As Taliban forces swept through Afghanistan, taking over provincial capitals with lightning speed in recent weeks, it was clear that the nation’s capital Kabul would soon fall to the guerrilla force that was driven out of power by the U.S. 20 years ago. When the Afghan government collapsed and Taliban forces entered Kabul on Aug. 15, viral videos captured the chaos at the Hamid Karzai International Airport where thousands of American-allied Afghan translators and contractors fearful of Taliban reprisals desperately sought safe passage out of the country.
President Biden was widely criticized for the failure of the U.S. to anticipate the speed of the Taliban march to victory, and not better organizing Special Immigrant Visas for the estimated 18,000 Afghans who worked for the U.S. military. In a speech on Aug. 16, Biden admitted that the fall of Kabul had unfolded more quickly than had been predicted, while forcefully defending his decision to end America’s longest war – honoring commitments made in a peace deal with the Taliban signed by the Trump administration.
Afghan citizens who remember the brutal Taliban rule from 1996 to the post-9/11 October 2001 U.S. invasion are fearful for their future, especially women and girls who were the target of the Islamist government’s most severe repression. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Melvin Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, who had a 42-year government career at the CIA and State Department. Here, he considers what the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan means for the Afghan people and the U.S.
MEL GOODMAN: I still find it shocking that four presidents over a 20-year period and four administrations over a 20-year period could make so many mistakes and have so many misassumptions about what they were dealing with. And there was so much deceit with regard with what was communicated to the American people. So it’s to me unfortunate that it falls on Biden to finally tell the American people what they needed to hear, which is that we have no national security interests whatsoever in Afghanistan, that we could never really engage in nation-building in a country that is not a nation. And I think he could have even gone further to take note of the fact that Afghanistan has been in a civil war situation off and on since the 1970s.
And even before the Soviet Union went in, in 1979, a very hawkish national security advisor by the name of Zbigniew Brzezinski convinced Jimmy Carter it would be a good idea to get involved with covert military assistance and the Afghan situation. And Brzezinski’s goal was to try to draw Soviet Union in thinking this would be a real weakness for the Soviet Union. So we were involved in this from before 1979. The Soviet Union ended up being in there for 10 years. Gorbachev came in in 1985, gave a secret speech referring to Afghanistan as a bleeding wound, gave the military one year to straighten things up when they couldn’t have any success whatsoever. He announced the timetable and got out in a year. We didn’t have that kind of a leader until Biden came along.
And if you even go to 2009, when you think of Obama’s first year, remember Obama campaigned on the premise that Afghanistan was the “good war.” If Iraq was the bad war, “Afghanistan was the good war.” And he fell for all of the military propaganda about what a surge could do in Afghanistan. This was the line that was being peddled by Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, by Gen. David Petraeus, Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Biden called Obama aside on a couple occasions to say, “Don’t get boxed in by the military. This is no time to be increasing forces.”
So Biden to his credit has wanted to get out of Afghanistan for more than the past decade.
SCOTT HARRIS: There’s a lot of justified concern right now about Afghan women and girls and what kind of government they will encounter with the Taliban coming back into power. There’s some thinking out there that the Taliban may have changed since they held power in Afghanistan during the 1990s. Is there any evidence that the forces now occupying the capital of Kabul are any more moderate than they were back in the ’90s?
MEL GOODMAN: I don’t see any reason to think that. I think maybe the wish is father to the thought that there’s the hope that this will happen. A lot has been invested in improving the lives of women in Afghanistan. They’ve made tremendous strides forward in terms of education, particularly. I think all of this now is at risk. When I look at the Afghan Taliban leadership, I wouldn’t call anyone a moderate. The only one who seems to be somewhat reasonable is (Mohammad) Yaqoob, who is the son of the former leader, Mohammad Omar who died in 2013, but the rest are very extreme. They’re Islamist, they’re anti-women. And, I fear for them. But at the same time, I don’t know what we can do. What influence we can have. A lot of people hope that the Taliban will be so dependent on international assistance that they will be careful in terms of how they administer this Islamist state. But I wouldn’t count on that.
SCOTT HARRIS: A lot of media pundits right now are talking about how the fall of the Afghan government, the U.S.- supported Afghan government and the victory of the Taliban — how that will affect the United States and its image, its presence around the world when it comes to military issues. How do you think this will play out in terms of how the world views the United States after this Taliban victory?
MEL GOODMAN: What I see in the mainstream media — particularly the Washington Post and New York Times — is just outrageous in terms of arguing that the international community is now going to look with far less respect for the United States, there’ll be far less credibility for the United States on the international radar. The fact of the matter is the United States was willing to spend 20 years to try to correct a situation in Afghanistan that was essentially a fool’s errand.
And I think when we think of the international community over the long run, they look at the United States as almost a rogue nation of sorts in terms of its willingness to use military power. The problem with U.S. power is our almost total reliance on that, as opposed to important soft power resources that we could put to use. And I hope that Biden’s steps in Afghanistan are really the beginning of steps that need to be taken to reduce our footprint in the global community.
We’re much too exposed in the Middle East, where we have no influence. Clearly, we’ve lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in just the last several years. And it’s not clear that our military power brings any real influence. Here we are with 700, 800 facilities in 80, 90 different countries. Our military spending – add that to our intelligence spending, exceeds the entire global commitment for military and intelligence affairs. We’re still talking about modernizing nuclear weapons. There’s no sign we’re going to engage in a real retreat from various regional decisions. So we need to do a lot of rethinking about our geopolitical presence throughout the international community
For more information visit the Center for International Policy at internationalpolicy.org and Mel Goodman’s CIP website at internationalpolicy.org/melvin-goodman and Mel Goodman’s website at melvingoodman.com.
