Afghanistan, Betrayal & the Liberal Order

How the CIA and the Taliban became excellent friends

On Monday, August 23 2021 Kabul wasn’t just the scene of frantic people, desperate to get out. It hosted a meeting between William J Burns, 8th Director of the CIA, former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as well as a former US deputy Secretary of State, and the Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. One can speculate about what they discussed, but whatever it was, the tone must have been cordial. The CIA and the Taliban are old friends, after all, and the two men could presumably swap stories about the good old days when their predecessors collaborated in the drug trade, reaping huge amounts of lucre from the production of heroin. This white gold then financed the Mujaheddin, who threw out the evil Russians.

Strangely enough, hardly anyone has cared to mention this historical fact in the torrent of articles about the shambolic end to the Afghan war.

But the historians have not forgotten. Alfred W McCoy, Department of History at the University of Wisconsin, has written two papers on the deep corruption financed by the poppy fields, the first Covert Netherworlds: An Invisible Interstice in the Modern World System, written in 2016, the second, Notes on Searching for Significance among Drug Lords and Death Squads in 2019. Here is an excerpt from the first one, putting the entire catastrophe into sharp focus:

Throughout more than three decades in Afghanistan, 1979 to 2015, Washington’s clandestine operations succeeded when they coincided with Central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium, the ultimate covert commodity, and suffered when they failed to capture or complement it. During its first intention from 1979m to 1989, the CIA mounted a surrogate war that expelled the Soviets, in part, because the agency’s mujahedeen allies used the country’s swelling drug traffic to sustain their decade long struggle. Throughout fourteen years of combat since 2001, by contrast, pacification by 100.000 American troops and 350,000 Afghan forces failed to curtail the Taliban insurgency, largely because, as conventional military forces, they could not capture the swelling surplus from the country’s heroin trade. In retrospect, control over this volatile illicit income seems determinative, contributing materially to the success of CIA covert warfare from 1979 to 1989 but constraining the US pacification campaign since 2001.

I don’t know why the Media consistently ignore historians, when with one paragraph, McCoy lays it out: the landscape, the players, and the realpolitik machinations.

In contrast, the intellectuals, generals, and politicians in the USA have engaged in general handwringing about the meaning of the Afghan adventure. H.R. McMaster says it was a stain on the nation, Nikki Haley blames everything on Biden, and Elliott Ackermann, a Marine who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, views it as a Tragedy in Four Acts, the fifth act coming shortly. The range of opinions ranges from Hubris and Mendacity to Incompetent Leaders, from Stalemate to Catastrophe. 

My personal view is this:  I believe Afghanistan is a dark, cracked mirror to the West, and what it reflects is of vital importance to our survival as a civilization. How we interpret what we see in the shards will play a crucial role in how the future of the west evolves. 

Let’s do what historians do, i.e., take the long view and go back to the beginning, to  9/11, a day of infamy and the start of the deep corruption that has been the overwhelming constant about the US engagement in Afghanistan. 

Above all, the war was not only illegal but demonstrated a complete lack of adherence to the rules of diplomacy which characterised the events leading up to the initial air war launched in 2001 and then the unholy alliance between US neocons and the warlords of the Northern Alliance. If there ever was a 'war of aggression', aside from the Iraq invasion, this is it. It was justified as the long hunt for Bin Laden, who was never brought to justice but simply executed.

According to the historian Vincent Ochs, the Taliban attempted to talk reason to the US regarding the surrender of bin Laden, but as usual it was 'our way or the highway'. He is correct: When Bin Laden was killed, he wasn’t even in Afghanistan, he was in Pakistan, which has a long history of collusion with the Taliban but gets millions in US aid, nonetheless. 

Ochs characterizes the war this way:

A military adventure built on the premises of revenge and greed, it was doomed to failure. The cynical rebranding of the conflict as a 'human rights' issue was ridiculous and calculated, and of course the media lapped it up.

A good friend of his did two tours over there but cut the second one short because he was sickened by the overtly racist attitudes of his American allies. So much for humanitarian agendas. I would say that the Afghan War was very much in the tradition of a Holy Crusade, waged with high humanitarian ideals that perished on the poppy fields. The history of the West fighting against the Muslim world goes back a long way. For context, I recommend reading the Pulitzer prize winning historian, Barbara Tuchman’sA Distant Mirror: the calamitous 14th century. In this doorstopper, she lays out why that century was ‘naturally mad’ (Michelet) and how we share in their madness.

Ochs concludes that the long, ludicrous 'war on drugs' launched by Reagan should be renamed the war with drugs in light of events in Afghanistan.

As we know, every attempt to kill the international drug trade has failed. Criminalizing it has only served to increase the production of heroin, and according to McCoy, has enabled bad actors to conspire in the murky netherworlds that operate out of sight, halfway between legal and criminal worlds. McCoy, writing in the 2019 article, reiterates his argument:

In a deft convergence with the covert netherworld, the CIA had sanctioned an alliance between the illicit opium traffic and Islamic guerrillas that sustained their resistance for the decade needed to force the Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. Over the longer term, however, such covert intervention, so easily unleashed in Afghanistan during the Cold War, produced a black hole of geopolitical instability not readily sealed or healed in its aftermath. 

This ‘black hole of instability’ is now likely to get worse, which is why the decision to admit failure and pull out was never a simple one. The current narrative is that it all amounts to a horrific betrayal. In The real reason why Biden was prepared to let Kabul fall, Mary Dejevsky of the Spectator London, lays out the choices open to the US. She concludes that it was the right decision marred by a shambolic and shameful retreat that could have been prevented ‘if the Intelligence hadn’t failed’. She also asks if the sharply divided opinions re the withdrawal could ever be resolved, because on the one hand, the withdrawal itself might have been the cause of the defeat,while on the other hand, the decision to withdraw was likely based on the knowledge that defeat was inevitable. She brings in the arguments made about how ‘we’ betrayed the Afghan people and shows that it was always based on the false hope nurtured by certain elites, that the Afghan ‘army’ could be relied upon to uphold law and order in the face of the Taliban. The fact that they melted away as soon as their US allies departed shows that the entire project was doomed from the start, based on illusions of western influence in a country that is, after all, Muslim. The division of opinions, say Dejevsky, runs along predictable lines: the elites who talk about betrayal of Afghans, and the ordinary folk who think that sending their offspring into an unwinnable war is also a betrayal. The only point on which there seems to be some agreement is that it was all a terrible mistake and that the price was too high.

The theme of betrayal continues with the Canadian paper of record, The Globe and Mail. According to Noah Richler, son of the great Canadian novelist, Mordecai Richler, Canada has betrayed the Canadians who were deployed to Afghanistan, and the Afghans we declared we were helping, in a Special to the Globe published on August twenty-first. Richler thinks that Canadians’ first mistake was to give up on ‘soft power’, which entails a lot of listening and whispering into important ears. Pretending to be hard warriors simply has never worked for Canadians, he says. It’s a good argument. However, can anyone seriously imagine people like the Taliban being impressed by whispers from a soft power?

Last but perhaps most prescient, is Nathan Gardels, Noema Editor-in-Chief: Biden is right to stick to his lack of guns in Afghanistan and think strategically about protecting the liberal order where it still exists.

The ‘liberal order’, remember that one? What are we doing to hold onto, protect and nurture a tradition of freedom of thought that goes back at least as far as the Enlightenment? We tend to forget that the West engaged in a bitter, bloody 200-year conflict over the separation of Church and State. Over the right to express one’s opinion freely without fear of retribution, and to believe what one wishes without someone cutting your head off. That such rights are enshrined in our constitution and protected under the law. This tradition is now at stake and under siege from two fronts: from the medieval Muslim extremists such as the Taliban and the Afghan warlords and their enclaves in Europe and the UK, and from within, from the extremists on both sides, the cancel culture warriors and the wars over gender and race. In this charged atmosphere, it is becoming ever harder to engage in ‘rational discourse’. Indeed, it is no longer possible at many of our universities.

We forget at our peril that this rational, free discourse is the foundation of our culture, and that the Muslim world never went through a similar fight. If they had, we wouldn’t be living in fear of terrorist attacks and getting more confused by the day about the value of our own tradition of freedom of expression. In a disturbing way, especially in the US, the deep disagreements in our society are beginning to mirror the place we call Afghanistan. Which is not a country at all. To quote Edward Snowden, it is… comprised of warring tribes, unable to form an inclusive whole; unable to wade beyond shallow differences in sect and identity in order to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves…

Snowden, whom I consider to be one of the most astute observers of global politics, ends with, Today, the country this describes is Afghanistan. Tomorrow, the country this describes might be my own. 

His foreboding is well founded. The USA is so deeply divided against itself that it’s increasingly impossible to see a way forward. Maybe facing hard truths about the war in Afghanistan is a first step. Admitting the endemic corruption of Afghan and American forces was necessary. Like cutting off a limb oozing gangrene, you might say. Not pretty. Painful. But essential for survival.

Corruption always leaves a trail called Follow the Money, which tends to reveal the ugly truth hiding beneath the surface. Let’s listen in to the Washington Post correspondent and author of the just released Afghan Papers (genius timing?), Craig Whitlock. In a sixteen-minute interview with Democracy Now, on August 22 2020, he laid out what his sleuthing has uncovered. 

To wit, the generals lied about the feasibility of this entire war, to the public, to themselves and to their allies. Yet, according to Mark Alexander Milley, 20th Joint Chief of Staff, Afghanistan was always a winning proposition. Though everyone in the lower ranks knew that the so-called Afghan Forces could not be trained to be a fighting force. The vast amounts of money (US$83billion) poured into the training and outfitting of this ‘army’ is one grand folly, but please, don’t blame them. Everybody jumped on this gravy train to perdition; the American subcontractors, the Afghan suppliers, the army brass, everyone. Who could resist living in this land of lucre. Taxpayer money, to be sure. Money that could have been spent on propping up the failing infrastructure and aid the struggling masses of the USA.

Then there are the obscene profits made by the big five US defence contractors. If you invested in them, you’ve done well by this ‘forever war’.

Whitlock didn’t spend much time discussing the drug trade that has fueled this 20-year disaster. But to his credit, he did mention it. He did not stress that it has always been and still is the lifeblood of the Taliban. They control that trade. Full stop. The sums of money involved here are nothing short of breathtaking and enable them to pay for new crops of young men from the countryside to join their ranks. 

There is a cynical ray of hope amongst the gloom: the Chinese, already getting enmeshed with the Taliban, and having a long border with the place where ‘empires go to die’, are next in line. Perhaps the Biden administration is counting on this? Now that they’re digging themselves out of the addiction to Afghanistan, they have opened the door to the Chinese to try their luck.

Perhaps a strategic coup, after all, and the beginning of a painful reckoning that is long overdue. 

This reckoning must go beyond the strictly material and venture into what we call ‘our values’. We must decide once and for all whether we will continue to mirror the medieval zealots in the Muslim world with our own, woke version. Yes, we have a secular religion, wokeism, on our hands. When will we wake up to what is essentially a regression to the 14th century, when any religious belief other than the approved Catholic one, was to endanger your life. There is heavy irony in the constant wailing over how we betrayed human rights in Afghanistan while we’re busily demolishing them at home. 

The West is aspirational in ways that no other culture on earth is. That’s why everybody wants to come here. It’s no accident that people generally do not wish to emigrate to Russia or China. Or Afghanistan. Freedom of expression and Freedom from oppression are priceless. 

Perhaps this is the moment to stop listening to those who would have us give up on the achievements and ideals of the Enlightenment, thus playing into the hand of the Chinese Communist Party, which is shouting to anyone who will listen that ‘the west is in irreversible decline’.

Mired in self-hatred and idiotic but dangerous culture wars as we are, the deplorable losses in Afghanistan need a historical perspective. There is a bigger war going on, the one between a still ‘free world’ and the autocratic one. That is the war we must win if we, as a society and a culture, want to survive, prosper, and stop waging endless unwinnable wars in faraway places that are very close to home.

We must decide if we are going to betray ourselves, or if we’re going to remember who we are, where we came from and where we want to go from here.