Would Afghanistan be better off had the US not invaded?

AP/ EPA/ Gerald Du

The past month was difficult for Afghans, as is every August. The month rips off a bandage and brings a flood of emotions that might never be truly processed. In one month, three years ago, Afghanistan’s republic fell, the Taliban came to power and the US-led Nato occupation ended. The last American soldier left Afghanistan on August 30, 2021.

Was that day the end of a dark chapter, or the start of one?

When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, then US president Barack Obama said: “War is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly.” Yet, in Afghanistan several US presidents – including Mr Obama – failed to realise how quickly America’s campaign turned from the former into the latter.

Taliban forces patrol at a runway a day after US troops withdrew from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, on August 31, 2021. Reuters

They believed, for 20 years, that further military force would eradicate the Taliban, stabilise the western-backed republic government and win over the local population. On the contrary, every troop surge or new aerial campaign only created more hatred for their presence among many of those they aspired to free from tyranny. The brutality led even Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president initially brought to power by the US, to state that Nato was taking on the appearance of an occupying force.

And when the US was not dropping bombs, it was throwing money at the problem. As far back as 2014, the journalist Douglas Wissing suggested America should leave Afghanistan and "prepare to help with the enormous humanitarian crisis that will predictably follow the inevitable fall of the corrupt Kabul government to the Taliban”.

I entered Afghanistan from Pakistan at the Torkham crossing that same year, for the first time as an adult. I remember the American soldiers stationed there. My younger sister asked: “What are these white people doing in our country?” My eldest sister responded that they were occupying it.

I remember seeing long, slow-moving American convoys that would turn their mounted machine guns on any civilian vehicle trying to overtake them.

Four years later, I moved back to Afghanistan permanently with the hope of serving it. Nowadays, I wonder if my working for the republic was playing a part in putting a human face on something oppressive. It was convenient for us then to not think too much about the times when the US and its allies killed more Afghan civilians than the Taliban, whom we were taught to see as the enemy.

The occupation need not have lasted so long, or even occur at all. Many forget that in December 2001, senior Taliban leaders essentially offered to surrender – an offer to which Mr Karzai was reportedly amenable. America refused, opting instead for an impossible “total victory”.

One might blame the Taliban for precipitating America’s invasion by harbouring Al Qaeda, but could one blame it for fighting when surrender was not an option? And when the invasion became a long-term occupation with so many excesses and cruelties, would a fight to resist such a thing not be on the right side of history? There is plenty to despair over in the Taliban’s present rule, but if you are not considering those questions, you are not trying to understand the Taliban and you have little hope of understanding Afghanistan.

Those of us who were heavily immersed in the republic’s system did a lot of good. I spent the final months of that era helping build field hospitals during the pandemic. But we should still judge ourselves and our wilful ignorance. Were we blind to the suffering of a much larger population who faced aerial bombings, torture, night raids and executions at the hands of the American troops or proxies? Or were we simply ignoring it?

The people the US were ostensibly there to help were the same ones it was killing

Three years on from America’s withdrawal, try to imagine a counterfactual: what would have happened in Afghanistan had the US never invaded at all? People in the White House and its Situation Room were undoubtedly asking that very question in the days after September 11. I imagine, given the invasion went ahead a few weeks later, billed as a liberation, that the consensus answer was that the Taliban would remain unchanged, and that Afghans would have gone on suffering under their oppressive rule.

Afghan burqa-clad women walk down a road in Kandahar on August 28. AFP

But I think the Taliban would eventually have had to succumb to the Afghan people’s demands for fundamental rights or the people would have overthrown them. Neither scenario would likely have happened peacefully. But either way, it would have been a fate Afghans owned.

The US occupation expelled the Taliban from Afghan cities long enough for the urban population to learn to dream, only for the Taliban to come back to power a generation later with a vengeance and shatter those dreams. A younger cohort of the Taliban who could’ve grown up within the rest of Afghan society and learnt to live differently were deprived of that life only to spend two decades in a war, the trauma of which they carry now into their governance.

America’s final days in Afghanistan are epitomised in two events: the suicide bombing of Kabul Airport’s Abbey Gate on August 26, 2021, and the US’s retaliatory drone strike three days later. The suicide bombing, reportedly carried out by ISIS, killed 183 Afghans and more than a dozen US soldiers. The thousands of Afghans fleeing the area were shot at by more US soldiers, and there is growing evidence that many of them were killed this way. The US drone strike, an attempt to retaliate against ISIS, killed 10 civilians (including seven children) and no terrorists.

The people the US were ostensibly there to help were the same ones it was killing. Twenty years on, America still couldn’t tell its Afghan friends from its enemies.

The war has been over for three years now, and Afghans are no longer being killed in large numbers by Americans. But their dreams are still being robbed with every new edict by the Taliban government. Afghanistan will inevitably struggle to write a new chapter that is less dark than the previous one, but at least it will be Afghans writing it.