- The longest war in American history has come to an end.

What began 20 years ago as a limited counter terrorism mission, transitioned into a nation building mission.

In the end, it was unsustainable and United States withdrew.

The Taliban overran US trained Afghanistan troops, what went wrong?

What has the United States learned?

We talk with a US Marine deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, now a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft on NewsMakers.

(upbeat music) Thank you for joining us on NewsMakers, the US withdraw from Afghanistan was swift and messy, a race against the clock, transporting Americans and allies from the country, meeting a deadline.

For inside look at the US presence and what its exit means for the country and the region we turn to Adam Weinstein, a research fellow, at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a former US Marine serving in Afghanistan.

You're visiting with us as a guest of the World Affairs Council of Western Michigan.

Thank you so much for joining us on West Michigan week.

- Thank you for having me.

- Well as a, Marine who served in Afghanistan, watching those initial images of the C-130's being boarded and those flights out of Kabul, what were you thinking in those moments?

- Ah, well, I was thinking it's finally coming to an end and it felt a bit surreal for me because, you know, when I deployed to Afghanistan, as a younger person in 2012, I was actually concerned at that time that I might never deploy as a young Marine, I very much wanted to deploy and I was worried I might miss the worst war so to speak and then here we are almost a decade later and it was still going on.

So it felt surreal that we had been at war in Afghanistan for an entire generation of Americans.

- It's interesting you talk about a generation of Americans, right, we go back to 9/11 and what launched this attack.

And then just years of hearing about Afghanistan, how do you think it plays in a generation of Americans when they hear Afghanistan and just what has gone on for two decades?

- Well, I think when you talk to the average American, they think it's absolutely absurd that we were there for 20 years, and this idea that we should have stayed just a little bit longer is really something that I've only heard in Washington DC.

I very rarely hear that sentiment outside of Washington DC.

So I think that's what both presidents Trump and Biden were responding to when they made the withdrawal decision, and of course they also felt it was in the strategic interest to end the war.

For a lot of America though, I think the war was out of sight and out of mind because of course a very small percentage of the population was in the armed services and an even smaller subset of that was deployed at any given time.

- I just wanna get back to those images and then we'll move into some of the deeper discussion here.

But it just looked so disjointed and as though it wasn't planned very well, leaving the country.

Why do you think it went down the way that it did when you've been somewhere for 20 years and you would think you would have some kind of an exit strategy that would make sense to make sure that everyone gets out safely, that you take all of your military equipment with you.

Why was it so disjointed and why did it look so poorly executed?

- Well look, losing wars has consequences and I think that a lot of folks in Washington haven't fully internalized the fact that, we lost this war at least as we defined it and or at least as we define what winning looked like.

And so I think it was just jointed and some of that was due to mistakes on the part of the Biden administration in terms of not wanting to make, the Ghani administration or the Afghan government look weak, so they were slow to get certain people out and get too much equipment out to rapidly lest it looked like we expected the government to fall too rapidly.

But some of it is just an extension, in fact, most of it is just an extension of what we saw over the last 20 years, which was that we never really had a coordinated or coherent plan for Afghanistan.

So why would we have it in the final moments?

- Let's look at the big picture then, what were the objectives?

- Well, initially when we invaded in 2001, the objective was pretty clear, dismantle Al-Qaeda, the group that had attacked us on 9/11.

And because the Taliban leadership wouldn't hand over Osama bin Laden by extension, we dismantled the Taliban as well and drove them out of the country.

But over time, that limited counterterrorism mission, became part and parcel of a counterinsurgency mission against the Taliban.

And it inevitably became nation building, because we didn't have a partner on the ground.

We had to create a government, we had to create an Afghan military.

So, it basically was the epitome of mission creep and then just became this behemoth of a mission that we couldn't manage.

- How have things changed in those 20 years?

If you go back and you were there in 2012, there has to be some kind of a US influence there that may change the trajectory moving forward although we are not there, just the influence that the US has had on the citizen there.

How did Afghanistan change over those years?

- Well, the city has changed a lot, We built an infrastructure, We educated, especially the urban populations, but even some of the rural populations.

Girls literacy rates and educations are still dismal, but as much better than it was and it's better across the board.

There's new sleek, modern buildings, there's hospitals, there's a whole infrastructure that didn't exist before and perhaps if the Taliban don't dismantle all of that, the Afghan people can enjoy those gains.

And of course, we have a responsibility too, right now, there's 2022 applicants from Afghanistan for the Fulbright program and it's unclear whether we're going to accept them or not.

I think we absolutely should accept Afghans into the Fulbright program and make sure that we're fostering the next generation of leaders, regardless of whether the Taliban is in control now.

And, there's diplomacy and aid that we should remain engaged with.

We have a say in whether these gains are reversed too, it's not entirely up to the Taliban, it's also up to us as well.

But the reality is that many of these gains were unsustainable without the indefinite presence of US troops and that's why we saw that as soon as we left, the country rapidly fell to the Taliban.

Not because the Taliban won militarily, so much as the fact that the Afghan government simply dissolved.

- So what were the timelines?

Did we have timelines?

'Cause you said that it was open-ended, was there a plan in place where you had to meet certain criteria along the way before exiting?

What did it look like to you?

- Well, we've had numerous benchmarks and timelines and conditions based withdrawals.

We've essentially been trying to leave Afghanistan for the last decade, but, it kept getting pushed back.

And I think, the folks who advocated for a conditions based withdrawal, wanting to see conditions that I don't think would have existed for another 20 years, let alone another six months.

And so that's why I think ultimately, two administrations in a row, both the Trump and Biden administration opted for a timeline and they determined what would happen, would happen.

- Can you take us a little further into that conditioned base, the idea of the exit and what was there, what was the Trump administration looking at and what did it look like for the Biden administration?

If you put them side by side, what were the differences?

What were the objectives?

- Well, essentially what, the Trump administration negotiated was the US Taliban agreement.

And this was an exit agreement, with the side effect of, encouraging some diplomacy between the Afghan government and the Taliban, but it was an agreement that excluded the Afghan government and it was negotiated between, the Taliban and the United States for the simple reason that the Taliban had the military advantage on the ground and the Trump administration wanted to leave Afghanistan.

So, in simplest terms, it was an agreement not to shoot us on the way out and at least sit down with the Afghan government and that's what happened.

And so then the Biden administration came into office and the Biden administration will sometimes say, well, we were beholden to this agreement, our hands were tied and we had to go through with it.

I don't think that's completely true, I think the agreement put the Biden administration in a precarious position if they chose to ignore it, because we had gone over one year without a US casualty explicitly due to the agreement and if the Biden administration violated it, then the Taliban would start targeting us troops again.

But at the end of the day, I think the Biden administration, made the exact same determination that the Trump administration did, which is that it was not in the US interest to remain in Afghanistan indefinitely, and remaining until a peace agreement was achieved or until the Afghan military was able to take control of the entire country would be measured in decades, not months.

- So now there's this vacuum, the US influence is gone.

I would imagine we still have somewhat of an influence there, but having the military leave the region, what does that do, when you have these types of vacuums around the world, that means somebody else can enter, what do you see happening here?

- Well, I'll be honest with you.

I don't think any of the regional countries are thrilled about entering.

If you look at China, for example, China is very risk averse when it comes to Afghanistan, the foreign minister has said that the reconstruction is the responsibility of the United States.

Doesn't seem to have any interest in investing in Afghanistan.

The spokesman of the Chinese foreign ministry recently said that, China will invest in Afghanistan when security conditions allow it to, but who knows when that will be.

I think China and Russia really want to keep, the Taliban at arms length, have limited relations with them.

They've kept their embassies there, same with Iran, but I don't think they're thrilled to have to manage this problem alone.

And even Pakistan I think is having a little bit of bias remorse, when it comes to the way it helped enable the Taliban over the years, because now it has a Taliban around government that has inspired extremist and its own borders to fight the Pakistani state.

So I'm not sure it's a vacuum that's been left so much as the fact that the power dynamics have been shifted, so that the responsibility of that region now falls on the countries that border Afghanistan.

But look, whenever the United States, invades a country or engages in regime change, it essentially creates the conditions, that will create a vacuum if it leaves years or decades later.

So this was something that was always going to happen.

The US was always going to leave at some point and when the US left, the equilibrium inside Afghanistan was always gonna change and in this case it changed in favor of the Taliban.

- So where's the backstop should things go south?

Are we still supporting Pakistan in case action is needed?

Where do we see the shift in power there?

Who are we supporting in the region should things go south?

- Well by things going south, you mean the Afghanistan becoming a Haven for terrorists again, I think the United States is gonna have to work with Pakistan and China and Russia.

None of those, even Iran for that matter, none of those countries want to see Al-Qaeda or ISIS running wild.

Now, certainly Pakistan and even Iran have been supportive of the Taliban in some instances, and Pakistan is supportive of other terrorist groups in the region.

But, none of those regional countries want to see Al-Qaeda and ISIS gain a foothold.

And so that's a area where the United States really can cooperate with these countries, even as tensions rise between the US and China and the US and Russia and other areas.

This is a place where they can come to some limited form of agreement to cooperate, because these terrorist groups threaten all of these countries.

- Did the US government understand, the ethnic groups involved, the politics involved, the social dynamics of Afghanistan going in, and was the country, was our leadership able to figure things out as we were moving forward?

How did all this play out?

- Absolutely not.

The US strategy in Afghanistan was like someone trying to solve a Rubik's cube while blindfolded, that's how I would put it.

When they first entered Afghanistan in 2001, they empowered the Northern Alliance and, supposedly the Bush administration had told the Northern Alliance, please don't enter Kubal and take over the city because that will anger Pakistan, but the Northern Alliance did that anyway.

And of course Pakistan was, worried about the Northern Alliance because the Northern Alliance was closely allied with India, and so that's part of the reason that Pakistan supported the Taliban.

There was an ethnic component to the conflict, the Taliban or majority posturing as a group, although they have some representation from other ethnic groups.

So what we were dealing with was a very complex web of tribal and ethnic allegiances.

And the way the United States manages, was to empower local warlords and power brokers on the ground who were often abusive to the local population which actually gave the Taliban some legitimacy when they came back in.

So, this was just a country, that the United States did not understand and was not capable of understanding at the level that would have been required to, manage its its problems politically.

After all, we're not a colonial power and our intention was never to remain in Afghanistan forever.

- Do our diplomats moving forward, better understand the region now, what's next?

- I hope our diplomats better understand the region and more importantly, I think our diplomats understand the limitations of their understanding of the region, which might even be more important.

- So now there's new leadership in Afghanistan, the Taliban is now in power.

So how do we now, work with the Taliban or they work with us or however this relationship works out.

What does that look like, moving forward?

- Well, look, I don't see the United States granting, recognition of the Taliban government anytime soon, but they're going to have to work with the Taliban as the defacto government.

They'll probably have to work with them in some ways through the intelligence community in terms of the fight against ISIS.

And they're going to have to work with them even to distribute aid in the country.

The United States has promised continued humanitarian aid, they're going to try to route it through NGOs and the international community, rather than channeling it through the Taliban itself.

But at some point there's going to have to be some coordination with the Taliban.

And I think, the United States should use recognition of the Taliban as leverage over the group it shouldn't grant recognition, if the group doesn't improve its human rights record.

But on the other hand, we shouldn't punish the population of Afghanistan, by cutting them off completely simply because we don't want to coordinate with the Taliban.

- All right, I'll give you an opportunity to Monday morning quarterback.

If we could go back a few months, were there other options in your mind, when it comes to leaving Afghanistan?

And if there were, kind of go through the pros and the cons with me here, how would you have envisioned this taking place?

- Look, I don't think it was in the strategic interests to remain in Afghanistan militarily, there's folks who think we could have kept 2,500 troops, I don't think that's true.

The reason the troops weren't, getting targeted by the Taliban was precisely because we had an agreement in place to leave.

There's folks who think we could have provided indefinite air support but, the reality is in 2015, when the Taliban took over the city of Kunduz, we ended up bombing the doctors without borders hospital, and I believe we killed 42 people.

So it's not like we had a great track record at air support either.

I think at some point we had to leave, and leave Afghanistan to off guns and the underlying power dynamics that existed.

If I had been the president organizing the withdrawal, I would have gotten the special immigrant visa applicants or the former interpreters out of the country, much sooner.

I think that effort should have been started months in advance by the Biden administration.

It shouldn't have been suspended by the Trump administration.

So we really lost an opportunity there, but I do support the withdrawal decision itself.

- Is it fair to say, although our troop presence is no longer there, we still have some type of a military presence.

And I think of drones, I think of other technologies that are in place.

How do we police the world today that's different from say two decades ago?

- Well, over the last decade, the US military intelligence and community has become increasingly reliant on drones and airstrikes.

In fact, in Afghanistan in 2019, there were more airstrikes that year than any year before.

And I think the over the horizon strategy is going to be reliant on drones, but we have to remember that our track record with drones isn't that great either.

I mean, a case in point is the fact that we killed an entire Afghan family, including seven children when we thought we were targeting an ISIS militant during the evacuation.

So I think the future of counterterrorism in the region is going to have to require more intelligence sharing with regional powers, and also accepting a little bit of risk, accepting that terrorism is never going to go away.

It's a risk we can manage, it's not a risk we can eliminate.

And, when we try to engage in constant air strikes, and drone strikes to dilute ourselves into thinking we're eliminating the strikes, those strikes don't come without a cost.

I mean, there's a civilian toll and there's even a propaganda costs.

When we kill civilians, it allows these militant groups to propagandize those deaths and recruit a new generation of people who hate the United States.

- From the perspective of those in the region, our leaving, sent what message?

- I think it was, I think countries in the region, initially didn't want the United States to have an extended footprint, but over time, they became comfortable with the status quo of the United States keeping things at a simmer inside Afghanistan and engaging in counter terrorism while these other countries like Pakistan, Iran, China, and Russia got to simultaneously work with the Taliban and with the Afghan government.

So actually I think it's become their problem now, the party's over the United States is leaving.

- What lessons do we learn when we get involved in these international conflicts and the way that this ended, what have we learned over time?

We have a history in this country of, you know, mission creep and other situations we find ourselves in militarily, what did we learn here?

- I think we learned three lessons.

One the United States simply is not, good at nation building because, we're not willing to invest the kind of blood and treasure that would be required for nation building and even if we were, I think nation building would likely still fail.

Two, as soon as we intervene in a country and append its underlying power dynamics, we've created a situation where, we are going to have to stay for years if not decades.

And lastly, it would be a mistake to disengage diplomatically.

That's what we did in the region in the 90s and that's when the Taliban rose up and we saw groups like Al-Qaeda gain a foothold.

So it's going to be important to remain engaged diplomatically, even if we've made the decision to leave militarily.

- Your sense of the vision the Taliban has for the country.

- I think the Taliban are still a very ideological group, I think they're very similar to the Taliban that was in power from 1996 to 2001.

So I don't see them being very reform minded.

That being said, they have shown themselves to be somewhat responsive to international criticism and they understand that they have an optics problem.

And the biggest change is that the Taliban are ruling over a population that's literate and has internet, and has WhatsApp, and has Twitter and social media, and they're simply not going to be able to cut off the Afghan population from the world the way they could in the 90s.

And I think that's going to make it more difficult for them to implement some of their more draconian policies, but we'll have to wait and see.

My hopes are not high for the Taliban.

- So there's another generation who has, a younger generation that has seen this westernization of Afghanistan is that what's in play here with the psyche of society in Afghanistan currently?

- Well, to some extent it was a westernization, but even in the conservative, rural parts of the country, I think there's a generation that has become accustomed to going to school, to girls going to school, to having a little bit more freedom of expression.

It's still an incredibly conservative society in many parts of the country, but, I don't think it's as rigid as the Taliban.

And so, that generation, I don't think is going to be content long-term, to adhering to the rigid ideology of the Taliban and that's going to be a real governing challenge for the Taliban.

- Is a test the treatment of women and girls and allowing women in society to have more freedom?

- So I think in some sense, how progressive the Taliban choose to be on girls education will be a test about how much they wanna be integrated in the global community and whether aid will actually be leverage over them.

Some of the humanitarian age continue regardless of the Taliban's actions, because it would be a mistake to allow Afghanistan to star.

But some of the aid can also be used as leverage to improve those actions.

And I think we shouldn't expect the Taliban to be completely gender inclusive.

I don't think that's realistic, but we should pressure them to allow, girls to go to high school and to be part of the workforce in some form, I think, there is room for negotiation with the Taliban.

So far, the actions of the Taliban do not look promising, they've restricted girls from education beyond sixth grade.

But since then, they've received a lot of international backlash and they claim to be attempting to expand that so I guess we'll have to see whether their statements match their actions.

- Working with other countries or allies around the world, what are their expectations working with us, not just in Afghanistan, but also in the future after what has unfolded in Afghanistan.

- Some critics of the withdrawal say that, us leaving Afghanistan has shaken our allies.

I don't think that's true.

I think the allies with which we have very vital strategic interests, know that those strategic interests are a higher priority than Afghanistan was, and some of those interests are in Europe or east Asia.

What I do think we need to do with our allies and what I think they expect of us going forward is that we keep them in the loop more.

An example is that, during the run-up to the withdrawal decision, Germany wasn't aware of whether we were coming or going in Afghanistan and this coincided with the renewal of their mandate to stay in Afghanistan.

In Germany, there actually is oversight, of war and foreign policy and so they have to renew their mandate on an annual basis.

And so it really created some uncertainty in their domestic politics I think that we hadn't decided whether we were staying or leaving in Afghanistan.

So, going forward, I think it's crucial that US administrations communicate more transparently with our partners especially NATO partners, for example.

But I don't think that, the withdrawal from Afghanistan has shaken, faith in US partnership the way that some critics say it has.

- Adam Weinstein research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, thank you so much.

- Thank you for having me.

- And thank you for joining us, we'll see you again soon.

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