US President Joe Biden’s announcement that he is pulling out every one of the 2,200 American troops from Afghanistan by September 11—on the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Centre bombings—may have set off a storm of criticism in Washington, with South Asia expert Christine Fair’s biting tweet “ISI wins, Afghans lose” being the most telling epitaph of America’s longest war.
Ms Fair is referring to the elephant in the room—Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence and the Pakistani army, demonstrably adept at playing the US off against new mentor Russia and debt-trapper China, and controlling the Taliban mullahs based in the Balochistan capital, Quetta, which now believes that with the US in retreat, it is poised to reclaim the Kabul that it lost in 2001.Biden’s September withdrawal plan that scraps his predecessor Donald Trump’s timeline of May 1 much to the chagrin of the Taliban, which had agreed to a cessation of hostilities in the landmark February 2020 agreement, is a marked shift of priorities.
It gives primacy, not to the policing of Afghanistan, but to the new challenge to American power posed by a rising China and Russia in the Indo-Pacific and Europe.US Special Peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has been all but tasked with handing Afghanistan to his newfound Taliban protégés, with whom he has built a strong relationship, being the prime mover behind prying a section of the Taliban out of Pakistan’s clutches, finding them a new headquarters in the Qatari capital of Doha while helping them build international legitimacy in world capitals.
Khalilzad must quiet the Taliban’s mistrust of Biden and bring them back to the negotiating table at the forthcoming Istanbul conference on April 24, where they have been promised a bigger say in an interim arrangement; albeit once Afghan president Ashraf Ghani is eased out the door. Simultaneously, he is dangling the carrot of restoring billions of dollars in security assistance to Pakistan if it continues to play good cop with the Taliban. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s confabulations with Pakistani Army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa are no accidents. Neither are the sudden protests by Pakistan based Tehreek-Labbaik-Pakistan. The TLP, a lever, a pressure tactic to keep Pakistan in line.
As Biden goes where even Trump hasn’t gone before, the disquiet in Washington’s security circles is understandable. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell has called it “a grave mistake”, a “retreat in the face of an enemy that has not yet been vanquished … abandoning our partners and retreating in the face of the Taliban”.The ‘Exit Afghanistan’ strategy, first aired by former President Barack Obama in 2009, repackaged by his successor Donald Trump in 2019, has not just been years in the making, but is 10 years too late.
The original provocation for US troops being air-dropped into Afghanistan on 7 October 2001 as part of Operation Enduring Freedom was to hunt down Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to his refuge in Afghanistan after he brazenly claimed responsibility for the hijacking of four commercial airliners that crashed into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. Of the 19 hijackers led by Egyptian Mohammed Atta, nary a one was Afghan.And if the provocation for sending troops into Afghanistan was to smoke bin Laden out of his hideout after Taliban leader Mullah Omar refused to hand over his ‘guest’, why did President George W Bush’s forces not pursue the Al Qaeda leader as he made his escape from the Tora Bora mountain caves into Pakistan? It was left to a handful of low-level Afghan commanders to corral his close associates. Bin Laden escaped on horseback.
Again, from 2006, as Taliban insurgents, given a new lease of life by Islamabad’s ‘deep state’, stepped up attacks on the US-NATO forces along its contiguous borders with Pakistan, why did American forces desist from crossing the border to attack their safe havens in that nation? They didn’t hold back when they tracked down bin Laden to the Pakistan garrison town of Abbottabad. And yet, they did not pull out of Afghanistan once they were done with the killing of bin Laden on 1 May 2011.
In retrospect, the flaws inherent in America’s Afghanistan strategy were glaring from the start. What began as a plan to crush Al Qaeda and run the Taliban out of the country turned into Bush’s wholly impractical Marshall Plan to rebuild Afghanistan. The appeal of Western style parliament and polls, limited to Afghan émigrés returning home in their thousands, and to the young, educated middle class, particularly women, who revelled in the end of the arcane misogyny of Taliban misrule that kept young girls out of schools and the workplace, didn’t cut any ice beyond the cities. Successive US presidents vacillated on troop reductions and troop upsurges, helping the Taliban stoke anger in the countryside against the presence of foreign troops. The reality on the ground is complicated by the Taliban’s refusal to disavow links to Al Qaeda, Daesh and ISIS-Khorasan.
It is this back story that must inform Biden’s new exit plan. For India, which saw Al Qaeda draw educated young Muslims from Kerala into the terror mesh, with a doctor being named as the main suicide bomber at the Sikh Gurudwara bombing in Kabul last year, it may be time to rethink its strategy on Pakistan, shed its antipathy to the Taliban and work with Khalilzad, the man Delhi loves to hate, in crafting a blueprint for an Afghanistan that can transition to a self-sustaining government.
The 20-year-long US presence in Afghanistan may have been flawed from the get go. But despite the unsettling parallels to the Soviet withdrawal, India and the world would greatly benefit if the exit does not open the doors to another ‘Caliphate of Terror’.
NEENA GOPAL
Senior journalist and expert on South Asia
(The author has written the book ‘The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi’)
(neenagopal@gmail.com)