

Reports indicate a number of reasons including diminished loyalty to a government regarded as corrupt and incompetent; underpayment and non-payment of the army; and a general reluctance to deploy and direct the army effectively against the Taliban on the ground, together with a great reluctance on the part of soldiers to engage in a war against fellow Afghans as part of a political dispute.

The sudden collapse was indeed unexpected. But if the alternative was a protracted civil war between Kabul and the Taliban, and if the odds were on the Taliban to eventually win that war, maybe the collapse merely brought the inevitable forward.

The Taliban received active support from many sources, not least Iran and very substantially from nominal US ally Pakistan

Biden is right in two respects. It was never possible for the US and its allies to guarantee the building of a functional, centralised, liberal democracy to replace what had gone before – unless that was the indomitable will of the Afghan people. He was also right to point out that if the Nato presence was ended, the Afghan government would sometime have to defend itself in order to survive. When?

If things had turned out differently and if there had been a protracted bloody civil war in which Kabul gradually lost ground and ultimately capitulated, would the chorus of condemnation for Biden have been muted? Would western face have been saved by the carnage?

Geopolitical importance

It is worth getting out your atlas to look at the geopolitical location and importance of Afghanistan. Located between Pakistan, Iran, the central Asian “stan” republics and China, it is strategically sensitive and vulnerable. The Taliban received active support from many sources, not least Iran and very substantially from nominal US ally Pakistan whose premier, Imran Khan, has warmly welcomed their victory.

Are Afghan women and girls to be disenfranchised and subjugated? Are free speech and civil liberty to be snuffed out?

The history of Afghanistan, going over 150 years successively from a pashtun emirate to a kingdom, a republic and a later communist “people’s republic” (eventually overthrown by US-backed mujahideen), to a Taliban theocracy before the Nato invasion took place after 9/11, is a history of constant efforts by outside powers to control the country. Britain had three Afghan wars as part of the imperial Great Game against Russia, in the last of which in 1919 it finally conceded to the Afghans the right to run their own foreign affairs. Russia later lost 25,000 soldiers trying to make it a satellite of the USSR.

The outcome, from a western point of view, is deeply worrying. Are Afghan women and girls to be disenfranchised and subjugated? Are free speech and civil liberty to be snuffed out? Is blood to be routinely shed in the name of Islamic conformity and is sharia law to be ruthlessly applied? These are questions of profound importance.

Idle talk about a “debacle” or “a failure of intelligence” is only that – particularly in the right-wing UK press.

However, just as Biden rightly pointed out that the Afghans had to fight for their values and liberty if they wished to preserve them, the same now applies to Biden himself? Will he stand by Taiwan or is it too now on its own?