FAREWELL AFGHANISTAN
By Robert H. Reid
Back in 2009 I took a drive around Kabul with an Afghan journalist colleague, soaking in the sights of a city that would be my home for the next 15 months. The conversation turned to what it was like when the Taliban rolled into town in 1996.
My friend talked of approaching his first Taliban checkpoint with trepidation, so used were he and others to being insulted, shaken down and occasionally robbed by armed men since the civil war that erupted after the Soviets withdrew in 1989.
“They were polite and respectful,” he recalled. “The people were relieved to see them because they promised to bring peace” after so many years of bloodshed and destruction.
A longing for peace runs deep in Afghanistan, which has been at war for most of the past 40 years. That’s part of the reason the Taliban were able to roll through the major cities to the capital Kabul and topple a government that the United States had struggled so hard to build and nurture.
More Afghans wanted peace than were ready to defend a government they saw as corrupt and ineffectual — especially if the United States was exiting the conflict.
Unlike the mid-1990s, Afghans today know the Taliban well, and millions of them, especially the educated, urban classes, are terrified at the prospect of a second chapter of Taliban rule. Well they should be.
But Afghans are also tired of fighting. They’ve been engulfed in war almost continually since 1979. In a country where the median age is 18, that means most Afghans have never known their nation at peace.
Afghanistan is a complex country difficult for outsiders to understand. What are the normal rules of life in villages in the southern Pashtun homeland is considered barbarism in cities such as Kabul and Herat.
Scenes of terrified Afghans swarming Kabul’s airport, and the heart-wrenching stories of bright young women facing a life of marginalization and servitude have shocked Westerners who long ago dismissed the Afghan War as one of America’s greatest international mistakes..
That’s one Afghanistan. It is the Afghanistan of Kabul and other major cities where many peoples’ lives were transformed by education and opportunity that was beginning to flourish behind the protection of American and other international forces, whose contribution was rarely appreciated in the countries that sent them there.
Outside the big cities, where 75 percent of the population lives, priorities are different. That’s where the war was largely fought. For the millions whose lives changed little over the last 20 years, survival and an end to devastation and death were the over-arching concerns..
Afghans living far from the capital were far-less invested in the success of a government they considered aloof and corrupt.
The depth of war-weariness may ring hollow to many Americans whose knowledge of Afghanistan is colored by false images of a blood-thirsty people who have been “killing each other for centuries.”
Americans too are tired of the “Forever Wars” waged since the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States. During the 20 years of America’s longest war, the United States, with about 330 million people, has suffered nearly 6,300 deaths among U.S. military members and contractors.
Afghanistan is estimated to have lost more than 165,000 people including government troops, Taliban fighters and civilians during the war.
Why did the Taliban maintain the will when the government forces did not?
Perhaps because the United States made clear it was withdrawing. It was not just pulling out the relatively modest number of soldiers but also contractors who maintained the combat aircraft that were the government’s edge over the Taliban.
The psychological shock of abandonment was too much. Morale collapsed, and the Afghan army melted away. That’s the Afghan way. There’s no tradition of fighting to the bitter end when all hope of victory is gone.
The same thing happened in 2001. The Taliban battled the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance until it became clear there was no chance of victory. Instead of fighting to the death to defend Kabul, the Taliban slipped away in the dead of night.
The Northern Alliance and their American partners walked into Kabul the next day.
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Robert H. Reid covered the Soviet invasion from Kabul in 1979, managed news coverage of Afghanistan from Islamabad in 2001–2002 and served as News Director for Afghanistan-Pakistan based in Kabul for The Associated Press from 2009–2010.