Why does afghanistan have war

There have been many unseemly Western military retreats in recent history: Algeria , Vietnam , Iraq , Sudan May , and now Afghanistan. Why does this one feel so different?

So raw, so immediate, and so personal? Social media sites were and still are awash with anguished comments from American and European veterans, military and civilian, of the year war in Afghanistan. The withdrawal of Western forces ended with the departure of the last U. As allied troops evacuated more than , Afghans, armies of diplomats, humanitarian aid, and development agency staff worked feverishly in Kabul and far away in national capitals to support the evacuation effort.

Perhaps even more remarkable is the degree to which civil society got involved. In the U. Similar private networks have sprung into action in other countries. Were there hitches and public hysteria, institutions, and people working at cross-purposes?

All of that. The evacuation also laid bare the abject failure of the multilateralism that Europeans so pride themselves on — of the U. The group completed their shockingly rapid advance across the country by capturing Kabul on 15 August. It came after foreign forces withdrew from Afghanistan following a deal between the US and the Taliban, two decades after US forces removed the militants from power in The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions.

Taliban forces have pledged not to allow Afghanistan to become a base for terrorists who could threaten the West. But questions are already being asked about how the group will govern the country, and what their rule means for women, human rights, and political freedoms.

Officials identified Islamist militant group al-Qaeda, and its leader Osama Bin Laden, as responsible. Bin Laden was in Afghanistan, under the protection of the Taliban, the Islamists who had been in power since When they refused to hand him over, the US intervened militarily, quickly removing the Taliban and vowing to support democracy and eliminate the terrorist threat.

Nato allies had joined the US and a new Afghan government took over in but deadly Taliban attacks continued.

President Barack Obama's "troop surge" in helped push back the Taliban but it was not long term. In , at the end of what was the bloodiest year since , Nato's international forces ended their combat mission, leaving responsibility for security to the Afghan army. That gave the Taliban momentum and they seized more territory. Peace talks between the US and the Taliban started tentatively, with the Afghan government pretty much uninvolved, and the agreement on a withdrawal came in February in Qatar.

The US-Taliban deal did not stop the Taliban attacks - they switched their focus instead to Afghan security forces and civilians, and targeted assassinations. Their areas of control grew. Four commercial airliners are hijacked.

Their air defences and small fleet of fighter aircraft are destroyed. Other cities quickly fall. The constitution paves the way for presidential elections in October He serves two five-year terms as president. More than British troops lose their lives in Afghanistan over the course of the conflict. The operation ends a year hunt led by the CIA. The senior people in that administration who were interlocutors to Pakistan succumbed to the ISI narratives which warned if the U.

That administration valued the stability of Pakistan and the security of its strategic weapons more than Afghanistan. To its credit, though, the Obama team was also willing to accept great risk in undertaking the raid that killed bin Laden. The Obama administration tried to focus resources on Afghanistan with a measured and prudent approach to strategy.

It undertook a laudable but insufficient effort to align means to the political object by crafting a theory of strategic victory for Afghanistan with the surge that began in Almost every U.

This guy came into office wanting to get out of Afghanistan altogether. The president himself had little will or interest in continuing the war in Afghanistan but for the first two years he heeded the counsel of his secretary of defense and national security advisor.

His team did craft a revised strategy with an ostensible commitment to win in Afghanistan. We will fight to win. From now on, victory will have a clear definition. Terrorists take heed: America will never let up until you are dealt a lasting defeat. An increase of about 3, U. Beyond the imperative to find a regional solution that would reduce external support for the Taliban, the approach re-aligned the increase in troops to advise more tactical units, to continue to double the Afghan special security forces and to expand the Afghan air force, all toward the aim of overmatching the Taliban in the fighting.

The idea was that this increased capacity could build military pressure and operational momentum against the Taliban to convince them to reconcile with the Afghan government. Pressure on Pakistan would curb the effects of sanctuary, in theory. Although the commander in chief exhibited little strategic wisdom and no will to continue the war, his predilections did not predominate until most of the adults were gone in late after he fired his only capable defense secretary and decent national security advisor.

Once they were gone, the 45th president was far less restrained and sound in his action and decisions. He selected and empowered Zal Khalilzad to negotiate an end to the war with a peace agreement that saw a hasty extraction from Afghanistan for the U.

It strained credulity to argue that no one in the administration knew that this represented an abandonment of Afghanistan. Worse still, during the last two years of the war, the 45th president authorized the theater commander to use air power more liberally during the very periods that human intelligence capacity was diminishing.

The Biden team clearly seems to have entered office already decided to get out of Afghanistan, and committed to go with the risibly unenforceable peace agreement signed by the previous, and most horrid administration in American history. It was a circus show and the terms that 45 and Khalilzad agreed to signaled the abandonment of Afghanistan. To be sure, many citizens of the United States, including myself, support the advent of team Biden. A sense of decency has supplanted the machinations of an evil miscreant.

Americans should be grateful for what this administration is advocating for infrastructure and the plight of ordinary people. Also, to be sure, the decision to end the twenty-year war in Afghanistan was both courageous and laudable. The current president decided in , when he was a senator and then became vice president, that Afghanistan was not worth the effort. Those arguing for the surge in Afghanistan won the debate in Biden lost.

His obduracy persisted. Surely, they explained that a small footprint of special and conventional forces advisors and support could sustain the Afghan special security forces, air force, and conventional forces, so those Afghan forces would continue to fight and resupply. Since , the Afghans were in the lead for security and their forces were doing the preponderance of fighting and dying.

Many more Afghan civilians and soldiers had died in the war than American or coalition members had. The president had dug in before inauguration. And, few resisted vehemently. No one resigned. A more judicious approach, one that brooked the facts on the ground and the realities in the South Asia region, might have been to hold with, or increase the advisors from 2, to 5, or 8,, to sustain the most capable Afghan security forces and renegotiate the end of the war.

His team could have then worked an agreement that included the Afghan government it supported and provided terms to allow the U. But the administration lost precious time in undertaking an Afghanistan policy review. Any power-sharing agreement that would have emerged would have been better than the current outcome, where the Taliban rule Afghanistan unchecked.

An aggressive attempt at diplomacy would possibly have spilled over past the summer, and the Taliban may have begun to attack U. But that scenario was manageable: It would likely have meant going back to a pre-February level of warfare, in which U.

A more considered withdrawal would also have meant giving the Afghan security forces more cover as we eventually withdrew — taking intelligence and air support away step by step, and empowering them in the process, rather than pulling the rug from under them. The choice was not to stay forever or to leave this summer, unconditionally. The choice was to assert our power while we were on the ground to try and achieve a better outcome for Afghans — one that was, with talks in motion, closer to being achieved than it had been at any point in the past.

We owed this much to Afghans. Arguing that the Doha deal left us no choice but to withdraw this summer may have been the politically and domestically expedient move. But it was not the morally correct one.

Order from Chaos. A how-to guide for managing the end of the post-Cold War era.