Afghanistan: Twenty years of blood and treasure all lost for nothing
The Afghan government’s fall reflects the most comprehensive failure of Western power in decades. We will now witness one of the worst tragedies for women and girls in modern history.
The fall to the Taliban of Tarin Kowt, for so long Australia’s base in Afghanistan, then of Maazar-i-Sharif, next Jalalabad, with insurgents at the gates of Kabul, shows that Australia’s military presence in Afghanistan for all these years has achieved absolutely nothing.
More than 40 Australian lives, billions of dollars of expenditure and no end of tragedy on the Afghan side, all for nothing, or near enough.
The almost instant collapse of the Afghan government as Americans are withdrawing reflects the most comprehensive and colossal failure of Western power in decades.
Twenty years of blood and treasure, allegedly building up the Afghan forces and the Afghan state, have seen city after city surrendered to the murderous Islamist Taliban, increasingly without the Afghan government forces even putting up a fight.
We are about to witness one of the worst tragedies for women and girls in modern history. From now on, once more, young girls, pre-teens, will be married off to much older men, often enough with multiple wives. Young girls won’t be allowed to go to school, they won’t be allowed to learn to read and write, let alone sing, they won’t be allowed to practice most careers, they won’t be allowed to go the bazaar without the permission, and generally the presence, of their controlling male relative.
Modern feminists might think Western capitalism sexist, but they have very little to say about Islamist regimes, up to and including the Taliban.
That the Afghan government and army are so ineffective after 20 years of Western help does reflect badly on the corruption and poor priorities of so much of Afghan leadership.
But the particular way this debacle has played out also reflects monumental blunders by both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Trump negotiated and authorised an insanely one-sided deal with the Taliban, which greatly enhanced the Taliban’s prestige, and undermined the Afghan government. Biden then implemented that deal.
It’s reasonable that the Americans had to leave at some point. But they should only ever have negotiated their withdrawal with their ally, the Afghan government. Instead they agreed a deal with the Taliban, which imposed insane conditions on the Kabul government, such as having to release Taliban prisoners, simply for the privilege of getting the Taliban to talk to them.
What we have witnessed in these last days is a collapse of confidence and will from the institutions of the Afghan government. This collapse in will was greatly accelerated by Trump and Biden both effectively signalling they expected the Taliban to win, that the Taliban were the people they’d talk to when they wanted to do serious business.
Australia played its part in the collapse of confidence by becoming the first Western power to announce the closure of its embassy in Kabul.
The Biden administration has done well on China policy, but very poorly on the broader Middle East and central Asia. Biden was the only senior person in Barack Obama’s administration to oppose the successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden. Biden also opposed Obama’s temporary redeployment of troops to shore up the Iraqi government as the Islamic State was gathering strength.
Biden continued his bizarrely poor judgment by announcing that the withdrawal of US troops would occur on the 20th anniversary of al-Qa’ida’s September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US.
This was one of the greatest propaganda coups the terrorists have ever won — the US ceding defeat in Afghanistan on the terrorists’ anniversary — created and gift-wrapped for them by Joe Biden.
Australia was right to go into Afghanistan 20 years ago. Australians died in the 9/11 attacks. By sheltering al-Qa’ida, the Taliban made itself the enemy of the US and its allies.
Not only that, a few weeks after the 9/11 atrocities, Osama bin Laden himself nominated Australia as a terrorist target for our crime in helping to separate the East Timorese “from the land of Islam”.
Some of the terrorists who subsequently attacked Australians trained with al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan.
Our troops on the whole performed with great distinction in Afghanistan. As Scott Morrison says, they served in our uniform, under our flag, for our country. We can do nothing but honour them, and remember them, and thank them.
But our real strategic purpose had almost nothing to do with Afghanistan. It was all about maintaining the US alliance. The Rudd government came to office in 2007 with the idea that Australia should withdraw from Afghanistan, but quickly formed the view that this would damage the alliance.
We never had a strategic purpose in Afghanistan, never sought a strategic role and never had any significant influence on allied policy.
And allied policy, as we can see, was a monumental, comprehensive, two-decade, tragic failure.
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