In Afghanistan, ‘we were beaten from day one’

With the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and subsequent collapse of the elected Afghan government as the Taliban quickly captured major city after major city, the future of the historically fractious state remains murky, local historians said.

University of Idaho historian and emeritus professor Richard Spence said Afghanistan was created in the late 19th century as a sort of buffer state between the British and Russian empires. However, the territory is home to a number of distinct cultural and ethnic groups like the Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara, among others, that have no history of cooperation or trust.

He said the Taliban include membership from many of these groups united under the common cause of ousting western forces and “the puppet regime they created,” but as they tighten their control of the country, old rivalries could be a source of instability. Additionally, the regime will have to balance the interests of regional power brokers like landowning warlords and their militias with their own geopolitical aspirations if they hope to rule.

“I’d say the chances of everything turning into sweetness and light are thin to nil, but on the other hand, the Taliban are the only ones who can bring any kind of stability and peace to the country,” Spence said. “Whatever else you think of them otherwise, they’re the only ones who can do that, because only, basically, religion can overcome the ethnic and political suspicions and hostilities.”

While the group’s political arm recently indicated it intends to be a more progressive, less brutal regime than the Taliban that controlled the country in the late 1990s and early 2000s, UI historian Bill Smith said it remains to be seen if they can control the behavior of the entire organization.

Smith, who is also director of the UI’s Martin Institute and Program in International Studies, said there’s a lot of mystery surrounding this political wing of the Taliban and what kind of power it can exert over the group as a whole. Simultaneously, he said it’s difficult to know if the group will be as ideologically driven as its previous iteration. He noted while they may wish to appear more progressive to the international world than the Taliban of the past, there’s a wide gray area between the old Taliban and a western-style democracy.

“Certainly, as it’s expanded operations in the last few years, there’s people who have joined it who were more interested in getting rid of the West than were interested in the purity of a doctrine,” Smith said. “We also don’t really know what the command structure looks like and if individual Taliban are going to be enforcing their own opinions, their own feelings, or if they’re going to be controllable.”

Smith said the Taliban received some de facto legitimacy as a political authority in Afghanistan when the U.S. engaged in negotiations with the group that excluded the western-backed Afghan government last year. But it will take some time to see just how the international world reacts to their leadership in the country. It’s unlikely that western governments will recognize the group as a legitimate government, Smith said but it will be interesting to see which consulates and embassies remain open in Afghanistan in the weeks to come.

UI history professor Dale Graden said the U.S.’s entire 20-year war in the country is reminiscent of other poorly executed interventions including those in Iraq, Korea and Vietnam. He said much of the conflict has been propped up by the U.S. military industrial complex, which has a fiscal interest in perpetuating armed conflicts that funnel money toward military contractors and their lobbyists.

He said Afghanistan itself has endured generations of intervention and meddling by other world powers including by Britain and the Soviet Union, the U.S. declined to learn the lessons of these ill-fated efforts. He said all of this, combined with a sort of colonial hubris, has allowed the U.S. to weather a long and costly war in a country where they are often seen as interlopers.

“We were beaten from day one,” Graden said.

“We still can’t figure out that we’re not going to reshape the world, in our model — it’s so much wiser to not get involved,” he added. “Stay at home and deal with our own problems, rather than these constant interventions, fueled by the military industrial complex ... to go abroad and get into these endless wars.”

Jackson can be reached at (208) 883-4636, or by email to sjackson@dnews.com.