The recent events in Afghanistan and the embarrassing efforts by the United States to extricate itself after two decades of war there come as no surprise to anyone who has studied the history of that country.
The Afghan way of war has always been a super puzzle to the superpowers and getting out of the country has always proved far more problematic than getting in.
The British tried three times to subdue the Afghans. They were soundly humiliated the first time and paid heavily for marginal success on the other two occasions.
The Soviet Union spent more than 9 years at war in Afghanistan before installing a puppet government and going home with a defeated and demoralized army whose failure has been credited, in part, for the breakup of the socialist republic.
Now, after 20 years of war, the United States is suffering a similar ignominious ending to its effort to impose some measure of independence and security in Afghanistan.
None of the superpowers that have intervened in Afghanistan have understood or fully appreciated the bewildering complexity of alliances of the disparate and often-warring Afghan tribes, clans and families that have doomed all previous efforts to bring them together under a centralized government.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
In the mid-19th century, the British believed if they paid enough bribe money to enough tribes, those tribes would be their allies. The tribes took the money and still attacked the British, often aligning with their sworn enemies. The British commander at the time believed “there was no real unity between the Afghans, merely temporary alliances where it suited the respective parties.”
That was true then and is still true today.
In January 1842, the British began a retreat from Kabul back to India that is among the most humiliating in all its military history. During the march through snow and ice and high mountain passes, Afghan tribesmen killed soldiers and camp followers with impunity.
The British commander kept making what he thought were deals with Afghan tribal leaders to spare his troops and their families. The deals would be made, only to be ignored or abandoned within hours. Only a handful of the garrison of more than 16,000 British and Indian troops and the thousands of families and camp followers survived the drawn-out slaughter.
Those deals were not unlike the one the Taliban made more than 150 years later with then-U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson. After the Taliban emerged from a brutal civil war as the dominant force in Afghanistan, Richardson pressed them for concessions on rights for women and ethnic minority groups. The Taliban agreed, only to abandon that agreement as soon as Richardson was out of sight.
Despite the long and bloody history of warfare in Afghanistan, even the most astute Western observers who have spent years studying the country frequently are mystified by the Afghan way of war and the multitude of changing alliances.
Howard Hart, the former CIA chief of station in Islamabad during the early days of the Mujahideen fight against the Soviets, said of those shifting alliances: “Any two Afghans created three factions.”
The Soviets never took this into account prior to their 1979 invasion. True to their Marxist-Leninist schooling, they tried to impose structure on the Mujahideen when there was no structure. The Afghan opposition made and broke alliances so often it was difficult to figure who was fighting with, or against, whom even with a scorecard.
Much like mercury spilled on the floor, the pieces of the Afghan resistance moved of their own volition, coalescing and splitting with no logical pattern.
Not only did the Soviets not understand this, neither did the CIA that supplied weapons and money to the Mujahideen. As long as the insurgents were fighting the Soviets, they were good, no matter who was aligned with them or what their ideologies were.
This lack of cohesion among the Mujahideen and what it meant to the future of the country was not lost on some. As Robert Gates, formerly director of the CIA who also served as U.S. Secretary of Defense said, “No one should have had any illusions about these people coming together politically – before or after a Soviet defeat.”
Following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the defeat of the Taliban, American military commanders began to discover the hard lessons learned by the British and the Soviets. A deal in Afghanistan is a deal only as long as the Afghans want it to be a deal, which often is only until a better deal comes along.
Ryan Crocker, who served as the U.S. ambassador to both Pakistan and Afghanistan wrote in Newsweek in 2009 that within three months of the Taliban’s ouster “it was obvious there were complexities at play in Afghanistan that we hadn’t anticipated on the ground, let alone grappled with at a policy level.”
The Biden administration is now grappling with those complexities, and not doing it well.
Ron Martz is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps (1965-68) and holds a master’s degree in history from the University of North Georgia. He was a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1981-2007, specializing in military affairs.
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