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      The Aftershocks of the Saudi and American Debacle in Afghanistan

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      Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan have a complex relationship. Their ties date back to the 19th century when Afghanistan became the first Muslim country to recognize the second Saudi state of 1824 to 1891. In 1930, Ibn Saud recognized King Nadir Shah’s rule in Afghanistan, in 1932, the two countries signed their first friendship agreement, and in 1950, King Zahir Shah’s visit to Saudi Arabia was commemorated on a Saudi stamp.

      Ties over the following decades remained close. This was not so much because of Saudi geopolitical interests in Afghanistan, but rather how the country affected Saudi Arabia’s relations with Iran and Pakistan, a major rival and an important ally of the kingdom respectively.

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      The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 marked the summit of Saudi influence. In coordination with Pakistan and the United States, the Saudis famously supported the mujahideen and also assisted many Afghan refugees. Throughout the 1980s, the kingdom exercised direct interference over various Islamist groups in Afghanistan and many Saudis traveled there to fight the Soviets.

      After the Soviet Union departed in 1989 and throughout the subsequent civil war in Afghanistan, the Saudis continued their role of manipulating Afghan politicians and factions, using their petrodollars and religious influence on behalf of the US, with mixed results. In 1993, all of the Afghan mujahideen factions signed a peace agreement in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, but that failed to stop the conflict.

      Saudi Ties With the Taliban

      Following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, some commentators have encouraged the Saudis to try to play the religious card again. In June, Muslim scholars from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia signed a “declaration of peace” in Mecca, which Arab News described as a “historic, landmark event on the path toward reconciliation between warring factions.” But the Taliban rejected the move — which, in any event, had no impact on peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government — as a theatrical attempt to steal the diplomatic limelight from Qatar using Islamic mercenaries.

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      Saudi influence over the Taliban began with funding hardline religious schools, or madrassas, in Pakistan where the movement started. It effectively ended in 1996 when the Taliban first took over Afghanistan. At the end of the 1990s, Saudi citizens were officially barred from giving money to any charity that was not state-approved, which meant Saudi public funding for the Taliban was largely cut off, except for a few individuals acting without the explicit knowledge of the government. A 2013 research paper by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs stated that Saudi “fundraisers for the Taliban … are believed to extensively exploit networks and use old mechanisms dating back to the times of Saudi cooperation with mujahedeen and Taliban functionaries.”

      When the Taliban last ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries to officially recognize their government; Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates were the other two. This was not because the Saudis supported the Taliban regime, but rather because they were looking for a way to grease the wheels for an approach by Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, to persuade the Taliban to extradite Osama bin Laden, the Saudi leader of al-Qaeda.

      The Saudis calculated that by recognizing the Taliban government, they could win influence as they had done in the past with other factions and warlords. But in 1998, when Prince Turki traveled to Afghanistan with a delegation of Muslim figures, the former Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, turned him down.

      The Saudi View of the Taliban

      The House of Saud now faces a disconcerting moment over Afghanistan, not least because like the former Afghan government, the royal family depends on the US for protection against external enemies and internal threats.

      In a report by Wikistrat about the implications of the Taliban takeover on Saudi Arabia, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, comments: “Questions are likely to be mounting in Riyadh about the sincerity and the reliability of US security guarantees which themselves have been a matter of considerable uncertainty since the September 2019 attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure.” He adds that the “sudden abandonment of Afghan partners, spelled out clinically and coldly in [Joe] Biden’s televised address, may resonate strongly among US regional partners for whom President [Barack] Obama’s perceived abandonment of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 set in motion a questioning of US motivations that then continued into the Trump era.”

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      Neil Quilliam, a Middle East analyst at Chatham House, continues in the same Wikistrat report: “The Taliban leadership will likely begin a campaign to challenge the legitimacy of the Al Saud and appeal directly to the Saudi population to challenge the ruling family’s authority.” He adds that the “nature of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is a cause for concern in Saudi Arabia. President Biden’s speech about the withdrawal, wherein he noted that remaining in Afghanistan no longer constitutes a vital interest, has also sent shockwaves through the Saudi leadership.”

      The Taliban may turn on Saudi Arabia in the media war. Transnational jihadist groups like al-Qaeda could also threaten the Saudis from Afghanistan again. But as Sami Hamdi explained in the Arab Digest podcast, there are reasons why Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman might benefit from the situation in Afghanistan in terms of finding a renewed utility toward the US. A foreign diplomat in Riyadh, quoted by Reuters, predicted that the kingdom will take a pragmatic approach. “The Saudis have a historical relationship with Afghanistan and will eventually have to accept the Taliban [again] … They have no other option,” he said.

      In 2019, Jalaluddin Shinwari, the former Taliban deputy minister of justice, told the New York Times: “What [we] are saying to Americans is this: You have accepted Saudi Arabia, and we won’t do more than their basic code — retribution for murder, chop off the hand for robbing. If you have accepted Saudi, what’s wrong with us being another? The rest will be your priorities: aid, friendship, economic relations.”

      The US Would Never Pull Out of Saudi Arabia

      The Taliban can dream of a relationship with the US akin to that which the Saudis enjoy. Yet that relationship is completely different from whatever ties the US has with Afghanistan. The United States would never pull out of Saudi Arabia the way it did from Afghanistan, not only because of hydrocarbons — although with the Middle East still providing around 31% of world oil production and 16% of global natural gas supply, this remains an important factor. Nor is American support just about Israel’s security — although the US and its Western allies certainly wish to ensure this, and they are ready to work with any Arab regime, particularly Saudi Arabia, that is ready to officially recognize Israel on US terms.

      The main reason the US can never pull out of Saudi Arabia is because of the unthinkable consequences of losing Saudi control of the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina to al-Qaeda or another jihadist movement. That is why US support for the Saudis remains solid despite misgivings on both sides.

      *[This article was originally published by Arab Digest, a partner organization of Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Tony Blair’s Stand-Up Number

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      Is there any reason to pay attention to what Tony Blair, the British prime minister between 1997 and 2007, has to say after the Afghan debacle? The former member of the comedy duo, composed of George W. Bush (the inarticulate gaffer) and Blair (the sanctimonious moralizer), that performed prominently on the world stage in the first decade of this century, no longer has any serious connection to political power. Still, Blair manages to make occasional appearances in the news cycle, thanks principally to the inertia that so relentlessly drives the media’s choices.

      Now that the war the Bush and Blair team enthusiastically launched in 2001 has been officially lost, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) was curious to hear what the former leader might have to say. Would Blair offer some insider perspective on an episode of history now judged to have been a vainglorious attempt to punish a spectacular criminal act by mounting a military campaign that turned out to be more spectacular, equally criminal, much more costly and far more self-destructive of the civilization that was presumably defending itself? Would he apologize for his own mistakes? Would he coldly analyze the political and ideological sources of those mistakes?

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      Blair did admit that “maybe my generation of leaders were naive in thinking countries could be remade.” That was neither a confession nor an apology, especially as he immediately followed up by implicitly critiquing President Joe Biden’s precipitated withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, adding that “maybe the remaking needed to last longer.” He then used the now obligatory example of the plight of Afghan women to assert that “we mustn’t forget … that our values are still those which free people choose.”

      Instead of confessing and clarifying, the monologue he delivered resembled a self-parody of the reasoning that drove his error-ridden decision-making in 2001. “Islamism,” he proclaimed, “both the ideology and the violence, is a first order security threat… COVID-19 has taught us about deadly pathogens. Bio-terror possibilities may seem like the realm of science fiction, but we would be wise now to prepare for their potential use by non-state actors.” In short, once again, we need to be afraid, very afraid.

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Potential use:

      A term used by politicians to describe an unlikely event that usefully inspires fear in the public’s mind to justify aggressive efforts labeled “defense,” but which objectively appear to take the form of offensive assault against other nations and peoples

      Contextual Note

      In such moments, Blair can appear as if he is vying to become a stand-up comedian, a kind of one-man Monty Python, satirizing his nation’s historical institutions. Unfortunately, despite Blair’s notoriety, they are not in the same league. The Flying Circus boys came together initially as irreverent university wits, who targeted post-colonial British culture and the pompous establishment’s status quo. As the former living symbol of that pompous establishment, Blair’s comic ambition is fraught with insurmountable obstacles. Even when his discourse manages to sound as surreally unhinged as that of any of the characters invented by the Python, Blair will never break free from his former identity as the real-life representative of the establishment’s fake wisdom and pseudo-sanity.

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      In the later years of his reign as the young and glamorous prime minister, even before the devastating findings of the Chilcot report on the UK’s involvement in the Iraq War, many politically aware Brits were already tempted to change the spelling of his name from Blair to Bliar, to highlight his habit of solemnly lying his way into disastrous wars, alongside his buddy, President Bush. Together, those two men led an enterprise that some observers assess as a complex and long-enduring war crime.

      That both of those men should still be welcomed on the world stage, treated as sages and counted on to deliver wise commentary on current events should shock only those who are unaware of how today’s media works. It systematically honors those who have been the boldest in committing crimes, so long as such crimes are committed in the name of national security. That rationale has become so fundamental and so obsessively inculcated by those who exercise any form of political or economic power that committing extreme violence in the name of “national security” will always be lauded in the media as proof of a politician’s courage to go beyond the call of duty. 

      Historical Note

      Tony Blair’s comedy appears to be based on a simple premise. His onstage character assumes the stance of taking seriously the startling idea formulated in 1989 by Francis Fukuyama, as the Cold War was ending. According to the young political scientist, a golden age governed by the principles of Western liberalism was dawning. Fukuyama claimed that “we are witnessing… the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

      Fukuyama himself eventually abandoned that thesis or at least corrected our understanding of what he meant by it. Blair thinks we can return to 1992, a year in which the book, “The End of History and the Last Man” was published and the Soviet Union only existed in the past tense. In his secular preaching, Blair maintains the faith in the triumph of liberal values. “Recovering confidence in our values and in their universal application,” he affirmed, “is a necessary part of ensuring we stand up for them and are prepared to defend them.”

      Blair’s forward-looking aims at new battlegrounds. “Britain should work more closely with European countries on how best to develop capacity to tackle the threat in areas such as Africa’s Sahel region,” he said. This stands as a scintillating demonstration of how the neocolonialist mind works. It seeks a region of interest and then invents the threat. 

      Why is Blair singling out the Sahel? The answer should be obvious. It is the logic used by 19th-century European colonialist powers, who opportunistically looked for occasions to exploit the weakness of their rivals to dominate a particular part of the world. France is currently retreating from its futile engagement in the Sahel, an area it dominated to a large extent as a colonial power and in which it has been active as a neocolonial defender in the “global war on terror.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Blair’s plan reads like a comic book version of traditional British imperialism. “We need some boots on the ground,” he said. “Naturally our preference is for the boots to be local, but that will not always be possible.” Let the natives die as we secure our rule. It is already laughable to suggest that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit Britain might “work more closely with European countries” on its relations with the African continent.

      Blair is obviously thinking of a tandem with France, whose citizens have lost all patience with their nation’s inept military operation across the Sahel region. He imagines France and Britain together renewing the glory formerly achieved by the US-UK duo in the Middle East. Together they will ensure that the “remaking” lasts longer. France’s Jupiterian president, Emmanuel Macron, humiliated by the current pressure to withdraw troops, would clearly welcome the chance of participating in such an alliance, even if the French people are reticent.

      For Blair, it isn’t about power and money, though he is clearly attracted to both, especially the latter, which he has shown a talent for accumulating. No, it’s about universal values, Blair’s own singularly enlightened values. That’s a language dear to the president of the French Republic, a nation that has tirelessly sought to exercise its “mission civilisatrice” across the globe for the last three centuries. Blair, the stand-up comedian, will “stand up for” those values and be “prepared to defend them.”

      “Be prepared” is the Boy Scouts’ motto. In the final act of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” the young prince of Denmark declared to his friend Horatio that “the readiness is all.” Unlike Blair, however, Hamlet wasn’t interested in magnifying real or imaginary threats to his well-being. Instead, he was affirming a certain equanimity and trust in his own capacities. No need to invest in his training before what turned out to be a rigged fencing match. Hamlet refused to let fear be his guide.

      From the beginning of Shakespeare’s play, Denmark was in a state of war, feverishly building its armaments to defend itself from a “hot and full” Norwegian prince, Fortinbras. But it was Denmark’s own criminal king who brought the country down, leaving bodies strewn across the stage just as the young Fortinbras is about to arrive, survey the damage and take control of the state.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Will the Taliban End Up Under the Influence?

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      Yahoo News Senior Editor Mike Bebernes asks the big question on everyone’s mind after the American debacle in Afghanistan: “Does the U.S. have any real leverage over the Taliban?” After summarizing the immediate political background of the topic, he compares the speculative answers of a variety of pundits.

      Bebernes distinguishes between what he calls optimists, who “say the U.S. has enormous leverage to hold the Taliban to their commitments,” and the pessimists, who apparently believe that the interests of the two countries have so little in common that it isn’t worth bothering about the concerns of such savage people. In other words, as Donnie Brasco would say, “Forget about it!”

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      The optimists typically cite the weakness of the Afghan economy and the problems the Taliban will face without US cooperation. Others think that a common concern with fanatical terrorist groups may create an opportunity for mutual understanding. Bebernes suggests that the Taliban government is likely to “seek support in combating its own terror threat from groups like [the Islamic State in Khorasan Province], which some experts believe will create another point of leverage for the U.S.”

      One of the pessimists appears to believe that, as in the Cold War, there may become what General Turgidson in “Dr. Strangelove” would have called a “leverage gap” between the US and Russia or China. “Other world powers could undercut America’s leverage.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Leverage:

      The measure of the power of a state with imperial ambitions over the life and death of populations beyond its borders

      Contextual Note

      The trauma Americans experienced after Saigon, nearly half a century ago, and Kabul today has provoked what might be called the first “leverage crisis” in US history. For more than two centuries, the United States has carved out, largely unimpeded, its areas of influence in various parts of the world. Areas of influence eventually evolved into “spheres of influence.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Following World War II, American strategists realized they could conquer, economically if not politically, the great sphere itself, the earthly globe. The globalization of what was originally the US version of Europe’s capitalist economy, along with a reinforced ideology thanks to thinkers from the University of Chicago, led every strategist within Washington’s Beltway to assume that the globe itself could become America’s hegemonic domain.

      Exercising geopolitical and economic hegemony required two things: physical presence — provided essentially by multinational firms and American military bases — and a toolbox of influence, which could take the form alternatively of overt and covert military action or economic sanctions. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US State Department has wielded those tools with a sense of ever-increasing impunity as it proceeded to intimidate both its allies and nations that refused to acknowledge their tributary status with regard to US influence. For the past four decades, the US has relied on either warfare — invasion, occupation and bombing campaigns, unlimited in time and scope — or increasingly severe economic sanctions to reaffirm what was officially formulated as influence, but exercised with a spirit of hegemonic control.

      The debacle in Afghanistan reveals a deeper trouble at the core of strategic decision-making in Washington. The new emphasis on the concept of leverage can be read as an admission that the toolbox to manage a sphere of influence has lost much of its efficacy. For decades, the idea of applying and reinforcing influence dominated Washington’s strategic thinking. It is now being replaced by the much more fragile idea of exercising leverage. Both the State Department and the media pundits appear puzzled about what that might mean.

      The concept of leverage comes from the field of mechanics. It describes the function of a lever. “Levers convert a small force applied over a long distance to a large force applied over a small distance.” Twenty years of yet another futile, expensive and demonstrably stupid war appears to have taught Washington that it no longer has the control over distance that it formerly believed it had. Its wasteful actions have also diminished its force.

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      Making leverage work in mechanics requires some careful analysis, preparation and effective execution. These are efforts the strategists, planners and decision-makers, convinced of the indomitable force of their influence, have consistently failed to carry out in a competent way. Could it be too late for them to learn the art of leverage? Or is the very fact that they are now obliged to think in terms of leverage rather than influence so humiliating an experience that they will fail to engage?

      This may be the occasion for US President Joe Biden to leverage the vaunted “power of our example” rather than the “example of our power” that he so regularly mentions in his speeches. That would require some real geopolitical creativity. And does he really believe that the US could live up to that standard? Few commentators have remarked that Biden, true to his own tradition, plagiarized that line from Evan Augustine Peterson III, J.D., who originally used it in 2005 to condemn the Iraq war that Biden had so forcefully promoted as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

      Historical Note

      In 1823, President James Monroe promulgated the Monroe Doctrine that continues to this day to dominate US relations with the entire American continent. It became a permanent feature of the mindset of US strategists, who without a trace of tragic irony routinely consider Latin America in its entirety, right down to the Tierra del Fuego, as Washington’s “backyard.” Peter Hakim, a senior fellow of the Inter-American Dialogue, in a Foreign Affairs in 2007 article with the title, “Is Washington Losing Latin America?” dared to express the feelings not only of the US political class, but also those of the USA’s neighbors. “Perhaps what most troubles Latin Americans is the sense that Washington just does not take the region seriously and still considers it to be its own backyard,” he wrote.

      In 1823, Latin America’s population consisted of three broad socio-cultural and ethnic components: indigenous people who occupied most of the mountainous interior; descendants of Iberian Europeans (Spanish and Portuguese) who, following their 15th and 16th-century conquests, dominated the political and economic structures; and imported African slaves (primarily in Brazil). All three were as distant from the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture of the US as anyone could imagine. These were the populations President Monroe wanted to “protect” from hostile action by European powers. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Through its own expansion justified in the name of “manifest destiny,” the US had demonstrated how it would deal with indigenous Americans. Primarily through genocidal warfare. It demonstrated its attitude toward Africans, deemed useful purely for economic exploitation as slaves. As for the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking populations who created the culture that prevailed across all the coastal regions of Latin America, they belonged at best to the category of second-class Europeans. The fact that the majority were mestizos (mixed-race) defined them irrevocably as third-class. At least they could thank their hybrid status for being spared the fate of the true indigenous, who could at any moment, even in recent times, be subjected to genocidal treatment.

      In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt refined the Monroe Doctrine by adding the Roosevelt Corollary. It “stated that in cases of flagrant and chronic wrongdoing by a Latin American country, the United States could intervene in that country’s internal affairs.” If during the 19th the Monroe Doctrine functioned mainly as a barrier to European incursion, by the beginning of the 20th century, the US had come to understand the value for its burgeoning capitalist economy of controlling what came to become a continental sphere of influence. Controlling meant having the power to organize the economy of the countries under its influence.

      Following the Second World War and the collapse of nearly all the vestiges of European colonization, the US discovered that the entire globe could potentially become its sphere of influence. Some have called the period of the Cold War the Pax Americana, simply because the standoff with the Soviet Union never became a hot war between the two massively armed superpowers. But throughout the period there were proxy wars, clandestine operations and regime change campaigns galore that meant the heat was never really turned down.

      What a comedown it must be today to have to debate how to exercise leverage.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      The Afghanistan Papers review: superb exposé of a war built on lies

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      BooksThe Afghanistan Papers review: superb exposé of a war built on lies Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post used freedom of information to produce the definitive US version of the warJulian BorgerSun 5 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 5 Sep 2021 02.02 EDTIn the summer of 2009, the latest in a long line of US military commanders in Afghanistan commissioned the latest in a long line of strategic reviews, in the perennial hope it would make enough of a difference to allow the Americans to go home.‘The intensity has not changed’: Jason Kander on the fall of Afghanistan – and trying to get friends outRead moreThere was some excitement in Washington about the author, Gen Stanley McChrystal, a special forces soldier who cultivated the image of a warrior-monk while hunting down insurgents in Iraq.Hired by Barack Obama, McChrystal produced a 66-page rethink of the Afghan campaign, calling for a “properly resourced” counter-insurgency with a lot more money and troops.It quickly became clear there were two significant problems. Al-Qaida, the original justification for the Afghan invasion, was not even mentioned in McChrystal’s first draft. And the US could not agree with its Nato allies on whether to call it a war or a peacekeeping or training mission, an issue with important legal implications.In the second draft, al-Qaida was included and the conflict was hazily defined as “not a war in the conventional sense”. But no amount of editing could disguise the fact that after eight years of bloody struggle, the US and its allies were unclear on what they were doing and who they were fighting.The story is one of many gobsmacking anecdotes and tragic absurdities uncovered by Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter at the Washington Post. His book is based on documents obtained through freedom of information requests, most from “lessons learned” interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), a watchdog mandated by Congress to keep tabs on the hundreds of billions flowing into Afghanistan.In the Sigar files, and other interviews carried out by military institutes and research centres, Whitlock found that soldiers of all ranks and their civilian counterparts were “more open about their experiences than they likely would have been with a journalist working on a news story”.Blunt appraisals were left unvarnished because they were never intended for publication. The contrast with the upbeat version of events presented to the public at the same time, often by the very same people, is breathtaking.The Afghanistan Papers is a book about failure and about lying about failure, and about how that led to yet worse failures, and so on for 20 years. The title and the contents echo the Pentagon Papers, the leaked inside story of the Vietnam war in which the long road to defeat was paved with brittle happy talk.“With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict,” Whitlock writes. “Instead, they chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift.”As Whitlock vividly demonstrates, the lack of clarity, the deception, ignorance and hubris were baked in from the beginning. When he went to war in Afghanistan in October 2001, George Bush promised a carefully defined mission. In fact, at the time the first bombs were being dropped, guidance from the Pentagon was hazy.It was unclear, for example, whether the Taliban were to be ousted or punished.“We received some general guidance like, ‘Hey, we want to go fight the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan,’” a special forces operations planner recalled. Regime change was only decided to be a war aim nine days after the shooting started.The US was also hazy about whom they were fighting, which Whitlock calls “a fundamental blunder from which it would never recover”.Most importantly, the invaders lumped the Taliban in with al-Qaida, despite the fact the former was a homegrown group with largely local preoccupations while the latter was primarily an Arab network with global ambitions.That perception, combined with unexpectedly easy victories in the first months, led Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to believe the Taliban could be ignored. Despite offers from some leaders that they were ready to negotiate a surrender, they were excluded from talks in December 2001 on the country’s future. It was a decision the United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, called the “original sin” of the war.Rumsfeld declared there was no point negotiating.“The only thing you can do is to bomb them and try to kill them,” he said in March 2002. “And that’s what we did, and it worked. They’re gone.”Not even Rumsfeld believed that. In one of his famous “snowflake” memos, at about the same time, he wrote: “I am getting concerned that it is drifting.”In a subsequent snowflake, two years after the war started, he admitted: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”’The Taliban had not disappeared, though much of the leadership had retreated to Pakistan. The fighters had gone home, if necessary to await the next fighting season. Their harsh brand of Islam had grown in remote, impoverished villages, honed by the brutalities of Soviet occupation and civil war. The Taliban did not represent anything like a majority of Afghans, but as their resilience and eventual victory have shown, they are an indelible part of Afghanistan.Bruised Biden tries to turn the page after US debacle in AfghanistanRead moreWhitlock’s book is rooted in a database most journalists and historians could only dream of, but it is far more than the sum of its sources. You never feel the weight of the underlying documents because they are so deftly handed. Whitlock uses them as raw material to weave anecdotes into a compelling narrative.He does not tell the full story of the Afghan war. He does not claim to do so. That has to be told primarily by Afghans, who lived through the realities submerged by official narratives, at the receiving end of each new strategy and initiative.This is a definitive version of the war seen through American eyes, told by Americans unaware their words would appear in public. It is a cautionary tale of how a war can go on for years, long after it stops making any kind of sense.TopicsBooksAfghanistanSouth and Central AsiaUS militaryUS foreign policyUS national securityGeorge BushreviewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      ‘I’m not Rambo’: Republican unrepentant about attempt to enter Afghanistan

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      US politics‘I’m not Rambo’: Republican unrepentant about attempt to enter AfghanistanCongressman Markwayne Mullin, criticized for rogue rescue effort, says he would do it again ‘without hesitation’ Edward Helmore in New YorkSat 4 Sep 2021 11.31 EDTLast modified on Sat 4 Sep 2021 11.36 EDTThe Oklahoma Republican congressman Markwayne Mullin has said he has no regrets about trying to enter Afghanistan on a rescue mission last month, saying that though he is “not Rambo” he would make such an attempt again “without even hesitation”.Afghanistan: militia endure ‘heavy assaults’ from Taliban in Panjshir ValleyRead moreMullin, a former wrestler described on his own website as “a former mixed martial arts fighter with a professional record of 5-0”, told Fox News he tried to enter Afghanistan as thousands of westerners and their Afghan allies attempted to flee the Taliban.“I wasn’t trying to go over there and be a cowboy or anything like that,” Mullin said. “It was just, ‘What else do you do when you see a problem? How do you say no if you can be an asset?’”Afghanistan fell to the Taliban last month, nearly 20 years after the US-led invasion. The Biden administration has said it evacuated about 124,000 American citizens and Afghans deemed at risk under Islamic militant rule.Mullin said he received requests to help thousands of people. He also said he was asked to accompany people with US military connections – “Delta [Force] guys” and “special forces” – into the war-torn country.“I’m not Rambo,” he said. “Never pretended to be Rambo. We were surrounded by great people. Out of all the guys I was working with, I’m the low man on the totem pole. And I understood that.”John Rambo is a character played by Sylvester Stallone in a series of action films first made in the 1980s, one concerning a mission to find Americans left behind after the Vietnam war.Mullin said he planned to help his companions by “open[ing] the doors for them, making phone calls and being able to take in the [special immigrant visa applicants] or the [American citizens] as they came onto the plane. That was the plan.”But, he said, “that plan changed. And it changed when we wasn’t allowed to get into Afghanistan.”According to the Washington Post, Mullin first attempted to enter Afghanistan via Greece, only to be denied permission by the defense department.He then reportedly called the US ambassador to Tajikistan with a request to help transport a large amount of cash into the country, saying he would be going on to Afghanistan to rescue a woman and her four children, all US citizens.Mullin told the embassy he planned to fly to Dushanbe in Tajikistan from Tbilisi in Georgia, then to rent a helicopter. The embassy turned him down. Officials told the Post Mullin threatened the US ambassador, John Mark Pommersheim.Mullin told Fox News: “Unfortunately, the ambassador, Pommersheim, was not helpful at all.”Mullin’s attempts to reach Afghanistan followed an unauthorized and widely criticised visit to Kabul by a Republican congressman, Peter Meijer, and a Democrat, Seth Moulton. The two military veterans have defended their actions.US troops completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan this week. The state department says Americans should not visit the country “due to civil unrest, armed conflict, crime, terrorism, kidnapping, and Covid-19”.Congressmen criticized over Kabul visit say they were ‘uniquely situated’ for tripRead moreMullin, who told Fox News he and others had estimated they had “a 50-50 chance of coming back” from their planned mission, wrote on Instagram on Wednesday that he had nonetheless helped Americans out of the country.“I am heading home,” he wrote, without specifying where he was.“Have we been helping get Americans out of Afghanistan? Yes. Is the mission continuing? Yes. Am I missing? No. Did I go dark for a little? Yes, because it wasn’t safe to be communicating. Am I extremely disappointed in how we (United States) left Americans behind … that would be an understatement.”Biden and members of his administration have said between 100 and 200 US citizens remain in Afghanistan. The White House has said it will continue efforts to help any who wish to leave the country. Veteran-led rescue groups have said the official estimate overlooks hundreds of permanent legal residents with green cards.After claiming Joe Biden was “absolutely lying to the American people about Americans and our friends being left behind”, Mullin added a hashtag: #Ordinarypeopledoingextraordinarythings.TopicsUS politicsUS foreign policyUS militaryAfghanistanSouth and Central AsianewsReuse this content More

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      Biden will survive the Afghan withdrawal, but it seals the fate of liberal interventionism | Jonathan Freedland

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      OpinionAfghanistanBiden will survive the Afghan withdrawal, but it seals the fate of liberal interventionismJonathan FreedlandThe notion that the west has a duty to act in extreme situations has been buried in the rubble of Afghanistan and Iraq Fri 3 Sep 2021 11.52 EDTLast modified on Fri 3 Sep 2021 12.28 EDTHe wanted to be Franklin Roosevelt; he ended up as Jimmy Carter. That’s the conventional conservative wisdom on Joe Biden and his handling of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. “The Afghan debacle will destroy the Biden presidency,” declared one longtime Republican pollster, confident that Kabul 2021 will do to Biden what Tehran 1979 did to Carter.Biden isn’t the first president to promise never to wage another war of intervention | Simon JenkinsRead moreThe assumption is that those initial, chaotic scenes at Kabul airport, with desperate Afghans clinging to planes as they took off, the heartrending stories of faithful servants of the US left to the mercies of the Taliban, and the sight of Afghanistan’s new masters posing with abandoned US military hardware worth billions, will together add up to a humiliation that the American public will not forgive. The assumption is that defeat is unpalatable – and that those images looked like defeat. And that even if that defeat was 20 years in the making, it was Biden left standing at the final hour and so he will bear the blame.I understand the force of the argument, and yet I’m not convinced. That’s for a variety of reasons – not all of them cheering.The starting point is that the US electorate accepts Biden’s bedrock case that it was time to end the “forever war” and get out. Both Biden and Donald Trump promised total withdrawal before next week’s 20th anniversary of 9/11, and some 98.1% of US voters gave their approval to that in November 2020. Biden can make, and indeed has made, a powerful defence for any politician: that he was simply keeping his promises.Except the current debate is not over the whether of withdrawal, but rather the how. Biden is faulted, among other things, for failing to start the evacuation of vulnerable Afghans months ago, so that those at risk could exit alongside the US military, rather than in a frantic scramble after almost all the Americans, and their protective firepower, had gone. The White House can counter that the Afghan government itself opposed any such early exodus, fearing it would spark a crisis of confidence, fuelling a self-fulfilling prophecy that the government was about to collapse and the Taliban take over.Still, now that the images from Kabul airport are off the TV news, arguments like those will shift to the thinktank and the seminar room. On the wrestling mat of day-to-day politics, Team Biden have plenty of moves: they can say that, after an admittedly shaky start, an airlift of 120,000 in a fortnight was an extraordinary achievement and that it came with relatively little loss of US life.And that, I’m afraid, is the crucial measure. The Iran hostage crisis was terminal for Carter because the 52 hostages were American, and their 444-day captivity was a long humiliation. It’s true that 13 US service personnel were killed in the August attack by the Afghan offshoot of Islamic State, but it’s the very fact that US soldiers had been dying in Afghanistan since 2001, 2,372 of them in total, that made Americans want to get out in the first place. And now they are out. The ones left behind, the victims of the withdrawal, are Afghans – whether they worked for the US and now fear for their lives, or if they didn’t but simply fear living under a medieval regime. The brute reality is that so long as Americans are unaffected, the lives of foreigners don’t move the needle in US politics.Republicans have made noise these last couple of weeks, but they can’t easily attack Biden for doing what they planned to do. They can hardly say a 30 August exit was too hasty: on 18 April, Trump was telling Biden he “can and should get out earlier”. Nor can Republicans slam the administration for paving the way for Taliban rule: it was Team Trump that did the deal with the Taliban that boosted its ranks by releasing 5,000 jailed fighters, and cut out the Afghan government altogether.Nor should Biden get much grief from the left. As MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan put it, “He evacuated more than 100,000 non-Americans in barely two weeks. He ended US participation in a war that has killed, by conservative estimates, more than 40,000 non-American civilians. He stood up to generals and hawks and defence contractors. All pretty progressive to me.”So the political obituaries of Joe Biden are surely premature. Unless you want to see the return of Trump in 2024, that should be a relief. And yet, there’s something dispiriting about the logic of it all the same.For one thing, it may be true that in the calculus of US politics only American lives matter, but that’s a gloomy reality. For another, left cheers for the end of a failed imperialist venture are shortsighted. The US may have left Afghanistan, but that does not signal the end of imperialist interest in the country. The other empires are circling, with China first in the pack, eyeing up Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, estimated at $1tn. If you oppose imperialism itself – rather than just the US variant – it’s a little early to celebrate.But the other sadness relates to the anniversary that falls next weekend. The wars prompted by the September 11 attacks – in Afghanistan and Iraq – were prosecuted in the name of self-defence: the west would protect itself from al-Qaida bases in one case, from supposed (though nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction in the other. But their advocates made a second argument, presented in terms of the self-interest of the invaded peoples themselves: the US, backed by Britain, would save Afghans from misogynistic theocracy and Iraqis from tyranny. Thus did the warmakers deploy the principle of “liberal interventionism”.The two rationales became tangled together, and now both are discredited. There are reasons to welcome that. Western intervention has repeatedly made bad situations worse; it’s almost always screamingly hypocritical, given the frequency with which the west intervenes on the wrong side elsewhere in the world; and if the west wants to help, there are non-military things it can do, starting now with a global vaccination effort.But before Afghanistan and Iraq, there were Kosovo and Sierra Leone, liberal interventions that worked. In the late 1990s, the idea grew that, while you couldn’t bomb countries into embracing democracy or women’s rights, there were times when, faced with the narrow, specific circumstance of a regime bent on murdering its own people, even hundreds of thousands of them, those with the power to stay the killers’ hands had a duty to act.Now, even as a last resort, that notion has gone, buried in the rubble of Iraq and Afghanistan. Witness the Syrians or Rohingya Muslims, whose pleas to be rescued from slaughter went unanswered. After 9/11, the west intervened blindly and recklessly, and at a terrible price. We live in a different world now. It’s warier – but no less brutal.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
      Join Hillary Clinton in a livestreamed discussion with Jonathan Freedland, on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and the US pullout from Afghanistan. Monday 13 September, 8pm BST | 9pm CEST | 3pm EDT |12pm PDT. Book tickets here
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      Yesterday’s war: why Raab did not foresee Afghanistan catastrophe

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      Dominic RaabYesterday’s war: why Raab did not foresee Afghanistan catastropheAnalysis: minister’s call log shows he had little interest in Afghanistan, prioritising India and south-east Asia Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editorFri 3 Sep 2021 10.38 EDTLast modified on Fri 3 Sep 2021 11.58 EDTDominic Raab has been reluctant to criticise Joe Biden, who has faced an unprecedented wave of criticism over the US exit from Afghanistan, partly because he always saw the decision as inevitable, and partly because in principle he instinctively sympathises with it.The foreign secretary is trying to position the UK as close as possible to the Biden administration, even though the criticism of the US president continues unabated from former British diplomats, politicians, security chiefs and military figures.Raab’s instinctive sense that Afghanistan was yesterday’s war, unlikely to flare up as a first order issue until next year, may also explain why he deputed the issue to a minister. There is surprise, for instance, that Raab took credit at the foreign affairs select committee for overseeing backchannel talks between Pakistan and Afghanistan over the last year. The talks were built on the personal initiative of the chief of the defence staff, Gen Sir Nick Carter, and depended on his relationship with the then Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, and Pakistan’s army chief of staff, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa.Dominic Raab seems to contradict PM by saying Taliban takeover was surpriseRead moreSenior sources in Pakistan said Bajwa had great respect for Carter but had never met Raab.Raab’s priority was great power competition, not terrorism, so his itinerary and call log reflects a deep interest in India and south-east Asia. That did not include Pakistan, let alone Afghanistan, explaining his previous failure to contact the Pakistani foreign minister.Indeed he told a select committee in October 2020 that he specifically excluded Pakistan from his definition of the Indo-Pacific.Raab explained this week that he and the UK ambassador to the US, Dame Karen Pierce, had concluded from presidential campaign rhetoric that the August troop withdrawal timeline was “baked in”. Biden had been a key sceptic of the US troop surge under Barack Obama. He had secretly visited Afghanistan and Pakistan at Obama’s instructions in January 2009, when he had furious discussions with both the Afghan and Pakistani presidents over the war. He had been accompanied on his trip by his now secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who like Biden saw nothing but muddled goals.The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) was historically more invested in the war, and according to one former UK ambassador to Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, incurably optimistic. Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, tried hardest at Nato defence and foreign affairs meetings in the spring to see if support for a continued Nato mission in Afghanistan was possible without US involvement.That in part explains the briefing war between the Foreign Office, the MoD and others in the Cabinet Office. It was not just about the grip of the Foreign Office in rescuing those stranded in Afghanistan. The MoD believed in the mission, though Raab less so.Raab has not fully articulated his views on the 20-year war, possibly waiting in vain for a definitive lead from the prime minister. But he hinted at them at the select committee this week. He said: “From 2001 there are questions about what was the mission, how it adapted, have we at every stage reconciled our means and our ends, and what the exit looked like in a strategic way. There are lessons to be learned about the way a campaign primarily morphed from counter-terrorism into something more akin to nation building. We have to recognise the support domestically for these kinds of interventions has fallen away.”Raab has said he is sure the US will bounce back, but other senior diplomats, including many in Europe, are less sanguine. In the wave of relief at Donald Trump’s departure, there was collective misreading of Biden and his promise that the US was back. For Britain, the end of the honeymoon is especially acute.The former Nato secretary general Lord Robertson describes it as “a crass surrender”. The former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt sees a dangerous split in the transatlantic alliance, highlighting decisions imposed on the UK. The former cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill condemned “a bad policy badly implemented”. The former No 10 foreign policy adviser Tom Fletcher said: “We expected empathy, strategy and wisdom from Biden. His messaging targeted Trump’s base, not the rest of the world, and not allies, past or (we’ll need them) future.”The former UK ambassador to Washington Kim Darroch perceived a defeat and a humiliation. Another said: “The G7 looks like the G1. When the rest of the G7 asked for a few days’ delay, and even went public, Biden gave us nothing.”In Europe there is similar dismay. “We must strengthen Europe so that we will never have to let the Americans do it again,” exclaimed Armin Laschet, the CDU candidate for the German chancellorship.Not surprisingly, there is now return of fire in the US from the many supporters of Biden’s decision. Emma Ashford, a leading advocate of a new grand strategy of US restraint, said: “If this episode pushes America’s European partners to improve their own military capabilities for this kind of thing, I’ll be thrilled.” Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard, writes in Foreign Policy that he is “mystified” by “the anguish of Europeans, which sometimes borders on hysteria”, and irritated by their lessons on “moral responsibility”.Senior diplomats say the US relationship has been through these squalls before, and now that “over the horizon” terrorist spotting is becoming the new order, they believe the need for intelligence cooperation only grows in significance.But it is a sobering moment and may yet require Biden to explain himself at the UN general assembly this autumn.John Casson, a former foreign policy private secretary in No 10, recently checklisted what his five personal objectives in diplomacy had been, admitting disarmingly that it was a chastening list of failure. The goals were: “Stay and lead in the EU; help young Arabs get free of authoritarians; the Foreign Office innovative and impactful, not timid and transactional; be a development superpower; leave Afghanistan well.”At least he can now claim the set is complete.TopicsDominic RaabForeign policyUS politicsJoe BidenBiden administrationAfghanistanPakistananalysisReuse this content More