Carter Malkasian's American War in Afghanistan.
Carter Malkasian, The American War in Afghanistan: A History, (Oxford: OUP, 2020).
The American War in Afghanistan had the ill-fortune to be completed just months before the withdrawal of the Americans and the subsequent fall of Kabul. It nevertheless offers a methodical and gripping account of twenty years of failures; Careful examination of tribal loyalties, military intrigue, and state-department intransigence are contrasted with barely concealed anger and grief at allies, friends, and opportunities lost. For Malkasian, then, this was a war experienced on the ground as much as in the archives and in conversation with the actors. It is, most strikingly, a failed war.
Yet this is not an insider account of the type that proliferated during and since the Trump administration. Malkasian trained foremost as a historian; he has a doctorate from Oxford, speaks fluent Pashto, and spent long periods on the ground in Afghanistan during the conflict, where he took pride in dispensing with the security apparatus that he repeatedly hints separated American and allied Afghan alike from people on the ground. This was not, of course, without its risks. Despite The American War’s academic register and focus (published by Oxford University Press and framed by the author’s careful attention to American concerns at the explicit expense of allied involvement, Malkasian’s dispassionate account of policy, attack, and expenditure is punctuated by personal accounts of the tragedies of war. Friends, acquaintances, and colleagues die needlessly from bullet, drone strike, R.P.G., or suicide attack. Yet while it consistently queries what it was that America did in Afghanistan, it leaves permanently open the question of how the Afghanistan shaped and will shape America.
First, a relatively brief and broad outline. Malkasian begins by giving a brief overview of Russian and British manoeuvring that took place in what is modern-day Afghanistan during the 1800s. In short, the Durrani Empire that emerged in the 18th century was replaced by the Durrani Emirate in the mid 19th, the lifetime of which was dominated by the heretofore mentioned intrigues of the British and Russians. Of particular interest is the 1880 treaty which saw Afghan policy subsumed under Anglo-Indian control. This ‘arrangement’ lasted till the 1919 treaty, which ended the third Afghan war, saw Afghan independence re-established. In his next act, Amanullah Khan reformed the state as a Kingdom in 1926. Emir Khan was succeeded by his son, who was in turn ousted by his cousin in a (relatively) bloodless coup d’etat in 1973. The Kingdom of Afghanistan now at an end, the Republic was to last a mere five years. Daoud Khan sought to accelerate the industrialisation of the country and consolidate his own power, especially by promoting links to American, Soviet, and Petro-state governments. Russia, however, began to suspect the so-called Republic of aligning with America and getting ready to shed its non-aligned status. They were nevertheless surprised when Communist factions in the Afghan military managed to overthrow the Republic in ’78. At the head of what became known as the Saur Revolution was Hafizullah Amin. Though Amin was quickly able to create a soviet-aligned state, this came at the cost of thousands of executions and profound social instability along broad ethnic lines. Ironically for Amin, Brezhnev’s reaction to the wave of violence was one of horror. Fearful that Amin would either cause the country to collapse or – worse – enter a pact with the Americans, he ordered the Soviet Union to intervene.
Much like the Americans’ invasion some twenty years later, the Soviets’ assassination of Amin and installation of a friendly government came with supposed support of rival internal factions. The Saur Revolution had left most of the country in open rebellion. Just as Amin had staged a coup against Taraki from within the Khalq faction, citing brutality and a cult of personality, so too did the Soviets replace Amin with Babrak Karmal from the moderate Parcham faction. It was in therefore as the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan that the soviet-backed government waged war against its own people. The Soviet-Afghan war (1979-1989) consequently took place between the soviet-backed state against increasingly western-backed Islamic and (surprisingly) Maoist militia. This placed the West (capitalised to indicate its loose relation to geography) as the backers of Islamists and Maoists (the gallant people of Afghanistan praised in the ending credits of Rambo III). Even by the standards of what the country had and would suffer, this civil war was particularly bloody. Around ten percent of the population is thought to have been killed by the time the Soviets withdrew in 1989. This timing is indicative. It is widely thought that the social and economic costs of the war were contributing factors to the Soviet Union’s dissolution.
After the withdrawal of Soviet backing of the Afghan government, it took until 1992 for the DRA to fall. Thus began another four years of violence, which ended only when the Taliban (students) – Pashtuns from the south and east of the country who had been educated in madrasas - emerged victorious from the collapsed state to take Kabul, execute the former President, and solidify their power by imposing relative peace under Mullah Omar. Fast forward to 2001. In the wake of 9/11, the United States demanded the Taliban give up Osama Bin Laden and other high ranking members of Al Qaeda, who were known to be based in Afghanistan. When the Taliban refused – citing customs of hospitality and unwillingness to believe that Al Qaeda would have broken the same custom by attacking America - the Americans launched a wave of strikes, followed by a minimal invasion force allied with the Northern Alliance – a remnant of the mujahedeen fighters of the previous civil war. Kabul fell quickly. Mullah Omar, however, would live on in hiding until 2013, sending missives to the reformed Taliban leadership in Pakistan.
American War’s reveals the intermeshing networks of patronage and loyalty that spanned, connected, and frustrated America and Afghanistan alike. Just as CENTCOM, State Department, U.N, and White House negotiated loyalties and policy, so too did Taliban, Pakistan, and Al Qaeda. Malkasian identifies the Taliban’s refusal to hand over those responsible for 9/11, which would have broken with the Pashtunwali tradition of offering refuge to guests, as an equal to the terrorist act itself in sparking the war. Artillery and boots on the ground followed, but never in enough numbers, and never on their own. If there was a common thread on the competing influences that made up the American side over the two decades of the conflict it was that the country’s presence in Afghanistan was not a nation building exercise. Americans were not, they insisted, another imperial conqueror. Yet just as the Taliban refused to hand over Al Qaeda’s leadership, so too did the Americans refuse to negotiate with the Taliban over the future of the country. For their part, the Taliban’s attitude to the Americans and the American-backed government in Kabul was clear: the Americans were occupiers and Kabul was illegitimate. There could be no negotiations with Karzai just as there could be no negotiations with America without a full withdrawal. In 2013, however, the outlook for a democratic Afghanistan had looked promising. Recruitment targets for police and army had reached what would be their zenith of 352,000, and the local police reached an additional 30,000. Afghanistan seemed to be on the verge of a peaceful and relatively democratic exchange of power as Karzai prepared to step down after a second term. The Taliban had been driven to the margins: waves of drone strikes kept them in hiding, on the mountains, in remote villages, or deep in Pakistan. Why, then, were the Taliban able to turn the tide to the point that they were able to retake Kabul in ’21 with such little resistance? Even without the book asking this question directly, the answer can be found in the careful traces of tribal warfare and American confusion. Even at its apparent strongest, the Afghan state was a thin veneer over tribal, ethnic, and religious rivalries. Though on paper it held Kabul and most major cities, its ability to impose its own sovereignty would prove fragile.
The first problem was that of ethnic and tribal rivalries. We must recall that one of the major reasons the Taliban emerged in the early 1990s was their promise to erase tribal differences and loyalties and enforce a bloody peace over competing warlords. With the Taliban driven to the margins, Tajik and Pashtun tensions and identities rekindled. Tajiks believed that they had a natural right to rule. When either side gained any influence with the Americans or money from the government, it would be apportioned in defence of their own interests and pockets and only very rarely against the Taliban. A repeated issue for the Americans meanwhile was American inability to identify Taliban, and their subsequent reliance on local informants. Unfortunately, as we will see, local sympathy was very much with the Taliban. Air strikes and raids were often called against competing factions or tribes, with the Americans only discovering that they’d attacked what were heretofore allies after the fact. American power was therefore allied not to the government as a whole, but to factions within the government. American rhetoric of protection against the Taliban rang hollow when they time and time again proved unable to even differentiate between supposed friend and foe. Unsurprisingly, infighting and manoeuvring had a deleterious effect on the functioning of the government itself. When the Tajik ‘Bismullah Khan was promoted to minister of interior in 2010 and minister of defence in 2012’ the president granted him leeway he denied ‘to any Pashtun.’ (328). Indeed, his Pashtun vice-president was permanently kept in the background. This would have been problematic enough, but since the military and police lacked a coherent central command hierarchies, personalities, and vendettas continued to clash. The idea that there was at any point a ‘liberal, democratic’ or even ‘burgeoning and flourishing’ government in Kabul was laughable. To the average Afghan, the question of peace and prosperity, let alone religious legitimacy, could never have easily lay with the novel Afghan state.
A wider problem, however, was that while the Taliban’s motivation was clear – occupiers out of Afghanistan, the return of the Emirate, the government forces were unwilling to fight and die for the government. A common refrain from government soldiers and police officers when asked was one of apathy or pragmatism; the need to earn a salary, the lack of other jobs. More problematic was their sympathetic attitude to the Taliban, hostility to American forces, and outright distrust of the government they were supposed to be fighting to protect. Little surprise, then, that willingness to fight – let alone die – for the government was minimal. Time and time again, a handful of Taliban were able to capture posts, weapons, territory without receiving more than a handful of return fire. When government forces did resist, it was at the behest of individual and often tribal leaders who inspired personal – rather than organisational – loyalty. A loyalty that of course ended when these leaders were inevitably killed in action. One of the most striking descriptions of the state of the country by Malkasian is how while Kabul-backed areas required striking displays of military power, you could travel for miles in Taliban controlled territory without seeing an armed man. Nothing quite exemplifies the difficulty Kabul had in persuading the country that it alone held legitimacy and could impose peace.
Hamid Karzai exemplifies the extent to which Afghanistan was failed by appearances over realities. To Americans, Karzai appeared fully westernised. Despite descent from Durrani and years spent as a Mujahadeen during the Afgan-Soviet war:
Americans would sometimes miscast him as Western in thinking because of his English and [apparent] support for democracy. Karzai was Afghan, having lived his life in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. He was adept at tribal politics – patient and skilled at mediation, acceptant of patronage as a tool. He was oddly unwarlike, preferring diplomacy and disdaining violence [with a colleague of Gandhi as his role model]. (67).
Americans saw an international and somewhat urbane intellectual who shared a political teleology for Afghanistan’s new state. Karzai held no such illusions. He was perfectly aware that dependence on the Americans was a block to legitimacy. He knew what his countrymen did: A true Afghan leader would never be at the beck and call of an invader. Yet Karzai and Kabul were propped up by an invader, and to keep hold of power Karzai had to rely on the tribal affiliations and alliances – all of which not only ran counter to the ideas the Americans had of a modern liberal state, but actively resisted American attempts to create one. In other words, America believed Karzai could build a westernised state because he acted like a westerner and so ensured his government would and could not fail. Karzai, on the other hand, understood that just because his government had the aesthetics of a secular democracy, Afghans did not share common cultural assumptions with Americans. Rather, power was continually contested, tribal, and contingent: Afghanistan was always in danger of splitting into warring factions, and that western assumptions of nation and state were not universal.
This was even more painfully apparent during the 2014 elections. In brief, Karzai had agreed not to stand for another term. The two competitors were the Western-Educated Pashtun Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah. Both had served in Rabbani’s government. Ghani had been an Anthropology professor at Johns Hopkins before working with the World Bank. A technocrat and liberal, with western-aligned aims for the state, he’d come fourth in the 2009 elections. Abdullah, on the other hand, had trained in Afghanistan as an ophthalmologist. Unlike Ashraf, Abdullah was Tajik, and had run against Karzai in 2009. In that election, there had been widespread allegations of voter fraud, and though the Americans had pressured Kabul for a second round run-off, Abdullah had refused to participate leading to Karzai’s victory by default. Although now without Karzai[1] 2014 had seen the resurgence of allegations of voter fraud, intimidation, and manipulation.[2] The risk of ethnic tension rose further when First Vice President Fahim died suddenly from a heart attack. It was via Fahim that Karzai had been able to negotiate an alliance between Tajik and Pashtun, and it was via Fahim that he maintained ‘an effective alliance with the powerful Panjshiri bloc’ (335). When Abdullah had run in 2009, Fahim’s influence had meant that the Tajiks had not united behind Abdullah. now however there was no such restraint, and Tajik and Pashtun voter blocs diverged further. Then there were the internal divisions. Despite – or perhaps because – of this split, even a wave of Taliban attacks could not dampen turnout. While Ghani was just one of many Pashtun candidates, Abdullah’s voting bloc nearly propelled him over the 50% threshold required to avoid a second round. When it came to the question of a second round two months later however, there was enough time for these questions to intensify. So worried was Karzai about the prospect of civil war on tribal lines that the Americans pressured the candidates to come to some agreement. An agreement did occur. Yet the details of the arrangement, where Ghani became president and Abdullah ‘CEO’, was never fully resolved. Both parties assumed the other was the junior, and both parties saw the apportioning of offices as a chance to reward supporters. As the Quetta Shura – i.e the Taliban ruling council in Pakistani exile – commented, quoting a Pashtun proverb - ‘other people’s problems are free entertainment.’
The sense Malkasian conveys is one of missed opportunities and unwillingness to define terms for fear of having to deal with their consequences. If Afghanistan was in some sense the ‘good’ or ‘righteous’ war – something Malkasian treats with a hint of irony – until 2006, then chances abounded to quit with something approaching dignity. Feelers were put out to the Taliban at several points, only for either America, Kabul, or the Taliban to back out. There might have been several points where the United States could have withdrawn with something approaching dignity. Then again, as we shall see, American self-deceptions were a continual stumbling block. As it stood, once the United States decided to back an interim government, and once that government refused either to commit to governing outside of tribal lines or to wholly reject American influence, then all the Taliban had to do was sit back and wait for the divisions to play themselves out. Once again, the historical echoes here are telling – yet Malkasian is unwilling to draw these out. Taking one step back, we can see that the Americans were almost fanciful in their belief that they were different from all the other empires that had attempted to ‘stabilise’ or influence Afghanistan. Just like the Soviets, and just like the British, they believed that their way of thinking was the natural progression of nation-building, and that by sheer force of will, they could ‘help’ Afghanistan correct their detours and get back on the historical path to enlightenment. What he is willing to do is to go into almost excruciating detail at the confusion and rivalries on the ground. At times, indeed, this descends into farce. It was only during the 2014 elections that it seemed to occur to Americans that yes, indeed, Taliban acted out of believe and that no, they were not acting as the result of economic or psychosexual forces.
No surprise then that the ferocity of Afghanistan came as a surprise to the Americans. Partly, this was influenced by Iraq; itself a marginal presence in Malkasian’s work. A more acute cause can be found in Mullah Dadullah Lang. After the fall of Kabul in 2001, Mullah Omar had fled to Pakistan. While the Haqqani network – a loosely affiliated offshoot of the Taliban with links back to the Afghan-soviet war – started reprisals in southern Afghanistan almost immediately, it was Dadullah who became Omar’s second in command and directed Taliban resistance. Dadullah was renowned for his piety and cruelty, neither ‘merciful or kind’. He was also explicit in his support for Al Qaeda and the concept of a global jihad. It was Dadullah who sought to re-enlist Taliban who had sought to return to normal life in the wake of the American invasion, and it was Dadullah who set up training camps. More importantly, it was Dadullah who ‘contacted Iraqi insurgents’ and brought them to Pakistani tribal areas to train new recruits. Propaganda flourished. It was also Dadullah who introduced IEDs and suicide bombings to Afghanistan.
Previously, Afghans had been unimpressed with the idea of killing themselves, let alone innocent lives along the way. The soviet invasion spurred the idea of martyrdom, but not suicide bombing. That came with Al Qaeda. Even then the Taliban abstained from the tactic until after 2001. Dadullah presented writings from arab religious leaders to justify suicide attacks. […] Omar approved of Dadullah’s extremism at this time, believing that jihad demanded hard action. The suicide bombing campaign was officially launched in January 2004. (118).
Ironically then, it was American involvement in Iraq that prompted the alignment of Al Qaeda and Taliban on these issues. Of course, this came as a shock to the Americans – they were unable to understand that geopolitics was something that happened to them rather than something that was at their beck and call. What was in effect the second or third order effects of American action elsewhere in the world was just used as proof either of the intrinsic hostility, wildness, or ungratefulness – and of the overriding necessity of the American presence to safeguard liberal democracy.
It was also as an offshoot of American and Syrian action in the middle east that the so-called Islamic State arrived in Afghanistan. Perhaps surprisingly, Taliban and ISIS did not form an alliance. Taliban saw ISIS as a rival power centre, but also understood them to be cruel in their attitude to justice. The idea of a global caliphate, while distasteful to some Taliban who thought the ejection of Americans and the restoration of the Emirate of Afghanistan sufficient, was nevertheless deeply attractive to disenchanted Talibs who saw the slickly produced media and salaries that sometimes reached ten times the levels Taliban could offer as an attractive alternative. The influence of ISIS on the Taliban cannot therefore be underestimated, but neither could the accidental influence of American involvement in the middle east and Afghanistan in the intensification of the violence.
This is not to say of course that America is straightforwardly responsible. Indeed, as we have seen, a cadre of American politicians were horrified at the idea that what they might be doing in Iraq and Afghanistan was in any sense a project of nation building. That was something an empire did, and the Americans were liberators – not occupiers, let alone an empire. But the fact is that that is what they were and what they were doing, and by refusing to either shit or get off the pot only made things worse than the alternatives they feared. Surprisingly, Bush did at first seem to understand the gravity of removing the Taliban. In 2002 Bush ‘quite out of the blue, called for a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute. The speech implied he wanted to rebuild Afghanistan like the United States had rebuilt Western Europe after the second World War.’ Yet despite Bush later asserting the ‘responsibility’ to replace the Taliban, ‘he did not follow up on his speech. Rumsfeld disregarded it and forbade commanders from pursuing nation building’ (83). Yet what did persist was the idea that America was somehow there to preserve the rights of Afghan women. Taliban treatment of women had long horrified America, and the American public, Malkasian asserts, linked Taliban terrorism with misogyny.
This became something between a raison d’etre and mythos for American involvement. Despite some funding, and broad international agreement that the protection of Afghan women mandated some sort of nation building, the willingness for that nation-building never materialised. Yet neither did it fully disappear. Indeed, the question of education for women – the path of least resistance thanks to the Qur’an’s defence of education for both sexes – became a reason for troops to stay in Afghanistan. The little progress made after 2001 – of women in parliament, female education, women’s rights – was tenuous. A major site of conflict was in the American-backed push for enshrinement of women’s rights in law. Since both sides knew it would never get through parliament, America pushed for Karzai to sign legislation criminalising violence against women himself, thereby bypassing the need for parliamentary ratification. Nevertheless, what could be decreed by the president could be rescinded by a future president. The bill was therefore introduced into parliament for ratification, where it lay in stasis from 2009 – 2013. The problem was one of Islamic law. The Afghanistan constitution decreed that what was contrary to Islamic law could not be Afghan law. The question then was whether the law was Islamic. Several speakers claimed it was against the Qu’ran, but discussion only lasted 15 minutes before the speaker stopped the debate and abandoned the motion. Yet because it had been signed by Karzai, the law was both in effect and had an effective self-destruct timer thanks to American promises to leave by 2014, when both law and its (female) proposers could be rescinded and attacked. The main problem, Malkasian argues, is one of differing attitudes to what constituted respect: Afghan attitudes were such that Western attitudes to women were seen as grossly offensive to female dignity. Once again, American refusal to either leave straight away or commit to long term protection promoted instability. As later events would prove, it only served to place Afghan women who aligned with liberal ideas as part of an illiberal polity in greater danger.
The wider tone of defeat points to a more worrying spectre at the back of Malkasian’s mind. The rise of populism in the United States, or to be more accurate its return after a near century of hibernation, suggests that as much as Afghanistan became the graveyard of British and Soviet empires, it could yet mark the fall of America. American involvement in Afghanistan ended abruptly in 2021 after over a decade of drawn-out half-promises. Ghani and Karzai fled. Cities fell without a fight. Kabul fell faster than anyone thought possible, and within days retaliation had begun against those who had worked with the previous government. Yet if American involvement in Afghanistan has come to an end, Afghan involvement in America remains a possibility. Whether the Taliban would risk American return by permitting terrorist attacks to be staged from the country is, frankly, unlikely. The diplomatic ties have begun to grow again, and despite abandonment of earlier pledges to respect the right of women and girls to education and a life free of summary violence, the hard-won rights have faltered as schools close and laws abandoned. Even if the Taliban persist within their borders however, the second-order effects of American involvement have already been kindled. There are young men now in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and throughout the middle east for whom their earliest political memory is the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is an open wound that will not easily heal. Equally troubling, however, is the question of what effect the return of American troops to the United States has and will have. Just as the memory of the American war in Afghanistan and the countless deaths by drone and suicide bomber will linger throughout the Islamic world, so too will it linger in the minds of American servicemen and their families. The question of how to reintegrate these men and women, and their valorisation or ignorance, has already had influence in British political discourse. It remains to be seen how this will play out in America.
[1] Karzai publically refused to back any candidate, privately noting that although he wished to support his brother, such a backing would clash with the modern democratic norms he wished Afghanistan to absorb. Nevertheless, he urged Zalmay Rassoul, a cosmopolitan Pashtun polyglot, medical doctor, & nephew of Amunullah Khanm who had served as Karzai’s Foreign Minister from 2010. He also privately pledged Ghani his support and urged him to choose the Uzbeck Warlord Abdur Dostum as his running-mate.
[2] The Americans had been a heavy presence in the previous elections, leading to (we assume) unfounded allegations of foreign interference. They now took a detached role, which of course led to more opportunity for innovations in voter security.