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Good riddance, Afghanistan, you deserve better but aren’t likely to get it

President Biden has it half right. There is no longer any point in US troops remaining in Afghanistan. There hasn’t been much point for the past decade. The Americans killed Bin Laden, our primary reason for invading Afghanistan, in 2011. By then we had already spent the better part of a decade trying to rebuild Afghanistan into something resembling a modern state. It wasn’t easy. Desperately poor and isolated, Afghans were also largely illiterate and already brutalized by decades of civil war. The warlords who ran much of the poppy-based economy had no interest in a modern state. Nor did their most important neighbors–Iran and Pakistan–want us to succeed. They provided safe haven and support to multiple Afghan forces resisting the state. Willing local elites and cooperative neighbors are two vital ingredients for successful state- and peace-building. Afghanistan had neither.

But Biden is also half wrong. There is a real possibility the Taliban will retake not only the provincial centers they are already seizing but also Kabul, though little likelihood they can do so without facing serious resistance both before and after. Neither ordinary Afghans nor the warlords are going to like the return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan any better than they liked the nominally Westernized state that Presidents Karzai and Ghani have produced. Much better armed and organized than in the past, warlord armies will likely clash among themselves as well as with the Emirate. The outcome of civil war will be more civil war, without the Americans and other NATO forces tilting the balance toward Kabul.

This terrifying outcome will be particularly bad for those Afghans who tried to help the American project. That includes not only the thousands of interpreters the US Army required, but also many more thousands of civil society and activists, many of them women who fear the return of Taliban discrimination and abuse. Many are now desperately trying to leave, along with their extended families. The US State Department has nowhere near the resources needed to process them all before the end of August when the troops will all be gone, so evacuation to third countries where they can await visa decisions seems likely. That evacuation will cause panic among a wider circle of Afghans, people who were not necessarily directly associated with the American project but who sympathized with it. The Taliban won’t treat them well either.

We may not see–I hope we will not see–anything like the helicopters evacuating the US Embassy in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war. It is precisely to avoid such a scene that Washington continued the fruitless war until President Trump decided on a conditions-free withdrawal. Now Washington is planning a force of 600 or so troops to protect the Kabul Embassy. But the diplomats in that Embassy, who haven’t gotten out much in the past 20 years, will get out a lot less. If the Emirate takes over, President Biden will need to reconsider. Does he want to keep an Embassy in a capital taken by a force that has failed to abide by the agreement it reached with the US, or does he want to close that shop and wait for more propitious circumstances?

The Taliban agreement with the US required negotiations with the Ghani’s government for a political solution as well as a clean break with terrorists prepared to operate internationally. Gaining on the battlefield, the Taliban have been unwilling to negotiate seriously with the Kabul government. Even Biden, the man with the rose-colored aviators, would find it surprising if there were anything like a serious negotiated solution to the conflict in Afghanistan. In Moscow yesterday the Taliban declared they would not allow terrorist operations against other countries from bases in Afghanistan. They are rivals of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and no doubt hope for international assistance, so they have some incentive to at least appear to rein them in. But will the Taliban risk the wrath of Al Qaeda and ISIS once the Americans are gone?

Afghanistan deserves better. There are lots of well-intentioned Afghans who merit the peaceful, prosperous, democracy they worked to construct for two decades. I met more of that variety in Kabul than in many other conflict capitals, where ethnic, linguistic, and religious fervor is far more prevalent. Afghanistan doesn’t lack good intentions. It lacks the capacity to translate good intentions into reality. It’s the old story: if you want to go someplace good, you shouldn’t start from here. Hope is not a policy, but I do hope Afghanistan someday recovers. In the meanwhile, the Americans have little reason to stay and most will be prepared to say “good riddance.”