9/11 anniversary: democracy was not doomed to fail in Afghanistan – the US did not live up to its promises

After the signing of the Munich agreement in 1938 that allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia, Winston Churchill spoke of the fate of that country in a powerful speech in

the House of Commons:

Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness.

The same could now be said of Afghanistan, 25 years after the September 11 attacks and subsequent US invasion that forever changed the country.

Sadly, there is now little inclination in Western policy circles to reflect deeply on Afghanistan’s experiences since then.

All too often, one instead encounters orientalist stereotypes that imply the post-2001 experiment with democracy was always doomed to fail, depicting the Taliban as somehow the true embodiment of “Afghan culture”.

This is despite the fact the Asia Foundation, in its highly regarded Survey of the Afghan People, reported that 88% of respondents in 2021 had “no sympathy at all” for the Taliban.

Afghanistan’s experience after 2001 deserves more careful study than this, if only because it offers useful lessons for the future.

What went right – and wrong

In all the postmortems on the US-led mission to oust the Taliban from power and bring democracy to Afghanistan, it is easy to lose sight of what was achieved during the two decades of the Afghan Republic.

As I recount in my book, coauthored with Afghan researcher and lawyer Ahmad Shuja Jamal, much went wrong, but a great deal also went right.

A generation of young Afghans was raised in an era of globalisation. By 2021, nearly 70% of the population used television to get news and information. Average per capita incomes increased and a vibrant civil society developed, fostered by the freest media in the region. Health outcomes improved across a range of indicators and access to education for girls also expanded (spectacularly in urban areas).

These achievements were sometimes exaggerated by Western donors, but they were real nonetheless, and not trivial.

However, much went wrong. The process of institutional design from 2001, heavily influenced by the United States, led to an overcentralised and complex state. Too much power was given to the president, resulting in a “neopatrimonial” system in which formal institutions became entwined with patronage networks.

The combination of bureaucratic complexity and a flood of aid money fuelled corruption. And from 2009, some elections were marred by fraud, which senior Western officials culpably failed to confront.

Even more seriously, the new Afghan National Army (ANA) was designed to be interoperable with its US counterpart. This made it heavily dependent on US civilian contractors to maintain the sophisticated equipment it was given, and acutely vulnerable if and when such services dried up.

International developments also had a dire effect on Afghanistan. The US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 sucked a great deal of oxygen out of US operations in Afghanistan at a critical time for the country’s democratic transition.

This “greenlighted” a resumption of malign meddling by Pakistan, which had been the Taliban’s original patron from 1994 and was desperate to block the consolidation of a pro-Indian government in Kabul. This was a problem far beyond the capacity of the Afghan Republic to handle.

Successive US presidents failed to bring effective diplomatic pressure to bear on Islamabad to cease its meddling, seemingly hoping it would simply go away. In 2021, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark A. Milley, testified that never “effectively dealing with Pakistan” was a critical error on the part of the US.

This was compounded by a grave misreading of the Taliban movement by Washington, legitimising the terrorist group as a partner in an ill-conceived negotiating process that purported to offer “peace” for the Afghan people.

Year after year, the Taliban – not the Afghan government or its Western backers – had been responsible for a clear majority of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, under President Donald Trump, the US in 2018 commenced “peace” negotiations with the Taliban, excluding the Afghan government.

This itself sent a dangerous signal. But worse was to come on February 29 2020 in Doha, Qatar, when a US envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, signed an exit deal with the Taliban.

Thomas Hobbes’ warning that “reputation of power is power” was seemingly lost on the US.

The tragedy of Afghanistan today

The irony was that most foreign forces had left Afghanistan at the end of 2014. The Taliban’s aim in negotiating with the US was instead aimed at detaching the Afghan Army from the civilian contractors vital to its survival. And the US negotiating team walked straight into the trap.

With then-president Joe Biden recklessly following the path laid out by his predecessor, the scene was set for the tragic sequence of events in August 2021: the chaotic withdrawal of the remaining US troops, the collapse of the Afghan republic and the return of the Taliban.

Biden’s approval ratings plummeted and were never able to recover. It was his Bay of Pigs moment.

For a US audience, the Taliban sought to project themselves as reformed and “inclusive”, and some US policy experts who supported the abandonment of Afghanistan continue to whitewash the group to this day. One historian has even argued “the Taliban have not ruthlessly oppressed the Afghan people”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Afghans are enduring unprecedented misery today. The Taliban regime has no constitution, and it openly rejects democratic choice. It functions as a totalitarian tyranny, with the Taliban leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, producing ever-more repressive decrees on the basis of a kind of Führerprinzip (Adolf Hilter’s “Leader Principle”).

There is no rule of law, and ordinary Afghans are entirely vulnerable to the arbitrary exercise of power. Most notoriously, the Taliban’s practice of gender apartheid has led to its international isolation once again, with only Russia willing to grant it formal recognition.

With no institutionalised basis of legitimacy, the regime depends on coercive control to survive. And while brutal, it is also brittle, not least because of the recent breakdown of its relationship with Pakistan.

The botched US exit from Afghanistan cast a long shadow. The Russians smirked, and invaded Ukraine six months later. Hamas celebrated, too.

A further lesson may be that US promises are of little value in the long run. Afghanistan’s status as a “major non-NATO ally” of the US proved meaningless. Presidential term limits function as “promise limits” too.

And there’s a final warning for the future. The first Taliban regime was overthrown in 2001 because it had hosted Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terror group. Afghanistan remains an operating base for terrorist groups today, as a recent expert report to the UN Security Council makes clear.

But the greater danger comes from the Taliban’s establishment of ever-widening networks of madrasas (religious schools). A new study by the Hamrah Network, an expert Afghan organisation operating in exile, paints an alarming picture of these schools.

With more than 3.65 million students enrolled, the danger that radicalised students could pose in the region and beyond should not be underestimated. These madrasas are a veritable time bomb.

William Maley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.