The national security establishment has never cared about Afghanistan
The mission there consistently played second fiddle to beefs with Iran, Russia, China, and Iraq
Matthew Yglesias
Aug 25
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After a rough couple of days, the evacuation of personnel from the Kabul Airport seems to be going a bit more smoothly, and the media’s obsession with trying to punish Joe Biden for defying the national security establishment and ending a hopeless and pointless war should fade away.
The damage to his approval rating will be already done, however, and a message will be sent to future politicians: it doesn’t matter how badly we fail; any effort to admit that we failed and cut out losses will be blamed on you, not us. What I find particularly frustrating about the national security establishment’s hostility to leaving Afghanistan — a policy they opposed during the most opportune moment to do it when Osama bin Laden was killed during Barack Obama’s presidency, a policy they successfully blocked during Trump’s four years, and a policy they’ve been furiously lashing out at Biden for implementing — is that they themselves have never treated Afghanistan as strategically important to the United States. This makes the policy disagreement over Afghanistan vexing and frustrating.
Afghanistan on the map
If you look at a map, for example, you can see that one of the countries next to Afghanistan is Iran. So Iran necessarily has opinions on what happens in Afghanistan and some ability to influence events there. Another country that borders Afghanistan is Pakistan. Again, Pakistan necessarily has opinions on what happens in Afghanistan and some ability to influence events there. One thing about geography is that it’s non-optional. The nation of Iran can’t relocate to someplace else, so it needs to prioritize Afghanistan in its foreign policy. Same for Pakistan. China also shares a small border area with Afghanistan. And while Russia does not border Afghanistan, it continues to have a lot of influence over Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which do border Afghanistan.
The Princeton University economist Atif Mian observed earlier this week that despite huge infusions of foreign aid money into Afghanistan, poverty actually rose because none of the aid went to bolster productive local industries. As Alan Cole notes, all that happened was we blew up a huge and unsustainable trade deficit in Afghanistan which has basically no exports.
Twitter avatar for @AtifRMian
Atif Mian
@AtifRMian
The focus should have been on investments that raise productivity of Afghan farmers e.g., and other inclusive growth measures.
Instead despite aid reaching as high as 50% of GDP, fraction of people living below poverty rose from 34% to 55%
August 23rd 2021
44 Retweets294 Likes
Well, normally countries trade with their neighbors. But the United States insisted from beginning to end on subordinating our interest in Afghanistan to our hostility to Iran, China, and Russia.
But all these regional countries fundamentally care more about Afghanistan than we do. Not because they’re so high-minded, but because they can’t not care. The Pashtun ethnic group lives on both sides of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. There are lots of Uzbek-speaking and Tajik-speaking people in Afghanistan, and Russia has made a continued sphere of influence over places like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan the center of its 21st-century foreign policy.
The United States, by contrast, is more or less free to decide whether or not we care about Afghanistan. Do we want to prioritize Afghanistan in our bilateral relationship with these other countries who have to care about it? The answer the United States has consistently given is no, we don’t want to prioritize it. Going all the way back to 2002, one could debate the wisdom of this choice. Maybe the U.S. should have prioritized Afghanistan instead of labeling Iran part of an axis of evil. Maybe the U.S. should have prioritized Afghanistan instead of invading Iraq. Maybe the U.S. should have prioritized Afghanistan instead of trying to pull Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence.
On the other hand, maybe Afghanistan is a poor land-locked country on the other side of the planet that doesn’t matter much. But what the establishment has tried to sell us on is the idea that Afghanistan doesn’t matter enough to prioritize over any other foreign policy goals, while also being worth fighting a multi-decade war over.
The U.S. and Iran in Afghanistan
Because Iran is adjacent to Afghanistan, they had to think hard about the rise of the Taliban back in the 1990s when Americans mostly didn’t care. And the Iranians were not happy about it. As Barnett Rubin and Sara Batmanglich wrote in an excellent 2008 report on Iran in Afghanistan, alarm about the Taliban caused Iran to broaden its view of the situation and start cooperating with Russia.
When Lakhdar Brahimi became the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan in 1997, he found that the Government of Iran believed that the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia were jointly supporting the Taliban in continuation of their previous policies. Iran consequently saw the Taliban as the spear-point of its strategic opponent and joined with Russia, India, and the Central Asian states in an effort to support and supply the Northern Alliance. Iran moved beyond its ideological support for Shi’a parties to a strategic policy of supporting all anti-Taliban forces. It settled its differences over Tajikistan with Russia, and the two states brokered the 1997 peace agreement in order to assure a consolidated rear for the Northern Alliance.
Now, unfortunately for Afghanistan, the problem with being the location of a regional proxy war is that both sides get to escalate. The Iranians were alarmed by the advance of the Pakistan-backed Taliban, so they pitched in with the Russians to help the Northern Alliance. But because the traditional diplomatic alignment in the region is Russia + India vs. Pakistan + China, this only made the Pakistanis see the Northern Alliance as a stalking horse for encirclement by India. So they stepped up their support for the Taliban.
Yadda yadda yadda, some years later 9/11 happens and suddenly the world’s only superpower is intensely interested in Afghanistan.
The U.S. and Iran have obviously traditionally had a bad relationship. But now we were swooping in to help Iran’s side in the war against the Taliban. The Iranians wanted to secure their interests in Afghanistan, and I think hoped that this whole series of events might make the American government look more favorably on Iran. But even though limited cooperation was happening, George W. Bush put Iran on the “axis of evil” list. And throughout the Bush presidency, America’s view was that it was fine for Pakistan and Israel to have nuclear weapons, but unacceptable for Iran. Since the United States was trying hard to squeeze Iran diplomatically, economically, and militarily, the Iranians naturally came to think it would be a bad idea to have a stable, U.S.-aligned country bordering them.
Iran wanted to get Hamid Karzai to sign a strategic declaration with Iran, which the United States did not want him to do since, to us, fighting Iran is more important than stabilizing Afghanistan. Karzai tried to tell the Iranians he couldn’t exactly stop the United States from using Afghanistan-based troops against Iran no matter what he declared.
Back to Rubin and Batmanglich:
The Iranians said that they knew that, but would like such a statement anyway, and that without such a declaration, President Karzai would not be welcome in Tehran for the August 2005 inauguration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A phone call to President Karzai from a cabinet officer in Washington for- bade the Afghan President from signing any such declaration or attending the inauguration. A few months later, in January 2006, another phone call forbade Karzai to travel to Tehran to sign eco- nomic agreements.
In early 2007, Washington reported that Iran had started to supply sophisticated arms to the Taliban in western Afghanistan. Iran had also increased political and military support to the former Northern Alliance, which had formed the core of the opposition National Front in parliament.
I’m not here to praise or to condemn Bush’s choice, simply to observe that he made a choice and the choice was not widely criticized at the time by the national security community. The view that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is fine and Israel’s nuclear arsenal is more than fine, but that Iran is an enemy state that must be squeezed on all sides and that this squeezing is more important than cooperating in Afghanistan is conventional wisdom in the United States. Naturally, the Iranians do not want to be squeezed, so they try to prevent the emergence of a stable U.S.-backed regime on their border. And America decided it didn’t care enough about Afghanistan to change its calculus.
The U.S. and Russia in Afghanistan
Russia’s actual interests in Afghanistan were hazier than Iran’s. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan border Afghanistan, but they aren’t ruled by Moscow anymore. Still, Russia maintains a kind of sphere of influence over those countries, so Russian views are relevant to their policies.
But Russia was also important to Afghanistan because of the so-called Northern Route for shipping supplies into the country.
This is not the best way to get goods into Afghanistan.
But the United States could not ship supplies across Iran (see prior section), so the only available alternative to the Northern Route was to truck things in through Pakistan. Most supplies took the southern route, but the Northern Route also conveyed an important minority of supplies. The Northern Route was also important diplomatically because it provided more flexibility vis-a-vis Pakistan.
Back in November of 2011, for example, a U.S. airstrike near the Afghan-Pakistan border killed 24 Pakistani troops.
The Pakistani government was not thrilled with that and threatened to shut down American shipping to Afghanistan. As Viola Gienger and Haris Anwar reported for Bloomberg at the time:
Pakistani authorities responded to the Nov. 25 air strike with expressions of outrage and by closing border crossings into Afghanistan that the coalition relies on to ferry supplies from a port to the land-locked war zone. Supply trucks for American-led forces in Afghanistan backed up on Pakistani roads near the border after the closure, leaving drivers and their cargo vulnerable to attack by Islamic guerrillas.
U.S. military officials have said their forces can sustain operations in Afghanistan for weeks in case of such a shutdown.
“There are other supply routes,” Little said. “The war effort continues.”
U.S. General William Fraser told Congress in July the Pakistan route was carrying 35 percent of “non-lethal” supplies for American-led forces in Afghanistan. The military has worked to shift to a northern route through Russia and Central Asia, Fraser said.
Then in March of 2014, a whole separate geopolitical drama that had been playing out in Ukraine came to a head as Russia invaded the country. The United States could have responded to that by saying “wow, Pakistan is an unreliable partner in Afghanistan and our only alternative to them is Russia. Especially since we’ve already alienated Iran, we should really prioritize Afghanistan in our bilateral relationship with Russia. Supporting anti-Russian parties in Ukraine was a mistake, and we should just let the Russians do what they want.”
But of course the Obama administration did not say that. And nobody was saying at the time that they should say that. Because the American national security community doesn’t think Afghanistan is important.
So Russia kept the Northern Route open long enough for most NATO equipment to leave the country, and then in 2015, they closed the Northern Route. Now logistics were harder, and the only way to supply our anti-Taliban efforts was by working with Pakistan.
But Pakistan supports the Taliban!
The upside to picking Pakistan rather than Russia or Iran as our partner in Afghanistan is that we don’t have a lot of extraneous fights with Pakistan. Iran, by contrast, is an enemy to Israel and Saudi Arabia. Russia is a geopolitical rival in central and eastern Europe. In Cold War politics, the U.S. traditionally sided with Pakistan over India. So that was the easiest, most uncomplicated partnership for a war against the Taliban.
But Pakistan was on the Taliban’s side.
Remember, Iran was inspired to start cooperating with Russia against the Taliban because they saw the Taliban as a proxy for Pakistan.
Pakistan was overtly sponsoring the pre-9/11 Taliban, cut it off after the terrorist attack, but was widely seen as resuming support for the Taliban once it became clear the insurgency was staying in the field. I’ve never totally grasped all their motives for this, but after years of speculation that they were supporting the Taliban, Wikileaks revealed a ton of American government communication saying Pakistan was supporting the Taliban.
But this was hardly a secret. In his memoir “Decision Points,” George W. Bush writes that Pakistan was consistently backing the Taliban throughout his presidency:
In return for Pakistan’s cooperation, we lifted the sanctions, designed Pakistan a major non-NATO ally, and heled fund its counterterrorism operations. We also worked with Congress to provide $3 billion in economic aid and opened our markets to more Pakistani goods and services.
Over time, it became clear that Musharraf either would not or could not fulfill all his promises. Part of the problem with Pakistan’s obsession with India. In almost every conversation we had, Musharraf accused India of wrongdoing. Four days after 9/11, he told me the Indians were “trying to equate us with terrorists and trying to influence your mind.”
Obama and Trump also wrestled with this problem which was objectively very difficult. We couldn’t cooperate with the Russians in Afghanistan because Ukraine was more important. And we couldn’t cooperate with the Iranians in Afghanistan because Saudi Arabia and Israel were more important. So the cooperation had to be with Pakistan. And every administration went back and forth with Pakistan over this, some carrots and some sticks, but at the end of the day Pakistan is right next to Afghanistan and can’t leave. For whatever reason, they decided that backing the Taliban there was a good idea; it was a considered decision reached by people intimately familiar with the region and deeply invested in it.
They didn’t change their mind just because George W. Bush asked nicely.
This was probably all correct
I disagree on the merits with the idea to prioritize fighting Iran over cooperating with them on Afghanistan. But that’s because I think the underlying fight with Iran is misguided. The hawks’ judgment that, objectively, Afghanistan isn’t important or worth making sacrifices in other areas for makes sense.
On Russia, obviously, Europe is a bigger deal than Afghanistan.
And I don’t have any magic solutions to the Pakistan issue that eluded everyone else. The way to deal with Pakistani support for the Taliban would have been to be less dependent on their cooperation, which would have meant prioritizing making nice with Iran and Russia, which would have meant accommodating their interests elsewhere.
Successive administrations didn’t want to do that and the national security conventional wisdom was that they shouldn’t do that. But that’s the underlying weirdness of the national security community’s insistence that Afghanistan was worth thousands of troops, decades of war, and tens of billions in annual expenditures. They don’t think it’s important! They just have an idiosyncratic view that this kind of resource expenditure — resources that could be put to good use either at home or abroad — is somehow no big deal.
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