I lived in the USSR when the invasion on 1979 started. That started the long chain of events ending up with the scenes we are observing now. My personal feeling is, such invasions are doomed and it is better to leave Islamic world alone to itself. What will now happen, sadly, the Taliban movement may spill over to the Central Asia that is geographically close. Hope that it will not trigger bigger conflicts.
I agree that what we are seeing now has deep historical roots and that these invasions are doomed. I believe we have simply delayed the inevitable for 20 years. As we watch with sadness and even anger the scenes at the airport and in Kabul, I think it’s important to understand the culture and history. It’s too easy to frame the picture in the emotion of the immediate moment, rather than in a deeper understanding of the culture and history and mistakes made by the U.S. across four administrations since 2001 (and even earlier).
I mentioned in an earlier post that it would be helpful if the U.S. government could analyze and learn from this experience in order to avoid becoming enmeshed in a future conflict. I was pleased to discover that there is an “Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction” who has compiled numerous “lessons learned” reports over the years. Whether these reports are studied and applied is another matter.
This link is to the latest report published this month. Reading the “Executive Summary” and “Introduction” at the beginning gives an overview of what went wrong. I haven’t read all 140 pages, but the quoted section epitomizes IMO the intrinsic problem with the entire mission in Afghanistan. It makes it clear, to me anyway, that it would likely fail, and why my initial reaction to the invasion in 2001 was sadly accurate. That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t care deeply about what we see happening to Afghans this week and in the future, while also acknowledging the complexity of the culture and ultimate futility of the U.S. attempt to reconstruct a country that had been in conflict since 1979.
https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/lessonslearned/SIGAR-21-46-LL.pdf
Page 80
WILLFUL DISREGARD FOR CRITICAL INFORMATION
When the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, they embarked on an ambitious effort to encourage or even impose broad reforms that touched essentially all aspects of Afghan society, including politics, economics, education, defense, rule of law, and the societal roles and relations between men and women.
The U.S. government pursued these reforms while simultaneously attempting to
quell multiple security threats, including a burgeoning Taliban insurgency, a powerful narcotics industry, warlords entrenched in the Afghan government, and a nascent local affiliate of the Islamic State.
Yet as this chapter demonstrates, rarely did U.S. officials have even a mediocre understanding of the environment, much less how it was responding to U.S. interventions.
In fact, blaming mistakes on a simple lack of information may be charitable. Many mistakes were borne from a willful disregard for information that may have been available. After all,
in many cases, the U.S. government’s very purpose was to usher in an orderly revolution that would replace existing Afghan social systems with western or “modern” systems. If the intention was to build institutions from scratch, understanding and working within the country’s traditional systems was unnecessary. As one former senior USAID official told SIGAR,
“We wanted to give them something they had never had before.”441
But instead of being a society deconstructed to its foundation by conflict and primed
for the introduction of western political, economic, and judicial systems,
it turned out Afghanistan was a complex society with ingrained traditions and an incorrigible political economy. These traditions were neither easy to uproot and replace, nor could they be shoehorned into a Western institutional framework, as evidenced by the attempts to use strongmen and warlords to build a nascent bureaucracy.
BBM