Author Mark Mazzetti, in his highly engaging book, The Way of the Knife, recalls how “the Afghan war would be decided not by soldiers in mountain redoubts but by politicians in Washington who had an acute sensitivity to America’s limited tolerance for years more of bloody conflict”. Today, as the Taliban’s comeback seems all but imminent as they control 65 percent of Afghanistan, have captured or threaten to capture 11 provincial capitals, and are fighting the government troops in 25 of 34 provinces, Mazzetti’s words seem prophetic. For, the die was cast for President Ashraf Ghani the very day his American counterpart decided to withdraw US troops, urging the Afghan leaders to fight for their homeland. President Joe Biden said that the US had spent more than $1 trillion over 20 years and lost thousands of troops.
The going has been tougher for the Afghan forces this time as the Taliban have decided to decimate them even in the non-Pashtun region of north Afghanistan. Last time, the Northern Alliance, led by Ahmad Shah Massoud made a full-frontal attack on the Taliban from this region. This time, with China and Pakistan putting their weight firmly behind the Taliban and Russia shedding its traditional reservations vis-à-vis the Islamist milita, while the US opting to leave the Afghan government on its own, there’s very little manoeuvring space for President Ghani. One can gauge the gravity of the situation from the fact that India had shut its consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif, the largest city in the north, and asked all Indians in Afghanistan to leave the country before air traffic shuts down. If Mazar-i-Sharif falls, the whole of the north goes out of the Afghan government’s control. And it would be all over for the Afghan government.
The die, however, wasn’t cast for President Ghani on the day the US decided to withdraw its soldiers. It was obvious from the very first day the Americans landed on Afghan soil. From Day 1, they seemed in a hurry to finish the war. It seemed they had equated the Afghan mission with the overthrowing of the Taliban regime and the killing of Osama bin Laden. As history suggests, it’s easiest to conquer Kabul, and toughest to rule it. They seemed to have ignored this adage, and after toppling the Taliban regime within 100 days they shifted their attention to Saddam Husain’s Iraq, without realising that opening two fronts had never worked for even the best of the armies— from Napoleon’s to Hitler’s! As Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and senior adviser to four US Presidents, including Barack Obama, writes in his book Deadly Embrace, the US “squandered an easy military victory, permitting the foe to recover, and make a comeback”.
But the biggest of the American folly was that they took wrong shots. And they made a dubious ally in Pakistan. In fact, their own officials, foremost being Riedel, repeatedly reminded Obama at the very beginning of his first term that the solution to the Afghan problem lies not in Kabul but in Islamabad. Or, should we say Rawalpindi?
The US knows it well that Pakistan has mastered the art of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. And yet it invariably chooses to ignore it. It just can’t seem to comprehend an Afghanistan policy without the presence of Pakistan. And it is this lack of imagination that has almost cost another Vietnam for the Americans in Afghanistan. It just fails to realise that the Pakistani hands that promise to decimate the Afghan jihadi factory, also sustain it. For instance, Gen Ashfaq Kayani was in charge when the Taliban received critical support from the ISI. And yet, when he became the Army Chief, he launched a massive operation against the Taliban in tribal Pakistan!
Islamabad has always stabbed Washington in its back. What’s more frustrating is that the Americans are well aware of this Pakistani perfidy. During the war against the erstwhile Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Pakistan pursued the same treacherous path. In The Bear Trap, Mohammed Yousaf and Mark Adkin describe how the US arms and aid reached the Afghan mujahideen. “As soon as the arms arrived in Pakistan, the CIA’s responsibility ended. From then on it was our (ISI) pipeline, our organisation that moved, allocated and distributed every bullet that the CIA procured,” they wrote.
Interestingly, when Gary Schroen, who was in charge of the initial CIA incursion into Afghanistan in September 2001 to topple the Taliban regime, shared an estimate of more than 2,000 missiles provided by the CIA to Afghan fighters during the jihad against the Soviet forces to Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir” seemed startled. “Do you know how many of those missiles I received?” Massoud wrote “8” on the paper and showed it to Schroen. “That was all,” Massoud declared, “and only at the end of the fight against the communist regime”.
So, if Pakistan can conspire to give just eight of the over 2,000 American missiles to Massoud, who was at the forefront of the US war against the Soviets, one can imagine what they would have done in the post-2001 scenario? Also, it’s a well-conceived myth of the ‘decisive’ Pakistani role in the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. Just like the British left India only after being completely exhausted and bankrupted by World War II, and less by Gandhian Satyagraha, the Pakistani-mujahideen hands have been overplayed in the geostrategic parlance. The reality is, as former envoy Rajeev Dogra writes in his highly informative but much-understated book Durand’s Curse that the US and Pakistan-backed mujahideen did not defeat the Soviets on the battlefield. The US-led forces won a few important battles, notably in Panjshir valley, but lost others. The Soviets could have remained in Afghanistan for several more years but they decided that the stay wasn’t worth the “high price in men, money, and international prestige”. Even the Americans knew this ground reality. Ambassador Dogra quotes Morton Abramowitz of the US State Department as saying: “In 1985, there was real concern that mujahideen were losing, that they were sort of being diminished, falling apart. Losses were high and their impact on the Soviets was not great.”
The Americans were plain lucky in the 1980s that the Soviets had bankrupted themselves by then and had no means to continue the war. There’s no such luck in favour of Americans this time. In fact, Pakistan, an important cog in the American scheme of things in the region, has created a cottage industry out of the so-called war against terrorism. The millions of dollars sent by the US to Pakistan in the name of fighting terrorism have led to a situation where “for each terrorist, the ISI helped capture, two new ones needed to be created to keep the racket going!”
The biggest tragedy of Afghanistan is that it often becomes a tabula rasa on which other world powers project their ambitions, geostrategic or otherwise. Now with China entering the fray, the Afghan equation has further been muddied. The Pakistan-China nexus, which has now been joined by Russia, has put the democratic forces in Afghanistan on the back-foot. It’s this nexus that explains a renewed Taliban effort to conquer the non-Pashtun regions in north Afghanistan that have traditionally been the strongholds of the anti-Taliban alliance, previously supported covertly by India, Russia, and Iran. It was from this region that the Northern Alliance took on the Taliban and if conquered this time, it will cut Kabul’s lifeline once and for all.
Americans have let the Afghans down in the past, first time in the early 1950s when they sided with the Pakistani dictators on the justifiable Afghan demands on Durand Line (a mistake which Nehru’s India too committed that in a way had its repercussions in Kashmir). And with President Joe Biden asking Afghan leaders to fight for their homeland and not look westward for support, the Americans have let the Afghans down again. At a time when President Ghani needed unequivocal support, he was left to fend for himself and his fledgling regime. And as he visits Mazar-i-Sharif, besieged by Taliban militia, on Wednesday, he seems to be waging a lonely battle. One hopes it’s not for a losing cause. For, any loss democratic Afghanistan suffers today, its repercussions will be faced by other world capitals sooner than later. More so America’s!