Tribune. If the victory of the Taliban in the coming months is only probable, our defeat was recorded by the declaration of Joe Biden announcing the total withdrawal of American troops for September 11. Despite an agreed speech on the American “victory”, none of the objectives set twenty years ago have been met: hundreds of Al-Qaida militants are present on Afghan soil, the Islamic State organization is Established in 2014, the elections have long been discredited by massive fraud, the Afghan elites are corrupt beyond description, the economy’s main resource is drugs, etc.
The few advances – women’s rights, media freedom – have been threatened for several years and will quickly disappear with the final withdrawal of Western forces. How could the world’s largest military alliance, NATO, lose this war despite an investment of over $ 2,000 billion, over 3,000 soldiers killed and tens of thousands injured? The public debate is meager, because this defeat, the consequences of which we will suffer in the months and years to come, hardly excites public opinion.
State request
It is then easy to refer our failure to an Afghan exceptionality. After all, isn’t Afghanistan the “Cemetery of empires” ? Contrary to these clichés, we believe that this defeat, like the debacle in Syria, Iraq and Libya, is the result of a flawed strategy, a biased world view and ineffective intervention mechanisms. Five elements seem essential here.
First, the coalition’s pretense made Afghanistan a tribal country, localist in its interests, fundamentally apolitical and allergic to the state. From a country crossed by revolutionary currents, subjected to a very rapid social transformation – multiplication of internally displaced persons and refugees, rapid urbanization, birth of an urban middle class – Westerners have retained only the image of an Afghanistan “traditional” and resistant to any state authority. However, what struck us is, on the contrary, the demand for the State which is expressed in Afghanistan, in particular the justice system and the police, which the coalition has unfortunately never considered as a priority.
Second, the coalition never made the effort to understand the insurgency. The qualifiers that were applied to it – “ tribal “,” ethnic “,” archaic “,” medieval ” – by most experts and soldiers reported a tragic misunderstanding of the reality of this movement. In particular, the organization of an alternative judicial system, the rotation of cadres between the regions, the effectiveness of the propaganda aimed at the Afghan population should have alerted the military and political leaders of the potential of the insurgency as early as 2003.
You have 52.18% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.