By Jordan Fermanis
In case you missed it, over the weekend the United States embarked on the first stages of its military withdrawal from Afghanistan. In one of the boldest foreign policy decisions to come out of the nascent Biden presidency, the administration announced it will withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan by - you guessed it - September 11th this year.
At its height there were 100,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan, but the military presence has declined in recent years to around 2,500. The US has been supported in operations by a coalition of NATO and strategic allies who have been engaged in training the Afghan army rather than military operations since about 2018. To date, the US has trained an Afghan army of around 300,000, but the war has cost trillions of dollars and the lives of more than 2,000 US service members. At least 100,000 Afghan civilians have been injured or killed and Biden is the fourth US president to preside over military commitments in Afghanistan earning it the title as a “forever war”.
Those numbers are quite staggering. When the US and its NATO and coalition partners invaded Afghanistan in 2001 the Taliban was driven out of power within weeks. The initial success was heralded as a swift and decisive victory. Yet these celebrations seem absurd when reflecting back on a war that has lasted the vast majority of my lifetime.
For the Afghan people, the 2001 invasion was another violent rupture in a long history of foreign interventions. In 1946, American engineers and their families started arriving in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan to work for the biggest construction company in the world Morrison-Knudsen. The Americans arrived in the country promising to build new cities and dams, propelling Afghanistan into the twentieth century using the hydropower generated by the Helmand River. The Morrison-Knudsen employees and their families lived in an exclusive residential complex separated from the rest of Afghan society. In this gated community known as “Little America” the Americans were free to live an American lifestyle celebrating Christmas in homes that resembled suburban America in the Afghan desert. The then king of Afghanistan Zahir Shah had been fixated on the idea of emulating the US in a Roosevelt-style New Deal society powered by the new energy secured from the construction of dams.
By the 1950s Morrison-Knudsen, supported by the US government, had built the new dams in Helmand. But there was a problem. The new dams raised the level of the water table increasing the sodium content in the soil and facilitating the growth of poppies, which was then seized upon for the production of heroin and a new billion-dollar drug industry. The dams had now also taken a geopolitical dimension in the context of the Cold War. Keen not to cede ground in the ideological war against the US, the Soviet Union started offering its own new schemes to modernise Afghanistan in the image of its communist ideals.
Soviet involvement in Afghanistan reached its apogee with the invasion in 1979. In a book by Nobel Prize-winning author and journalist Svetlana Alexievich titled Zinky Boys she describes the Soviet reaction to the war in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The Soviet leadership had sold the war as a defence of the Motherland, with soldiers conscripted to to fight along the Soviet Union’s southern border with Afghanistan. But the war quickly lost its lustre among Soviet citizens and the families of the young soldiers conscripted to fight in a foreign war. In the same way the public mood shifted in the US against the war in Vietnam, Soviet public opinion began to turn against young soldiers fighting a long and ultimately hopeless war on foreign soil. The victory of the US-backed Mujahideen rebels over the communists in Afghanistan ended the invasion, but it ushered in a period of civil war in Afghanistan that continued right up to the US invasion in 2001.
The reality is that no matter how decisive the initial victory by the US and coalition forces almost 20 years ago, lasting peace in Afghanistan has not been achieved. The invasion that was prompted by the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and New York by Al Qaeda and the subsequent hunt for figurehead Osama bin Laden has now continued long after the US operation that killed bin Laden in 2011.
Since the Trump administration, the US and the Taliban have been negotiating a peace agreement, albeit with the Afghan government conspicuously missing from the negotiations. The talks held in Doha had mostly stalled as the two parties stumbled along in protracted negotiations until suddenly President Biden announced US forces would leave Afghanistan on the symbolic date this year.
The US withdrawal announcement was followed by the UK who will withdraw nearly all of its 750 troops and draw up plans to hand over control of the military academy in Kabul where troops help to train Afghan soldiers to the government. Smaller withdrawals have been announced by the likes of Germany and Australia.
The decision to pull out of Afghanistan has been roundly criticised by many onlookers. Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat who served as soldier in Afghanistan has questioned whether a complete US withdrawal is the right strategy. Tugendhat argues that maintaining a low level presence in the country is preferable to a complete drawdown of forces because of the very real possibility that a power vacuum is left to filled by the Taliban. There is also a risk that pulling out of Afghanistan could scupper any chance of a political settlement between the Taliban and Afghan government. Then there is the potential impact the withdrawal may have on the delivery of vital international aid to the country and the risk of further violence as regional disputes between Afghanistan’s neighbours opens up the possibility of a proxy war.
The history of US military operations in the region tells us that withdrawal strategies can be as catastrophic as invasions. The drawdown of US troops from Iraq in 2011 and the Obama administration’s reluctance to intervene in Syria in 2013 arguably contributed to the rise of ISIS, while Obama’s “leading from behind” approach to Libya resulted in the violent overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.
The Afghanistan announcement coincided with the tenth anniversary of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden code-named Operation Neptune Spear. In what Obama describes as one of his crowning achievements as president, bin Laden was killed after an assault on a residential house in Abbottabad Pakistan. The assassination was the result of meticulous planning by the US Navy Seals and Nighthawk divisions over a significant amount of time. The crucial intelligence that identified the whereabouts of bin Laden is still unknown, with theories ranging from CIA infiltration into Al Qaeda to tip offs from Pakistan’s intelligence services.
Like the invasion of Afghanistan, the death of bin Laden was met with jubilant celebrations at the time, but the proceeding years can hardly be described as a success. Al Qaeda and similar terrorist organisations like ISIS have continued to grow and there is no doubt that US and coalition allies are no closer to achieving the elusive peace in the Middle East.
What is more certain is that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan signals a distinct foreign policy shift. With the public appetite for overseas military conflict non-existent and the calamitous cost to human life, we may be seeing the last of the US and coalition overseas troop deployments. The US is now looking to reorient its foreign policy objectives. The presidencies of Obama, Trump and Biden have all been broadly moving in the same direction - concerns over how a more aggressive and powerful China will challenge the US in years to come will replace any desires to be the saviour in the Middle East.