The first photograph I remembered showing the Taliban at work actually dated to the Soviet occupation. It showed a victim of the mujahedin, a woman in a burqa lying on the ground with a caption explaining that she had been shot to death for teaching girls to read. I think my mistake came from later reading about such killings by the Taliban. One of the more horrific newspaper anecdotes I can remember about the Taliban was very recently repeated, probably in either the Times or the Washington Post, by a reporter apparently once as startled by it as I was—it related Taliban amputating the finger tip of a woman who’d applied nail polish. The most memorable internet-viewable home video showed a middle-aged man identified as a member of the Taliban morals police repeatedly beating a woman in a burqa with a leather paddle, the woman screaming, and her screams translated in the subtitles as something like “Just kill me”. The relatively frequent news stories about the forced marriage of quite young girls to Taliban fighters were much more common, also arguably worse, so it is presumably the rarity of the video, perhaps surreptitiously recorded on an early smart phone, that made it stick in my mind.
Biden’s first speech about the victory of the Taliban mentioned women and girls twice. The first reference was to American women: “How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not?“ Of course, until Biden withdrew the remaining American troops and airpower the Afghan government’s troops had fought in their civil war: researchers at Brown recently estimated that around 69,000 of the Afghan security forces had died in that fighting, along with 2448 Americans, and my memory is that over that time and when backed by American airpower they had held all of their country’s cities, retaking the few that briefly fell. So that particular attack on the Afghan forces was an ugly lie. Tom Tugendhat, a Tory MP who’d served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was remarkably tactful when he suggested on the floor of the Commons that “Those who have never fought for the colours they fly should be careful about critcising those who have”.
Biden’s second and last reference to women did mention Afghan women: “We’ll continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people, of women and girls, just as we speak out all over the world.” The many thousands of Afghan women desperately struggling to get out of Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban victory do not seem reassured by Biden’s vow to speak out. Despite the risk of being scorned as a would-be ‘White saviour’ it makes sense to begin any consideration of Biden’s decision by thinking about Afghanistan’s women, because they are dreadfully likely to pay the most terrible price for it. Secularists, other political enemies, ethnic minorities and Shiite Hazaras defined as heretics are also at great risk, but women are probably at most risk, and we know this because of the Taliban’s well-documented and very thorough repression of women during the five years they ruled almost all of Afghanistan, also from what has trickled out from the areas they never ceased to rule, and in some of what their predecessors did in the fight against the Soviets. There is a chance that this time it will be different, that desperation for foreign assistance will make the difference, but there are also reasons to suspect that it won’t be different, because in a counterfactual world where a Taliban Frank Capra made a Pashto version of “Why We Fight” for internal consumption, the repression of women would presumably loom pretty large. The Taliban are, after all, morally serious, and their morals are not ours. The American military presence did not create an educated and professional Afghan female population—friends who remember Kabul in the ‘70s remember meeting such women—but it does seem possible that the American military presence may have allowed its recreation, just as the Soviet and then American military presence made likely its destruction, because Western ideas about gender became part of a war Biden decided to lose rather than stalemate.
Biden’s defense of total withdrawal centers on victory being impossible, with victory usually being defined as building a unified, stable, modern and reasonably liberal state in Afghanistan. This definition of victory is rhetorically ingenious, an almost perfect defense of abandoning the Afghans because there has never been such a state in Afghanistan, which is not least unusual in being an area where there has never been a strong, stable state of any description. If victory is also understood as requiring the destruction of Taliban authority in all of Afghanistan, that, too, is almost surely impossible, because the Taliban, the creation of the Pakistani intelligence services, can always retreat to Pakistani sanctuaries and return at a time of its own convenience. This happened in 2002, when the Taliban’s presence in Afghanistan melted away as quickly as the current Afghan government and army did in August of 2021, and in some places also happened during the nearly two decades of fighting since. Sufficient American pressure on Pakistan to end its sanctuaries and its arming, training and directing of the Taliban never happened, not least because American forces in Afghanistan were to a degree supplied from (or over) Pakistan, a country our policy elites considered a friend and ally long after Pakistan’s elites ceased to regard the United States as anything of the kind. Victory so defined was also vastly unlikely because of the profoundly predatory elites who administered, which is to say systematically looted, the Afghan state created in the wake of the lightening American victory in 2002, who starved and cheated the armed forces we created.
What could have been done other than acknowledge the eventual inevitability of what Biden did? What might have been possible was stalemate. After all, stalemate had prevailed for two decades in Afghanistan. Women, for now forty percent of Afghanistan’s students and members of its professions, were most secure in the cities the Taliban could never take until we wholly abandoned their maltreated and now maligned defenders. Stalemate is not alien to modern American warfare and statecraft: after all, it is what we achieved in South Korea, in 1950 a desperately poor statelet afflicted with deeply corrupt, tyrannical and predatory elites as well as militarily formidable enemies. Some of this state of affairs persisted for decades, although South Korea eventually became one of the richest democracies in the world, and stalemate in Korea, much maligned at the time, now looks like the most brilliant success of our post-war international strategy. It is very hard to imagine a near or middle term Afghanistan evolving into anything like South Korea—among other differences, the Korean peninsula with its radically different cultures and history has seen very strong states for thousands of years–but it is not obvious that the stalemate that kept the Taliban mostly in the south and out of the cities was inevitably unsustainable. Airpower is famously a force multiplier, and our Afghan allies, now derided for being dependent on airpower, were also almost impossible to destroy when so supported. Saigon’s fall has fewer similarities to Kabul’s than are sometimes asserted, but it does have one: Saigon fell when, in the wake of Watergate, American airpower based in Thailand ceased to support the ARVN’s elite units and we largely ceased to rearm and refuel their own air force; the battles of An Lộc (1972) make for a striking comparison to the collapse of 1975. Stalemate is also what we achieved in Central Europe after 1945, and while the current Hungarian government is less cheering to behold than are the South Koreans, it’s infinitely more alluring a sight than Nazi-aligned or Stalinist Hungary was. Would the stalemate have held? After all, expecting Biden to wholly suppress Afghan elite thievery and Pakistani elite treachery is surely too much to ask, but it’s not clear that asking for a bit more pressure on both would have inevitably failed to achieve anything at all. And in any case, the almost-twenty year stalemate was achieved with no effective pressure on either Afghan or Pakistani elites.
Maintaining a stalemate would have required leaving a small force in Afghanistan, some of whom would have died each year. In one recent year forty Americans died in Afghanistan, every one of them a tragedy beyond description to parents, widows and children. More were grievously wounded. But it is the business of soldiers to run those risks—it is one reason we so respect them—and the business of politicians to decide whether the risks are worth running. When making and justifying such a decision there is no more right to preposterously assert the certainty of total military failure than there is to equally preposterously assert the possibility of total victory. Biden has said that only the vital interests of our country can justify the deaths of our troops, but vital interests are not easily defined. Was a vital British interest at stake during the sixty years when 1500 of the Royal Navy’s seamen in the West African Squadron died in the course of suppressing the slave trade? Would a hypothetical Prime Minister Biden have condemned that decades-long mission and pulled out the ships sometime in the late 1820s? Is the defense of Estonia a vital interest? Is the defense of Taiwan? Biden’s decision in Afghanistan has probably made it at least a little likely that we’ll find out about those two a bit sooner than we need to have. Are the probable and pretty bad fates of the women of Afghanistan any interest of the United States after twenty years during which we boasted of improving their situation? Biden seems to have decided on what has so far proved a disastrous withdrawal in part because he didn’t care what happened to the people of Afghanistan, or is at least quoted to that effect by people who claimed he said as much to them—Richard Holbrooke, I think was one of them, and was so quoted by someone—Dexter Filkins?–in a podcast this morning. And he also seems to have made his decision because he was pretty certain that he would pay no political price for doing this.
He may, of course, be right. So far, while Biden’s favorability is falling, popular support for leaving Afghanistan remains pretty strong. One of the suddenly more noticeable parts of Biden’s strategy turns out to be what Disraeli called dishing the Whigs by stealing their clothes, which meant adopting the policies of a rival political party in order to steal a share of its electorate. Trump’s Republicans are the party Biden seeks to dish, some of whose clothes he seeks to steal. Like Trump, Biden is not a free trader, he seems to be interested in what is in effect if not name an industrial policy, possibly a neo-mercantilist one, he is averse to both foreign wars and the Chinese government (if he and we are unlucky, two perhaps incompatible aversions), and despite his vaunted empathy he seems to share just a bit Trump’s indifference to the moral claims of foreigners. He almost certainly assumes that in 2020 he reassembled part of the New Deal coalition by precisely this sort of neo-Disraelian costume change, and reminds critics that he ran on the program of withdrawing from Afghanistan. He remains, in almost every respect, Trump’s infinite moral superior, but claiming that the buck stops here while disdaining any responsibility for a very ugly outcome may unpleasantly remind us of the man Biden calls the former guy.
And even if almost no one seems too interested in them, some questions don’t go away. Is the astonishing thievery of a predatory elite sufficient justification for perfect indifference to the fate of those from whom they have stolen? Is an inability to effectively defend oneself a persuasive social-Darwinist warrant for conquest by a more militarily-capable and very cruel antagonist? Is a corrupt and feckless formal democracy in no way preferable to a principled misogynist theocracy? Are people perhaps half of whom suddenly claim to favor a Taliban victory—around a year ago a Pew Poll had support for the Taliban at 19%—if it results in a broad coalition government remotely likely to get what they now say they want? As we used to say on the Left: to ask these questions is to answer them.