The graveyard of empires
Afghanistan is back at the centre of attention, for all the wrong reasons.
In this week’s Not in Dispatches, we want to go behind the news of a resurgent ISIS-Khorasan and the Taliban’s recent deal-making with Russia and Iran to re-examine the history of Afghanistan and its enduring role in great power politics. The world may have forgotten about Afghanistan, but Afghanistan hasn’t forgotten about the world.
Imperial hubris
Located at the crossroads of the Russian, Persian, Indian, Chinese and Turkic worlds, Aghanistan has been coveted throughout its long history. Yet while it has been invaded many times, great powers have repeatedly sent in troops and colonists without having been able to maintain stable long-term rule.
The British Empire fought and lost three wars (1839-1842, 1878-1880 and 1919), including its most comprehensive defeat when all but one of its 18,000 troops were killed in the Retreat from Kabul.
The Red Army got bogged down for ten years (1979-1989) in a war that killed around 3 million Afghans, and contributed to the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
And most recently, the United States along with its NATO coalition (2001-2021) failed dismally in its objectives of destroying al-Qaeda, ousting the Taliban, and bringing about a stable democratic government. All this came at an extraordinary cost — the US spent $2.26 trillion on the conflict and over 241,000, almost all of them Afghans, lost their lives.
Ungoverned spaces
Afghanistan has almost never been successfully centrally ruled by anyone, let alone foreign invaders. There have only been a few brief periods—most notably, under the ‘Iron Emir’ (1880-1901) and the Taliban (1996-2001)—when it cohered into a state with anything resembling a monopoly on power. Indeed, despite having the trappings of a nation-state since the 1700s, only rarely has Afghanistan had a single ruler and rarer still has it had a unified political system.
One reason for this is simple geography.
Afghanistan’s population is strung out sparsely over a large territory split by mountains. The land is barren, the climate harsh, and only a few green veins where valleys run are inhabitable. With poor infrastructure, travelling between these oases is extremely slow and difficult. One result is that most villages have remained largely untouched by whoever was ruling from the capital, Kabul. Another is that Afghanistan’s geography makes for perfect guerrilla territory.
Another reason is demographics.
Afghanistan has scores of ethnic groups and a patchwork of competing tribal principalities governed through maliks. These are not so much village chiefs but representatives who serve as first among equals and for whom allegiances are entirely personal, transactional, and perpetually up for negotiation. And the roughly twenty ethnic groups, of widely varying backgrounds and cultures, often have little in common beyond (as the CIA puts it) “their observance of Islamic law, martial tradition and distrust of government”.
A third reason is cultural.
Afghanistan’s largest tribal group, the Pashtun, operates as a society strictly guarded by a code of common rules, customs and social behaviours known as Pashtunwali. Dating back to pre-Islamic times, the Pahtunwali code of honour—including courage (tora), revenge (basal), hospitality (melmestia) and giving asylum (nanawatai)—has made its tribal groups of eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan impervious to government rule or control. (Such values led the founder of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammed Omar, to refuse to hand over Osama bin Laden.)
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No vacancy
But while these characteristics—a lack of centralised governance owing to a dispersed and resilient society fractured by geography—may have prevented Afghanistan from ever becoming a strong nation-state, they also helped it survive foreign invasion.
Foreign invaders, from the British to the Soviets to the Americans, have all eyed off Afghanistan for similar reasons, seeing it as a buffer zone or area of imperial competition.
The British launched their first Anglo-Afghan War off the back of spurious intelligence about a pending Russian invasion. The Soviets invaded in an effort to prevent the communist government falling to anti-communist Muslim guerrillas as part of the broader Cold War. And the United States made Afghanistan the locus of its Global War on Terror.
Each imperial power, however, ran into similar challenges.
Since Afghanistan is very poor, each was unable to finance their occupations from looting resources or taxing impecunious locals. The vast size of the country and its harsh terrain made a sustained military occupation economically unfeasible. And, in every case, the foreign invader faced a people made incredibly resilient by the land and a much longer (and resentful) historical memory.
War of error
The US and its NATO coalition (2001-2021) were no exception.
Even at its peak, the US only really ever governed Kabul. And while it may have had some influence over other urban centres, like Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif, out in the provinces it never really gained a foothold.
The counterinsurgency strategy of trying to win “hearts and minds” was a failure. Elites in Kabul may have been convinced, but few minds and ever fewer hearts in the provinces were won. And the reason was not, as some argue, for poor execution owing to a lack of cultural nous. Rather, for a people whose tribal structures favour shifting allegiances, and whose history is one of repeated occupation, the battle was never going to be won.
In a classic error of statecraft, the invaders also misunderstood what they were getting themselves into. While Western policymakers largely saw the war as between the forces of secularism and militant Islam (al-Qaida and the Taliban), they had also inadvertently stumbled into a complex war shaped by pre-existing and overlapping conflicts that had been taking place for decades.
At one level, the invasion inflamed an inter-ethnic civil war between the Pashtuns (around 50% of the population) who came to resent then-President Hamid Karzai’s Western-installed regime, which had empowered three other ethnic groups (the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras).
At another level, the war exacerbated divisions between various Pashtun tribes, among whom hostility has run for centuries.
Finally, the war also changed the dynamic in the covert proxy war between India and Pakistan that has played out in Afghanistan since Partition in 1947.
Down the Khyber
While far-flung imperial powers have maintained sporadic interests in Afghanistan, its neighbours—especially Pakistan and India—have had much more vital concerns.
Since the early 1970s, when India quickly defeated Pakistan in their third war leading to the carving out of Bangladesh, Pakistan’s core national security interest has been to be able to defend against a potential war with India. Completely outsized, Pakistan fears above all an invasion by India and so looks to Afghanistan, on its western border, for ‘strategic depth’, to which it could retreat if necessary.
Over the decades, that first-order concern has led Pakistan to oppose any pro-Indian Afghan government. Accordingly, throughout the whole war, Pakistan harboured Taliban fighters, allowing them to prepare on Pakistan territory and then unfurl a series of attacks and duck back across the border to the safe haven—doing that on repeat for twenty years until the US was ground down.
This strategy, however, is now beginning to harm Pakistan. Once loyal to their handlers in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, ethnic Pashtun militias are now embarking on a killing spree along the contested border. And whereas Pakistan could have once prevailed upon the Taliban to intervene, the relationship is not only now more complex, but the Taliban in many cases has lost control.
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Land of rebellion
In the twenty years between the two periods of Taliban rule, Afghanistan changed in several significant ways.
The war caused much devastation. Around 170,000 Afghans were killed (50,000 civilians, 70,000 military and police, and 50,000 opposition fighters). Over five million were forced to flee their homes, taking refuge abroad. And despite the extraordinary sums of money spent on the war, the country stayed exceptionally poor.
Kabul saw some benefits. The city grew with rapid urbanisation and some development. Many moved from the provinces with sudden opportunities for new jobs off the back of aid money. An entrepreneurial people, many Afghans started businesses and non-government organisations. The greatest change was greater freedom and opportunities for women, at least in Kabul.
Yet the return of the Taliban in August 2021, following the withdrawal of the last remaining US troops, has seen some predictable results. As one expert neatly summed up: “The economic situation is dire, malnutrition rates are increasing, women’s rights are being curtailed, there is continuing migration and internal displacement, and the health care system is crumbling.”
So far, the Taliban appears to have governed with a reasonable degree of coherence. But, like all rulers throughout Afghanistan’s history, they will face the constraints of geography, tribal splits and a spirit of rebellion.
Outlook
The Taliban has also started to bring back many of the barbaric practices for which it was condemned during its first rule. Slowly, rights gained over the past twenty years have been eroded, particularly rights for women and girls. Education for women has been slowly and surely wound back, with stoning re-introduced for adultery. And with each new measure, the Taliban has seen limited response from the international community and felt emboldened to continue its strict interpretation of sharia law.
Undoubtedly, some within the Taliban are warning against making the same errors of the first rule, overreaching on the strict application of laws, leading to a lack of international legitimacy and discontent among the population. But, for now, it appears any moderate voices are being drowned out by hardliners, bolstered by their impunity, and still revelling in the images of an American withdrawal and yet another empire repelled from their homeland.
Since the takeover, Afghanistan has struggled economically. Its GDP per capita is back at 2008 levels. In the 2022 fiscal year, the Taliban collected just $2.2 billion in revenue – mostly coming from border taxes. And we have also seen ample signs that Afghanistan is once again a terrorist haven, the very thing twenty years of war attempted to prevent.
It remains difficult to see the pathway for growth and development for Afghanistan. As has happened throughout much of its history, the Afghan people are once again being forced into simply surviving, and not much more. The so-called graveyard of empires will continue to haunt the region, and the world, long into the future.