ISTANBUL — As the United States combat mission in Afghanistan ends this December, departing American soldiers have looked on as the Taliban have seized bits of the tribal hinterland that they struggled so long to pacify.
The failure of the Afghan government to hold far-flung districts may be galling for many — but the Taliban’s return is not necessarily a bad thing.
For 13 years, the West has sought to impose on Afghanistan its own vision for the country. But instead of creating a fair and sustainable nation, it has built a Frankenstein state, animated only by vast injections of money and tens of thousands of troops.
It’s time to allow that creation — born of a misplaced belief in nation-building — to perish and let Afghans fashion their own system, imperfect as it might appear.
The reality is that a future Afghan government will have to include a role for the Taliban, and recognize that much of the south outside the major cities will be ruled by them and a consortium of tribal councils that pay little or no lip service to Kabul, the capital. Over the past year, groups aligned with the Taliban have already made inroads in Helmand and Oruzgan Provinces.
Such a scenario is a far cry from the Western vision for Afghanistan that soldiers and politicians have propounded over the past decade, one that cast the Taliban as a dark, existential threat to the democratic, inclusive government we sought to build. But this does reflect the deeper reality of this predominantly rural and clannish country, one in which the Taliban have never been a monolithic entity, just another voice in the tumult of tribal politics.
The new administration of President Ashraf Ghani should reach out to these groups and fashion the political settlement that the country has so far lacked. His chances of success will be greater with American support — but only if Washington can reconceive its role in the country.
That starts by letting the Afghans take the lead in negotiating the war’s complex politics. So far President Obama has not shown a willingness to listen. His Afghan policy has zigzagged between the extremes. In 2009, Obama approved the tripling of the number of troops in Afghanistan to 100,000 despite concerns raised by Hamid Karzai, the president at the time, about whether any gains could be sustained.
After the Afghan government proved unwilling and unable to administer the pacified countryside, Mr. Obama took the opposite tack, largely disengaging in recent years as the “surge” troops were withdrawn.
Hundreds of Afghans I met and interviewed over the past decade tell me that they want neither approach. What they’re asking for is United States engagement and partnership — provided it’s on their own terms. Letting Afghans take the lead while staying engaged is all the more important because the Taliban are not the only concern of the American and Afghan governments. Pakistan is using the country in its battle against India. Iran is intent on supporting Shiite Muslims, and Saudi Arabia is backing an extreme brand of Sunni Islam. Afghanistan has long been a home for other countries’ wars.
If the United States makes a hollow show of withdrawing troops, it might score political points back home but will only fuel a power vacuum in Afghanistan for others to fill. The current crisis in Iraq shows the dangers of withdrawing precipitously.
Just as America must come to the painful realization that the Taliban can’t be destroyed, so the militants and their supporters in the Pakistani government must be made to realize that the United States is backing the Afghan government for the long haul.
There’s the legitimate question of whether the Taliban will accept this reduced arrangement. Given that they once ruled the entire country, it’s easy to think that they won’t settle for less. Bumbling American efforts to talk to the Taliban in recent years have shown how readily their leadership can manipulate such openings for their own advantage.
But negotiations can make sense provided they are part of a deeper reconciliation between the country’s factions and the regional powers that have aided them. After all, the Taliban movement is splintered. In Afghanistan’s hinterlands Mr. Ghani will find there are deals to be struck with local commanders and disgruntled tribal chiefs. If he can incorporate such deals into a broader political settlement — a vision that eluded his predecessor, Mr. Karzai — it will be harder for the Taliban to ignore him.
The outlines of a future Afghanistan — one in which the government controls the major cities, and the Taliban and its affiliates, the country’s tribal hinterlands in the south and east — are starting to emerge. Mr. Ghani was a high-minded reformer as the country’s first finance minister after the Taliban. This time around, he’s going to have to accept the sometimes crude reality of Afghan politics, where everything has its price. In December 2001, the Taliban leadership opened negotiations with Mr. Karzai over the terms of a surrender, only to have the talks stopped by Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary. We’re nowhere near that moment now, but until Mr. Ghani starts talking with Taliban officials he won’t know what their demands are.
The United States can play a vital role in bringing together all sides, so long as it doesn’t seek to curtail whom the Afghan government speaks to. It must work toward aligning interests between Afghanistan and its neighbors, principally Pakistan, which is fighting a war against its own version of the Taliban. Kabul and Islamabad have much in common. There’s no quick fix, but any dialogue that lessens the outside interference in Afghanistan is to be embraced.
What could an Afghan-run Afghanistan look like? More overtly religious and conservative, and no less corrupt, but arguably better than the American-led one.
At the height of the surge in 2011, the West poured $15.7 billion in aid into Afghanistan, according to a World Bank report. However, 88 percent of it was delivered off-budget — that is, it was spent by donors rather than the Afghan government. Most of that money didn’t stay in the country, but was funneled back out again by contractors. Meanwhile, many of Afghanistan’s successes since 2001, such as the expansion of the primary school system to boys and girls and the creation of a vibrant media culture, have had little to do with Western aid. The country’s best rebuilding program, run on a shoestring, involved local communities choosing and managing their own projects.
The lessons from the Afghan war are many, but perhaps they can be boiled down thus: Listen to those you are trying to help. Don’t try to do too much. It will take longer than you think.
The Israeli politician Abba Eban is believed to have said, “You can always rely on Americans to do the right thing — after they have exhausted every other option” (a comment sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill). We’ve reached that point in Afghanistan. The hope is that the United States will finally dispense with its one-sided nation-building plans and its succession of timelines for defeating the Taliban in favor of a more realistic, enduring vision for the country.
Jack Fairweather, a Middle East editor and correspondent for Bloomberg News, is the author of “The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan.”