Experts “who examined the Afghan security issue closely have no doubt that the United States could have brought true stability to Afghanistan with a larger force, could have made the return of the Taliban and the terrorists virtually impossible.” So assured high-ranking National Security Council veteran Richard Clarke in his controversial 2004 book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, with a certainty that seems absurd after 20 years of America’s Afghanistan debacle.
Clarke criticized limited American deployments after 9/11 to Afghanistan, where the country’s Taliban rulers had allowed Al Qaeda terrorists to establish bases from which to wage global jihad. Therefore, after the Taliban quickly fell to an American-led coalition, the “new Afghan government of President Hamid Kharzi was given little authority outside the capital city of Kabul,” Clarke wrote. He bewailed a supposedly lost
opportunity to end the factional fighting and impose an integrated national government. Yet after initial efforts to unite the country, American interest waned and the warlords returned to their old ways. Afghanistan was a nation raped by war and factional fighting for twenty years. It needed everything rebuilt, but in contrast to funds sought for Iraq, U.S. economic and development aid to Afghanistan was inadequate and slowly delivered.
James Dobbins, a “career diplomat and expert on military and security issues,” highlighted for Clarke the limited American resources in Afghanistan. Dobbins had “worked on rebuilding Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, and Bosnia. In 2001, he began similar work on Afghanistan,” Clarke explained. He recalled from Dobbins’ comparisons that “in the first two years of the Bosnia and Kosovo rebuilding efforts, funds available totaled $1,390 and $814 per capita” in contrast to merely $52 in Afghanistan.
Clarke also critiqued American support for Afghan security forces:
The goal the Pentagon approved was only a 4,800-man Afghan national army by 2004. Some regional warlords count their strength at ten thousand men under arms. The initial units of the new force were trained by the U.S. but we soon stopped support and supervision. Many of the new recruits departed the force, taking their equipment with them.
Meanwhile the Taliban presented real jihadist threats in Afghanistan, Clarke noted, in contrast to claims that the Taliban remained fundamentally distinct from Al Qaeda. The Taliban showed “effectively little difference between their leadership and that of al Qaeda,” he wrote:
Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, completely agreed with bin Laden and al Qaeda’s goals. There were stories of intermarriage between the bin Laden and Omar families. There were also economic, military, and political ties that were inviolable.
Yet the fragility of the Taliban’s Afghan opponents concerned Clarke, who had advocated before 9/11 American military aid to the Northern Alliance based in Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley and led by Ahmad Shah Masoud:
I had tried to argue that the U.S. work harder to fight against the Taliban in its civil war in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance still held sway over a third of the country but provinces switched sides as a result of combat or cash, and much of the combatants and all of the cash came from bin Laden to help the Taliban. It was only a matter of time before the Alliance crumbled.
Clarke also worried that Masoud, whom Al Qaeda assassinated two days before 9/11 in a suicide bombing, was no liberal saint, whatever his hatred of the Taliban. “Massoud was a good guy now, but later the Congress, or the media, or some other White House staff would focus on the fact that he sold opium, abused human rights, and had killed civilians,” Clarke wrote.
Over $2.3 trillion spent, and 2,400 American war dead, in Afghanistan since 9/11, Americans have learned only too well about the weaknesses of Afghan leadership. As he himself indicated, rival warlords and ethnic groups in a culture dominated by sharia supremacism make any attempt to install a stable, pro-Western government in Afghanistan a fool’s errand. Any Western development aid here will usually only buy temporary support from mercenary, corrupt Afghan leaders.
Only more limited strategies to contain Taliban threats in Afghanistan ever made any sense, such as Clarke’s realpolitik willingness to support the Northern Alliance. Yet he surprisingly departed in Afghanistan from his criticism of President George W. Bush’s overly ambitious nation-building project in Iraq. A strident opponent of the Iraq war, Clarke rejected that “calls from Washington for democratization in the Arab world help if such calls originate from a leader who is trying to impose democracy on an Arab country at the point of an American bayonet.” How his Afghanistan policy recommendations involved any fewer American bayonets than in Iraq remained unexplained.
By contrast, Clarke did provide an insightful account of the various strategic quandaries that challenged American policymakers in confronting Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein over decades, as a future article will examine. Although Clarke expressed longstanding desires to remove Hussein, Clarke favored more limited leadership alterations in Iraq rather than Bush’s grand regime change. As Clarke’s own writings on Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have indicated, political progress in Muslim-majority countries must proceed cautiously to have any chance of success.
mortimer says
Much of Richard Clarke’s agenda makes sense to me. The stumbling block for everything is of course what he calls ‘Sharia supremacism’. Discriminatory Sharia law means in effect that only one Islamic sect can be ‘right’ and that all other Islamic sects are ‘wrong’ and must be suppressed, along with all other non-Islamic religions. Discriminatory Sharia ruins the pursuit of democracy by overruling it with ‘Allah’s laws’. In actual fact, Sharia is not ‘Allah’s laws’ at all. The mullahs who invented Sharia lived hundreds of years after Mohammed. They knew more about Islam than Mohammed or Allah.
The mullahs are the spoilers for democracy in Islamic-majority countries. They don’t want modernity, progress or human rights that move society away from their 7th-century authoritarianism.
Wellington says
Ah, if only more money had been spent. Yeah, that would have done it.
No! Afghanistan was hopeless from the beginning and after initially taking out the extra bad guys right after 9/11 we should have left with the proviso that occasionally Special Forces might have to be sent in to clear out more extra bad guys.
The overall strategy with the Islamic world must be one of containment, very similar to how America handled Communism during the Cold War (until President Reagan with his great instincts realized that the time had come to end containment and go in for the kill, which Alexander Bessmertnykh, Gorbachev’s own Foreign Minister, confirmed the wisdom of when he said that “Ronald Reagan’s military build-up and Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) accelerated the demise of the Soviet Union”).
Of course, during the Cold War Communism was seen as iniquitous by both Republicans and Democrats (JFK was arguably even more of a hawk than Reagan and spent more on defense as a percentage of the federal budget than Reagan did). Now, virtually no Democrats see Islam as iniquitous, which it surely is, and many, many Republicans do not as well, though some Republicans do, especially at the state level as evidenced by certain state legislatures like those of Oklahoma and Tennessee.
PMK says
Wellington,
JFK may have spent a greater percentage of the federal budget on defense than Reagan did, but that was before LBJ’s Great Society programs and the growing welfare state greatly increased federal spending. LBJ was also bent on containment, but he had opposition from those who wanted to build the welfare state. That Reagan got as much as he did for defense after McGovernites took over the Democratic Party is a credit to Reagan.
Accept this as 20/20 hindsight, but in addition to leaving after chasing al Qaeda into Pakistan (which Muslims would have interpreted as a victory for Islam anyway), we needed to at least ban travel to the US from any of the ‘stans’. Add to that a warning to the world: if any of your citizens attack the US again, your country’s people will also be denied access to the US.
Individuals and terror groups can plot attacks on the US all they want. The fact remains they can’t attack the US homeland directly if they are denied entry.
gravenimage says
Spot on, Wellington.
Terry Gain says
Political initiatives in Muslim countries are a waste of time and money. They are mad for Muhammad. Only they can initiate change. Leave them in the dust.
somehistory says
News from Newsmax
“U.S. officials will meet with senior Taliban officials on Saturday and Sunday for talks aimed at easing the evacuations of foreign citizens and at-risk Afghans from Afghanistan, a U.S. official said Friday.
The focus of talks in Doha, Qatar, would be holding Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders to commitments that they would allow Americans and other foreign nationals to leave Afghanistan, along with Afghans who once worked for the U.S. military or government and other Afghan allies, the official said.”
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/united-states-taliban/2021/10/08/id/1039784/?ns_mail_
Talking with known lying terrorists always works out well….
It might work if they were isolated, a hostage negotiator was engaging them, while snipers were working behind the scenes to take some shots.
Alas, evil idiots who don’t want good resolutions are the ones “in charge.” That is what caused all of this in the beginning….evil working evil with other evil.
PMK says
The globalists are in charge. To them there is nothing exceptional about America or its freedoms. Good resolutions might mean closing America’s borders to Muslims all over the world. That is a no-no today.
gravenimage says
+1
gravenimage says
Richard Clarke’s Good War in Afghanistan
…………
Alas, Afghanistan, which is statistically 100% Muslim, never could have been civilized, no matter how many Americans were sent in to die there.
Kepha says
As a former denizen of the aptly named Foggy Bottom, I fear Clarke probably suffers from some blind spots that afflict the American elite, as well as having a few good insights.
Generally, the American policy elite has been in a kind of stupor about the role of traditional beliefs in any society, and has been captive to the hope that all “religions” (and SURELY enlightenment liberalism and post-modrn radicalim CAN’T fall into that category!) should be expected to take the tack of the liberal American “Mainline” churches and bow to every secular idol or trend that comes along, obediently rolling ovuer and playing dead when their cultured despisers tell them to do so. The Islamic resurgence simply caght our elite with its pants down; and its response has been to demonize traditional Christians rather than even begin imagining what to do about a renewal of Islamic militance.
It never ceased to amaze me how so many highly intelligent people could have so little appreciation for historical trajectories and experience. Surely someone should’ve noticed that Afghanistan was a barely developed hole-in-the-map with an unforgiving mountainous terrain and a habit of repelling invaders who were unwilling to take some abominably harsh measures with the local people.
Nor did anyone have any sense of the ornery aspects of Islam, or notice that Islam’s “bad guys” had the upper hand in interpreting the religion and culture’s foundational texts.
If the Soviets could not handle an Afghan resistance supported on what was essentially a shoestring when the country was on its southern border, how could we have “won” there, when we were dependent on a logistical trail running through duplicitous Pakistan?
gravenimage says
Much of Switzerland, Andorra, Nepal, and Bhutan have unforgiving mountainous terrain as well, Kepha–but they are not marred by the endemic practice of Islam, so they are are far more civilized.
Kepha says
Granted. What think you, though, of Switzerland’s being one of the last Western countries to grant woman suffrage? Or Bhutan engaging in mass expulsions of Nepali-origin people?
gravenimage says
Kepha, I am *no* defender of Bhutan’s treatment of ethnic Nepalis, culminating in the appalling Lhotshampa Expulsion in the late 1980s.
I also think it shamfeful that Switzerland didn’t grant women the vote *until 1971*, decades after most of the rest of the west.
This being said in both cases, none of the countries I cited have been anything like the chaotic, violent, genocidal, and misogynist horror of Afghanistan–because none of these nations are Muslim..
Walter Sieruk says
Limited warfare is pointless . The goal of war of to win ,the faster the better. That means the use full force military might and then get it over with once and for all.
Not to so so means a long war ,as in twenty years,is very cruel. So cruel that that it’s worse than a long dragged out war which only prolongs the suffering and waste.
At least on military man had declared :”limited warfare is madness.”
His statement is valid and true. As seen in that “limited warfare” In Afghanistan.
Which was made even worse by the folly of Joe Biden . Not because ending America war involvement in Afghanistan was a “bad idea” but because Biden did it in the very worse way possible by not heeding the US generals advise for a gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan starting after September 11, 2021 .
As Sun Tzu in the wisdom of in his book THE ART OF WAR instructs “He will win who has the military capacity and in not interfered with by the sovereign.”