President Biden speaks Tuesday (August 31, 2021) on ending the war in Afghanistan.

 Biden Forcefully Defends His Decision To End The U.S. War In Afghanistan

Updated August 31, 20215:46 PM ET 

Brian Naylor in 2018.

BRIAN NAYLOR

Twitter

President Biden speaks Tuesday on ending the war in Afghanistan.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Speaking one day after the last United States troops left Afghanistan, ending America's longest war, President Biden on Tuesday forcefully defended his decision to end the U.S. military involvement in the beleaguered country, calling it "the right decision, the wise decision, the best decision for America."

"I was not going to extend this forever war," Biden said in remarks from the White House, "and I was not extending a forever exit."

Pushing back against those who advocate for a small force remaining in Afghanistan, Biden said, "There is nothing low grade or low risk or low cost about any war."

He said U.S. missions overseas should have "clear achievable goals" and "stay clearly focused on the fundamental national security interests of the United States."

Biden also defended the much-criticized U.S. evacuation, and said the U.S. is committed to continuing to help Americans and Afghans leave the country.

The war's massive costs

As he has previously, the president painted the decision to leave Afghanistan as a binary choice — either continue indefinitely the 20-year war at an additional cost of U.S. lives and resources, or end the American involvement.

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With The Americans Gone, Afghanistan Enters Its Uncertain, Taliban-Led Future

ASIA

With The Americans Gone, Afghanistan Enters Its Uncertain, Taliban-Led Future

Biden said the U.S. achieved its original goal in Afghanistan a decade ago by hunting down Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader and the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, but still stayed another decade. The terrorist threat has metastasized since then, Biden said, and the U.S. will maintain its fight against it, but he added, "We don't need to fight a ground war to do it."

Nearly 2,500 U.S. service members have died over the 20-year war in Afghanistan, which cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

In his remarks, Biden said that people don't understand "how much we have asked of the 1% [of Americans] who put on the military uniform."

He cited the war's costs to America — an estimated $300 million a day — as well as human costs to veterans and their families — including, he said, the 18 U.S. veterans who die by suicide each day.

Americans remain in Afghanistan

Biden also defended the decision to leave Afghanistan by his self-imposed Aug. 31 deadline. He said it was not arbitrary, but "was designed to save American lives."

The U.S. has evacuated some 5,400 Americans from Afghanistan over the past month.

Here's How Presidents Have Responded To Terrorism

ANALYSIS

Here's How Presidents Have Responded To Terrorism

Biden said 100 to 200 Americans remain in the country "with some intention to leave." Most of them, he added, "are dual citizens, long-time residents who had earlier decided to stay because of their family roots in Afghanistan."

Biden said that "the bottom line" was that "90% of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were able to leave, and for those remaining Americans, there is no deadline. We remain committed to get them out if they want to come out."

Biden said since March, the administration reached out 19 times to Americans in the country "with multiple warnings and offer to help them leave."

Biden praised the service members and diplomats who worked to evacuate more than 120,000 people from Afghanistan in recent weeks, calling it an "extraordinary success."

That followed a statement from Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin Monday night, thanking "all those who labored so hard and under such difficult circumstances over the past few weeks."

Bipartisan criticism of a chaotic exit

But the withdrawal from Afghanistan was anything but smooth.

Thirteen American service members and an estimated 170 Afghans were killed by a suicide bomber at a gate at the Kabul airport last week.

He Is The Last American Soldier To Leave Afghanistan

ASIA

He Is The Last American Soldier To Leave Afghanistan

There's A Bipartisan Backlash To How Biden Handled The Withdrawal From Afghanistan

POLITICS

There's A Bipartisan Backlash To How Biden Handled The Withdrawal From Afghanistan

In response, a U.S. drone strike had targeted suspected militants with ISIS-K, the group that had claimed responsibility for the attack. Now the U.S. military says it is looking into reports that up to 10 civilians were killed when the U.S. carried out another strike Sunday on a vehicle near the airport.

In his remarks Tuesday, Biden told ISIS-K: "We're not done with you yet."

Biden has faced criticism — from Republicans and some Democrats — on the manner in which the withdrawal was carried out.

"The President made the morally indefensible decision to leave Americans behind," Sen Ben Sasse, R- Neb., said in a statement. "Dishonor was the President's choice. May history never forget this cowardice."

Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, said in a statement after Biden's remarks: "Joe Biden abandoned Americans in Afghanistan. For months, Biden and his administration promised the withdrawal from Afghanistan wouldn't be chaotic, they were wrong."

Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told NPR that junior aides in his office were embarrassed how "poorly coordinated" the effort to help Americans and Afghan allies evacuate was, and he learned more from his staff than from federal officials.

"There isn't a lot of communication. There isn't a lot of collaboration. And it is a source of both confusion and disappointment," he said.

Phillips credited the Biden administration with the large number of those who were airlifted but said the decision making about the policy needs to be examined, and top Cabinet officials need to be held accountable for what went wrong.

While there is bipartisan criticism about the exit from Afghanistan, the politics is where the parties disagree.

Republicans on Capitol Hill say voters will remember the chaos and argue the president ignored warnings about the consequences of leaving now.

"This was a political decision, pure and simple," Texas GOP Rep. Michael McCaul told reporters.

But Democrats note that Americans from both parties support getting out of Afghanistan.

"Anybody who tells you at this very moment what's going to be on the minds of American voters in the next midterm election is misleading you because nobody knows," Phillips told NPR.

With reporting by NPR's Deirdre Walsh and Krishnadev Calamur

The Taliban's Takeover of Afghanistan Was the U.S. Greatest Intel Failure Ever

The Taliban's Takeover of Afghanistan Was the U.S. Greatest Intel Failure Ever

 Andrew Korybko

31/08/2021

The key takeaway is that the US’ technological superiority was irrelevant during its War on Afghanistan and the human sources that it depended on for intelligence were too unreliable.

History will testify that there has never been a greater intelligence failure for the US than the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. Contrarian voices might bring up Pearl Harbor or 9/11 but it’s since been discovered that some in the US were at least somewhat aware of those two attacks ahead of time even if no action was preemptively taken to thwart them for whatever reason one wants to speculate. As for the War on Iraq that some might also bring up, that doesn’t count in this context since the intelligence that was supposedly relied upon was fabricated and only shared with the public to shape international perceptions in support of that preplanned campaign. The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan is altogether different than those three examples since America’s Intelligence Community totally failed to foresee that scenario.

It’s true that some in the CIA and the State Department warned about this over the summer but it was too late for them to change anything after the US’ massive military machine already set its withdrawal into motion. This is utterly unacceptable from a professional standpoint because it’s been known for quite a while already by members of the US’ own permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) that their country was losing the war. Proof of this lies in Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary covering the 2004-2010 phase of the conflict and the Afghanistan Papers that the Washington Post obtained in 2019 after a Freedom Of Information Act request. Both showed that the “deep state” was lying about the war, keenly aware of corruption, and pessimistic about the conflict’s prospects.

CIA withdrawal from Afghanistan

The CIA was planning to close its satellite bases in Afghanistan and pull all its personnel back to Kabul by early summer.

hese internal observations didn’t in and of themselves automatically mean that the Taliban would take over Afghanistan even before the US completed its withdrawal but they very strongly suggested that it might do so inevitably with time. This dramatic scenario was missed by the “deep state” because its members believed their own self-interested lies about the war that they spun for the public’s sake. After a while, they were unable to objectively identify the truth between the falsehoods. They knew that the Afghan National Army (ANA) was incorrigibly corrupt and improperly trained, but they hadn’t properly assessed just how demoralized it always was, let alone after US President Joe Biden committed to completing his predecessor’s planned withdrawal, albeit with an extended timeline.

Another major factor that they missed was the Taliban’s genuinely popular and rapidly growing appeal among average Afghans, especially those serving in the ANA. The group successfully rebranded itself as a national liberation movement despite still being designated as terrorists by Russia and the rest of the international community. They were able to convincingly present themselves as the so-called “lesser evil” after the US and its ANA allies killed countless civilians as so-called “collateral damage” during their nearly two decades’ worth of purportedly anti-Taliban operations. The Taliban also took a strong stand against corruption, incorporated more minorities into its ranks (including its leadership ones), and was thus able to ideologically infiltrate much of the ANA.

This aforementioned outcome resulted in the US unknowingly training Taliban sympathizers on how to operate the $85 billion worth of cutting-edge military equipment that it left behind for them to fight against that group. That’s why so many of them surrendered en masse once the Taliban reached the gates of their cities, especially after some of the most stalwart holdouts among them become completely demoralized after their foreign patron cut off its air support for them. The Ghani Government was therefore almost more or less ephemeral and never truly existed in practice anywhere outside of Kabul and perhaps a few corners of a couple of other major cities. Speaking of the former president, he defied his patrons by refusing to resign in order to facilitate the transitional government that America expected to create ahead of its withdrawal to retain some influence.

The US thought that Ghani was their puppet, and while he veritably was for the most part, his ego was much too big to allow him to resign like that, especially after he talked so tough about holding out until the very end. He eventually fled though once he realized that he couldn’t trust his own men, many of whom secretly sympathized with the Taliban and didn’t want to risk their lives holding onto Kabul for his sake. Ghani’s hubris therefore blinded him to this reality, just like the US’ own hegemonic hubris blinded it to his principled refusal to resign despite being their puppet. As was earlier written, everyone believed their own lies out of professional or personal convenience and therefore didn’t have the will to objectively assess the situation. The end result is that the Taliban took over not only Afghanistan, but also captured all of its US-supplied military equipment.

Biden Camp David

CIA’s Former Counterterrorism Chief for the Region: Afghanistan, Not An Intelligence Failure — Something Much Worse

In hindsight, it’ll likely be concluded that this was the result of several converging factors. First, the “deep state” couldn’t admit that it wasn’t winning the war by any conventional metrics, nor that such metrics were irrelevant to the conflict that they were fighting. This led to the second factor of them lying to the public and even their own colleagues about everything, which thirdly created the alternative reality whereby they believed their own lies and became too divorced from objective reality. Reliable human intelligence could have helped counteract these trends but was evidently lacking. In fact, the Taliban probably had countless double agents working for them and feeding the US more information to bolster their wishful thinking in order to influence them into continuing with their counterproductive courses of action.

The group was able to pull this off because the US lacked any other meaningful ways to obtain intelligence about it. The Taliban didn’t rely on modern-day information-communications technology like most other intelligence targets across the world do. Their messages therefore couldn’t be intercepted and analyzed by the NSA, which resulted in the US’ disproportionate intelligence dependence on human sources, most of whom were likely Taliban sympathizers (whether all along or eventually), if not secret members of the group. This whole time, the Taliban spun the US around its fingers, sending it on wild goose chases and deliberately deceiving it about the true extent of their grassroots appeal throughout Afghan society, which ultimately made its historically unprecedented and almost bloodless two-week liberation campaign such a smooth success.

The key takeaway is that the US’ technological superiority was irrelevant during its War on Afghanistan and its human sources were too unreliable. The “deep state” eventually believed its own lies, which thus perpetuated a self-sustaining cycle thereof which contributed to the formulation of even more counterproductive policies, and few had the will to objectively assess everything that was right in front of their eyes this entire time. Ideology can therefore be said to have been the most important determinant in this conflict: the Taliban’s ideology attracted enough Afghans to its ranks that it achieved intelligence superiority with time while the US’ liberal-democratic ideology convinced it that there was no way that its nation-building mission could ever truly fail. Had America properly dealt with these two factors, then the outcome of the war might have been different.

Source: One World

The Divestment Delusion Why Banning Fossil Fuel Investments Would Crush Africa

 

The Divestment Delusion

Why Banning Fossil Fuel Investments Would Crush Africa

BY YEMI OSINBAJO

August 31, 2021

• YEMI OSINBAJO is Vice President of Nigeria.

In April, seven European countries, including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, announced that they would halt public funding for certain fossil fuel projects abroad. A little less than one year prior, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, sold out of positions in major mining and energy companies because of environmental concerns. And in 2018, Ireland became the first country to pledge to entirely divest from fossil fuels.

After decades of profiting from oil and gas, a growing number of wealthy nations have banned or restricted public investment in fossil fuels, including natural gas. Such policies often do not distinguish between different kinds of fuels, nor do they consider the vital role some fuels play in powering the growth of developing economies, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. As development finance institutions try to balance climate concerns against the need to spur equitable development and increase energy security, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union have all taken aggressive steps to limit fossil fuel investments. The World Bank and other multilateral development banks are being urged by some shareholders to do the same. The African Development Bank, for instance, is increasingly unable to support large natural gas projects in the face of European shareholder pressure. Even UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called on countries to end all new fossil fuel exploration and production.

Although all countries must play their part in the fight against climate change, a global transition away from carbon-based fuels must account for the economic differences between countries and allow for multiple pathways to net-zero emissions. For countries such as my own, Nigeria, which is rich in natural resources but still energy poor, the transition must not come at the expense of affordable and reliable energy for people, cities, and industry. To the contrary, it must be inclusive, equitable, and just—which means preserving the right to sustainable development and poverty eradication, as enshrined in global treaties such as the 2015 Paris climate accord.  

LITTLE GAIN, MUCH PAIN

Curbing natural gas investments in Africa will do little to limit carbon emissions globally but much to hurt the continent’s economic prospects. Right now, Africa is starved for energy: excluding South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa’s one billion people have the power generation capacity of just 81 gigawatts—far less than the 108-gigawatt capacity of the United Kingdom. Moreover, those one billion people have contributed less than one percent to global cumulative carbon emissions. In Nigeria, for instance, the average person emits just 0.6 metric tons of carbon per year, a fraction of the 4.6 tons per capita global average and even less than Europe’s 6.5 tons per capita and the United States’ 15.5 tons per capita. Put another way, energy use and emissions are so low in sub-Saharan Africa that even tripling electricity consumption through natural gas—which no one is proposing—would add just 0.6 percent to global emissions.

 But limiting the development of fossil fuel projects and, in particular, natural gas projects would have a profoundly negative impact on Africa. Natural gas doesn’t make sense in every African market. But in many, it is a crucial tool for lifting people out of poverty. It is used not only for power but for industry and fertilizer and for cleaner cooking. Liquified petroleum gas is already replacing huge amounts of hazardous charcoal and kerosene that were most widely used for cooking, saving millions of lives that were previously lost to indoor air pollution. The role of gas as a transition fuel for developing countries, especially in Africa, cannot be overemphasized.

Yet Africa’s progress could be undone by the rich world’s efforts to curb investments in all fossil fuels. Across sub-Saharan Africa, natural gas projects are increasingly imperiled by a lack of development finance. Institutions such as the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation were specifically created to help spur high-impact projects in countries where private capital is not yet filling the gap. Gas pipelines and power plants in the most energy-hungry markets need development finance to attract other capital and enable such projects to proceed. In Nigeria, a consortium of international finance agencies helped build the Azura-Edo power plant, which by itself boosted our national capacity by ten percent. But many more such power plants are needed to deliver electricity to our people, to power our industry and growing cities, and to balance intermittent solar power. A blanket ban on finance for all fossil fuels would jeopardize those objectives.

Efforts to restrict fossil fuel investments in Africa are even harder to stomach because many of the wealthy countries behind them—including Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—include natural gas in their own multidecade plans to transition to clean energy. Belgium, for example, has doubled its gas use since 1990 and has plans to build even more gas-to-power capacity in the coming years. Germany insists on burning coal until at least 2038 and is building the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to secure its own energy security. Some of the biggest private European and U.S. firms are even developing natural gas in Africa—in Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Senegal, among other countries—for export to Asia and Europe. Yet at the same time, their governments seek to choke off financing to gas projects for domestic use in Africa. 

FUELING A GREENER FUTURE

In Nigeria, clean energy is central to our government’s plan to transition to net-zero emissions. Our flagship Solar Naija program, for instance, aims to electrify five million households by 2023, leveraging solar minigrids and standalone systems. But off-grid renewables are only one part of the solution. For Nigeria and most other sub-Saharan nations, weak traditional grids will continue to hamper wind and solar penetration long into the future. Gas-fired power can be quickly ramped up or down to meet demand, thereby helping balance Nigeria’s energy mix and enabling greater use of variable sources, such as wind and solar. And because the expected operating life for natural gas plants of the kind Nigeria needs is between 25 and 30 years, we will have time to transition to an even cleaner energy system by midcentury. But our citizens cannot be forced to wait for battery prices to fall or new technologies to be created in order to have reliable energy and live modern, dignified lives.

Nigeria and other African countries are committed to a net-zero future, not least because of our acute vulnerability to the adverse effects of climate change. We have expressed our commitment to the Paris accord through our nationally determined contributions. But our commitment to climate action cannot be separated from our energy needs. A just global energy transition must include Africa, and it cannot deny our people their right to a more prosperous future. Instead of hampering the continent’s economic development, the rich world should help Africa’s energy producers secure financing for vital natural gas projects that can serve as a bridge to net-zero and for renewable projects and the modern grids required to handle them. Climate action shouldn’t mean strangling all fossil fuel projects but rather facilitating the flow of capital to the countries that need it most.

The end of the war in Afghanistan.

 The end of the war in Afghanistan.

What state did we leave it in?

Isaac Saul

Aug 31

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.”

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Today’s read: 11 minutes.

The war in Afghanistan comes to an end.

Clarification.

In the last few days, several news outlets — including this one — have referred to some $80 billion worth of American military equipment left to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Further reporting on this claim has clarified that the $83 billion is a sum from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) which includes money spent on rebuilding the government and training. The sum of the weaponry is still mind-boggling. But we gave the Afghan government something more like $24 billion in weaponry and equipment over 20 years, and it’s not clear how much of what has been left with the Taliban is still operational. So it’s not close to $83 billion worth.

Quick hits

The Education Department said Monday it has launched investigations into five GOP-led states that banned mask mandates in schools. (The investigation)

China announced a new restriction on young gamers, saying they could only play online video games for a maximum of three hours per week. (The ban)

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) falsely claimed that elections in the U.S. are “rigged” and warned that there would be “bloodshed” if the electoral system wasn’t fixed. (The video)

Trapped citizens in New Orleans have resorted to posting their addresses on social media and asking rescue teams to come help them. The death toll is now up to four, with more than 1 million people still without power. (The pleas)

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) called on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to be replaced. (The demand)

What D.C. is talking about.

Afghanistan. Yesterday, the longest war in U.S. history — 7,267 days, or nearly 20 years — officially came to an end. The final U.S. military forces left Afghanistan with Taliban fighters firing their weapons into the air in celebration. Army Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division who was leading the evacuation, boarded a cargo plane that left Kabul at 3:29pm EST.

Approximately 66,000 Afghan military and police, 47,245 Afghan civilians and 51,191 Taliban fighters died in the war. 2,461 U.S. troops and 3,846 U.S. contractors were also killed, and 20,000 more were wounded. 13 Americans and dozens of Afghans died in the final days of the withdrawal when a pair of suicide bombings took place outside the airport being used for evacuations.

The war began after the September 11 attacks in 2001, which U.S. officials say were coordinated by al-Qaeda, who had been welcomed and protected by the Taliban in Afghanistan. When the Taliban leaders refused to turn over members of al-Qaeda, the U.S. invaded in an effort to kill Osama bin Laden and wipe out al-Qaeda, thus beginning the “war on terror.” The war in Afghanistan is estimated to have cost about $2 trillion. 

In the final weeks of the war, as the Taliban re-took the country from the Afghan government and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, more than 123,000 people were evacuated, including about 6,000 Americans. But not everyone made it out: U.S. officials say between 100 and 200 Americans who want to leave remain in Afghanistan, as well as at least 100,000 Afghan allies who are attempting to flee the Taliban rule. But the threat of another attack on U.S. troops, a commitment to the August 31 deadline and concerns about inclement weather forced the final planes out.

For the fifth time since 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, a new political order is rising in a country often called the “Graveyard of Empires.” Supporters of the war will point to many accomplishments: the death of Osama bin Laden, the spread of girls’ education, the weakening of the al-Qaeda and two (relatively) democratic elections. Detractors argue the war brought more violence, cost an exorbitant amount of taxpayer dollars, did not stop the proliferation of terrorism and has left the country just as corrupt and fractured as it was when we arrived.

Below, we’ll take a look at some reactions from the right and left to the war’s final days. Then my take.

What the right is saying.

The right’s opinions vary, with some focusing on Biden’s “failed withdrawal,” others concerned about U.S. standing globally, and some saying it’s just good the war is over.

The New York Post editorial board called it a “dishonorable end” to the war, and blamed President Biden.

“He decided early on that troops would be gone by Aug. 31 no matter what, even while claiming there’d be no ‘hasty rush to the exit.’ The withdrawal would happen ‘responsibly, deliberately and safely.’ It was ‘highly unlikely’ the Taliban would take over soon, and there was ‘no circumstance’ where helicopters would be needed to evacuate people from the US embassy,” the board wrote. “That was all fantasy, of course… It also explains why Biden was vacationing at Camp David and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the Hamptons as Kabul fell. They actually believed their own PR.

“And despite all the chaos and bloodshed since — and the dark days ahead — they’re still indulging their delusions: Asked by ABC’s Martha Raddatz on Sunday what he’d tell Americans and Afghans about leaving the country after the airport closes, Blinken cited a ‘senior Taliban spokesman’ who’s ‘repeatedly reassured the Afghan people’ they’d be free to travel after Aug. 31,” the board wrote. “Oh, and ‘the international community intends to hold the Taliban’ to their commitments. Real-world translation: You’re on your own, folks. Good luck getting out!”

In The New York Times, Ross Douthat said the final days of the war made him even more cynical “about America’s capacities as a superpower, our mission in Afghanistan and the class of generals, officials, experts and politicos who sustained its generational extension.”

“First the withdrawal’s shambolic quality, culminating in yesterday’s acknowledgment that between 100 and 200 Americans had not made the final flights from Kabul, displayed an incompetence in departing a country that matched our impotence at pacifying it. There were aspects of the chaos that were probably inevitable, but the Biden White House was clearly caught flat-footed by the speed of the Taliban advance, with key personnel disappearing on vacation just before the Kabul government dissolved. And the president himself has appeared exhausted, aged, overmatched — making basic promises about getting every American safely home and then seeing them overtaken by events.

“At the same time, the circumstances under which the Biden withdrawal had to happen doubled as a devastating indictment of the policies pursued by his three predecessors, which together cost roughly $2,000,000,000,000 (it’s worth writing out all those zeros) and managed to build nothing in the political or military spheres that could survive for even a season without further American cash and military supervision,” Douthat said. “Before this summer, in other words, it was possible to read all the grim inspector general reports and document dumps on Afghanistan, count yourself a cynic about the war effort and still imagine that America got something for all that spending, no matter how much was spent on Potemkin installations or siphoned off by pederast warlords or recirculated to Northern Virginia contractors. Now, though, we know that in terms of actual staying power, all our nation-building efforts couldn’t even match what the Soviet Union managed in its dotage.”

In The Wall Street Journal, John Bolton argued that China and Russia were “eyeing” a retreating U.S.

“One major misjudgment underlying the ‘ending endless war’ mantra was that withdrawing affected only Afghanistan,” Bolton wrote. “To the contrary, the departure constitutes a major, and deeply regrettable, U.S. strategic realignment. China and Russia, our main global adversaries, are already seeking to reap advantages… In the near term, responding to both menaces and opportunities emanating from Afghanistan, China will seek to increase its already considerable influence in Pakistan; Russia will do the same in Central Asia’s former Soviet republics; and both will expand their Middle East initiatives, often along with Iran. There is little evidence that the White House is ready to respond to any of these threats.

“Over the longer term, Beijing and Moscow enjoy a natural division of labor in threatening America and its allies, in three distinct theaters: China on its periphery’s long arc from Japan across Southeast Asia out to India and Pakistan; Russia in Eastern and Central Europe; and the Russian-Iranian-Chinese entente cordiale in the Middle East,” Bolton said. “U.S. planning must contemplate many threats arising simultaneously across these and other theaters. This underscores how strained our defense capabilities are to protect our far-flung interests, especially given the unprecedented domestic spending demands President Biden is now making. Washington’s most important task, therefore, is somehow to secure significant increases in defense budgets across the full threat spectrum, from terrorism to cyberwar. Diplomacy alone is no substitute.”

What the left is saying.

The left’s opinions are also mixed, with some arguing the war is a reminder of wasted money, others saying America is not in retreat, and still others saying the situation on the ground is a disaster.

Katrina vanden Heuvel argued that we can afford Biden’s investments at home based on the money we spend on war.

“Here’s the price tag: $5.48 trillion. No, that’s not the cost of what President Biden is calling a ‘generational investment’ to rebuild America. That’s the price of the so-called War on Terror since 2001, as detailed by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs — the cost to U.S. taxpayers of sending forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and other countries in a continuing war that, as Biden implied last week, has metastasized more than it has succeeded,” vanden Heuvel wrote. “Roughly half of that total — $2.3 trillion — went into Afghanistan. That total doesn’t include the priceless human cost of nearly 6,300 American lives lost, thousands more wounded, and the vast losses suffered by the Afghan people.

“Contrast that sum — and those lives — with the $3.5 trillion that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) correctly dubs the ‘most consequential piece of legislation’ since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal,” vanden Heuvel added. “It would begin to address the existential threat posed by climate change, reduce childhood poverty by half, expand public education from pre-K to free community college, extend health care through Medicare while making drugs more affordable, support families with help for day care, paid family leave and a child allowance and more… Trillions of dollars for debacles abroad versus trillions of dollars for investments at home. Yet, appropriations for the former zip through the Congress while the Biden domestic investments must overcome a filibuster by a unified Republican opposition and posturing by a handful of centrist Democrats demanding cuts.”

In The New York Times, Dennis Ross said to “stop the doomsaying.”

“Vietnam, cited so often in recent days, was undoubtedly a debacle,” Ross wrote. “But it did not spell the end of American leadership on the world stage, nor did it lead others to believe they could not depend on the United States. And since then, there have been many other geopolitical challenges and top-level decisions (or lack thereof) that have cast doubt on American credibility. They did not, however, lead to a waning of American influence.

“Despite the messy exit from Kabul and the devastating bombings at the Kabul Airport, Afghanistan will be no different,” Ross added. “Partners and allies will publicly decry American decisions for some time, as they continue to rely on the U.S. economy and military. The reality will remain: America is the most powerful country in the world, and its allies will need its help to combat direct threats and an array of new, growing national security dangers, including cyberwar and climate change. That does not mean that the United States can dismiss the costs of its mistakes in Afghanistan. But it does show that America can recover.”

The Washington Post editorial board said it was a “disaster” that Americans were being left behind.

“Enormous as it is, the number of people evacuated by air from Kabul since the end of July — about 122,000 — is not large enough,” the board wrote. “Thankfully, many thousands of American citizens, third-country nationals and Afghans who worked directly for U.S. and allied military forces or embassies made it out. But many thousands of people did not, including former U.S. interpreters and their families, and Afghans classified by President Biden and his administration as ‘vulnerable’ — such as staff for U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations and women’s rights activists… This is a moral disaster, one attributable not to the actions of military and diplomatic personnel in Kabul — who have been courageous and professional, in the face of deadly dangers — but to mistakes, strategic and tactical, by Mr. Biden and his administration.

“Those left behind appear to include many local journalists who worked for U.S.-supported media such as the Afghan service of RFE/RL,” the board wrote. “Painfully emblematic, too, is the experience of the American University of Afghanistan, all but a few of whose roughly 4,000 students, faculty, alumni and employees remain in Kabul. AUAF was the signature U.S.-funded civilian institution in Kabul. The school symbolized not just the U.S.-Afghan relationship, but modernity itself. Therefore, it came under repeated and deadly attack from the Taliban, yet brave and determined women and men continued to teach and study there — until Kabul fell and the Taliban raised its flag over the campus. A last-ditch attempt to bus several hundred members of the university community to the airport ended in frustration Sunday, when it became clear that civilian rescue flights were ending. Now, university officials tell us, these — mostly young — Afghans are back in Kabul, feeling abandoned and afraid.”

My take.

The case the Biden administration can make to defend itself is dwindling. But if I were on their communications team this is what I’d say: the State Department issued warnings to Americans to leave the country as early as April. We could not force people to go. We did not expect the Afghan army to fall as quickly as it did, and we largely succeeded in retrieving more than 100,000 people in a matter of weeks. We had one mass casualty event, but one that was practically unavoidable unless we totally refused to search or welcome Afghans to the airport. All of this — the infrastructure present in Afghanistan, the state of the war, the state of the Afghan government, the presence of ISIS-K, the deal with the Taliban, was inherited from previous administrations.

That’s about the best defense you could mount.

And it’s not a very good one.

I support President Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan. Like Ross Douthat, my big-picture takeaway from the last few weeks is more cynicism about our inability to nation-build, the colossal waste of money that could have been spent here at home, the disastrous mistakes made by the Bush administration, and the decades of lies from the U.S. government about what was actually taking place on the ground. Biden, too, recognized these things, and has consistently been critical of the war and promised to end it. He’s fulfilling that promise now, something neither Obama nor Trump could do, despite similar rhetoric.

But how can this be described as anything but a disaster? We were told the Taliban couldn’t take over for months or years, yet they’re already in control. We were told no Americans would be left behind, but at least one hundred who want to leave are still there. We were told none of our allies would be abandoned, but tens of thousands have been. The president we propped up fled. We had one of the deadliest attacks in the history of the entire war take place on our way out. Desperate Afghan teenagers fell from the wheel wells of American planes as they took off. Diplomatic systems to process and vet Afghans were overwhelmed. Nearly everything we built crumbled in weeks — we lost lives along the way and we ultimately stuck to an arbitrary deadline because we could not confidently control the threats on the ground.

When this started a few months ago, it would have been hard to imagine it going much worse.

The last few weeks are one of those formidable events that expose the partisan hacks on both sides: Trump loyalists who dutifully agreed with Trump that we should withdraw, supported an early deadline to leave, and spent about 12 hours being upset when we abandoned our Kurdish allies in Syria are now calling for Biden to resign or be impeached. Meanwhile, Biden loyalists continue to move the goalposts on withdrawal, first celebrating the promise nobody would be left behind, then the assurances no American lives had been lost, and then — when it became apparent those things weren’t going to happen — the last thing they’re standing on is that Biden stuck to a deadline we could have extended.

Biden, like Trump and Obama, inherited a disastrous war brought to you by the George W. Bush administration. Unlike Trump and Obama, he actually pulled the final troops out in the face of unwavering pressure from the interventionist punditry, members Congress, and some allies. Hopefully, it’s really over (reports of continuing CIA operations and potential forthcoming airstrikes are not encouraging). But the withdrawal seemed hasty, rushed, chaotic and unsafe, and the only assurances we’re getting now are that the Taliban will grant safe passage to Americans or our allies left behind, with some wishful thinking they won’t learn how to fly Blackhawk helicopters.

The last American soldier is gone and the longest war is finally over. But Biden’s name now joins the list of presidents forever marred by Afghanistan, and his administration’s competence — especially the arm dealing with foreign policy — will rightly be questioned for the remainder of his presidency. 

Review Essay : The Case for Complacency

 REVIEW ESSAY

The Case for Complacency

Does Washington Worry Too Much About Threats?

BY TANISHA M. FAZAL

September/October 2021

As U.S. President Joe Biden seeks to resurrect American leadership on the world stage, the perennial question of how the United States should respond to international crises looms large. In his latest book, the political scientist John Mueller offers a refreshingly straightforward answer: Washington should aim not for transformation but for “complacency,” which Mueller characterizes as “minimally effortful national strategy in the security realm.”

Mueller’s case rests on two claims. The first is that war is in decline; not only do wars occur less frequently, but the idea of major wars has effectively gone out of style. The second is that the U.S. foreign policy establishment is prone to panic and often blows potential threats out of proportion, thereby justifying military interventions that frequently prove counterproductive. Because Americans face fewer threats than they think they do, the United States should shrink its military.

Mueller is a provocative and original thinker. He was one of the first scholars to argue that war was in decline, and he has made the case that the threats posed by terrorism, cyberattacks, and even nuclear war are overblown. His latest book synthesizes decades of work and marshals reams of historical evidence to chronicle a litany of mistakes abroad—from the Vietnam War to the invasion of Iraq—that add up to an unflinching indictment of U.S. foreign policy since 1945.

The Stupidity of War reflects strands of thought popularized in recent years by self-proclaimed “restrainers,” analysts who object to the United States’ muscular post–Cold War foreign policy. A growing chorus of restrainers argue that U.S. hegemony should not be preserved for its own sake and that the United States should not throw around its military might every time a potential new threat emerges. Mueller reaches similar conclusions via a slightly different route, claiming that since 1945, U.S. foreign policy has been characterized by unnecessary interventions that “have mostly failed to achieve policy ends at an acceptable cost.”

Mueller frames his book as a critique of conventional wisdom and establishment thinking. But its specific targets are not immediately clear. Who, exactly, thinks war is smart? As the United States winds down its war in Afghanistan and refrains from placing many boots on the ground in other theaters, such as Syria and Yemen, few scholars or analysts are arguing for aggressive U.S. military deployments. At the moment, debates about U.S. grand strategy are dominated by figures who harbor deep anxiety about the durability of the liberal international order and others who have argued for limited humanitarian interventions in the face of atrocities abroad.

Neither of those positions is necessarily at odds with Mueller’s argument. For proponents of a rules-based order, a strong U.S. military is less important than diplomacy, economic statecraft, and multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. Mueller’s preferred foreign policy would be consistent with those priorities, as long as they don’t involve the use of military force—although he equivocates on the question of humanitarian intervention, arguing that U.S. forces could be deployed under the auspices of the UN to “police destructive civil wars or to depose regimes” but that such interventions are becoming increasingly unlikely owing to lukewarm domestic support.

So if proponents of a U.S.-led, rules-based order and liberal interventionists are not Mueller’s intended targets, then who is? One possibility is the Beltway thinkers who argue that U.S. military strength explains the “long peace” of the last 75 years. (Mueller references the historian and foreign policy commentator Robert Kagan and the current national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, in particular.) But if his aim were to persuade these opponents, insulting them with his title and mocking them with a “sardonic litany” of their own arguments in the book’s appendix would be an unworthy approach.

Mueller’s true audience seems to be his fellow restrainers, and his contribution to the debate is a particular logic of restraint. The United States’ fundamental mistake, he argues, is not so much overextension as it is the overhyping of threats—and especially the threat of war. So, for example, the United States should retrench not because China’s rise is inevitable but because the decline of great-power war will not reverse. The world has become a largely safe and secure place, at least for Americans and U.S. interests. Maintaining a large military is simply unnecessary. Mueller’s advice boils down to this: Washington should just calm down.

WAR’S WANING DAYS?

Mueller stakes much of his argument on the claim that war is in decline—that is, that the total number of wars and battlefield deaths has decreased since 1945. But although he is correct that this thinking has gained traction in policy circles, his conclusions are distorted by a narrow definition of war. He focuses on wars between rich, northern countries (plus Japan). But war, or something close to it, continues apace between India and Pakistan, Russia and Ukraine, and Iran and Saudi Arabia. Even more misleading is Mueller’s exclusive attention to international conflicts. He neglects civil wars in his analysis, even though civil wars have become the dominant type of war since 1945. The argument about war’s decline came into vogue around 2011, following the publication of books such as The Better Angels of Our Nature, by the psychologist and scholar Steven Pinker. Ironically, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the number of ongoing conflicts began to increase right around the same time. Despite that reversal, the “decline of war” thesis remains influential.

Another problem with that thesis is that the data that Mueller and others rely on are slightly distorted. For instance, the data sets they reference typically use battle death thresholds: for a conflict to count as a war, a minimum number of military personnel must have died. But over the same time period that war has supposedly declined, there have been dramatic improvements in military medicine that have shifted many casualties from the “fatal” to the “nonfatal” column. This shift has made it harder for any event to qualify as a war today, regardless of the nonfatal toll it exerts. It also undermines Mueller’s claim that the United States has a long-standing aversion to casualties, as the general public is relatively indifferent to the human and financial costs of nonfatal war casualties.

Mueller connects his argument that war is in decline to the notion that the idea of war has become obsolete in the minds of Americans. The public opinion polls he cites do not explicitly demonstrate such a change in public thinking, but he gives “the growth of aversion to international war and of an appreciation of its stupidity” as yet another reason why Washington should adopt a foreign policy of restraint. But if the American public really does generally believe that war has gone out of style, and public opinion matters greatly for U.S. foreign policy, then why has the postwar period been characterized by U.S. interventions and adventurism? One possible answer is that Mueller is simply wrong: the American public does not believe that war is obsolete. Another is that the defense industry is served by the maintenance of a large U.S. military with frequent foreign deployments. Members of Congress are concerned about base closures in their districts, defense contractors want to secure sales to the Pentagon, and the military worries that its skills will erode if they are not put to use. As the international relations scholar Elizabeth Saunders and others have argued, elites shape public opinion on foreign policy, rather than the other way around. Mueller rejects this assertion, which is puzzling given that it would help explain why a supposed widespread public belief in the obsolescence of war has not actually fostered a policy of restraint.

Perhaps the biggest unanswered question in The Stupidity of War is what is at stake for Mueller and his position. Theorists do not develop grand strategies just for the sake of it. Strategies are meant to serve ends, and Mueller’s ends are obscure. Does Mueller aim to save American lives? To prevent global atrocities, as his apparent amenability to humanitarian intervention might suggest? Or to secure U.S. interests? If so, what are those interests? Mueller is frustratingly silent on these important questions.

DEMOCRATIC SOUL-SEARCHING

Mueller does not quite say so, but almost everyone—including restrainers—would agree that the preservation of American democracy should be a lodestar of any U.S. foreign policy. Put in those terms, Mueller’s conclusion is correct: for the time being, at least, the United States should shrink its military and resist the temptation to put a finger in every foreign policy pie. Washington should do so not because war is on the decline or because alleged external threats are overblown, although Mueller often makes a convincing case for the latter. Instead, temporary restraint makes sense because the current state of U.S. domestic politics demands that the country turn its attention inward if it is to do itself or anyone else any good.

Among the supposedly overblown threats Mueller identifies are the boogeymen of China, Iran, and Russia. These states’ regimes, Mueller assures readers, will eventually collapse, just as the Soviet Union did. The United States, by contrast, remains stalwart. Even its incompetent response to the COVID-19 pandemic could not dent American power, Mueller argues: “The country is so strong, it can’t even be destroyed by itself.”

In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, that claim seems less convincing than it might have been just a year ago. Ongoing attempts to restrict voting, deep structural inequalities, extreme polarization, and the lack of a collective understanding of facts have created a dangerous cocktail. As the political scientist Rachel Myrick recently argued in Foreign Affairs, domestic polarization also reduces U.S. credibility abroad. When domestic political institutions are struggling, it is hard to identify what foreign policy priorities should guide grand strategy.

U.S. foreign policy has helped enable some of these worrying domestic trends. The military has become the default tool of U.S. foreign policy, asked to accomplish goals it was never designed to meet. The fetishization of the military should give all citizens pause, especially when it seeps into domestic affairs. Consider, for example, the scenes of police officers donning riot gear and deploying tear gas—sometimes purchased as surplus from the Pentagon—to confront protesters on the streets of dozens of American cities in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020.

The United States’ resources are finite, and redirecting time and money toward the preservation of U.S. democracy is the smart move. The United States spends many times as much on defense as it does on education or the environment. But for reasons including constitutional principles and the possibility of extremism in the ranks, it should be clear that the military cannot protect American democracy from threats emanating from within the country.

This does not necessarily mean that the United States should “substantially disarm,” as Mueller suggests. If the United States can right its domestic ship, the military may have critical roles to play in bolstering international institutions, responding to atrocities, and confronting climate change. A strong U.S. military can further these goals by supplying troops and other support to peacekeeping efforts and by responding to the security threats that will inevitably emerge from climate crises. And although its track record on counterinsurgency leaves something to be desired, the U.S. military has had success in disaster relief and humanitarian aid, missions that can inspire confidence in the United States among foreign publics.

As Mueller notes, military restraint comes with risk; after all, not all international threats are overblown. For example, owing to climate change, the prospect of conflict in the Arctic region—and perhaps in other places significantly affected by global warming—seems much more likely today than it did 20 years ago. But a strong military is hardly sufficient to tackle such challenges, and the value of military strength becomes questionable if it comes at the expense of civilian institutions. Allies around the world will look askance at a United States whose commitment to democracy at home appears uncertain. Focusing on the restoration and protection of American democracy will be much more helpful for U.S. standing in the world than would building an ever-stronger military alone. What—and whom—is grand strategy serving otherwise?

• TANISHA M. FAZAL is Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota and the author of Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict.

 

How Will the Taliban Rule?

Governing Afghanistan Is More Difficult Than Conquering It

BY CARTER MALKASIAN

August 23, 2021

• CARTER MALKASIAN is the author of The American War in Afghanistan. He served as Senior Adviser to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford from 2015 to 2019 and as a U.S. State Department official in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province from 2009 to 2011.

The Taliban’s advance into Kabul and the collapse of the democratic government of Afghanistan unfolded with stunning speed over the course of a few weeks. The dizzying turn of events and the scenes of chaos and desperation that followed have understandably led to a torrent of questions about how things went so wrong so quickly. But the Taliban’s rapid success also has much to tell us about the prospects of their rule—both the considerable freedom the Taliban will likely have to enact their vision over the next few years and the steep challenges that will emerge as time goes on.

The Taliban have shown themselves to be the most effective political organization in Afghanistan. For two decades, while Afghan politicians have bickered and democracy has faltered, the Taliban’s values, organization, and cohesion have proved enduring. Girded by their notions of unity and Afghan identity, the Taliban surmounted two leadership transitions, the rise of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), and a 20-year U.S. military presence. They are now in charge and likely to stay in charge for some time.

But that doesn’t mean their victory represents an end to Afghanistan’s 40 years of war, uncertainty, and trauma. The Taliban face the poverty, internal strife, illicit crops, meddlesome neighbors, and threat of insurrections that are endemic to their country—and have proved the bane of all its rulers.

LONG IN THE MAKING

Although the takeover seemed to come unimaginably quickly, the Taliban had in fact been laying the groundwork for their final offensive for years. Since 2014, they had been pressing government forces out of the countryside and surrounding district centers and provincial capitals. By the end of 2020, almost every provincial capital in Afghanistan was vulnerable to Taliban assault.

The offensive that ended with the fall of Kabul started in May. The Taliban swept up as many as 50 beleaguered district centers. Sometimes the army and police ran, leaving arms and vehicles behind. Sometimes they agreed to hand the district over to the Taliban, to avoid bloodshed and in return for safe passage. Sometimes, in more cases than may be remembered, they resisted—recall reports published by the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations of high levels of violence during the late spring and early summer. A key Taliban strategic move was cutting off the roads or border crossings into major cities: nearly all were effectively surrounded by the time the offensive began.

In the last week of July, the Taliban commenced major assaults on Herat, Kandahar, and the Helmand provincial capital of Lashkar Gah. One Afghan officer on the ground in Lashkar Gah—a veteran of 20 years of combat—described the fighting in early August as the most intense he had ever seen. As those battles raged, the Taliban opened up new assaults on other provincial capitals. Zaranj, on the Iranian border, fell first, without a fight; then Sheberghan, in the north; next Kunduz, also in the north, where government forces had been fighting for six years. Soon provincial capitals across the north were falling into Taliban hands.

From there, events moved at lightning speed. With provincial capitals succumbing left and right, soldiers and commanders decided to run, surrender, or hide rather than fight to the death. They could see which way the wind was blowing. On August 12, the Taliban broke through government lines in Herat and Kandahar and captured the city centers. Mazar-e Sharif, the crown jewel of the north, surrendered on August 14. The next day the government forces, including its vaunted commandos, seemed to stand down around Kabul and let the Taliban in. President Ashraf Ghani vanished into exile.

Seemingly spontaneous collapse is by no means unprecedented in Afghan history. As the anthropologist Thomas Barfield has explained, defeats in the provinces have often caused Afghan regimes to unravel quickly, as supporters switch sides or lay down their arms rather than fight to the death. Both the Taliban’s initial rise to power, in the 1990s, and the Taliban’s fall in 2001 are examples of this phenomenon.

“THEY HAD LITTLE CHOICE”

The speed and extent of the Taliban’s victory mean that the Taliban now have far less reason to share power than publicly announce the restoration of the Islamic emirate. Their victory has put them in the position to disarm the vast majority of opponents, as they are doing now; any political actors currently negotiating with the Taliban over the makeup of a new government, such as former President Hamid Karzai and former Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, are completely vulnerable to Taliban coercion at the barrel of a gun. One Afghan leader explained why northern power brokers accepted the new regime by tersely replying, “They had little choice.”

With such commanding Taliban control, the outlines of the new Taliban state are coming into view. The Taliban say they are drafting a new constitution and Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is in Kabul discussing the future government with Karzai, Abdullah, and others. Whatever those discussions entail, the new government will likely enshrine Islamic law as the sole basis of the legal system, centralize power under a single Taliban leader, and share a token amount of power with other Afghan leaders (perhaps Karzai or Abdullah, but far more likely lesser-known religious and tribal leaders who have sympathized toward the Taliban cause). The new constitution may allow for elections, but they will be designed in a way that will preserve Taliban control over key functions of the state. 

In the course of their victory, the Taliban promised adversaries that they would be unharmed if they laid down their arms. They are sure to continue to make such promises in order to build acceptance of the new regime and may even offer a few concessions to buy off old adversaries. The extent of Taliban military control, however, makes commitments along these lines far from credible. Over time, Taliban leaders will have little reason not to use their military power to consolidate and monopolize control.

The Taliban victory has also demonstrated a degree of cohesion that is likely to persist. It has always been difficult to know for certain how unified the Taliban have been: they are composed of the main Taliban movement from southern Afghanistan, the Haqqani network from eastern Afghanistan, and a variety of associated tribal groups and smaller militant cadres. The coordinated offensive across Afghanistan reflects cooperation and cohesion among these different groups. Unlike the mujahideen in 1989, the Taliban did not break into quarreling factions as the foreign occupier withdrew. In fact, it was the previous government that was plagued by division (particularly between Ghani, backed by eastern Pashtuns, and Abdullah and other northern leaders). In the week before the government’s collapse, northern leaders were telling U.S. officials that “no one wants to die for Ashraf Ghani.” The Taliban appear much less vulnerable to factionalism than democracy was.

Such cohesion should help the Taliban impose a degree of order in their territory, especially the southern and eastern provinces where their roots lie. Brutality alone does not explain the Taliban’s ability to instill order. Other Afghan warlords are brutal, too. The difference is that the Taliban can inflict brutality without also fighting among themselves. “The Taliban follow an emir,” a member of the Taliban’s leadership body, the Quetta Shura, lectured me in 2019. “Our system is of obedience. … We are not like other Afghans.”

Perhaps more disturbing, the Taliban’s victory indicates that their new government could enjoy wider popular support than it did when they were in power from 1996 to 2001. Years of fighting in the north means that they have some degree of support from Tajiks and Uzbeks, who opposed them in the past. In the cities, young, clean-shaven men are eagerly taking pictures with the Taliban, and at least some educated urban Afghans now appear to be working with them.

THE CURSE OF AFGHAN GOVERNMENTS

Yet for all the strengths demonstrated by the military victory, there are other challenges and vulnerabilities that will persist—and likely grow over time.

For one, tribal politics and feuds are the curse of all Afghan governments. The Taliban, too, will struggle to manage them. Tribes have long-standing rivalries and often prioritize acts of individual honor over acceptance of mediation. When it comes to land and water issues, the Taliban will try to please the landless farmers who have been a key source of support, but the very same decisions will upset tribal leaders who lose out. Even under Islamic law, tribal leaders will want to defend their land, which is the source of livelihood for their families. Tribal clashes and calls for vengeance are inevitable and will be a headache for the Taliban, as was the case in the 1990s.

The Taliban will also struggle to balance competing imperatives when it comes to poppy cultivation. Taxation of the illicit sector has constituted a major source of Taliban revenue, and permitting its cultivation has generated support among poor farmers—a key factor in their military success, since the refuge offered them by these farmers helped the Taliban close in on district centers over the past six years. In power, the Taliban will face considerable external pressure— possibly including from powerful neighbors such as China and Iran—to crack down (as they briefly did under international pressure in 2000). Given the poppy’s political and economic importance, such international criticism is likely to have marginal impact.

Rapid military success also means that the Taliban will lose out on the international funding that likely would have continued to flow to at least some extent had they come into power through a compromise political settlement. The continuation of such funding does not seem politically feasible for most donors now. That leaves the Taliban all the more dependent on poppy cultivation and funding from China.

Before and during their offensive, the Taliban political leadership worked to strengthen their relations with the outside world. They visited Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and China, none of which offered serious opposition to the Taliban takeover. The desire for regional acceptance is one reason the Taliban are taking great pains to portray themselves as professional, moderate, and neutral. But it is unlikely that the Taliban will continue to receive consistent support from all four regional powers, given the dynamics of regional competition. If history is any guide, at some point one or more of Afghanistan’s neighbors will see reason to oppose the Taliban regime and even to support opposition forces fighting to undermine it.

Such opposition may eventually turn into challenge, however long their odds may look at the moment. Taliban control of Afghanistan is not likely to go uncontested. Already, Ahmad Massoud (son of the famous resistance fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud) and Amrullah Saleh (Ghani’s vice president) claim to be rekindling a resistance movement in the Panjshir Valley. Given the events of the past three months, there’s reason to be pessimistic about their prospects. Such forces were in a much better position to fight a few months ago. At that time, many observers (myself included) wondered if leaders in the north would mobilize their forces and defend their provinces. These leaders had often assured U.S. officials that they were stockpiling weapons and ready to “go to the mountains” to fight another guerrilla war if necessary. But with a few exceptions (Mohammed Atta, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Ismail Khan), the response of these leaders and their forces was weak. Northern militia leaders were at odds with Ghani and thus hesitated when it came to defending him. Equally important, many now have comfortable homes outside the country and supporters who learned to enjoy urban life—they had, in the characterization of one Kabul journalist, become “bourgeois.” (As I write this, Ahmad Massoud is reportedly in talks with the Taliban.)

In Afghanistan, the traditional way of war often involves not confronting an enemy head-on but going to ground to fight a guerrilla war. The British, Soviets, and Americans—as well as the Taliban during their last stint in power—all found themselves on the receiving end of such guerrilla action.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?

For the past 40 years, no ruler has managed to bring stability to Afghanistan. There have been other moments when the Afghan people seemed exhausted by war and violence seemed to have come to an end: the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the Taliban’s first takeover in 1996, the U.S. intervention in 2001. Each time, violence returned before long, helped by Afghanistan’s internal fissures, rugged terrain, scarce resources, and troublesome neighbors. The same obstacles to stable rule persist today. Even if they seem well positioned to enforce order, the Taliban still face real structural challenges.

For now, the Taliban are, understandably, having their own “mission accomplished” moment. But there is good reason to think that Afghanistan’s 40 years of civil war and trauma may not be over. One way or another, the Taliban are likely to find governing Afghanistan to be far more difficult than conquering it.

General David H. Petraeus ile mülakat 23 Ağustos 2021

 MON, AUG 23, 2021

David Petraeus: ‘The Taliban are about to be acquainted with a very harsh reality—that they are broke’

New Atlanticist by Atlantic Council

Related Experts: Barry Pavel

UK coalition forces, Turkish coalition forces, and US Marines assist a child during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 20, 2021. Photo via Sgt. Victor Mancilla and the US Marine Corps via Reuters.

Watch the full event

MON, AUG 23, 2021

The state of play in Afghanistan

11:30AM

On Monday, General David Petraeus, the former director of the US Central Intelligence and commander of US and allied forces in Afghanistan, joined the Atlantic Council to assess the state of play in Afghanistan following the Taliban’s swift and stunning takeover of the country—and its consequences for counterterrorism, US alliances, and, most urgently, the evacuation of Americans and American partners. Below, edited for length and clarity, is his conversation with Barry Pavel, the director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

BARRY PAVEL: What size force roughly do you think is required, and under what timelines, to successfully and comprehensively conduct the ongoing evacuation operation in Kabul and potentially elsewhere in Afghanistan? It seems to me that the president might have set out the right objectives in terms of the operation, and that is getting everybody back, but it seems like in terms of how we’re accomplishing it, it’s sort of small ball, where—shouldn’t we be laying out the whole requirement and then executing it with allies and partners? So what’s needed? Do any bases need to be reopened? How do we get Americans, Afghan allies, coalition allies, people from far-flung parts of Afghanistan out of the country and to safety and resettlement? And what might the Taliban do in response?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: The only honest [answer to the question] you’ve just asked, Barry, I think, is that we really don’t know. The military always keeps what’s called a running estimate process ongoing, and I’m sure that our military planners, together with coalition counterparts, are looking at all options, including having some folks assemble at other locations, not just inside Kabul but all around the country, where there are large airfields. Kandahar in the southwest would be very helpful, Herat in the west, Mazar-i-Sharif, even Bagram north of Kabul, which has an extraordinary expanse of concrete but we should recognize that all roads in Afghanistan lead to Kabul, not Bagram, as nice as all that concrete might be. And I’m sure that there are all types of forces on call and already participating.

Major General Chris Donahue, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, the commander on the ground in Kabul, knows all of our most special mission units and other elements exceedingly well and he knows how to work with interagency partners from his time with such units also.

I’m sure that State is also examining, together with the Department of Defense and interagency partners, whether we should reoccupy that splendid embassy that we built for $750 million. It would offer a lot of benefits as we figure out how we might influence the government being put together by the Taliban, which is going to be in such a serious fiscal bind in the near to midterm that the lights could literally go out in Kabul and the country, and that’s just one of the many ways in which we have influence, needless to say, on the government that is now being formed.

I do want to offer one caution. It is one thing to fly a C-130 or a Chinook or even a C-17 to pick up folks at Kandahar or Bagram or Herat or Mazar; it is another not so trivial thing to reopen an airfield like Kandahar, as that would require substantial security, fuel, bed down, water, food, maintenance, generators, spare parts, and possibly munitions.

The real issue, I think, at the end of the day, though, surrounds who we will fly out of Afghanistan. Some categories are clear. US citizens, very clear. Green-card holders, even special immigrant visa holders, and applicants and family members are fairly clear. However, where does one draw the line when it comes to anyone whose security is jeopardized because of work with the US or Afghan governments, our innumerable implementing partners over the years, civil society groups that will be in the crosshairs, etc.? The Department of State and the White House really have to come to grips with that pretty quickly or many, many hopes will be dashed.

In truth, right now, having followed numerous individual cases and groups, it appears to me that there is no true system for those inside Afghanistan beyond American citizens, green cards, and SIVs. And those who are getting through have partners in Kabul who can operate effectively in the city, pick up individuals and groups, get them through the Taliban checkpoints, navigate the airport entry control point, and get to a private or chartered aircraft that was able to get landing rights. In sum, what they are doing is working around the system, not through it. I think Washington’s going to have to provide some more specific guidance on who can come to the US or even go to a third country. We have written right now a very substantial blank check that I fear we may struggle to redeem.

BARRY PAVEL: Where do you think the failure in the withdrawal operation to date has been greatest besides the overall policy of withdrawal, which we know you are clearly on record as opposing? Is it more of an intelligence failure, a planning failure, a policy failure, or maybe just an operational execution failure, or some combination of all four? How do we fix things going forward?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: First of all, let’s just remember that there is a common recourse in Washington when something doesn’t turn out quite the way folks had hoped it would be, as Peter Bergen reminded us the other day, to declare an intelligence failure. I’m not sure that is the case at all here in this situation. In fact, if you followed even what’s just on the public record, it would not appear that that is necessarily the case.

Look, I think it was what my great diplomatic partner and great friend Ambassador Ryan Crocker described in a brilliant piece in The New York Times over the weekend. And he called it a lack of strategic patience, which, ironically, we are demonstrating in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere in Africa under this administration. And ironically, where we were prior to the decision to withdrawal was sort of what then-Vice President Biden always wanted us to get to but wasn’t possible back in late 2009-2010 and so forth because of the missions that we had been assigned. But Ryan wrote in this piece: “As Americans, we have many strengths, but strategic patience is not among them. We have been able to summon it at critical times such as the Revolutionary War and World War II, where, for example, Congress did not threaten to defund the war effort if it wasn’t wrapped up by 1944. In Korea, nearly seven decades after an inconclusive truce, we still have about 28,000 troops. But our patience is not the norm. And it certainly has not been on display in Afghanistan as the world watched the Taliban storm into Kabul.

“As the enormity of the events in Afghanistan this past week sinks in, the questions start. How did this happen? How could we not have foreseen it? Why didn’t Afghan security forces put up a fight? Why didn’t we do something about corruption? The list goes on. There is one overarching answer: our lack of strategic patience at critical moments, including from President Biden. It has damaged our alliances and emboldened our adversaries and increased the risk to our own security. It has flouted 20 years of work and sacrifice.”

He then goes on to acknowledge, unsparingly, our successes, our failures, our shortcomings. Near the end, he observes:

 “It did not have to be this way. When I left Afghanistan as ambassador in 2012, we had about 85,000 troops in the country. The Taliban controlled none of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals. When President Obama left office, there were fewer than 10,000 troops. And when Mr. Trump departed, there were fewer than five thousand. The Taliban still did not hold any major urban area. Now they hold the entire country. What changed so swiftly and completely? We did. Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw all US forces destroyed an affordable status quo that could have lasted indefinitely at a minimum cost in blood and treasure.”

We needed to acknowledge that we could not win the war in Afghanistan… but we could have managed it.

David Petraeus

The bottom line, I think, Barry, is that we needed to acknowledge that we could not win the war in Afghanistan, given that the enemy had sanctuaries and a variety of other factors that made it an exceedingly difficult place to truly prevail. But we could have managed it and retained a critical platform for our regional and Afghan efforts, an ally, however flawed the Afghan government may have been, and access. All of which are now gone and replaced by a regime that may have a more polished public-relations apparatus than it did before, but will likely take Afghanistan back many centuries, if not all the way to the seventh century as before.

Even our country wasn’t built in a couple of decades. In fact, it’s instructive occasionally to remember that we had a brutal civil war some eight or so decades into our history. And terrible corruption was a reality well into the twentieth century. It takes real patience to allow a country to build institutions, capabilities, identity, and so forth. And clearly, two decades was not enough when it came to Afghanistan.

BARRY PAVEL: Is your main point that there was, for a small investment—roughly 2,500 forces—on the ground for a sustained period of time going forward, we could have bought a lot of insurance for the types of threats and challenges that we’re now having to deal with head-on because of the full withdrawal?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: It is, Barry. And, I mean, I don’t know how you can contrast what we had—and, again, of course, it’s 2,500. But what really makes it is the constellation of drones that we can now put over places like Afghanistan, especially if you can do it efficiently from bases in the country so they don’t have to commute to the fight, as we say, as they will now. Probably 60 percent of a Reaper’s flying time now will be taken up just getting to and from Afghanistan if they’re launched out of bases in the Gulf states.

So it would—it’s that. It’s a lot of intelligence fusion. It is close air support that is quite precise and for which we have mechanisms with the Afghan headquarters so that you can actually bring it to bear. It’s not easy to bring airpower to bear. You know that, actually, I know, from your time in the National Security Council staff and all the rest of that, and studying the defense issues, etc. You have to literally have systems. You have to have joint tactical air controllers to authorize it. It is not trivial. And we had that all set up—2,500, 3,500, whatever—plus these enablers.

What we really were doing—we were no longer on the front lines. It’s well known we haven’t had a battlefield loss in eighteen months. Not just because of the very flawed agreement that the previous administration signed with the—with the Taliban, having excluded the elected government of Afghanistan from the agreement, and then forcing them to release over five thousand detainees, most of whom went right back to the fight. So, yes, that would have been the way.

Afghans have learned over the centuries how to survive. … They will cut a deal if they can see which way the wind is blowing in a very strong manner.

David Petraeus

And of course, what we saw is that for the lack of those 2,500 to 3,500, it’s almost one of those tales of, for the lack of a nail the shoe was lost, for the lack of a shoe… and it goes on. For the lack of 2,500 to 3,500 Americans, 8,500 coalition forces withdrew. Eighteen thousand maintenance contractors withdrew, who kept the US provided. And we insisted on providing sophisticated US helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft for transport and close air support. They couldn’t maintain them. You need a whole supply chain and all kinds of diagnostics and kits and everything else. And maintaining that from Gulf states via FaceTime or Zoom just obviously was not possible.

That was the critical element in providing response when the early days of the fighting with the Taliban, Afghan units did fight for two or three days before realizing no one has our back, no one’s coming to the rescue, resupply, aero medevac, or close air support, so why are we fighting? And Afghans have learned over the centuries how to survive. Some have called them professional chameleons at times, and I think that’s more than a bit unfair. But they will cut a deal if they can see which way the wind is blowing in a very strong manner.

Innumerable international organizations have provided very important basic services to the Afghan people, supplementing the government, and probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will leave Afghanistan because of this as well, many of them seeking, of course, to come to the United States either directly or via a third country. And, again, that’s where we need some specificity on who is actually going to qualify because that is not present, to my knowledge, right now.

Much has been made that the Afghans didn’t fight. Look, Afghans have been fighting and dying for their country, particularly since, say, roughly 2014 or so when we transitioned frontline security, by and large, to them. But they’ve had over 66,000 casualties. That’s just, roughly, twenty-seven times the American losses.

So the idea—a lot of my old colleagues in uniform reacted to the assertion that they wouldn’t fight somewhat indignantly, frankly, having been out there and seeing them shed blood for their country. Again, by no means perfect. Lots of shortcomings, many issues, corruption, all the rest of that. But they would fight if they knew that somebody had their back, and for quite a while we had their back if their own air force and their own forces could not provide that.

BARRY PAVEL: Some people who aren’t as familiar with the details aren’t as familiar with how the coalition, the United States, and the contractors worked with Afghan forces. How should a hand-off at some point, assuming that the president was coming in and saying, we’re going to go to zero, how could that have been handled with more effectiveness than, perhaps, we saw?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: Well, certainly, timing is an issue. I mean, this is a very rapid, arguably, hasty withdrawal right at the beginning of what was widely anticipated to be the most active fighting season since we’ve been back.

And so, again, there’s a variety of tweaks. To be fair to the president and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others who have made the point, this was never going to be smooth. The question is, could it have been smoother and, perhaps, again, with some tweaks and at least extending the amount of time.

I have to think that there was probably disbelief still, certainly, in Afghanistan. I think it wasn’t just the agreement the previous year that started to shake people’s confidence. Then it was the announcement that we would withdraw, and I think people still thought they’ll look into the abyss and they’re going to draw back and say, whoa, this could be really ugly. Maybe we sort of, again, maintain some kind of reshaped force.

And then when the withdrawal really did take place and then the contractors and all the others followed, keep in mind, I’m just giving the wave tops here. There’s endless more everything in terms of institutions and organizations and implementing partners and everything else.

And then the dam breaks and everybody starts to try to cut a deal, find a way out, and so forth. And, of course, but people don’t want to leave their home. They don’t want to leave a business in which they’ve invested twenty years and all the rest of that.

y, I think, when reality really set in, especially in Kabul, because I think a lot of people were just in disbelief that there would not be a massive defense of Kabul and that they had more time than it turned out they really did have.

BARRY PAVEL: Let me turn a little bit to some of the challenges going forward, like the nature of the terrorist threat. Do you think al-Qaeda or similar terrorist groups might be more capable than they were in the 90s? Because in the 90s they didn’t have the internet. Now that they enjoy online connectivity, do you think that it will help them to recruit, to train, to plan, and to execute terrorist operations against those whom they perceive as their enemies, which is us?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: Yeah. I’m a former economics professor and I learned in that endeavor that you can never go wrong by answering a question by starting, “It depends,” and in this case, it does depend, and there are numerous factors on which it depends, for example, whether the Taliban prevent al-Qaeda and also the Islamic State.

Keep in mind, there’s the Khorasan group out there in the AfPak area that has been established. They’re also trying to establish sanctuaries. By the way, they’re not working with al-Qaeda. They’re actually enemies of each other. But do the Taliban fighters keep them from reestablishing the kind of sanctuaries that al-Qaeda had when the 9/11 attacks were planned on Afghan soil under Taliban control?

It depends on how effectively we can identify any al-Qaeda or Islamic State efforts to establish such sanctuaries and then, of course, disrupt them, degrade them, destroy them. And we should be careful before we completely remove all authorities, by the way, that are associated with the authority to use military force because we may just have to depend on those authorities again in this kind of situation.

It depends on how well we and our allies and social media platforms, to get at your point about the internet, how well they do at making it difficult at the least for al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to establish virtual caliphates—that is, effective presence in cyberspace that enables them to recruit, to inspire, to motivate, to plan, to share explosive formulas, tactics, techniques, and procedures and fuel up attacks outside Afghanistan in the way that we saw the Islamic State able to do this very effectively when it had a caliphate on the ground where it could build an internet center in Raqqa, and that enabled it to build the virtual caliphate in cyberspace as well. Ultimately, that was destroyed, needless to say, although there still is a presence on the internet and we all have to go after that together comprehensively—coalitions, partners, and private sector partners as well.

It depends on how well our Pakistani partners might do in identifying and disrupting al-Qaeda and Islamic State elements on their soil now that, presumably, the Taliban and Haqqani network headquarters and leaders can displace from Baluchistan. I mean, there’s a reason they call it the Quetta Shura, after all, and North Waziristan and in Pakistan, respectively, making it easier for the Pakistani army to go after true extremist elements.

But, again, we will have to see all of these. It depends. And let’s recall the very forthright words of CIA Director Bill Burns, who acknowledged that there will be a degradation of our ability to collect intelligence, having shut down the majority of our footprint in Afghanistan, presumably, which depends a good deal on military capabilities just in case they get into trouble and now we’re going to do it all from either countries in the region, which have not yet allowed us the kind of air-based platform that would be so helpful and cut down on the amount of time spent commuting, for Reapers in particular. But even for our fighter-bombers and other aircraft that can be refueled, it’s going to take a fleet of aerial refueling tankers to get them to and from Afghanistan, to keep them over it, should we need to do that.

There has been this… magnetic attraction for al-Qaeda when it comes to eastern Afghanistan.

David Petraeus

So lots of challenges out there, and lots of factors I think that will determine whether this will be able to develop, whether the terrorist threat can actually manifest itself once again on Afghan soil—noting that there has been this, to me, unexplainable attraction—magnetic attraction for al-Qaeda when it comes to eastern Afghanistan. I went out there on a number of occasions over the years in several different positions trying to understand what it was that they saw in eastern Afghanistan. And it was somewhat elusive for me, but clearly, it is not for them.

So I think that’s the way forward here. And, again, noting that, by the way, this administration I think has astutely recognized the need to keep an eye on Islamist extremists wherever else they are. This is really the outlier. And one of the big lessons of the past twenty years of fighting Islamist extremists is that they will exploit ungoverned spaces. You really do have to do something about it. We generally have to lead. And it should be a coalition, but we’ll have to be the base piece. And you have to do it for quite a while. You need a sustained, sustainable commitment—sustainability being measured in terms of blood and treasure

BARRY PAVEL: Thinking about the the Taliban, will the leopard change its spots? And they have a good public relations machine now, but we’ve already seen reporting, videos: They’re beating people in the streets. They’re not letting women and girls act like normal citizens. So, are you optimistic that this new Taliban will not provide safe haven to extremist groups? Or do you think we should really prepare for the worst case?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: Well, I think you seldom can go wrong by preparing for the worst case. You can have all the hope you want, optimism, etc. But at the end of the day, we don’t know at this point in time what their actions will be as we go forward. And we need to be prepared, again, for them to revert—maybe not all the way to the seventh century, as people have described life under the Taliban in the late 1990s—but certainly a number of centuries back. How abusive is it? How unacceptable is it?

But this is where again, I would come back to the fact that the Taliban are about to be acquainted with a very harsh reality. And that is that they are broke. Yes, they control the illegal narcotics trade, the poppy products, and all the rest of that. And maybe they can charitably get $500 million, billion from that somehow. But their budget, the budget of the Afghan government in recent years, has been roughly in the $18-19 billion range. That has been funded by the United States, Japan, the UK, and a handful of other major donor nations, because they can only generate about a billion to two billion in a great year. And this is not going to be a great year for the economy, with most of the internationals having either reduced or left, and from a variety of customs, duties, and taxes.

So the lights literally could go out in Kabul, as I mentioned earlier. If you can’t get refined fuel products in and other means of keeping generators going—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. So much is done by that government, so basic services are going to degrade very considerably. And I noted earlier that many of the nonprofit organizations, international organizations that have done so much for the Afghan people, particularly over the past twenty years but they even did it in some cases before—again, many of them, fearing the security situation, have left.

So I think they’re going to find that they are going to be quite dependent on outside aid. The IMF’s Special Drawing Rights for $450 additional million have been frozen. Their assets around the world, in most places, have been frozen. They’re going to be in a very, very tough situation. Should we not retain a footprint at the embassy? What’s the best way to communicate with them? How can we try to influence them? Because, again, that—it may be possible. And if it is possible, I think that’s preferable for the Afghan people—if we truly care about human rights and all the rest of that, and I think we do—then let’s ask what it is that we might do in this new reality and determine that going forward as well.

BARRY PAVEL: Another difference from the 1990s is China. We’ve already seen China probably cutting deals with the Taliban over human rights and investments like the Belt and Road Initiative. So does that reduce our leverage because of the China factor?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: It certainly may. Now keep in mind that China has always wanted to get into Afghanistan and extract the extraordinary mineral wealth. Again, we estimated—when I was the commander there, some nonprofit came in and estimated it at over two trillion dollars worth of minerals, including lithium, rare earth, and all the other minerals that are in such demand and that China has so aggressively sought around the world. They did, in fact, have—I believe it was a copper mine south of Kabul or in north Logar Province, which they shut down and left when presumably the Taliban and/or Haqqani shot rockets and mortars at them. Now given that that security threat may now be in charge rather than trying to obstruct progress, it’s possible that they could.

But keep in mind that their model is one that typically brings in Chinese workers, Chinese materials, Chinese food, Chinese construction and design techniques, and all the rest of that. That may get some royalties for the Afghans, but I don’t know that that is going to generate right now quickly the kinds of revenue that they need. And I’m a bit skeptical that China would sign a check for fifteen billion dollars or something on that order just again to gain favor with the Taliban. They’ll be a bit wary as well. And as you noted, they’re very, very concerned about the possible threat of Islamist extremism leaking out into the area of the Uyghurs. Of course, that’s the—Xinjiang is the area that—this tiny little sliver that extends northeast of Afghanistan, connecting the two countries. Now keeping in mind that it is literally snowed in probably four to six months a year depending on the weather patterns. So that could be an alternative.

Russia could be an alternative. Again, I don’t think that they have quite the resources needed. The point is going to be that the Taliban may have to adjust how they operate, may have to be a bit more benevolent than they have been in the past or they’re going to be in serious trouble.

BARRY PAVEL: The way this withdrawal was done has really caused some concerns, in particular in the transatlantic alliance. So how can we try to minimize the damage from the withdrawal operation so far to America’s alliances across the world? How can the US most effectively restore its credibility? We’re in this era of great-power competition against China and Russia. How do we get the allies back?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS : Well, there’s an irony here, because I think one of the aspects of this administration that you and I and most of the Atlantic Council folks have all celebrated and applauded has been the outreach to allies, to partners all around the world. It’s been rejoining institutions that the previous administration left, like the WHO, the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran nuclear deal—we’ll see whether that’s possible or not and—but so on and so forth—and again, pursuing what I think is the most important overarching goal for the United States, which is obviously to achieve a comprehensive… policy for the relationship with China. And yet, this has obviously really bruised some of those relationships. Indeed, we’ve heard people such as the British minister of defense quite directly criticizing the US decision, Tom Tugendhat, a member of Parliament, very eloquently expressing reservations as well, and he’s a friend; he’s a fellow veteran, again, served there.

So, what do we have to do? Well, I think as always we have to demonstrate that we are steadfast, reliable, competent, thoughtful, and capable allies and partners. I think we are seeking to do that right now on the ground in Afghanistan. We’re certainly seeking to do it again as part of this effort to build the relationship between our allies and partners with China. It is crucial the way to influence a potential adversary obviously is by having as many folks on your side of the field as you can possibly assemble. But I think you also, to do this, you have to actually acknowledge that this episode has seriously shaken our relationship with our most important NATO allies, again, including the UK, and a number of others who would have preferred to have stayed. In fact, many, I think, if not most, of our partners wanted to stay but, again, they could not without the US, which is an interesting commentary, by the way, on the capability of those partners and it reminds us of the gulf between our capabilities, particularly in these areas that have been so important in what are called the advise and assist and enable missions, again, the constellation of drones, the intelligence fusion, and the precision air attack. And they just could not do that without us. We spend not just more than all of our twenty-nine NATO allies together on defense, as you know, Barry, we spend well over two times more than all of them, and that gulf is actually real and it’s something that we have to recognize.

So our departure from Afghanistan, its timing, the conduct of it have all called a lot into question. I don’t think this is actually debatable, and the process of rebuilding relationships is best facilitated by getting the ongoing evacuation right and doing so together and in true consultation, not just informing but consulting our allies and partners on the ground and helping in a whole variety of other ways.

BARRY PAVEL: Let me turn now to the questions we’ve gotten in. The first question is from John Petrik from the CyberWire. He asks: Do you have any insight that you can offer into what noncombatant evacuation planning the Department of Defense did against the eventuality of a Taliban victory?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: Look, my understanding is there were actually various scenarios that were played out and noncombatant evacuation was one of those. But, of course, it’s one thing to do this in sort of a wargame kind of—you’ve been part of these as a member of the NSC staff over the years. It’s one thing to do that in that kind of scenario with, you know, [we say] OK, we do this, they do that, we do this, they do that, and it’s quite another when you see a country and a government just collapse in a matter of a couple of weeks, with a final collapse coming very, very abruptly, really over the course almost of a weekend but, at most, a week or so.

So, again, and I’ve been through many, many different neo-planning efforts, but then the plan collides with reality. As they say, the enemy gets a vote, the context gets a vote, and clearly, that’s where we are right now. But we have enormous capability on the ground; there’s considerably more capability on call. We’re now supplementing our considerable airlift with the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, which is not going into Kabul, to be sure; it’s going to countries that are now at the limit for individuals that can be taken out of Kabul and put there for a period of time. And of course, that is the challenge. It’s not just getting people out of Kabul; it is finding places for them to go until we can determine what it is that will be done with them for the follow—it’s very easy with American citizens; they can obviously come home, green-card holders. But when you get into the SIV cases, the Special Immigrant Visa cases, for those who served two years or more as battlefield interpreters with our men and women on the ground sharing risk and hardship, where are they going to go? Again, have they been through the full process?

That process, by the way, I should—to be fair to this administration, the sluggishness, the bureaucracy, the glacial pace of progress on the special immigrant visa effort, in particular, has characterized three administrations, really, but especially the previous one. And that—as part of No One Left Behind, a nonprofit organization that focuses on this issue—one of the co-founders is, in fact, a former battlefield interpreter—this just has not moved swiftly enough, and again, despite lots of urging from Congress, despite additional visa quotas, money, etc., and it’s only now that we are really getting serious about trying to figure out how to do this. But as this—as tens of thousands become possibly over a hundred thousand or more, this is not a trivial exercise. And so there are many, many different elements of this that will be the long pole in the tent for a period of time and have to be solved.

But I think, again, to be fair, now that we have decided to do this in a very substantial way, it is going on very impressively, albeit I don’t know the solution or the definition or the specificity that will be required for those who do not fit those categories that are pretty easily defined of citizens, green cards, SIV holders or applicants. What is the definition going to be for others whose lives are in jeopardy according to their assessment, and what do we then do with them? That is going to be a huge challenge. And again, as I mentioned earlier, we have in a sense written a very substantial blank check, and I don’t know whether we can fully redeem it.

BARRY PAVEL: So that is an urgent policy recommendation that you would suggest. The administration needs to define with great clarity who are we getting out in this initial tranche anyway and who are we not getting out, which is a hardheaded and difficult set of choices that they’ll have to make. But they have to get that out there and they have to be very clear.

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: Yeah, because the problem right now is, of course, you just have everybody converging at one gate. It’s tens of thousands of people. Now, there are various workarounds that are now working and so forth, but at the end of the day, Washington can’t micromanage certain aspects of this. Clearly, they can’t be the ones making the decision at the entry control point. That’s going to be literally what we used to call the strategic sergeant or strategic lieutenant or captain, you know, who’s making a small decision that has strategic consequences in some cases, certainly for the individuals.

But what might—what Washington can and must micromanage is, again, figuring out how to define who it is that gets inside and a plane ride outside Afghanistan, and to where, and who does not. And that is a terrible decision to make, but it is going to have to be made. And I hope that there are State Department and Department of Homeland Security individuals who are real experts on this, once it is clearly defined, who will make those decisions rather than putting that on the poor strategic sergeant or lieutenant.

BARRY PAVEL: And just on that question, it just strikes me as so important to consider can we open one more runway somewhere else? Having one gate for an entire set of refugees and US citizens coming out just seems like a very narrow approach to an urgent problem.

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: Well, first of all, there are multiple gates. And again, it’s how you use those gates. It’s do you want only American citizens here and can you push that out farther.

By the way, there’s something that is looming over this that we should acknowledge, and that is the potential—it has been publicly reported that there are concerns about Islamic State terrorist attacks. And if you remember back to the days in Iraq and so forth where you’d get a huge crowd of young men wanting to be recruits for the Iraqi army, that was also a huge target for al-Qaeda in Iraq. And reportedly, there are concerns about that. And that is very, very challenging. Anywhere you have some kind of control point, there is going to be a substantial crowd that is also in the eyes of the Islamic State a substantial target, and I know that that is weighing on people as well. And a lot of it comes down to how can you streamline the process for those who are very clear that they’re going to get on a plane. And then, how do you develop the process so that you can determine who can come in and who can’t come in? And again, a very, very tough decision that is going to have to be made on the ground, can’t be, again, micromanaged in Washington.

BARRY PAVEL: Let me turn to the next question, from Mahdi Sarmafar, a freelance journalist, who writes: What is your prediction on the fate of the resistance in Panjshir? Can Massoud organize and lead the Taliban opposition from there? Is it possible to hope for this resistance? Or will Panjshir also fall? And is that a point of leverage, I would add, for the United States and our allies and coalition members?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: Well, it is a point of leverage down the road. But we need to be very, very careful right now because, for right now, the main effort—everything about getting—taking care of American citizens, green-card holders, and SIV qualifiers and applicants in particular, and then all these others. And the last thing you want to do is start supporting a group that could foment some kind of—again, this could be the civil war that we feared. And so, again, you need to see how does the Taliban operate, how do they act, is it so egregious? Is it unacceptable? That will take some time to manifest.

They have been actually slightly expanding the area that they control, sort of southwest of Panjshir just a bit. The real problem, for those who are in Panjshir right now, is that there is no connectivity to the outside world. When Ahmad Shah Massoud was there, they had a way of linking up to one of the Central Asian states at the least from the northeastern end of that valley. And, to my knowledge, the dots don’t connect right now. There’s some other fighting going on up in various other locations and northern provinces—modest fighting. And it’s possible that they could ultimately connect up.

But, again, I think that makes that somewhat questionable about how long that can be sustained if, again, the long pole in the tent here always for Afghanistan is that it is dependent on outside countries for a number of different goods, services, and commodities—not the least of which is refined fuel products. And they will run into the same challenges in the Panjshir as Afghanistan collectively could run into, depending on their financial future.

BARRY PAVEL: Let me turn to the next question from Ambassador Peter Galbraith, a former deputy special representative of the UN Secretary-General to Afghanistan. He asks: You are an expert on counterinsurgency and ran one of the military commands in Afghanistan. And for a successful counterinsurgency, there has to be a local partner. Our partner in Afghanistan, he says, was corrupt, ineffective, and, as a result of fraudulent presidential elections, illegitimate government. How do you make a strategy predicated on having a local partner work when there isn’t one that is where you need them to be?

And I raise this because—I think it’s a great question—because right now we’re saying: We’ll never do this again. But you know as well as I do, David, looking back at history, this will—we will be—we will be doing this again. It will be somewhere else. It’ll be in a different time, with different players. But this is going to be important. Again, at the Atlantic Council we have a three-year program on this very thing, how do you strengthen stabilization operations in fragile states? So this is really important.

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: Well, my PhD dissertation was titled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam.” And among the conclusions was that we wanted to consign anything that looked like Vietnam—which in some aspects, at the very least, was counterinsurgency operations. Although, we also had a pretty big war going on, made a big war. But, we didn’t want to do that. The problem is, of course, that it may not be the war you want, but it may be the war that, again, the president orders you to engage in. That is exactly what happened actually, when we embarked on Afghanistan and then Iraq, at least beyond the early days.

And so you do have to have a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign. And for all those people that say it went wrong when we tried to do nation-building, well, tell me how you develop institutions to which you can hand off tasks that you have been performing in the past if you don’t help build those institutions? And so there’s a little bit of something there that’s somewhat counter-intuitive.

And we had to build Afghan forces, security forces, of a variety of different types. We had to help institutions be established, or we were going to be stuck performing those tasks endlessly. And we did actually hand off to them. We did establish processes for handing off security tasks. That’s why there were 66,000 Afghans who died fighting for their country. Was it imperfect? Certainly, it was. Peter knows that well. He was part of the process, actually. And he knows it in Iraq as well. Again, welcome to our world. You don’t get the partner you’d like. You get the partner you have. You try to do everything you can to help that partner achieve success, and to deal with, again, endemic corruption and all the other shortcomings that are there.

If [the Taliban] really want to prove that they truly mean what they say about ensuring that al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are not welcome on their soil, they should welcome us back to Bagram Air Base.

David Petraeus

The problem is, the alternative is what we are just—have just done, which is to throw your hands in the air and leave. And I think we now see how that is working out. There should at least be some who have a tiny bit of buyer’s remorse over what has taken place here. Again, as I mentioned earlier, for all of its flaws the elected government—and, again, yes, you could say even the election was not without flaws. But there was a government that was, at the very least, our ally and partner. It welcomed us having bases in that country, which helped us in the region.

It’s well-known that these were the bases that were the platforms for the so-called regional counterterrorism campaign—the most significant operation of which, which is publicly known, was that which brought Osama bin Laden to justice, launched from Afghan soil to Abbottabad, Pakistan, home of the Pakistani military academy, and then back to Afghan soil. And again, phenomenal bases, intelligence facilities, partners—all the rest of that, however flawed. But we do not have that now. And certainly, the government that is assuming control, that is being formed, I don’t think is one that we can expect to be that kind of partner.

I have said already, though, if they really want to prove that they truly mean what they say about ensuring that al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are not welcome on their soil, they should welcome us back to Bagram Air Base, for which they’re not going to have much use I wouldn’t think. We could build some kind of compound structure, we coordinate it all with them, and we continue to carry out operations that ensure that we can identify when al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are, indeed, trying to re-establish sanctuaries like the one that al-Qaeda had in which they planned the 9/11 attacks.

BARRY PAVEL: What should be US and allies’ policies toward the Taliban now? I think we—there’s an opportunity to shape that in a way that is productive for us and ideally considered as productive for them, to the extent that we can deal with them as an actor. But what do you think are the two or three basic outlines of the policy that the United States and its allies should take toward Afghanistan going forward?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: Well, I think there’s going to have to be a degree of pragmatism, flexibility, and so forth going forward. We have to recognize a new reality. We probably should indeed—there should be a point at which we say, OK, look, this has happened. We can argue over, again, why and the blame and point fingers and all the rest of that. But in addition to focusing on, again, being sure we honor our commitment to our citizens, green cards, SIVs, and so on, what do we do going forward? What are the different options that the Taliban could exercise? How do we respond to those? What are the metrics? It always helps to have some kind of somewhat concrete measures that would help us determine how we do deal with the Taliban.

And again, to come back one last time to the idea of the embassy—and as we recognize now, it certainly would not be in the Taliban’s interest to have some kind of fracas with us over that embassy, and of course, it’s inside the greater Green Zone near the presidential palace. It might be convenient to still be able to walk over to the presidential palace even if you don’t particularly have great affection for those who might be in the presidential palace.

We have worked together historically with plenty of regimes that we have deplored and abhorred, and this may be yet another of them.

David Petraeus

But now we have to recognize reality and we have to move forward. We should stick to our principles, to the values, and all the rest of that that we are seeking to promote once again with greater emphasis under this administration, and that all has to be there. But it’s going to depend—again, remember the economic professor response—again, on what they do, how they act, and all the rest of that. And I do think, as you have mentioned, that there is opportunity for us to influence them. There are certainly very significant penalties we can inflict on them if they prove to be the kind of extreme organization that we most fear would be the outcome. But if they are not, if there are areas where we can work together, then we have to do that.

We have worked together historically with plenty of regimes that we have deplored and abhorred, and this may be yet another of them, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t try to do that and try to find some mode of operating with them to try to achieve our objectives, which of course are most significantly about the Islamist extremist threat that could emanate from there—although I don’t think that’s a near-term threat certainly to the homeland, or even probably to our NATO allies for the time being. I would be concerned if there is the kind of virtual caliphate that they’re able to build up because they’re uncontested on the ground and can build up some kind of capability like that, and then over time what they might be able to build if we can’t sufficiently degrade it and destroy it.