Michael Cox **Editor**

**Afghanistan:** Long War, Forgotten Peace

the West's ignominious withdrawal in August 2021.

Afghanistan has been in the headlines for many years – but tragically for all the wrong reasons. First invaded by the Soviets in 1979, the country experienced the trauma of civil war followed by yet another intervention, this time by the United States and allies, which ended with

and why, and what the future holds for the country now the Taliban are

Multidisciplinary in approach, this book features analysts from a variety of academic disciplines, including policy-makers and public intellectuals – many with direct experience of having lived and worked in Afghanistan. It explains why the Taliban finally triumphed, what this means for Afghan society, and how competing actors in the international system have reacted to the Taliban takeover. Questions include whether the West's withdrawal represented a major or only a temporary setback for NATO and the United States, and whether and how there can be any amelioration of the situation in Afghanistan itself. The country and its people face multiple interrelated challenges, including those of women's rights, the drugs economies and human trafficking and

This volume is essential reading for all those concerned with what happens in Afghanistan over the coming months and years, the consequences for the Afghan people – and for the rest of the world.

Afghanistan: Long

**Afghanistan:**

Long War, Forgotten Peace

Michael Cox

examines multiple dimensions of what happened

**Edited by** Michael Cox

LSE Public Policy Review Series

War, Forgotten Peace

back in power.

exploitation.

## **Afghanistan Long War, Forgotten Peace**

edited by *Michael Cox*

Published by LSE Press 10 Portugal Street London WC2A 2HD press.lse.ac.uk

Text © The Authors, 2022 Book first published 2022 Previous versions of many of the chapters were first published in LSE Public Policy Review (2022), Volume 2, Issue 3: *Afghanistan*. https://ppr.lse.ac.uk/8/volume/2/issue/3/

Cover design by Diana Jarvis Cover photo: Women in Kabul (2011) by Ben Stephen-Cox © Ben Stephen-Cox, reproduced with permission

Print and digital versions typeset by Siliconchips Services Ltd.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.31389/lsepress.afg

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Suggested citation: Cox, M. (ed.) 2022. *Afghanistan: Long War, Forgotten Peace*. London: LSE Press.

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# **LSE Public Policy Review Series**

This series republishes in book form selected issues on interdisciplinary themes from the LSE Public Policy Review journal.

#### *Series Editors*

Professor Timothy Besley, Department of Economics, LSE Dr Tania Burchardt, Department of Social Policy, LSE Professor Nicola Lacey, LSE Law School, LSE Professor Susanna Mourato, Pro-Director of Research, LSE Professor Andrés Velasco, School of Public Policy, LSE

#### *Titles*

Wellbeing: Alternative Policy Perspectives (2022) Populism: Origins and Alternative Policy Responses (2022) Afghanistan: Long War, Forgotten Peace (2022)

## **Contents**

## **Editor**

**Michael Cox** is a Founding Director of LSE IDEAS and Emeritus Professor in International Relations at LSE. He was appointed to a Chair in International Relations at the School in 2002. His more recent publications include a new edition of EH Carr's *The Twenty Years' Crisis* and a collection of his own essays entitled *The Post-Cold War World*, which was published in 2018. 2019 saw the publication of his new edition of JM Keynes's *The Economic Consequences of the Peace*, and in 2021 he edited and brought out EH Carr's 1945 long out of print classic, *Nationalism and After*. His most recent book, *Agonies of Empire: American Power from Clinton to Biden*, was published in 2022. He is currently completing a volume for Polity Books called *Comrades: Xi Jinping, Putin and the Challenge to Western Liberal Order*.

#### *LSE Public Policy Review Series Editor*

**Irene Bucelli** is a Research Officer at the LSE School of Public Policy and programme coordinator for the Beveridge 2.0: Redefining the Social Contract initiative. She is also a Research Officer at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (LSE) where her research focuses on multidimensional inequality, poverty and deprivation.

## **Contributors**

**Afzal Ashraf** was a senior officer in the British Armed forces with operational experience in Afghanistan and other conflicts. He served in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and other government departments. He previously held a Research Fellowship at the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews, and was a Consultant Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank. He is currently teaching international relations, politics and security at Loughborough University. His research interest is in beliefs and strategies that motivate conflict and peace.

**Sir Rodric Braithwaite** is Senior Research Fellow in Diplomacy and International Affairs at the University of Buckingham. A very experienced diplomat, he was the last UK Ambassador to the USSR, with previous postings in Jakarta, Warsaw, Moscow, Rome, Brussels and Washington. He has written on the Soviet experience in Afghanistan in *Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–89* (2012).

**Michael Callen** is an Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics. He is a co-director of the state capabilities programme at the International Growth Centre and a research associate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He completed his PhD in economics at the University of California, San Diego, and his BSc at LSE. His research focuses on development economics, political economy, and behavioural economics. He works primarily in Afghanistan, Nepal and Pakistan.

**John Collins** is Director of Academic Engagement at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) in Vienna. John also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the *Journal of Illicit Economies and Development* (JIED), LSE Press. He is Treasurer/ Secretary of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy (ISSPD) and a Fellow at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining the GI-TOC, John was Founding Executive Director of LSE's International Drug Policy Unit (IDPU), a Fellow of LSE's Phelan United States Centre and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Yale Centre for the Study of Globalization. John's contemporary policy interests focus on the political economy of international drug control and the evolving dynamics of national and international policy reforms.

**Shehryar Fazli** is a consultant for the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. A specialist in political and security affairs in South Asia, he has served several organisations, including the World Bank, United Nations agencies, and several private international institutions. From 2003 to 2005, he was a South Asia Analyst for the International Crisis Group, and later its South Asia Regional Editor and Senior Analyst (2008– 18). He has delivered lectures at various US universities, such as Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Johns Hopkins SAIS, Bard College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His articles have appeared in a range of international publications, and his first novel, *Invitation*, was a runner-up in the 2011 Edinburgh International Book Festival's First Book Award.

**Paal Sigurd Hilde** is Associate Professor at the Institute for Defense Studies, Norwegian Defense University College. He received his DPhil in politics from the University of Oxford (St Antony's). Paal has previously held various positions, including as the head of the secretariat for the Norwegian Commission on Afghanistan. His research interests include Norwegian security and defence policy, NATO and Arctic security. Paal currently serves as a special advisor at the Norwegian Ministry of Defence, but contributed to the article in this book in his academic capacity.

**Thi Hoang** is Managing Editor of LSE Press's *Journal of Illicit Economies and Development* (JIED) and Analyst at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC). She is an expert on human trafficking with a specific focus on the role and impact of technology on human trafficking and on the vulnerability of migrant workers, particularly from Asia to Europe. Thi coordinates the Responsible and Ethical Business Coalition against Trafficking (RESPECT) Initiative, and the Modern Slavery Map, and she is a research lead at the Tech Against Trafficking initiative. She coordinates and manages the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime (IASOC), the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy (ISSDP)'s membership, and the Drugs and Development Hub (DDH) initiative. Thi is also the regional advisor of Pacific Links Foundation, supporting their capacity-building workshops for European responders on the smuggling and trafficking of Asian (especially Vietnamese) migrants in Europe.

**Devika Hovell** is Associate Professor in Public International Law at LSE. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and a Master of Laws from New York University, where she was awarded the George Colin Award. She served as an Associate to Justice Kenneth Hayne at the High Court of Australia, and as a judicial clerk at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. She was formerly a lecturer at the University of New South Wales and Director of the International Law Project at the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law, UNSW.

**Michelle Hughes** is an experienced human rights practitioner and current doctoral student in LSE Law School. A former US Army Intelligence Officer (Lieutenant Colonel), paratrooper, and combat veteran, she has field experience in 24 foreign countries and was Senior Rule of Law Advisor to the NATO Police Training Mission in Afghanistan and subsequently Special Advisor for Rule of Law to the Commander of NATO Special Operations forces.

**Shahim Ahmad Kabuli** is an independent Afghan researcher. In the past 20 years he has worked with the Afghan government and with international development agencies, such as the World Bank and The Asia Foundation. His last job was working for the Afghan government as Energy and Infrastructure Specialist, Office of the Chief of Staff to the Afghan President.

**Caroline Kennedy-Pipe** is Professor of War Studies at Loughborough University. She has a first-class degree in history, an MScEcon in strategic studies and a DPhil in international relations. Caroline has been an advisor to the House of Commons Defence Committee and was a Visiting Fellow at the Rothermere Institute in Oxford. She works on urban warfare, Arctic affairs and Russian foreign policy. She has published a number of books and articles and is currently preparing a book on urban warfare.

**Nargis Nehan** is a women's rights activist and former Afghan government cabinet member. Since 1999 she has been working in both public and non-governmental sectors. She has served the public sector as the Treasurer of the Ministry of Finance and as Senior Advisor to ministers of Education, Higher Education, and Women's Affairs, and to the President. She also served as Minister of Mines and Petroleum. In the non-governmental sector, she founded EQUALITY for Peace and Democracy (EPD) for empowering women and youth and strengthening their participation in public affairs. She holds a master's degree and speaks Farsi, English, Pashtu and Urdu.

**Sten Rynning** is Professor of War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He is a Senior Fellow of the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies and a member of the Alphen Group. In 2021 he was made Knight of Dannebrog. Sten has participated in and advised commissions on foreign policy and the Afghan war in Denmark and Norway. He works on transatlantic security, Europe's security order, NATO, and geopolitics.

**Ian Tennant** is Head of Multilateral Representation at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC). Ian manages the GI-TOC Resilience Fund, a multi-donor initiative which supports civil society individuals and organisations working to counter the damaging effects of organised crime around the world. He is based in Vienna, where he leads GI-TOC engagement with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the wider diplomatic and civil society community in Vienna. Ian is currently Vice Chair of the NGO Alliance on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice. Before joining GI-TOC, Ian spent five years at the UK's Permanent Mission to the UN in Vienna, where he led UK engagement with UNODC and represented the UK in several prominent UN negotiations on organised crime and related issues.

**Leslie Vinjamuri** is Director of the US and the Americas programme and Dean of the Queen Elizabeth II Academy for Leadership in International Affairs at Chatham House. She is also Reader in International Relations at SOAS University of London, where she was founding Co-Director (2010–15) and then Director (2016–18) of the Centre on Conflict, Rights and Justice. She is Deputy Chair of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission, a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and sits on the Advisory Board of LSE IDEAS.

**Florian Weigand** is ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of International Development at LSE. He is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Armed Groups at the Overseas Development Institute and a Fellow in the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit at LSE. His research focuses on how conflict zones function and the ways in which they are governed. He has conducted research on armed conflict in a number of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Thailand.

**Feng Zhang** is Professor of International Relations at the Australian National University and Executive Dean of the Institute of Public Policy at the South China University of Technology. He studies Chinese foreign policy in East Asia (especially China-US and China-Southeast Asia relations), international relations in East Asian history, and international relations theory. His recent book, *Taming Sino-American Rivalry*, was co-authored with Ned Lebow and published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

## **1. Introduction – Before and After the Towers: Afghanistan's Forty-Year Crisis**

Michael Cox

It is one of the many tragedies of our time that in an era of 'great power peace' bloody conflicts have broken out on the so-called periphery of the international system with immense regularity. The list almost seems endless, from Central and Southern Africa, where countries such as Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have experienced the most brutal conflicts, right through to the Middle East, where one country after another – Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen being perhaps the most recent – has undergone that most appalling of experiences: civil war made worse by the intervention of outside actors and powers.

Whether we believe Afghanistan has suffered more or less than these other countries is not a question that can ever be answered. All one can say with certainty is that like them – but for much longer – it has experienced the most violent of conflicts going right back to late 1979 when the Soviet leadership, then led by KGB man Yuri Andropov, took what its military believed was an ill-considered decision to intervene. As Rodric Braithwaite shows in Chapter 2 of this volume, not only did this have major consequences for the USSR (some even claim it accelerated the system's demise), it had even more devastating results for Afghanistan itself [**1**]1 .

The trauma did not come to an end when Moscow finally decided to leave 10 years later. A long civil war then ensued, followed in turn by Taliban rule supported by Al Qaeda (AQ), who then went on to attack the United States on 9/11. This in turn precipitated a large-scale intervention by the West, the main burden of which was borne by the US. Born of high hopes that Afghanistan could be turned into a functioning democracy with a thriving market economy, within 10 years the mission was already creaking, by 2014 most Western troops had left, and by August 2021 the United States finally decided to call time on what President Biden – never an enthusiast – termed the 'forever' war [**2**].

Western analysts never cease reminding us how much Afghanistan cost the West and the US in terms of 'blood and treasure'. Indeed, Biden himself laid great stress on how much the war had cost the United States in his various speeches and statements defending his decision to leave.2 But for Afghanistan and Afghans, the cost has been of a quite different magnitude. Obtaining accurate and reliable figures is by no means easy. Yet even the most conservative estimates point to a human disaster measured in numbers killed and injured, refugees created, and lives upended by an almost permanent state of war. Indeed, the Soviet intervention alone led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, two million internally displaced people, and somewhere close to 5 million refugees.

During the decade of civil war that followed, there was further upheaval. The population of Kabul dropped from around two million to 500,000, many more were killed or injured, and hundreds of villages were destroyed. After 2001, the number of casualties went down somewhat. Even so, possibly more than 200,000 people were killed over two decades, 70,000 of them civilians. Indeed, between 2016 and 2020 there were nearly 4,000 civilian casualties, including 1,600 children.3 This long list certainly tells us something. On the other hand, it tells us 'very little about the conflict's indirect costs measured in terms of poverty, starvation, mental illness and life-long impacts on health and well-being'[**3**]. Neither does it reveal much about the impact all this had on ethnic tensions inside Afghanistan itself. In fact, given that the Taliban were not exactly known for their commitment to Western-style democracy, some of its leaders (almost exclusively recruited from the majority Pashtun ethnic group) later blamed ethnic tensions for the failure of democracy to take root in the country [**4**].

The narrative in this collection begins in effect with the 9/11 attack, followed by America's initial military response, which then widened out to include NATO in what Sten Renning and Paal Sigurd Hilde show in Chapter 10 to have been its most significant mission out of area since the end of the Cold War [**5**]. But first and foremost this was a US war. Having determined the attack on the American homeland had been carried out by Osama bin Laden backed by the Taliban – a fact the Taliban to this day denies [**6**] – the next move was to destroy the Taliban and its various allies.

Initially, at least, this proved to be relatively easy. However, what complicated the mission was, firstly, the imprecise legal basis upon which the war was justified, as shown by Devika Hovell and Michelle Hughes in their chapter; secondly, President George W. Bush's much-criticised decision to widen the 'war on terror' and invade Iraq [**7**]; and finally, a lack of clarity about what the war was supposed to be achieving. Was it, as some assumed, merely to drive Al Qaeda and its allies out of Afghanistan and then go home? Or was it a more ambitious goal of cleansing the Augean stables and reforming Afghanistan in the hope a new kind of polity and society, now purged of what President Bush called the evil of extremism, would finally emerge? As we now know, this turned out to be a bridge too far. Indeed, the broad consensus now seems to be that building a 'new nation' in a country as rural, conservative, and indeed as poor as Afghanistan was 'always destined to fail' [**8**]. Yet, to many of those on the ground at the time, it seemed as if this was the only thing that could possibly justify the ongoing war against the Taliban.

At the start of the Western operation, the sheer unpopularity of the Taliban was perhaps the biggest advantage held by the US-led coalition. The problem was that as the occupation went on, not enough Afghans saw immediate benefit for themselves, giving the Taliban time to regroup, then gain ground, and finally, as Florian Weigand shows in his contribution, to win yet again in 2021. That said, something was achieved, especially through the vehicle of several international agencies often working under the auspices of the UN. There were certainly some 'bright spots', including a lowering of 'child mortality rates, increases in per capita GDP, and increased literacy rates' [**9**]. Even so, a great deal was not done, and many opportunities were missed by the West. Yet because of the sheer determination shown by many Afghans, women in particular – an issue discussed by Nargis Nehan in her piece – some improvements did take place. But as Afzal Ashraf and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe demonstrate in their contribution, much more might have been achieved if it had not been for the West's basic misunderstanding of the cultural and tribal customs of much of Afghan society itself. Nonetheless, as a Brookings study has shown, whereas in 2003 fewer than 10% of girls were enrolled in primary schools, by 2017 that number had grown to 33%. Meanwhile, female enrolment in secondary education grew from 6% in 2003 to 39% in 2017. Women's life expectancy also grew from 56 years in 2001 to 66 in 2017, and their mortality during childbirth declined from 1,100 per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 396 per 100,000 in 2015 [**10**].

Success, they say, has many parents, but failure is more often than not an orphan. It is thus inevitable that this particular collection of essays, written in the shadow of the West's hasty and ill-planned withdrawal in August 2021, reads a little bit like a catalogue of failure. Perhaps if it had been composed a few years earlier when the Taliban only controlled a small part of the country and the future looked less bleak, the authors here might have been able to put more of an optimistic gloss on what happened. But given the speed with which the whole coalition effort imploded, leaving so many Afghans behind, it is hardly surprising that the essays here tend to assume that the question that really needs answering is not what went right but, rather, why did the whole effort fail so badly?

Even the withdrawal was handled badly, and what should have been a carefully planned evacuation turned into a messy and bloody rout. As Leslie Vinjamuri explains in her analysis, Biden had never been keen on the mission and made it clear in his run for the White House in 2020 that America would be withdrawing sooner rather than later. To that degree he made good on his election promise. However, the chaotic character of the departure, with masses of desperate Afghans trying to get on a plane at Kabul airport, did little to enhance America's reputation as an ally one could trust. Quite the opposite in fact. If anything, the way in which the US got out 'shredded' not only its reputation and that of President Biden but also that of the 'entire western alliance' as well [**11**].

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan itself, the hasty retreat into exile of President Ashraf Ghani's government and its replacement by the Taliban has only led to what looks like the almost complete collapse of everyday life. No doubt some hoped that the new Taliban would not be like the old one. But such hopes were quickly dispelled. The rhetoric of the Taliban may have moderated somewhat since 2001, but their extremist beliefs do not appear to have changed at all. As one seasoned observer has noted, 'All evidence suggests the Taliban still believe in restoring their old system of an emirate, in which an unelected religious leader, or emir, was the ultimate decision-maker' given authority from God (quoted in [**12**]).

Since seizing control, the Taliban leadership have shown little inclination either to share power or to concede anything to the demands of the international community to respect human rights. The insurgent group expected a complete handover of power, and this is precisely what happened. Thus the first new interim government contained no women, the interior minister was a long-standing member of the Haqqani network, who also happened to be on an FBI wanted list, and one member of the government was a former Guantanamo detainee who had, it was rumoured, been close to Bin Laden (something he denied). No doubt under pressure from more friendly countries like Pakistan, Russia, and China to do something, the Taliban leadership did go on to make additional appointments on 22 September. This very slightly broadened the new government's makeup, but it did not fundamentally alter its Pashtun character; significantly, neither were any women added. As one observer pointed out, it was clear the Taliban were not willing to 'make any significant concessions for the sake of international recognition, sanctions relief or the resumption of aid from Western governments' [**13**].

Since then, it has been difficult to detect any sign of positive change, either in the government's outlook or in terms of what is happening on the ground itself. On the contrary, the situation appears to have moved from the desperate, immediately following the almost Vietnam-like withdrawal of US forces in August 2021, through to the deeply tragic. Neither does the situation look like it will improve in the near or medium term. As Michael Callen and Shahim Kabuli explain in their contribution, the Afghan economy was hardly in great shape before the Taliban takeover, but since then, the situation has become a good deal worse. The war may have come to an end, but the economic situation remains distinctly bleak. Indeed, only a month after the West's withdrawal, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was estimating that the Afghan economy would contract by 30% by the end of 2021, with appalling human consequences. And so it turned out to be. In fact, only a few months later, the UN was already calculating that Afghanistan would see a rise in people in need of humanitarian assistance 'from 9.4 million in 2020 to 24.4 million in 2022'. It also identified the many reasons for this, 'including the suspension of much foreign aid, which had financed around 75% of public spending in 2019, the Taliban's decisions to ban the use of foreign currency and many women from employment, shortages of cash due to the demobilisation of security forces, non-payment of civil servants, and restrictions on access to Afghan assets held abroad' (quoted in [**14**]).

All this in turn has only exacerbated an already desperate situation, not only for those who had to remain – the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) talked openly at the end of 2021 of the need to avert a 'basic needs crisis' [**15**] – but also for those who had been forced to flee the country. Towards the end of 2020, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, was already warning of Afghanistan's refugee crisis being at a breaking point [**16**]. Equally challenging was life for those who had been displaced within Afghanistan itself. As another UNHCR official pointed out just after the Taliban had seized control, the refugee flow would no doubt continue. But the 'displacement crisis' was equally critical inside Afghanistan, with over 3.5 million Afghans having been uprooted by conflict [**17**].

What then to do, asks Thi Hoang in her contribution on the wider costs of the conflict reflected in a likely increase in human trafficking and aggravated migrant smuggling, especially of women and girls? Here the West, she argues, must follow what she terms 'a pragmatic, human rights-centred approach' over and above immediate diplomatic and political considerations. Otherwise 'more lives will be lost' or destroyed as a result of smuggling and trafficking. John Collins, Shehryar Fazli and Ian Tennant then look at an equally difficult area impacting on Afghanistan: opium and the trade in opium. They are not optimistic. As they go on to explain, one of the greatest failures of the West during its long 20-year engagement in Afghanistan was a failure to eradicate or reduce Afghan poppy cultivation even after the Taliban was ousted in 2001. Now with the Taliban in charge again, and farmers having few economic incentives not to grow poppies, the future looks decidedly bleak.

Assuming that there is no easy solution to the current crisis, we are nonetheless compelled to think creatively of policies that might at least help alleviate the situation. Those who are less hostile to the Taliban, such as Iran or Pakistan, could help, as of course could China, whose attitude towards Afghanistan is discussed in detail in this collection. Yet as Feng Zhang shows, even the Chinese will be cautious when it comes to getting involved. Iran, meanwhile, may welcome the departure of the Americans. Whether or not it is likely to provide serious backing for a regime of a different theological cast of mind to its own is not so clear. Moreover, having already played host to millions of Afghan refugees, it is unlikely to be willing to welcome many more [**18**]. Russia, of course, is well positioned to gain new leverage in Afghanistan. Moscow, in fact, could hardly contain its joy at what finally happened to the US. Yet given its now almost complete preoccupation with the war in Ukraine and the impact that sanctions are having on its own economy, it is unlikely to spend too much time worrying about Afghanistan [**19**].

In a strange twist of fate, therefore, all roads once again lead back to the West. Thus far no Western government has recognised the Taliban and, for the time being, are most unlikely to unfreeze Afghan assets or advance the new government in Kabul the aid it so desperately needs. Talks continue between the parties, but as the discussions in Oslo in January 2022 showed, Western donors will not make any significant material concessions to the Taliban unless the Taliban is willing to undertake policies such as widening the government, protecting human rights, and providing girls and women much greater access to education [**20**]. Many in the West meanwhile continue to press for sanctions to be lifted, if only to prevent a looming humanitarian crisis. To leave hundreds of thousands of people starving is, as one policy-maker put it, not an option. But there is still a long way to go. The bitter legacy of the war, the brutality displayed by the Taliban throughout the conflict, and the way in which it took over and has since run the country does not at this moment leave much room for hope.

Then, as if the situation was not dire enough, came the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Indeed, with the West's attention now concentrated almost completely on the humanitarian crisis facing Ukraine, what little hope there may have been for Afghanistan has been dealt a serious blow. Once again, Russia appears to have become the arbiter of Afghanistan's destiny. Whether or not its war against Ukraine becomes 'Putin's Afghanistan' remains to be seen [**21**]. But for Afghanistan itself, the consequences of what is going on in Ukraine look to be little short of disastrous. As Afghanistan's former ambassador to Ukraine has reminded us all – more in sadness than in anger one suspects – the world is already forgetting about Afghanistan, leaving the Taliban free to implement their policies with little or no international scrutiny [**22**]. The Afghanistan tragedy, one fears, still has a long way to run.

*Original versions of most of the chapters were commissioned for an issue of LSE Public Policy Review (https://ppr.lse.ac.uk), a journal that encourages inter-disciplinary commentary on contemporary issues, based on frontier-level research.*

### **Notes**

1 Chapter 2 in this book by Sir Rodric Braithwaite details the USSR's intervention. This is discussed in more detail in his book [**1**].

2 See also US Costs to Date for the War in Afghanistan in \$Billions, FY 2001–2021, Watson Institute For International and Public Affairs, 2022.

3 Figures obtained from https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/40-all -civilian-casualties-airstrikes-afghanistan-almost-1600-last-five-years

## **References**

/blog/order-from-chaos/2022/02/24/could-ukraine-be-putins -afghanistan/

22. Shams S, Hakimi A. Ukraine war: Why the West cannot afford to ignore Afghanistan. Deutsche Welle. 2022 March 14. Available from: https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-war-why-the-west-cannot -afford-to-ignore-afghanistan/a-61121939

## **2. Afghanistan: Learning from History?**

#### Rodric Braithwaite

Policy-makers could have concluded from Britain's three wars in Afghanistan and the Soviet defeat that the Americans were likely to be defeated there too. It is mountainous, poor and turbulent. Even successful invaders have found it ungovernable. The British imposed their foreign policy requirements on the Afghans, but then quickly withdrew. The Russians installed a Communist puppet, but withdrew after a long war against determined Islamist guerillas. Afghanistan descended into civil war until the Taliban imposed their version of law and order. America began with a stunning victory, ejecting the Taliban who had backed Osama bin Laden's destruction of the Twin Towers in New York. But after 20 unsatisfactory years they too withdrew and the Taliban returned. Three old lessons were reconfirmed. Liberal interventionism – the attempt to re-engineer someone else's society by force – very rarely works. Policies of counter-insurgency rarely work either. Pouring aid into a poor country raises expectations, but raises corruption even higher. But the lessons need to be applied critically, not blindly.

## **Introduction — 'This Time It Will Be Different'**

As the Russians were going into Afghanistan in December 1979, a senior official is said to have reminded Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko of the trouble the British got themselves into when they invaded the country a century earlier.

'Are you comparing our gallant Soviet warriors with those mercenaries of British imperialism?' Gromyko responded furiously. 'No, no, minister, of course not,' the official replied hurriedly. 'The soldiers are quite different. But the mountains are the same'.

Governments can be like adolescents. Their judgements are often coloured by wishful thinking and a belief in their invulnerability. They very rarely listen to advice, but have to learn for themselves. Some are quicker and better at it than others.

But a knowledge of the history can illuminate the mistakes of governments not only with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time or even before they are committed. America's defeat in Afghanistan was foreseeable by anyone who was paying attention, and who had bothered to look at the Soviet war in the 1980s or Britain's three Afghan wars in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

## **The Background**

Afghanistan's modern rulers have always faced four main tasks: to preserve a semblance of national unity; to preserve the independence of the state from the depredations of outside powers; to modernise their country; and to stay alive.

The last has been the most challenging. Between 1842 and 1995 seven of Afghanistan's leaders fell victim, whether to family feud, palace coup, mob violence, revolution, or outside intervention. Over five more were forced into exile. Others prudently abdicated while the going was good.

The country these individuals fought to control is extremely poor, sparsely populated, and ruggedly mountainous. In places, it is impassable, with its considerable mineral resources barely exploited. Afghans are devout and occasionally fanatical Muslims, divided between Sunnis and Shias. They fight bitterly among themselves, within and between families, tribes, and ethnic groups, including Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras.

Outsiders sometimes maintain that Afghanistan is not a real country at all, that it is too fissiparous, too unwilling to submit to central direction, too prone to disintegrating into dissent and rebellion. Past Afghan governments nevertheless held it together reasonably well. Their methods have never been pretty: a combination of bribery, ruthlessness towards the weak, compromise with the powerful, keeping the key factions in balance, and leaving well alone. Such methods may not have been what the West would regard as good governance. But they worked.

Because Afghanistan stands at the crossroads of ancient trade routes, it has always attracted the attention of neighbouring predators despite its poverty. Its foreign policy has primarily consisted of distancing itself from one predatory rival in return for a guarantee of security from, and a large bribe to, the other. In terms of deterring invasions, this is a policy that has often failed. The course of history shows a country that is frequently successfully invaded.

But while the invasions are often successful, the subsequent occupation of the country has never been equally so. Despite their domestic quarrels, Afghans are almost always willing to unite against foreigners. They may have disorderly military methods, but Afghans are good at dying for their country and at fighting for it effectively. The invaders have usually preferred to cut their losses and pull out. That has always been Afghanistan's ultimate defence.

## **The British Lesson**

Contrary to myth, Afghanistan was not the grave of the British Empire. Though it embroiled the British in three unsatisfactory wars, British policy towards Afghanistan was a qualified success. They quickly learned that the imperial formula that worked so well in India would not work in Afghanistan, and sensibly settled for their minimum objective, a monopoly of Afghan foreign policy – a goal they sustained for 80 years.

Underlying Britain's interest in Afghanistan was the fear that a rival power, like Persia, France, or Russia, might use Afghanistan to steal their Indian empire away. Their solution was to install their own puppet first. They defeated the Afghan army in 1839, but their own force was massacred by irregulars as it attempted to return to India. They sent a new 'Army of Retribution' to revenge the humiliation. It sacked Kabul and hanged the notables in the market place. Honour satisfied, the British then sensibly withdrew. Their puppet Shah Shujah was murdered, but his successor, Dost Mohamed, agreed to consult them in matters of foreign policy.

Before their next Afghan war, the British had defeated the Sikhs and annexed the Punjab, a chunk of Sikh territory around Peshawar that had formerly belonged to Afghanistan. The Afghans never accepted the change. It involved the British, and in due course the Pakistanis, the Russians, and the Americans, in a great deal of trouble.

Disorder in Kabul led to a fraying of the British tutelage. To reassert it, the British returned in 1879. The main body of their army was successful, but a large detachment was badly mauled at Maiwand in Helmand province. Once again the British devastated Kabul, hanged a lot of people, and withdrew.

Abdur Rahman emerged from the chaos. He agreed with the British to keep the Russians out in exchange for material and political support. A brutally effective ruler, he set up the rudiments of a modern state bureaucracy, modernised his army with the help of the British, and struck a skilful balance between them and the Russians.

This cosy arrangement lasted until 1919. With the Indian army deployed to fight in the First World War, Rahman's grandson Amanullah invaded North West India in the hope of recovering the Punjab. The British expelled him. But they were running out of imperial steam and agreed to give up their hold on Afghan foreign policy.

Amanullah was a reformer. He established a Council of Ministers, promulgated a constitution, decreed a series of administrative, economic and social reforms, and unveiled his queen. He thus angered religious conservatives and provoked a rebellion. In 1929 he was chased into exile in Italy.

His grandson Zahir Shah reigned from 1933 to 1973, the longest period of stability in Afghanistan's recent history. During his rule, further reforms were made, including an elected parliament, the introduction of political parties, some freedom of speech, and votes for women. The emancipation of women was a notable achievement, with women attending university, and working unveiled as airline hostesses and receptionists, announcers on Kabul Radio, and as diplomats at the United Nations. Inevitably, Zahir was also overthrown, by his cousin Daud in 1972, and also took flight to Italy.

Daud continued the reforms. By now Afghanistan was reasonably secure, with a substantial army and the bureaucratic paraphernalia of government. Foreigners and the tiny middle class who lived in the big cities later looked back on this time as a golden age. But for the vast majority little had changed, and at its core the system remained the same combination of ruthlessness, compromise, and decentralisation it had always been.

## **The Russian Connection**

The story long persisted, and perhaps still persists, in the West that the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979 in order to threaten the West's oil supplies, to acquire a warm water port, or to incorporate the country into the Soviet Union, and that they were chased out in 1989 by a bunch of gallant mujaheddin guerrillas armed with little more than Kalashnikovs and Stinger missiles supplied by the CIA. Such a narrative is almost entirely mythical.

By the 1930s, the Soviet Union was Afghanistan's most important commercial and political partner. After the Second World War, Zahir and Daud manoeuvred successfully between the Americans and the Russians. The Americans were first persuaded to build a large irrigation project in Helmand province, but then became distracted by Vietnam, so Afghanistan looked to the USSR. The Soviets increased their provision of loans, grants, training, and technical and military assistance. Large numbers of young Afghans went to the Soviet Union to further their education.

These delicate balancing acts were derailed when the Afghan Communists overthrew and killed Daud in April 1978. The Soviets were taken by surprise, though they naturally had to welcome this addition to the Socialist bloc. The new rulers announced that they would leap direct from feudalism to a prosperous, just society, giving land to the peasants, food to the hungry, education to all, and freedom to women so that they should no longer have to live completely shut up in their homes. They would move before the landlords and the mullahs could stop them. If that meant taking short cuts on the way, so be it.

But they were deeply split between two factions. The first faction, from the city, held Nur Muhammad Taraki as President, and the second, from the country, followed Hafizullah Amin the Prime Minister. In their impatience to establish control, they turned to terror. First, it was used against others, then against one another. When the Russians advised moderation, they retorted that what had worked for Stalin would work for them. Soviet officials compared them to the murderous reign of Pol Pot in Cambodia.

The Communists were never welcomed by the Afghan people, not least because of their attacks on Islam. In March 1979, an army unit mutinied in the provincial capital of Herat, and was backed by the locals. The government panicked, and asked the Russians to send troops.

But the Soviet leaders were clear: the central role of religion, the low standard of literacy, and the backwardness of the economy all meant that Afghanistan was not ripe for revolution. Any attempt to impose it with Soviet bayonets would lead straight into a quagmire. So they told Kabul to sort Herat out for themselves.

That they did. But revolts continued to break out all over the country, and the murderous strife within the Afghan Communist Party got even more vicious. In September 1979, Amin had Taraki murdered, took sole control, and stepped up the terror against his opponents both inside and outside the Party.

By now Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, had convinced himself that the Americans had recruited Amin when he was studying in New York, and that he was on the verge of switching alliances. A small clique around the senescent Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, concluded that Amin would have to be ejected by force.

The Soviet military were aghast. The Chief of Staff, NIkolai Ogarkov, told his civilian bosses that a military intervention made no sense. He was slapped down. The Defence Minister told him it was not his place to teach the Politburo its business. He should do as he was told.

On 27 September Amin was killed by the Russians in a special forces operation and replaced by their puppet, Babrak Karmal. But even before this, the 40th Army had begun to cross the frontier. It was an improvised force of about 80,000 conscripts, its officers trained to fight sophisticated armies in Germany and unprepared for the infuriatingly unorthodox Afghan way of war. The Russians' limited aim was to train the Afghan security forces to defend the regime, and then leave.

But they soon discovered that large numbers of Afghans were entirely unwilling to accept an atheist Communist government backed by foreign troops. Just as the Soviet military had feared, they got bogged down and were kept in Afghanistan for the next nine years. Their attempts to negotiate a settlement at the UN were consistently frustrated by the Americans. The war in which they now found themselves was a brutal matter of small-scale raids, ambushes, roadside bombs, and air strikes, with appalling atrocities committed by both sides. The mujaheddin rebels fought with practised skill. Their simple weapons were generously supplied over the mountains from Pakistan, supplemented by sophisticated weapons from the CIA. The Russians fought with ferocity, matched by willingness to take casualties. They won most of their battles. But they never had enough troops to hold their ground, and when they withdrew, the rebels moved back.

When the Russians entered Afghanistan, Soviet 'socialism' was still seen as a model in some parts of the developing world. The Soviets had brought Soviet-style law and order, economic and agricultural development, and higher education (including for women) to their Central Asian republics. The idea that they could help the Afghans construct a modern society was not wholly absurd. Their civilian advisers, many speaking the language, fanned out across the country, and got on well with the Afghans, with many of their projects proving successful. It did not take long for them to learn that there was little point in going against the grain of Afghan society. They advised the Afghan government to abandon the idea of rapidly making the country 'socialist'. Despite the stress of war, Kabul was still a flourishing and vibrant place when the Soviets left, where women could play – and were playing – an increasingly substantial role. Nostalgic Afghans would later say that they had lived better under the Russians than they did under the Americans.

But by the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Soviet public opinion had turned against the war, as the body bags piled up at home. The military were clear that they could hold territory, but only as long as their soldiers remained. Otherwise 80% of the country was dominated by the rebels. The Soviet Chief of Staff told Gorbachev in 1986, 'We have lost this war'. Gorbachev was anxious to leave as soon as possible. But the Americans were anxious to hold their opponents' feet to the fire. And he faced the dilemma that all face when they try to disengage from an unsatisfactory war. A million Soviet soldiers had passed through Afghanistan. Thousands of them had died, said Gorbachev, 'and it looks as though they did so in vain'. There is a widespread belief that portable anti-aircraft missiles provided by the Americans, called Stingers, enabled the mujaheddin to turn the scales. It is a myth. The Stingers had no impact on Gorbachev's decision-making: he had already decided to withdraw before the first Stinger appeared on the battlefield. The Stingers were an inconvenience to the Soviet airforce, but little more: the Russians rapidly modified their tactics to meet them.

Despite deliberate foot-dragging by the Americans, Gorbachev managed to negotiate a withdrawal deal by 1988. The Soviet forces departed in an orderly fashion, with bands playing and flags flying. The details were agreed in advance with the Afghan authorities and the rebel commanders, so there was a bit of fighting, but not much. They were gone by February 1989, little more than nine years after they arrived.

Soviet occupation was replaced with a competent government under Mohammad Najibullah, a former Communist and secret policeman who reinvented himself as a Muslim patriot. He had a substantial army, armed with fairly modern Soviet equipment, with many of its officers having been well trained in the Soviet Union. This was the army that had fought alongside the Russians adequately, if not brilliantly, and despite its weaknesses, it continued to fight on its own against the rebels for more than two years after the Russians left. But throughout this period, it depended on supplies of Russian food, equipment, and ammunition. After Najibullah was overthrown in 1992, the Russians cut these off, and the mujaheddin leaders turned on one another. Orderly government disintegrated, and Kabul was practically destroyed in an atrocious civil war.

The Soviets failed in Afghanistan because their force was too small to hold the ground; they were unable to seal the frontier with Pakistan; their opponents received massive foreign aid; and the governmental and popular will collapsed inside the Soviet Union. Most Afghans were determined not to accept the transformation of society that the Russians had to offer. A Russian commentator summed it up: 'We tried to teach the Afghans how to build a new society, knowing that we ourselves had failed to do so [in Russia?] …. Our army was given tasks which it was in no position to fulfil, since no regular army can possibly solve the problems of a territory in revolt' [**1**].

He was right. Much the same lessons could have been drawn from the British experience. You can invade Afghanistan, you can defeat Afghan armies, and you can negotiate workable arrangements with the authorities. But if you stick around for too long, the Afghan people will turn against you, and you will find yourself having to pull out.

## **Fiasco**

A new force now arose in Afghanistan: the Taliban. Backed by Pakistan, they defeated the remnants of the mujaheddin and took over the country. They were welcomed by many ordinary people as good Muslims who brought law and order after the appalling chaos of civil war.

But in 2001 the Twin Towers in New York were destroyed by a group of terrorists, largely Saudis directed by their countryman, Osama bin Laden, whose Al Qaeda terrorist network was headquartered in Afghanistan. When the Taliban refused to hand him over, the Americans invaded, toppled them and chased Bin Laden out of the country. Their campaign was brilliantly effective, but it depended as much on Afghan allies on the ground and small contingents of American special forces on horseback as it did on the sophisticated weapons at which the Americans were so adept.

The Americans then had to decide what to do next. There were two alternatives. One was to pull out, warning the Afghans that they would be back if the terrorists returned. The other was to stay, to help rebuild and modernise the country, in the belief that turning Afghanistan into a modern state (whatever that might mean in practice) would prevent it once more from becoming a base for international terrorism fuelled by Islamic fundamentalism.

The Americans decided to stay. Hamid Karzai, a courageous but comparatively minor Pashtun grandee, was parachuted into office as president. He did not live up to expectations. Rather than help create a democratic modern government in Afghanistan, he adopted the traditional Afghan methods of government: nepotism, compromise, bribery, and the occasional threat. But he lacked the ruthlessness of his more brutal and effective predecessors, earning only the contempt of his own people and his American sponsors.

Aid money poured in, backed by innumerable expensive consultants and official experts, few of whom had much understanding of the way Afghanistan worked. Much of the money went on fees to the foreigners or as bribes to local officials. Much of the rest was spent on ill thought-out projects that failed to deliver.

Many well-meaning volunteers arrived too, with strong ideas about rights for women, good governance, and sustainable agriculture. Despite their courage and dedication, they found it hard to accept that most Afghans had their own firm views about religion, the role of the family, the position of women, and the right way to conduct everyday affairs, and that they had no intention of abandoning them at the behest of another bunch of outsiders.

At first the Taliban lay low. But they began to make their presence felt in 2006, just as NATO deployed its International Security Assistance Force. The British chose to go to Helmand, forgetting that this was where they had been roundly defeated during the Second Afghan War. The Afghans remembered and assumed that the British were coming to take revenge.

The Taliban offensive rapidly gathered pace. They performed a succession of attacks on police posts and suicide bombings in markets, quickly making it clear that the American-led occupation was going disastrously wrong. Generals came and went, reinforcements surged in and out. But, in tones eerily reminiscent of official voices in Saigon as the Vietnam war turned nasty, military spokesmen continued to insist that the occupation was on its way to success.

President Barack Obama came to office determined to end what was becoming an open-ended commitment. In 2011 he announced that most American forces would leave by 2014: the Afghans would then take over responsibility for their own security. His unhappy generals argued that he was inviting the Taliban simply to wait out the American departure and invite Al Qaeda back to threaten America.

In 2013 an American think tank said bleakly that the American government 'has not laid credible plans for the security, governance, and economic aspects of Transition. It has not made its level of future commitment clear to its allies or the Afghans, and it has failed dismally to convince the Congress and the American people' [**2**]. Inevitably, the withdrawal went ahead. The domestic need to win votes at home won out against broader foreign policy goals. This withdrawal was continued – and accelerated – under President Donald Trump, who took office in 2016. American forces were steadily reduced from 10,000 in 2011 to 2,500 by the end of 2020. Without consulting the Afghan government, President Trump agreed with the Taliban that by May 2021 they would all be gone. President Biden delayed that date by three months.

The Americans and their allies then scuttled off in unplanned, humiliating disorder, abandoning the Afghan children, the professional people, and above all the women who had trusted their promises of a better life. Adding insult to injury, Biden said: 'Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight' [**3**].

One thing Afghans can do without any Western training is fight for something they believe in. The Taliban did. The attempt of Western allies to deflect the blame onto the very people that they had put in place and trained for 20 years was not only peculiarly unattractive: it showed that they never got to grips with the basic problems.

#### **Why Did the West Get It So Wrong?**

It all went wrong because of a central flaw at the heart of Western policy. The policy rested on the idea that Al Qaeda could be eliminated if we destroyed the Taliban and re-engineered Afghan politics to ensure that the country never again became a base for Islamic terrorist groups. But Al Qaeda have shown that they can operate effectively from many bases. Some of the worst terrorist atrocities have been planned and mounted from within the West. The most effective means for dealing with that are good intelligence, good police work, and the occasional use of unorthodox military force. That does not require boots on the ground in Afghanistan.

The differences between the Soviet and the American wars in Afghanistan were significant. The Soviet generals gave their opinion about the feasibility of an operation without too much souped-up military optimism. They were always under firm civilian control. The civilians could and did reject their military advice as they saw fit, sometimes to everyone's disadvantage.

By contrast, despite their supposed subordination to civilian politicians, American soldiers expressed their views in public, and often the public listened. Successive presidents had to take that into account. Only Obama, who got rid of one insubordinate general, came close to acting as decisively as President Harry Truman did when he sacked General Douglas MacArthur in 1951.

America's overwhelming military power and its victories in 1945 encouraged Americans and their generals to believe that the difference between war and peace is absolute, and that the aim of war is unconditional victory. American strategic thinkers attacked the Soviets for sticking to Carl von Clausewitz's view that war and peace are two aspects of the same activity. But Clausewitz and the Soviets were right. The Americans have never lost on the battlefield. But in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan they lost their war, and after Korea they only managed to force a stalemate. And that was because they forgot that you can pursue a war to victory only if you get the politics right.

The American war in Afghanistan lasted twice as long as the Soviet war. The only solace to take from this war is that, thanks to smart weapons, the casualties on both sides were substantially less than they were in the Soviet war, or in the American wars in South East Asia.

The dismal debacle in Afghanistan reminded us of three things that we knew already.

#### **Liberal Intervention**

Liberal intervention designed to re-engineer other people's societies doesn't work. Very expensive American attempts to create democracy failed not only in Afghanistan, but also in China, Vietnam, Iraq and elsewhere.

To build a democratic nation in Afghanistan would have required a degree of sustained stamina, clarity of purpose, insight, and generosity that was never remotely likely to be forthcoming. And it wasn't only democracies that failed because of their obsession with the short term and concern with domestic popularity. Fatigue and domestic politics took over for the Russians too.

The Americans successfully presided over long-term change in Germany, Japan and South Korea after 1945. They fought and then stayed in all three countries long enough for change to succeed. They did so not for moral reasons, or because they were fond of the three peoples involved, but because they had a Cold War to fight. In Vietnam even that motive was inadequate.

Some think that the Americans should have left their small remaining contingent in place to give the Kabul government the breathing space to get its act together. No one has shown convincingly why that would work when a massive effort over two decades had already failed.

#### **War Against Terror: Counter-Terror and Counter-Insurgency**

The second lesson is that overwhelming military power is not enough to secure victory over people who are fighting for their country or their ideology and have the time, the commitment, the discipline and the appropriate weapons. However many battles they won, the Russians lost in Afghanistan, as did the Americans, in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; the British in Palestine, Egypt, and Aden; the French in Indochina and Algeria. As the Taliban used to say: 'You have the watches, but we have the time'. In the end, foreigners get tired and go home. The insurgents, as has so often been said, don't have to win: they simply have to avoid losing.

'Counter-insurgency' is not the answer. The theory was developed by the French in Indochina and was much touted by American generals in Iraq and Afghanistan. The British believed they were rather good at it. It depends on winning the hearts and minds of ordinary people, on persuading them that they are better off with the forces of law and order than they would be with the insurgents. It has rarely worked, if ever. The reason is simple. If you use military force, you are bound to kill people's wives and children. Saying you're sorry for the 'collateral damage' wins no hearts at all.

 The Russians hammered the Chechens into the ground, then outsourced the management of the place to a unscrupulous local warlord. Other imperial powers have also behaved ruthlessly when they felt they needed to, especially when it was conveniently out of the public eye. But in our modern interconnected world the political price is almost always too high.

## **The Seductions of Aid**

The third thing we already knew from much experience is that if you pump billions of aid into countries that don't have the necessary infrastructure, a large proportion of the money will end up in the pockets of foreign contractors and in the offshore bank accounts of the local politicians. The Marshall Plan worked because the Europeans already knew how to run a modern economy, but needed help in rebuilding the ruins. Afghanistan was very far from this. Nor is it enough to say that Afghan government was corrupt, because so are many governments across the world. While the West may celebrate our avoidance of the more obvious forms of corruption, we still practise theories that openly celebrate greed. Poor countries do not have that luxury.

### **What About the Future?**

Those who took part in the Afghanistan intervention have an immediate moral obligation to repair some of the damage they have done, to provide new lives for those who have been forced from their country, and to get medical and other aid to those who remain behind. That means entering into a relationship with the people who now run Afghanistan. Some object to any formal recognition of the Taliban, and regard that as an excuse to freeze Afghan assets abroad. But without informal arrangements that help the Afghan economy to get going again, the people we have deserted face disaster yet again. That would leave the remains of our moral reputation in tatters.

The West's ability to shape future events in Afghanistan will now inevitably be limited. Its neighbours – Pakistan, India, Iran, China, Russia and its Central Asian associates – have a far more direct and continuing interest in what goes on there than the West does. Their mutual rivalries mean they will find it hard or impossible to cooperate effectively. The West will now be able to do little more than use its limited diplomatic and political assets to nudge them in the right direction.

But the widespread argument that defeat in Afghanistan marks a permanent decline in American power and influence misses the mark. America recovered from Vietnam and went on to win the Cold War. Its problem lies elsewhere, and has nothing to do with Afghanistan. America's hegemony lasted a little more than a decade after its victory in the Cold War. But it will remain outstandingly powerful, rich, and ingenious for the foreseeable future, with the key difference being the presence of China, a more versatile and formidable opponent than America has ever faced. China has the largest population in the world and the second largest economy. It is beginning to surpass America in an increasing number of sophisticated branches of technology. Like America, it produces goods that people everywhere want. It already has enough sophisticated nuclear missiles to make the Americans think very carefully before getting into a scrap. George Kennan's idea of containment worked with the Russians. But it will not enable America to see off the Chinese.

Let us not draw the wrong lesson from history yet again.

## **References**

## **3. Three Sins: The Disconnect Between**  *de jure* **Institutions and** *de facto* **Power in Afghanistan**

Michael Callen and Shahim Kabuli

Three key issues that would plague the Afghan government were woven into its fabric from the beginning. First, the Afghan government initiated at the Bonn conference in 2001 explicitly excluded the Taliban. This is widely argued to be the 'original sin' that stymied subsequent political development. This *exclusionary* decision gave the Taliban and their supporters no choice other than to sustain violent conflict, deepen ties to Pakistan, and seek more favourable terms or an outright victory. This was not the only sin. Second, the government adopted an electoral system that combined large multi-member districts with a single non-transferable vote (SNTV). This obscure system is used almost nowhere in the world precisely because it is known to be politically *divisive* and to undermine the development of political parties. This, in turn, limited the potential for groups focused on shared political agendas to emerge. Third, the highly *centralised* presidential system created by the 2004 constitution – which copied many elements of Mohammad Zahir Shah's 1964 constitution – did not accommodate Afghanistan's rich diversity and the reality that *de facto* power is decentralised. These three features of Afghan institutions ensured that a broad-based and inclusive government capable of providing stability, safety, liberty, and economic opportunity to Afghans would not emerge, even with unprecedented levels of international assistance. These *exclusionary, divisive, and centralised* political institutions were fundamentally out of sync with Afghanistan's political realities and encumbered the development of an effective state.

## **Introduction**

The international effort to build a state in Afghanistan carried tremendous financial and human costs. The US spent \$2.3 trillion, and around 176,000 people, mostly Afghans, were killed [**1**]. If we consider development assistance alone, Afghanistan received \$145 billion (or about \$4,000 per Afghan), which, in real terms, amounts to substantially more than was spent under the Marshall Plan. Nonetheless, more than half of the country's population – an estimated 22.8 million people – now face life-threatening food insecurity as the economy crumbles, while many of the human rights advances achieved during the past 20 years are being quickly reversed [**2**]. An unprecedented international effort to modernise Afghan institutions has ended politically almost where it started: with Afghanistan under the control of a brutal Taliban theocracy.

It is hard to imagine a scenario that more starkly calls into question whether stable democracy is possible in Afghanistan. Indeed, it makes a case that any such effort, no matter how it is executed, may not be worth the phenomenal financial and human costs. Such pessimism is reinforced by the fact that Afghanistan has managed only two peaceful transitions since 1747: in 1901 when Habibullah Khan inherited the throne and in 2014 when Ashraf Ghani was elected [**3**].

A substantial body of political economy research – much of it written post-9/11 – argues that insurgent conflicts, like that in Afghanistan, are best understood as violent contests for state control [**4–9**]. As such, success is much more a question of politics and popular support than one of military superiority. For peace to endure, it must be palatable to any potential spoilers, and, correspondingly, provide them with an acceptable degree of political voice and power. If the design of the state is fundamentally out of sync with underlying social and political power dynamics, it has little chance for success. In such a scenario, the state both has limited incentive to invest in capacity [**10**] and cannot navigate the traditional forces which block reform and oppose the development of a modern state [**11**].

This article contends that the reason democracy failed to take root in Afghanistan is because of three specific design choices – which we call the three sins – that ensured Afghanistan's *de jure*  political institutions did not cohere with the underlying allocation of *de facto* political power. Collectively, these three sins put a political solution that might achieve a broad enough consensus to work out of reach, with disastrous consequences for the Afghan state.

First, the Taliban were explicitly excluded from peace negotiations and constitutional deliberations, restricted from any political participation by a provision in the constitution, and otherwise disallowed from any form of non-violent participation. This served to disenfranchise a significant percentage of the population, not least the confederation of Pashtuns who came to support the Taliban. Adopting such a stance ignored the fact that globally, the most successful peace agreements are those that allow for insurgent participation [**12**, **13**] and made Afghanistan's institutions fundamentally *exclusionary*. The only avenue to gain voice for the Taliban and their supporters was to sustain violent conflict, seek support from Pakistan, and push for more favourable political terms or the outright victory they ultimately achieved.

Second, political parties could not develop because of the decision to create large voting districts along with single non-transferable votes. This system is basically not used anywhere else in the world precisely because it drives political division, as we detail below. Restrictions on listing party affiliation on the ballot also did not help. The electoral system, in this sense, was fundamentally *divisive* and created a winner-take-all system. Predictably, this led to a patronage-oriented politics that entrenched existing elites [**14**] and excluded groups that shared pro-growth agendas, such as the growing urban middle class or new business elites, from becoming a viable political force.

Finally, the constitution gave vast powers to the executive, such as appointing all provincial and district governors. The highly *centralised* system is as far from the *de facto* federal nature of Afghan tribal authority as can be imagined.

Several experts have already pointed out that these design flaws encumbered Afghanistan's political development [**15–18**]. Our observations are not novel. We argue, however, that it is important to consider these design features together. They created an *exclusionary, divisive, and centralised* set of formal institutions that were fundamentally disconnected from Afghanistan's political realities.

This, in turn, created two downstream issues for Afghanistan's political and economic development. First, there was limited room for healthy politics and for effective state-building. Elites excluded from power opposed the state and sabotaged its development, both from within and from without. The crescendo of violence from the Taliban, the fact that the outcome of every election from 2009 onward remained deeply contested, and a series of failed power-sharing arrangements, all provide evidence that many of Afghanistan's elite never bought into the mission of the state. Afghanistan also suffered frequent opposition from within, with ministers refusing to pursue the agenda of the President, ministries frequently working at cross-purposes, and a broad range of actors deciding to loot rather than to build the state. Unprecedentedly large flows of foreign assistance exacerbated these issues, creating the widely discussed focus on capturing rather than building the Afghan state.

Second, because this dysfunction was woven into the country's institutional fabric, international actors – even when they worked to improve the situation in Afghanistan – could only work at the margins. International forces were restricted to winning hearts and minds through the provision of local development projects [**5**, **6**, **19**] or revising tactics to minimise civilian casualties [**20**]. While these pursuits were necessary for the US-led coalition to succeed in Afghanistan, they could not be sufficient. Matters as fundamental as institutional reform and bringing in the Taliban were basically off the table until it was too late.

State building, at its core, requires identifying a domain in which there is sufficient agreement on the core mission as a precondition for building state capacities [**21**]. The US did not, and perhaps could not, create a coherent long-term strategy focused around this mission. Instead, it spent colossal sums trying to fix problems at the margins. HR McMaster, whose involvement in the Afghan war culminated in serving as US National Security Advisor, famously argued that Afghanistan was not a 20-year war but rather a one-year war fought 20 times over. Much of those 20 years was spent working on problems at the fringes, and not at the core, of Afghanistan's political issues.

## **How Did This Happen?**

Many of the fundamental issues that would plague the US-created Afghan government began at the Bonn Conference. As Surhke [**17**] describes, when the architects of the Afghan state convened in Bonn on 27 November 2001, they created a system with no room for the Taliban and one that naturally led to a highly centralised presidential system. This was for at least three reasons.

First, the goal of the conference was not to create a viable long term political solution. It was to quickly create a palatable successor regime to the Taliban. Then–Secretary of State Colin Powell and the US military wanted terms for an interim governing arrangement before the US-backed Northern Alliance militias captured Kabul (in part, to avoid the bloody settling of ethnic vendettas). The much longer project of building consensus around a set of institutions – a hallmark of successful constitutional processes [**22**] – was simply incompatible with US timelines. This was left to the future.

The UN, which was put in charge of the Bonn negotiations to provide an international stamp of approval, allowed only four narrow political factions to be represented. It created an iterative structure that included a timeline for progressively wider elections and the eventual 2004 constitution. Much of the hard work of negotiating a peace process was left to the future, but was made impossible by the fact that elites had control from the outset [**17**]. Hamid Karzai guided the country toward a highly centralised state with an electoral system that *de facto* prevented the emergence of alternative coalitions or parties [**15**, **16**] as we describe below.

Second, the US severely underestimated the Taliban's degree of grassroots support, its importance to the Pakistani military, and therefore its potential to reconstitute itself. Had it appreciated this, a much better option would have been to ensure that the Pashtun confederations that had always supported the Taliban were genuinely bought into Afghanistan's political institutions.

Third, in 2001, there was little debate that Western liberal democracy would inevitably be the preeminent model of political organisation [**23–25**]. Even before 9/11, the neoconservative movement took this to its most extreme – if markets and politics globally should be fashioned in America's image, then why not intervene to accelerate that process wherever possible? Military intervention was added to the set of instruments acceptable to neoconservatives to propagate the Western liberal model after 9/11.

Confidence in the US's ability to quickly build democracies, of course, proved misguided. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the existing literature on the fundamentally political nature of counter-insurgency and civil war, such as Galula [**26**] and Popkin [**9**] was largely forgotten. It would not be rediscovered and used to guide military policy until the publication of the US Army Field Manual on Counterinsurgency [**27**]. And the remarkable political economy literature on conflict, governance, and development was created largely in response to the need to understand state formation and provide solutions for policy-makers engaged in the colossal undertaking of building modern states in poor war-torn countries [**28**].

It was challenging to forecast how long or costly engagement in Afghanistan would be, or even to think about how to pursue this effectively. Correspondingly, there was limited appreciation of the political complexity of insurgent conflict and of the potential to be drawn into a quagmire. The example of Iraq is instructive. In October 2002, Nobel laureate William D. Nordhaus produced one of the only independent and professional attempts to forecast the costs of a potential invasion in Iraq. He provided two estimates. If the occupation was short and favourable the war would cost \$121 billion. If it was prolonged and unfavourable it would cost \$1.595 trillion. Nordhaus's estimates vastly exceeded the official estimates from the US government and were viewed as outlandish, even though he pointed to the frequent failures to estimate the eventual costs of wars, including the Vietnam war, which cost 11 to 15 times the original estimate. In practice, Iraq greatly exceeded Nordhaus's maximum estimate. The most recent estimates place the costs of the Iraq war at just over \$2 trillion, before including future veterans' care.

## **Three Original Sins: Creating an Exclusionary, Divisive, and Centralised Political System**

Several commentators have pointed to the exclusion of the Taliban from politics as the 'original sin' in the Afghan war [**18**]. However, there were a set of related issues that also shackled political and economic development. This section considers a broader set of three original sins.

#### *Sin 1: excluding the Taliban*

The exclusion of the Taliban from the original negotiations at the Bonn Conference was the original, most damning sin. Successful peace arrangements often include provisions that allow all parties to participate [**12**, **21**]. For example, of the 110 conflicts that were settled between 1975 and 2005, 33 of the 42 that permitted rebel participation endured for five years, while only 30 of the remaining 68 survived that long [**13**]. While this research came of age after 2001, it is not altogether surprising that if large groups or powerful actors are entirely excluded from a political system, they will resort to violence to force their way in.

Early in the war, conceding a role for the Taliban was anathema to America, which had the veto power to block their inclusion. President George W. Bush conflated Al Qaeda and the Taliban in a speech on the evening of 9/11 [**17**], and pursuing terrorists with the full military might of the US was the order of the day. The authors had a particularly memorable conversation in Afghanistan in 2009 with a US Army colonel who was at Central Command in Orlando during the planning phases for the Afghan invasion. He described a stressful round-the-clock planning process that involved running through nightmare scenarios like Al Qaeda obtaining a nuclear weapon from the Pakistani arsenal and the escalation of a broader war that might draw in Pakistan. Tellingly, the intellectual exercises of either not invading at all or of only running a limited 'over-the-horizon' counter-terrorism mission aimed at killing Osama bin Laden were apparently not discussed at Central Command in October 2001. Not invading was not an acceptable option. Nor, as Lakhdar Brahimi, the lead UN negotiator in charge of the Bonn proceedings explained, was involving the Taliban in any successor regime. Signalling that an attack on the American homeland would carry major and lasting consequences even for the Taliban – who were only tangentially involved in the 9/11 attacks, but did refuse to give up Bin Laden – was the paramount consideration.

#### *Sin 2: promulgating an obscure and inherently polarising electoral system*

The Afghan constitution enshrined an electoral system that combined multi-member districts and a single non-transferable vote (SNTV). This system is exceedingly rare and used by almost no successful democracies [**16**]. It is only used, or only has been used in, Jordan, the Pitcairn Islands, Vanuatu, Japan from 1948 to 1993 (with the important caveat that constituencies were limiting to having very few representatives), and Taiwan from the 1960s to the 1990s. Both Japan and Taiwan abandoned the problematic system because it led to factionalism and created incentives for patronage.

Afghanistan only holds elections for the president and for the lower house (Wolesi Jirga). The Wolesi Jirga comprises 250 seats spread across 34 constituencies (provinces). When Afghanistan decided on its electoral system, the interim government felt that any constituency other than the 34 provinces would be unacceptable (although the country does have 421 districts contained within those 34 provinces that could plausibly constitute single-member electoral units).

The problem with the combination of multi-member districts and SNTV are carefully described by Reynolds and Carey in two pieces [**15**, **16**]. At its most basic, members from the same party or political alliance are forced to run against one another. Moreover, if a candidate receives more votes than needed to enter office, they cannot transfer these excess votes to their allies. And so, they do not form coalitions. In contrast, other multi-member systems that allow pooling within party lists avoid this issue. Under an SNTV system with large multi-member districts, unless a political alliance perfectly anticipates its voter support, and nominates a number of candidates in line with that support, and controls its voters such that it distributes support across them evenly, support for the alliance will not translate into votes for that alliance. It is easy to devise scenarios where parties can receive a substantial majority of votes and still receive a minority of seats. Therefore, there is very limited incentive for political coordination. It is every candidate for themselves.

This system led to a number of costly outcomes. First, it made it virtually impossible for parties or other political coalitions to emerge around a shared political agenda. Consequently, the same tribal groups that fought during the bloodiest period of Afghanistan's 40-year-long episode of constant instability had no incentives to form broader political coalitions. Nor could new political actors, such as new business-oriented urban elites, easily create new pathways to political power.

Second, the system created incredible incentives for election fraud, which is documented in our study of the 2010 Wolesi Jirga election reported in Callen and Long [**14**]. There we precisely measure how much specific candidates were able to inflate their vote totals during the aggregation process, and found consistently that a small set of powerful candidates engaged in dramatic vote inflation.

Widespread fraud not only undermines the key role that elections play in both allowing voters to select competent politicians and in providing performance incentives to incumbents who know they will someday face re-election [**29**]. It also erodes the social contract. In Berman, Callen, Gibson, and Long [**30**], we find clear evidence that reducing election fraud *causally* increased popular support for the Afghan government. It also increased citizens' willingness to cooperate with the state in basic and fundamental ways, such as being willing to pay taxes or provide critical intelligence regarding anti-state actors to state forces.

The Taliban understood the vital nature of free and fair elections with broad-based participation for legitimising the state. On election days, the Taliban committed about 10 times as many attacks as they would on a normal day. Moreover, a remarkable study using fine-grained data on attacks and travel routes to polling centres shows clearly that the Taliban sought to disrupt voting, by, for example, attacking travel routes while simultaneously minimising civilian casualties by attacking in the morning [**31**].

Reflecting the fading legitimacy of the Afghan state and disaffection with the system, turnout in Afghan elections dropped successively and very severely, from 9,716,413 voters (83.66% turnout) in 2004 to 1,823,948 voters (18.87% turnout) in 2019.

Third, the system is incredibly complex for voters. Ballot papers were often several pages long and included the names of hundreds of candidates.

Fourth, voters share only a very broad geography with all of their elected representatives. Afghanistan's provinces are both large and incredibly diverse. Allowing candidates to run at-large in a province almost ensures that some regions and groups will have no elected political representation.

#### *Why did Afghanistan adopt such a deeply flawed electoral system?*

Indeed, the decision to have large district magnitude, SNTV, and electoral rules prohibiting party affiliation on the ballot were implemented precisely to prevent the formation of parties and to preserve the power of the executive. While the UN argued for a proportional representation system, through a series of machinations, Hamid Karzai controlled the entire process leading up to the constitutional convention in 2004, and it was quickly ratified. The first draft was devised by a nine-member committee appointed by Karzai between October and March 2003, and from April to December 2003 a further 35-member all-Afghan constitutional commission selected by Karzai finalised the draft. They presented it to the Loya Jirga (grand council) in December 2003. The highly controversial constitution did not specify the electoral system, though intimated it should be some form of list proportional representation (PR).

The precise details of the system were to be worked out by the Afghan government in cooperation with the Joint Election Management Body (JEMB) and the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). They agreed to a closed-list PR system using multi-member districts based on Afghanistan's 34 historic provinces.

However, Karzai tasked a young assistant with making the case for closed-list PR to his cabinet. The assistant did not understand the system or its logic, and did not make a compelling case [**32**]. This, combined with popular distrust of political parties due to the chaotic nature of multi-party politics in the 1960s and the subsequent Communist Party rule and Soviet occupation (1978–89), and a belief that creating single-member districts from Afghanistan's traditional 34 provinces was not logistically or politically feasible, led to the eventual adoption of SNTV with multi-member districts.

#### *Sin 3: enacting a centralised presidential system*

Afghanistan is highly polarised: while the country has never had a census, around 40% of its population are Pashtuns, 30% are Tajik, 10% are Hazara and 10% are Uzbeks. These groups are also religiously divided. The Pashtuns and Uzbeks are predominantly Sunni, while the Tajiks and Hazara are predominantly Shia. Historically, Pashtuns have dominated politically, but Pashtun regimes in Kabul have been forced into *de facto* federal arrangements because of the large non-Pashtun populations in Afghanistan's north and west. Correspondingly, prominent Tajik leaders, as well as political scientists working on Afghanistan, advocated for a federal system.

#### *How these sins undermined the development of a capable state*

There are several logics regarding why e*xclusionary, divisive, and centralised* winner-take-all political systems, in ethnically, religiously, and culturally divided societies become extractive and do not develop politically or economically [**32**, **33**]. The characterisation from Padró-i-Miquel [**34**] describes Afghanistan well. In the presence of entrenched social cleavages, especially when succession protocols are weak (as with highly controversial elections), rulers can gain the support of a sizeable share of the population even while pursuing policies focused on personal enrichment. The rationale is that citizens will have a preference for rulers from their own group, even if they are corrupt, because they will be better off than they would be if a similarly ineffective and venal ruler from another group took power. In such an equilibrium, political order and continued opportunities for rulers to enrich themselves, are maintained through in-group patronage, rather than through pursuing inclusive and effective reforms.

## **Reasons That Afghanistan is Uniquely Dysfunctional**

While it is clear that the design of Afghanistan's institutions severely undermined the country's chances, Afghanistan will always be beset by major obstacles. Any account of why Afghanistan failed is incomplete without acknowledging these.

First, the challenging reforms required to create stable and inclusive political institutions requires complete sovereignty. So long as the dispute between India and Pakistan persists, this is all but impossible. Pakistan simply will not risk the possibility of a stable and autonomous ruling regime in Afghanistan that could some day refuse to support Pakistan in its dispute with India.

This is because Pakistan's powerful military believes it needs 'strategic depth' in case of an Indian land invasion. It also trains proxy terrorist groups in Afghanistan, which it views as key to its military strategy against India. Reportedly, when George W. Bush offered Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan's prime minister, a large aid package to cut ties with the Taliban, a large number of senior military officers resigned in protest.

Second, many of those involved in the creation of Afghanistan's institutions in the run-up to 2004 criticised the US decision to subsequently invade Iraq. The US took its best and brightest and focused them on what they thought was a more important objective: replacing Saddam Hussein and building a democratic ally in the Middle East. The shift in focus by the US State Department and Department of Defense came at a critical moment, when the Afghan constitution was on its way to ratification. Perhaps this is why the US allowed Karzai to essentially dictate the terms and choose a set of institutions that did not acknowledge existing power dynamics and that entrenched existing divisions.

Third, there is no shortage of foreign benefactors in Afghanistan's neighbourhood who see no issue with autocratic governments and who are not especially concerned with the welfare of Afghans. Beyond Pakistan, which seeks a sympathetic regime above all else, Russia, and especially China, which is allied with Pakistan on the issue, see benefit in seeing the US humiliated. China also seeks free access to Afghanistan's mineral wealth. Afghanistan's collapse was a major geopolitical victory for Russia and for China. It also underscored the case that autocrats are making the world over: that Western liberal ideas are antiquated and should no longer be viewed as the objective of political development.

Last, if indeed it is true that no democracy in Afghanistan can exist that does not possess two features: (1) maintaining its 34 districts as the fundamental political unit and; (2) letting voters vote for a candidate and not a party, then the SNTV system with multi-member districts may be the only option. If this is so, given that the system is both conceptually and empirically known to be highly ineffective, this would argue that Afghanistan is exceptionally unsuited to democracy. However, these two requirements seem artificial.

## **Conclusion**

The American quagmire in Afghanistan carried tremendous costs, most especially for Afghans who saw their long struggle for a brighter future crushed by a brutal theocracy. From 2000 to 2019, GDP per capita increased from around \$320 to \$555 (in constant 2015 US dollars). Male primary school enrolment increased from 40% to being near-total, and female primary enrolment increased from 0% to 90%. In 2022, the country stands on the brink of collapse.

Given the degree of investment and the implications for human welfare, it is deeply important to acknowledge the reality that one size does not fit all countries. Despite this, there was little consideration as to how the design of Afghanistan's political institutions and constitution should reflect its unique character. We contend that three design choices caused the country's institutions to be fundamentally out of sync with its political realities. We emphasise that, because these were choices, it is wrong to accept that there is no solution that could have possibly worked to create democracy in Afghanistan.

## **Acknowledgements**

This article benefited from conversations with colleagues and collaborators working in and interested in Afghanistan, including many devoted civil servants in the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the International Security Assistance Force. We thank Eli Berman, Tim Besley, Elizabeth Callen, Ali Cheema, Mick Cox, Joseph Felter, Ruixue Jia, James D. Long, Jacob N. Shapiro, Mohammad Isaqzadeh, Nargis Nehan, Scott Guggenheim, Tarek Ghani, Gerard Padró-i-Miquel, Rohini Pande, and Noam Yuchtman.

## **References**

Economic Review. 2015; 105(1): 354–381. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1257 /aer.20120427

## **4. Self-Defence and its Dangerous Variants: Afghanistan and International Law**

Devika Hovell and Michelle Hughes

The question as to whether Operation Enduring Freedom was justified under international law may seem one that has passed its practical use-by date. Yet, as may be disturbingly apparent from current global conflicts, justifications relied on by certain states in the past can influence their credible use by other states in the future and diminish opportunities to refute them. In this essay, the authors examine the international legal arguments used by the United States and its allies to justify the intervention in Afghanistan. They look at the impact these justifications had on the authority, purpose and expectations of Operation Enduring Freedom, as well as on relevant frameworks for cooperation and acceptable limits of collateral damage. The authors also look at the impact these justifications have had on interpretations of the law of self-defence in modern conflict more broadly.

## **Introduction**

Let's just pause, just for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control…

—US Representative Barbara Lee, 14 September 2001

The use of force is prohibited in international law. This simple but fundamental legal principle can be obscured in a geopolitical context littered with conflict and threatened conflict where the exceptions are more often seen as the rule. Relatedly, there is a tendency to dismiss international law as a 'marginal enterprise' at moments of political crisis [**1** p26]. This is why, in the immediate wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, legalistic objections to the United States' use of force against the perpetrators (and enablers) of these attacks could not help but sound reedy and off-key. However, 20 years later, the world is confronted by images of Afghanistan tumbling back under Taliban control, this time against the tragic backdrop of a military operation that cost 175,000 military and civilian lives and more than \$3.2 trillion. It may be thought at this point that international legal arguments come too late. Yet, for international law, 'hindsight is a necessary vice'.1 The practice of states, even that forged in heated times of war and crisis, can harden into enduring legal principles unless objected to or criticised in its aftermath. In this short essay, we examine the legal justifications for the military intervention in Afghanistan and consider the potential dangers in allowing these justifications to endure as part of the legal framework governing the use of force in international relations.

Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter, often described as the Charter's cornerstone, provides that 'All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations' [**2** pxii–xiii]. In the ordinary course of things, the use of force against a state to achieve regime change, such as seen in Afghanistan in 2001, would be a manifest violation of the Charter. It may even amount to an unlawful use of force warranting higher censure as an act of aggression.2 Yet there are exceptions. First, the prohibition does not cover situations where the government of a state consents to the use of force by another state within its territory [**3**]. Second, the Charter establishes a collective security framework, vesting 'primary responsibility' in the UN Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security, and allowing the Council to authorise measures including the use of force where 'necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security'. Third, Article 51 of the Charter notes that nothing in the Charter impairs the right of a state to use force in individual or collective self-defence in the event of an armed attack until the Security Council is able to take necessary measures.

These three circumstances – consent, Security Council authorisation, or self-defence – are the only circumstances in which the use of force is not prohibited in international relations. Each of these justifications has its own elements and limitations. The US intervention in Afghanistan was justified on the basis of the doctrine of self-defence and, at least initially, faced few objections.3 Yet despite (or perhaps because of) the initial wide support, US action in Afghanistan has indelibly affected contemporary understandings of the doctrine of self-defence, and generated a number of variants of the traditional doctrine. This has happened to the extent that it has become common to divide analysis of self-defence (and indeed *jus ad bellum* more broadly) into pre- and post-9/11.4 Christine Gray's seminal volume, *International Law and the Use of Force,* notes that that 'the US invasion of Afghanistan … led to a fundamental reappraisal of the law on self-defence' [**4** p200]. Below, we analyse these variants and assess the extent to which they impacted the authority, purpose, expectations, cooperation with and acceptable collateral damage in the context of the Afghanistan intervention.

## **Rush to Unilateral Action: The 'First Option' Variant**

Two opportunities stand above all others. First was the chance to convince the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden before the outbreak of war. Second was the opportunity to include the Taliban in the new political settlement. In both cases, the urgency of the moment overcame diplomacy. —Carter Malkasian, 2021

Prior to 9/11, it was 'self-evident and generally recognized' that self-defence was only available as an action of last resort [**5**]. This 'last resort' requirement is a component of the principle of necessity. The most famous articulation of this doctrine derives from the Caroline Affair in 1837. Following this incident on the Niagara River, which involved the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Canadian independence movement, correspondence between US Secretary of State Daniel Webster and UK Foreign Secretary Lord Ashburton recorded that a state must show 'a necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation'.

The 'last resort' criteria, or the requirement to show 'no choice of means', is usually described in terms of an obligation to establish the non-availability of measures other than the use of force. However, the broader interpretation is that a state can only resort to self-defence when there are no other 'realistic' alternatives, including the non-availability of the other justifications for force, such as host state consent or Security Council authorisation. This interpretation suggests a hierarchy between the three available justifications for the use of force: first, state consent; second, Security Council authorisation; and third, self-defence.5 This positioning of self-defence as an option of last resort is seemingly justified by Article 51's qualification that nothing shall impair the inherent right of self-defence 'until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security'.

A little-discussed aspect of the US response to 9/11 is that it seemingly upended this hierarchy. On 12 September 2001, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1368, which seemed to immediately cede the ground to the United States, recognising 'the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence in accordance with the Charter'. It has been suggested that this reflected a deliberate and strategic preference on the part of the US, which elected for unilateral over multilateral action despite clear Security Council 'readiness to take all necessary steps' in Security Council Resolution 13686 [**6** p635–636, **7**].

This suggestion does not rest upon a sufficiently nuanced assessment of the Council's reasoning. It is important to recall that in the moment, it was not only the Americans who were deeply shaken, but the international community as well. There had never been a terrorist attack of the magnitude, complexity and scope of 9/11, and even though the US and its allies had been closely tracking Al Qaeda since the late 1980s, their militaries, intelligence services and law enforcement had all missed critical indicators and warnings [**8**].

Furthermore, the relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda had been matters of Security Council concern since 1996 [**9**]. Following the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the effort assumed global importance, and the Clinton administration worked aggressively through diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement channels to find a way to bring Osama bin Laden to justice [**9** p121–126, 205–207]. Subsequently, the Security Council passed four resolutions between 1998 and 2001 that specifically cited the threat from Al Qaeda and declared the supporting actions of the Taliban government in Afghanistan to be a threat to international peace and security [**10–13**]. These resolutions were the foundation for the diplomatic activity that immediately followed the 9/11 attacks, including Resolution 1368. They indicate that while willing to act unilaterally, the US was aware that the transnational nature of Al Qaeda's networks and operations still demanded a multilateral approach.

The question remains as to whether the 'last resort' threshold had been reached. It is clear that the law enforcement measures authorised in Resolutions 1267 [**11**] and 1333 [**12**] had not yet fully been exhausted. Both resolutions authorised the use of measures to halt the funding of Bin Laden's and Al Qaeda's operations, but 'there was as yet no coordinated U.S. Government-wide strategy to track terrorist funding and close down their financial support networks' [**8** p119]. More problematically, there is also a strong counterfactual if we consider the availability of diplomatic options. Although such alternatives appeared to have been exhausted, the urgency of the moment and unprecedented international unity following the 9/11 attacks may have created a new opening for negotiations with the Taliban. According to former Bush administration officials, even though his national security council had concluded that any attack on Al Qaeda would have to take out the Taliban as well, President George W. Bush was not initially ready to commit to a course of action that would lead to regime change [**8** p315, **14**]. Instead, Bush at first maintained his position that if the Taliban would agree to turn Al Qaeda leaders over to the US, close all terrorist camps, free foreign prisoners, and comply with UN Security Council resolutions, the US would leave the regime in place [**9** p332–333, 14]. By 18 September, as Secretary of State Colin Powell lined up support for an eventual invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistani interlocutors reported that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar had considered the US proposal, and 'was not negative on all these points' [**9** p333].

Bush did not expect the Taliban to acquiesce, but in that moment, it was not yet an unrealistic option. With patience and sustained strategic pressure, diplomacy may have worked. Historian Carter Malkasian, a US State Department official in Afghanistan who later served as political advisor to the commander of the NATO forces, exhaustively researched the Taliban's decision-making process in the early days following 11 September. Malkasian concludes that while there may never be a definitive answer on whether a diplomatic solution could have been reached, there is strong evidence that – but for a combination of miscommunication, US political imperatives and the Bush administration's fear of further attacks – a negotiated solution would have been possible [**15**].

Events overtook such an opportunity. On the evening of 11 September, Bush had privately declared that the US would punish not just the perpetrators of the attacks, but those who harboured them as well [**9** p330]. Over the days and weeks that followed, his resolve hardened and expanded to encompass the broader aim of 'the elimination of terrorism as a threat to our way of life' [**9** p331]. Meanwhile, communicating through the Pakistanis, Mullah Omar agreed that he would ask Bin Laden to leave Afghanistan and further indicated that he would be willing to surrender him to a third country other than the US [**15**]. With the American public clamouring for vengeance, however, this had become unacceptable for Bush. Within days, the window for an agreement that would avert unilateral action slammed shut, and with the initiation of US airstrikes on Afghan targets on 7 October, Taliban resistance to what they saw as Western interference had hardened as well. Separated by time and absent the emotion, one can argue that by prematurely abandoning diplomatic negotiations, the 'last resort' requirement as a prerequisite for self-defence may not have been met.

The further tragedy is that the pre-invasion refusal to negotiate with the Taliban carried over into the post-invasion Bonn Conference, which charted Afghanistan's political future. Western representatives envisioned the Bonn Agreement as a power-sharing arrangement that would form the basis for a modern democracy, but at the US's insistence, the Taliban, and by extension the percentage of Afghan society that sympathised with its national vision, were excluded. Many experts believe that the refusal to include the Taliban, or to acknowledge the interests it represented, set the conditions for the 20 years of violent conflict that followed [**9** p455–466, **16** p877].

## **Invasion of Afghanistan: The 'Complicity' Variant**

Nothing did more for our ability to combat terrorism than the President's decision to send us into the terrorists' sanctuary. By going in massively, we were able to change the rules for the terrorists. Now they are the hunted.  Al-Qa'ida must never again acquire a sanctuary.

—George Tenet, 2002

Article 51 of the UN Charter provides that a state may use force in self-defence 'if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations'. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the idea that the US was entitled to use force in self-defence against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps seems to follow as a matter of legal logic. However, the legal position is not so simple. It is complicated by the fact that, unless terrorists are located on the high seas or otherwise outside the territory of a third state, the use of force against terrorist groups will necessarily implicate the use of force against the territorial integrity of the state in which they are located. Terrorist attacks do not in and of themselves justify a military response against the territory or government of a non-consenting state within whose borders members of the responsible terrorist group might be found.

Prior to 9/11, the extraterritorial use of force by a state against terrorists within another state was considered a violation of Article 2 (4) [**17** p209, 213–214]. In the 1970s and 1980s, such claims to the right to use force (for example, by Israel, South Africa and the US in Libya) were systematically rejected by the international community [**7** p377]. In order for self-defence claims to justify the use of force against non-state actors situated in another territory, it was necessary to establish a certain level of involvement on the part of the relevant state. The standard was established in the *Nicaragua* judgment, handed down by the International Court of Justice in 1986. Here, the ICJ determined that an 'armed attack' that sanctioned the right of self-defence included the 'sending by or on behalf of a State of armed bands, groups, irregulars or mercenaries, which carry out acts of armed force against another State of such gravity as to amount to (inter alia) an actual armed attack conducted by regular forces, or its substantial involvement therein'. A right to self-defence against a state would therefore only arise where it could be established that the state had substantial involvement with the non-state actors launching the attack. In determining the meaning of 'substantial involvement', the ICJ considered that assistance to rebels in the form of provision of weapons or logistical support would not suffice.7

In Mullah Omar's retelling, although the Taliban refused to surrender Osama bin Laden, there was no suggestion that they had a substantial involvement in the 9/11 attacks or even that they explicitly endorsed them [**18**, **19**]. Yet to suggest the Taliban was simply a passive provider of sanctuary and incidental support would underplay the extent of their involvement. While the relationship between Bin Laden and the Taliban leadership was sometimes tense, its foundation was deep and personal [**9** p125]. By the 1990s, the Taliban were providing bodyguards for Bin Laden, and Afghanistan had become a sanctuary where Al Qaeda 'created a terrorist army … with little interference' [**8** p237].

There was also an often-overlooked symbiotic aspect to the relationship. In return for sanctuary, 'Bin Ladin invested vast amounts of money in Taliban projects and provided hundreds of well-trained fighters to help the Taliban to consolidate and expand their control of the country' [**8** p237]. Thus, US Deputy Chief of Intelligence George Tenet concluded: 'While we often talk about two trends in terrorism – state supported and independent – in Bin Ladin's case with the Taliban, what we had was something completely new: a *terrorist* sponsoring a *state*' [**8** p238].

This level of complicity was underplayed in official statements. The US justified the intervention on the basis that 'the ongoing threat to the United States and its nationals posed by the Al-Qaeda organization have been made possible by the decision of the Taliban regime to allow parts of Afghanistan that it controls to be used by his organization as a base of operation' [**20**]. The UK explained that its military action was directed against 'Usama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terrorist organization and the Taliban regime that is supporting it' [**21**]. Articulating its support for the intervention, the European Council expressed its view that military action 'may also be directed against States abetting, supporting or harbouring terrorists' [**22**]. Implicit support was given to this position in Security Council Resolution 1373, which imposed an obligation upon states to 'refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts, including by suppressing recruitment of members of terrorist groups and eliminating the supply of weapons to terrorists'; 'to deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support or commit terrorist acts, or provide safe havens'; and to 'prevent the movement of terrorists by effective border controls' (though notably it did not expressly authorise the use of force against states failing to comply with these obligations).

Broad support for the US and UK strikes against Afghanistan has led to suggestions that there has been a reinterpretation of 'armed attack' in the wake of 9/11, emphasising the level of attribution required between non-state actors responsible for an armed attack and the targeted state. While there is a continuing practice to identify links between the targeted state and the terrorist organisation responsible for the attacks, it has been noted that the link appears to have been moderated from 'substantial involvement' to 'complicity'. Christian Tams describes the need to establish that the targeted state 'is responsible for complicity in the activities of terrorists based on its territority – either because of its support below the level of direction and control or because it has provided a safe haven for terrorists' [**7** p359, 385]. In the Commentary to the United Nations Charter, Randelzhofer offers a reinterpretation of attribution in the wake of 9/11, which proposes that an attack will be:

attributable to a State if they have been committed by private persons and the state has encouraged these acts, has given its direct support to them, planned or prepared them at least partly within its territory, or was reluctant to impede these acts. The same is true, if a State gives shelter to terrorists after they have committed an act of terrorism within another State [**23**].

Yet it must also be recalled that the intervention against Afghanistan was not merely targeted against the relevant terrorist groups, but that it led to regime change in the targeted state. More obviously than the question of attribution, questions of necessity and proportionality are clearly in play. Indeed, a legal focus on the attribution of the 9/11 attacks to the Taliban seems artificial in a context where the more relevant focus is the Taliban's role in perpetuating the ongoing threat, necessitating actions in self-defence. The lawful purpose of self-defence is not punishment for past acts, but prevention of ongoing threats.8 The legal question is arguably less a question of attributing the 9/11 attacks to the Taliban than a question as to whether the conduct of the Taliban rendered defensive force against that state's territory and government *necessary*. As Kimberley Trapp argues, complicity may provide evidence of necessity where a state's complicity in its territory being used as a base for terrorist operations renders defensive force against terrorists in that state's territory necessary.

This interpretation is more consistent with the strategy that the US pursued during the entire 20-year war. It began with an assessment that, by giving Al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan, the Taliban had allowed Bin Laden and his operatives to meet, plan, train recruits, and ensure that they would remain out of the reach of international enforcement action. Afghanistan's diplomatic isolation meant that there were few opportunities for meaningful negotiation, and there was no credible outside presence that could monitor Al Qaeda's activities or intent [**8**]. This was reinforced by the fact that between 1996 and 2001, the US had worked with 'dozens' of foreign governments to disrupt Al Qaeda, and engaged in a concerted diplomatic effort to use UN mechanisms to force the Taliban to cooperate with efforts by the international community to bring Bin Laden to justice, to no avail [**8**]. By 1997, US intelligence officials had come to the conclusion that the road to stopping Al Qaeda ran through the Taliban, which meant that any response to 9/11 would logically have to include the possibility of regime change [**8**]. During the later years of the war, as one US administration after another contemplated leaving, the fear that Afghanistan would again become a safe haven became a major political stumbling block to withdrawal, yet arguably in circumstances of less legal justification for their continuing presence.

Looking back to the United States' earliest decisions, it is important to realise that its operations *at that time* could have been justified by reference to the principle of necessity. That is not to say that every state providing safe haven to terrorists can lawfully be the subject of attack (or even regime change). However, as the next section seeks to demonstrate, this may be the legal consequence if the legal justification is based, not in necessity, but in a looser standard of attribution more generally.

## **Incursions against Pakistan: The 'Unwilling or Unable' Variant**

Now I prefer cloudy days when the drones don't fly. When the sky brightens and becomes blue, the drones return and so does the fear. Children don't play so often now and have stopped going to school. Education isn't possible as long as the drones circle overhead.

> —Zubair Rehman, 13-year-old Pakistani student, 29 October 2013

When considering the scope of US military operations following 9/11, the focus is generally on Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq.9 However, the Bush administration's 'global war on terror' (GWOT) was truly global. In all, there were at least 14 named operations within the GWOT constellation, including in the Philippines, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, as well as against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. During his administration, President Obama tried to shift to a more defensive narrative by directing use of the term Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) instead of GWOT, but the geographic breadth and lethal nature of the operations continued to expand, particularly through the increased use of small special operations teams and unmanned, standoff capabilities such as drone strikes [**25**].

The US continued to use OEF to describe many of its later operations, including those in Yemen and Somalia, in part to leverage the legality that OEF had ostensibly secured in Afghanistan to more tenuous claims, including a right of self-defence against terrorists operating from states 'unwilling or unable' to deal with them. The idea is that the right to self-defence extends to the right to use force against terrorists posing a threat of armed attack in states where those states are unwilling or unable to address the terrorist threat. Closely related to the 'complicity' variant, the 'unwilling or unable' variant represents a further expansion of the international law of self-defence. The extent to which it has been used to justify forceful interventions in third states is such that it merits separate consideration.

Nowhere has recourse to the 'unwilling or unable' variant been more obviously problematic than in Pakistan. For international forces fighting in Afghanistan, the operational imperatives for intervention were admittedly compelling. Following the Soviet withdrawal in the late 1980s, Pakistan had viewed its relationship with Afghanistan and the Taliban as a means to expand its influence westward, deny territory to regional rivals such as Iran, and derail India's objectives in Kashmir [**26**, **27**]. There were risks. The consolidation of Taliban leadership in Quetta and the presence of Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist organisations throughout Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas guaranteed a significant degree of internal instability that would have to be carefully managed [**27**]. However, Pakistani military leaders believed that the Afghan Taliban could be manipulated to support Pakistan's political objectives at a reasonable cost, and many supported them out of ideological sympathy as well [**27**]. The net effect was that for successive US administrations threatened by Islamic extremism, some of which originated within Pakistani territory, Pakistan's accommodation represented an intractable security challenge. As one expert stated, 'Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world today. All of the nightmares of the twenty-first century come together in Pakistan: nuclear proliferation, drug smuggling, military dictatorship, and above all, international terrorism' [**28**].

The Bush administration's initial post-9/11 approach was to use military and economic incentives to convince Pakistan's then-President Pervez Musharraf to withdraw official support to the Taliban and deny sanctuary to Al Qaeda [**27**, **29**]. This diplomatic victory was short-lived. Pakistan continued to maintain an open-door policy to fleeing Taliban, allowing them to evade American capture. Within months, the Taliban began to regroup and organise new operational hubs from Pakistan to launch its insurgency against Western forces on the Afghan side of the border [**27**, **29**]. The West failed to respond to the growing threat, and the Karzai regime was unable to do so. From 2006 onward, Pakistan never stopped allowing safe haven, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency further provided Taliban insurgents with specialised training, logistics, intelligence and support [**27**]. At times, Pakistani security forces attacked US formations that were pursuing Taliban operatives along the border [**27**, **29**].

Pakistan continued to insist that it was still an ally in the war on terror, however, and at times made key arrests, shared critical intelligence with the US and its allies, and served as intermediary between the various insurgent factions and organisations. At the same time, it steadfastly refused to permit outside intervention, insisting that it would participate in GWOT on its own sovereign terms. Ultimately, the US assessed that it had no choice but to pursue a more aggressive posture [**27**]. While a military ground presence was never seriously considered, by 2008, US commanders in Afghanistan had authorised limited 'hot pursuits' over the Pakistani border, and occasional artillery and aerial drone strikes against verified Taliban positions on Pakistan territory had become a norm [**27**].

The nature of the legal justification for such cross-border incursions was foreshadowed in an August 2007 speech by then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. Obama asserted that 'if we have actionable intelligence against bin Laden or other key Al Qaeda officials … and Pakistan is unwilling or unable to strike them, we should'. Over the course of his administration, these words were put into action. The most famous example was Operation Neptune Spear, in which Navy Seal Team Six killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in Pakistan, but less publicised, US-directed drone strikes have been far more lethal and persistent. The exact numbers will likely never be disclosed, but one credible watchdog organisation has estimated that between 2004 and 2020, there were at least 430 confirmed strikes on Pakistani territory, killing 2,515–4,026 individuals, including several hundred civilians [**30**]. Although there have been occasional reports that it gave clandestine approval for some of the strikes, Pakistan's government has never publicly given consent for what it has labelled 'unauthorised unilateral action'. For their part, US officials have consistently implied that US actions were justified on the basis that Pakistan had shown itself to be 'unwilling or unable' to suppress the threat posed by Bin Laden.

The 'unwilling or unable' doctrine is a dangerous variant of the doctrine of self-defence that provides an unsatisfactory measure for future action. As articulated, it draws no distinction between the earnest though unsuccessful state seeking to root out threats, and the state that finds itself in the crosshairs because of its own double-dealing. This is not to deny the seriousness of the security challenge facing states threatened by the inability or unwillingness of host states to assist. In the case of Pakistan, for example, it is clear that the Taliban would not exist today without Pakistan's support, and Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not have been able to thrive without the safe havens it provided. As a practical matter, however, there is no limit on how far this expansion permitting unilateral incursions might go, and with the proliferation of drones and other standoff weapons technology, the 'unwilling or unable' doctrine threatens to upend the principles of sovereignty that underpin the *jus ad bellum* structure entirely.

## **Enduring Counter-insurgency: The 'Pre-emption' Variant**

America lost? Lost How? By failing to convert Afghanistan into a well-governed, pro-Western state through elections and investment? That was…not America's purpose. —Michael Miklaucic, 20 July 2021

Operations in Afghanistan continued for 20 years. Long after the Taliban had been overthrown and Al Qaeda had been expelled and organisationally decapitated, the initial invasion had morphed into a massive, multinational civil-military effort to transform Afghanistan into a stable democracy in which the Taliban would have no leadership role and Al Qaeda and its clones could never regroup. Yet contrary to conventional thinking, neither President Bush nor his successors were fully committed to modernising the Afghan state. How then, did the war last so long, and why did the original legal justification of self-defence continue to apply?