The American War in Afghanistan: A Foretold Defeat?

It was 8 a.m. and the sleeping Afghan sergeant stood on what he called the front line, a month before the town of Kunduz fell to the Taliban. A tacit agreement protected both parties. There would be no shooting.

This was the nature of the strange war the Afghans had just fought and lost with the Taliban.

President Biden and his advisers say the total collapse of the Afghan military has proven his unworthiness, justifying the US withdrawal. But the extraordinary merger of government and military, and the bloodless transition in most places so far, points to something more fundamental.

The war the Americans thought they were waging against the Taliban was not the war waged by their Afghan allies. This made the American war, like other neocolonialist adventures, most likely doomed from the start.

Recent history shows that it makes no sense for Western powers to wage wars on other peoples’ lands, despite temptations. Local insurgencies, though seemingly outnumbered in money, technology, weapons, air power and the like, are often better motivated, have a constant flow of new recruits, and often make their living off the border. .

Outside powers wage war as visitors – occupiers – and their former allies who actually live there, something completely different. In Afghanistan, it was not good against evil, as the Americans saw it, but neighbor against neighbor.

Regarding guerrilla warfare, Mao once described the relationship that should exist between a people and troops. “The first can be compared to water,” he writes, “the second to the fish that inhabit it.

And when it came to Afghanistan, the Americans were a fish out of water. Just as the Russians were in the 1980s. Just as the Americans were in Vietnam in the 1960s. And as the French were in Algeria in the 1950s. And the Portuguese in their failed attempts to hold onto their land. African colonies in the 1960s and 1970s. And the Israelis during their occupation of southern Lebanon in the 1980s.

Each time the power intervening in all these places announced that the local insurrection had been definitively defeated, or that a turning point had been crossed, smoldering embers caused new fires.

The Americans thought they had defeated the Taliban at the end of 2001. They were no longer a problem. But the result was actually much more ambiguous.

“Most had basically melted and we didn’t know where they had gone,” Brig wrote. General Stanley McChrystal, quoted by historian Carter Malkasian in a new book, “The American War in Afghanistan”.

In fact, the Taliban have never been beaten. Many had been killed by the Americans, but the rest simply vanished into the mountains and villages, or across the border from Pakistan, which has supported the movement since its inception.

By 2006, they had recovered enough to launch a major offensive. The end of the story played out in the grim and predestined American humiliation that unfolded over the past week – the consecration of American military loss.

“In the long run, all colonial wars are lost,” wrote the historian of Portugal’s misadventures in Africa 20 years ago, at the very moment when the Americans were fatally bogged down in Afghanistan.

The entanglement and ultimate defeat of the superpower for two decades was all the more surprising given that America in the decades leading up to the millennium had been bathed in rhetoric about the supposed “lessons” of Vietnam.

The main one was stated by former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield in the late 1970s: “The cost was 55,000 dead, 303,000 injured, $ 150 billion,” Mansfield told a radio interviewer. “It was unnecessary, unjustified, it was not related to our security or to a vital interest. It was just a mishap in a part of the world that we should have kept our noses out of our noses.

Long before, at the very beginning of the “misadventure”, in 1961, President John F. Kennedy had been warned against Vietnam by an authority no less than Charles de Gaulle. “I predict that you will gradually sink into a bottomless military and political quagmire, no matter how much you spend on men and money,” de Gaulle, the French president, later recalled to Kennedy.

The American ignored him. In words that foreshadowed both the Vietnamese and Afghan debacles, de Gaulle warned Kennedy: “Even if you find local leaders who, in their own best interests, are ready to obey you, the people will not. agree with that, and in fact does not want you.

In 1968, the American generals claimed that the North Vietnamese had been “whipped”, as one of them put it. The problem was that the enemy refused to acknowledge that they had been defeated and continued to fight, as foreign policy analysts James Chace and David Fromkin observed in the mid-1980s. The South Vietnamese ally of the Americans, meanwhile, were corrupt and had little popular support.

The same unholy trinity of realities – boastful generals, an undefeated foe, a weak ally – could have been seen at all times of the US engagement in Afghanistan.

Kennedy should have listened to de Gaulle. The French president, unlike his then and later American counterparts, distrusted generals and did not listen to their flattery, despite being the first French military hero.

At that time he was emerging France from a brutal eight-year colonial war in Algeria, against the fervent wishes of his senior officers and the European settlers there who wanted to maintain colonial rule for more than a hundred years. Its generals have argued, and rightly so, that the resistance of the Algerian guerrillas from within has been largely crushed.

But de Gaulle had the wisdom to see that the fight was not over.

Massed on the borders of Algeria was what the insurgents called “the border army”, later the National Liberation Army, or ALN, now the ANP, or National People’s Army, still the National Liberation Army. dominant element of Algerian political life.

“What motivated de Gaulle was that they still had an army at the borders,” said Benjamin Stora, the main historian of Franco-Algerian relations. “The situation was therefore frozen, militarily. De Gaulle’s reasoning was that if we keep the status quo, we lose a lot. He withdrew the French in a decision that still torments them.

The leader of the ALN, who would become the most important post-independence Algerian leader, Houari Boumediène, embodied tensions in the Algerian revolution – dominant tensions – which will be familiar to Taliban observers: religion and nationalism. The Islamists then turned against him because of socialism. But the massive outpouring of popular grief at Boumediène’s funeral in 1978 was genuine.

Boumediène’s hold on the people stems from his humble origins and his tenacity against the hated French occupier. These elements help explain the virtually flawless infiltration of the Taliban through Afghan territory in the weeks and months leading up to this week’s final victory.

The United States believed it was helping the Afghans fight an avatar of evil, the Taliban, running mate of international terrorism. It was the American perspective and the American war.

But the Afghans, many of them, were not fighting this war. The Taliban are from their towns and villages. Afghanistan, especially in its urban centers, may have changed in the 20 years of American occupation. But the laws promoted by the Taliban – the repressive policies against women – were not so different, if at all, from the time-honored customs of many of these rural villages, especially in southern Pashtun.

“There is resistance to girls’ education in many rural communities in Afghanistan,” a Human Rights Watch report noted soberly last year. And outside the provincial capitals, even in the north, it is rare to see women not wearing the burqa.

This is why, for years, the Taliban have delivered justice, often brutally, in the areas they control, with the assent, even the acceptance, of the local populations. Disputes over property and petty crime cases are adjudicated swiftly, sometimes by religious scholars – and these courts have a reputation for being “incorruptible” to the rotten system of the former government, Human Rights Watch wrote.

It is a system of punishment, often harsh. And despite Taliban protests this week for the forgiveness of those who served the now defunct Afghan administration, they have shown no tolerance in the past. The group’s clandestine prison system, housing large numbers of soldiers and officials, has instilled fear in local populations across Afghanistan.

Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Gani Baradar is said to have received an enthusiastic welcome when he returns this week to the southern city of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban. This should be another food for thought for the superpower, which 20 years ago felt it had no choice but to respond with its military to the crimes of September 11.

For Mr. Malkasian, the historian who was himself a former adviser to America’s top commander in Afghanistan, there is a lesson to be learned from the experience, but it’s not necessarily that America should have stayed. apart.

“If you have to get in, go ahead with the understanding that you can’t be completely successful,” he said in an interview. “Don’t think about it, you are going to solve it or fix it.”