The U.S. Failure in Afghanistan Is Not Pakistan’s
Fault
Anatol Lieven Thursday,
Oct. 14, 2021
The
anger directed by Americans at Pakistan in the wake of the disorderly end of
the U.S. war in Afghanistan is understandable. After all, Pakistan really did
give shelter to the Afghan Taliban, something that played a vital role in the
Taliban’s eventual victory. However, the reaction in Washington is also a way
of avoiding an honest analysis of the comprehensive failures of U.S. policy in
Afghanistan. Moreover, it misses key aspects of what motivated Pakistan’s
behavior, with very important implications for how the United States itself
understands and acts in the world.
To
begin with, Islamabad’s support for the Afghan Taliban was not just a product
of the Pakistani military’s strategic approach to the conflict in Afghanistan.
It also reflected the opinion of a large majority of people in northern
Pakistan, and among the Pashtun minority in particular. This was combined with a hostility to
the U.S. that was among the highest anywhere in the world. The
sympathy Pakistanis felt for the Taliban had its roots in the same dynamics
that motivated their support for the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviet
occupation in the 1980s. It can also be seen in the context of the historical
memory of Afghan resistance to the British Empire in the 19th century.
But
the U.S. refused to learn from the experience of other countries or to draw any
parallels between their past roles and that of the U.S. today. When I and other
observers suggested to U.S. officials in the early years of the war that they
might study the Soviet failure in Afghanistan, they rejected the idea
dismissively. That stubborn refusal befuddled the entire U.S. effort in
Afghanistan.
As
for official Pakistani policy toward the Taliban, it was largely driven by fear
of India’s role in Afghanistan, as has been widely noted. But it was
also shaped by concerns that the U.S. and the West would leave Afghanistan
without creating a successful Afghan state, and that Pakistan, as well as
Afghanistan’s other neighbors, would be left to live with the resulting mess.
This is what had happened in the 1990s, and Islamabad—rightly, it turned
out—feared it would happen again.
Both
a practical and an ethical issue are involved here. In the end, because of its
geographic location, the U.S. faces no real existential, territorial threats.
All of its foreign military operations are therefore to a greater or lesser
degree a matter of choice. The countries located in regions where the U.S.
conducts military operations have no such choice. They cannot pack up and go
home.
Every
U.S. intervention must therefore be shaped with the wishes of regional
countries firmly in mind, while recognizing that, from a practical point of
view, the hostility of regional powers to Washington’s objectives will almost
certainly doom any counterinsurgency effort to defeat. By the end of the United
States’ presence in Afghanistan, its wider policies had meant that this
presence was opposed by all Afghanistan’s most important neighbors. Pakistan
was infuriated by U.S. drone strikes and what it regarded as bullying, and it
feared possible U.S. support for an increased Indian presence in Afghanistan.
Iran feared that Washington would use Afghanistan to attack Iran, and Tehran
supported the Taliban in order to give itself the ability to strike back in the
event such an attack took place. Growing hostility between the U.S. on one hand
and Russia and China on the other meant that these countries opposed the
presence of U.S. bases in their vicinity.
No
counterinsurgency can succeed where the entire region is hostile to it. This is
particularly true when neighboring countries provide safe haven to the
insurgents. In such cases, great powers fighting counterinsurgencies often
consider invading the neighboring countries to eliminate these safe havens. But
they almost always reject the option—rightly—on the grounds that far from
winning the war, doing so would only vastly expand it. .
The
same logic holds true with regard to the argument made repeatedly over the
years by many U.S. commentators that Washington should have “done something”
about Islamabad’s behavior. What exactly the U.S. should have done, however, is
never explicitly described. Invading Pakistan would have only succeeded in
colossally widening the scope of the war.
As
for U.S. economic pressure on Pakistan, it was also constrained by a dilemma or
ambiguity at the core of U.S. strategy in the region. On one hand, the U.S.
wished to defeat or at least contain the Afghan Taliban, though as time went on
this was chiefly driven by the desire to maintain U.S. “credibility.” On the
other hand, Washington was still concerned with the original purpose of the
invasion of Afghanistan, namely to counter Islamist terrorism.
Any
economic pressure sufficient to change its behavior would also have risked the
collapse of a state that possesses more than five times Afghanistan’s
population, nuclear weapons, and an army of half a million soldiers. That in
turn would have created a terrorist threat that would have dwarfed Afghanistan
and Syria combined. As a result, U.S. economic pressure on Pakistan was limited
to the withholding of U.S. aid, which China soon
replaced on a much larger scale.
Ultimately,
the U.S. needed three things from Pakistan: a crackdown on the Afghan Taliban,
land routes to supply U.S. forces in Afghanistan and cooperation against
international terrorism. Washington never got the first, but it did get the
second and most of the third. Pakistan failed to hunt down Osama bin Laden, but
it did capture and hand over to the U.S. numerous other al-Qaida leaders and
operatives, and cooperated quietly with the CIA and U.K. intelligence to
identify plots by Pakistanis against the American and British homelands.
That
illustrates a fundamental lesson of international affairs that the U.S.
establishment would do well to study. The U.S. can rarely get everything it
wants. It will often have to make compromises and settle for an uncomfortable
but tolerable outcome. Living with Saddam Hussein was uncomfortable for
America. Invading Iraq to get rid of him led to disaster. Losing in Afghanistan
has been acutely uncomfortable for America. Destroying Pakistan for the sake of
an illusory Afghan victory would have led to catastrophe on an almost
unimaginable scale.
Finally,
what has happened in Afghanistan demonstrates the truth of the principle that,
in practice, geopolitical and military power is local and relative, not
universal and absolute. The outcome of any contest between two countries will
depend on the power that one of them is willing and able to bring to bear in a
particular place or on a particular issue, relative to the power that another
is willing and able to employ to oppose it.
Those
decisions, in turn, will be determined by the location of the countries
concerned and whether the issue involved is a vital or only a secondary
interest for them. By those standards, just as Russia is a great power in
eastern Ukraine and the U.S. is not, so Pakistan is a great power in eastern
Afghanistan—and the U.S. is not. The U.S. does not have the physical power to
dominate everywhere. Equally important, most Americans do not feel that most
issues around the world are of vital concern to the United States. This
inevitably limits the commitments and sacrifices they are prepared to make in
these cases, especially over the long term.
The
lessons from Afghanistan are a case study of these principles. Future U.S.
strategy should be shaped with them firmly in mind.
