On 31 August 2021, after 20 years, the United States left Afghanistan. The US invaded in October 2001, to hunt down Al-Qaeda and its leader Osama Bin Laden, just weeks after the attack that brought down the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. The US stayed to undertake a doomed attempt at nation building. After the loss of more than 6,000 American and 100,000 Afghan lives, and a US investment of more than $2 trillion, Afghanistan is back in the hands of the Taliban (the ‘Students’, in English), who themselves lost over 50,000 fighters in the conflict.
The emerging consensus is that the US was right to leave but that the withdrawal, hampered by a lightning Taliban advance that took over the country in 10 days rather than the expected 90, was botched. This left Americans and their European and Afghan allies scrambling desperately to get out of Afghanistan from a teeming Kabul airport. Despite the chaos, turned into panic by sickening suicide bomb attacks that killed more than 100 people, including US and UK soldiers, the US and its European allies evacuated around 124,000 people, including some 5,000 Americans, between 14 and 31 August.
Predictably, in the US, Republicans have been quick to criticise President Joe Biden, a Democrat, for his failures. This is despite Biden, for the most part, implementing a deal ex-President Trump agreed with the Taliban in 2020. It is also unclear what efforts a Trump administration would have made to evacuate non-Americans. Trump supporters on American right-wing media have stated clearly that the US has no obligation to take in Afghan refugees, even those who worked with them.
A wider withdrawal
Leaving Afghanistan is part of a policy of American US disengagement from the Middle East. In 2019, under Trump, the US pulled out of Syria and, this year, the US will cease combat operations in Iraq, leaving behind only ‘advisers’ and ‘trainers’. American priorities in the region will be to counter terrorism through intelligence, air strikes and raids by special forces and to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons with which to threaten US allies Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The 20 th anniversary of the 11 September attack on the Twin Towers may see President Biden announcing the end of the ‘war on terror’, launched by President George W. Bush. America will breathe a sigh of relief and turn to focus on other threats, such as the rise of China and cybersecurity attacks by foreign powers, notably Russia. However, important questions remain, including what this policy change means for Afghanistan and the US’s most steadfast ally, Europe.
An unpredictable future
The Taliban offer Afghans an end to foreign intervention and stability, even if draconian implementation of Sharia law is the price, but stability is not guaranteed. The Taliban are Pashtun, a tribe making up around 42% of the 33 million Afghan population. The rest are Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen or from one of several other tribes, all with a long history of conflict between them. As well as ethnic, there are religious divisions. The Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), the group behind the deadly attacks at Kabul airport during the evacuation, does not believe that the Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic law is strict enough. ISKP is clear that it will not tolerate deviation from God’s will, as it sees it.
Afghanistan has also changed in the last 20 years. Life in Kabul, while not that of a modern western city, is light years from that in rural Afghanistan. The population is younger, more women are educated and work, people have electricity, plumbing, transport and mobile phones. It is not clear that the Taliban, who lack the experience of running even a semi-modern state, can put the genie of even partial modernisation back in its bottle. Far from being stable, Afghanistan may again become a haven for terrorists, but if their activities are confined to the Middle East, it is no longer the West’s problem.
Europe’s problem
For Europe, the immediate concern is of a wave of Afghan refugees like those from Syria in 2015. This is extremely unlikely. The Taliban are making it difficult even for those who have residence in other countries to leave and will not permit a mass exodus. The land route to Europe, a journey of more than 3,000 km, requires crossing Iran before reaching Turkey. Shia Muslim Iran already has nearly a million Sunni Muslim Afghans. It does not want any more and has closed its border with Afghanistan.
According to the UN, so far this year around 600 asylum seekers from Afghanistan, have arrived in Greece by sea. They came not from landlocked Afghanistan, but from Turkey. However, President Erdogan has no intention of allowing Afghan refugees (even if any reach there) to cross the border from Iran into Turkey with the idea of sending them to Europe, not least because Europe will not let them in. France, Germany and Austria have also made it clear that there will be no repeat of the refuge crisis of 2015 and Greece has closed its border with Turkey to Afghan refugees.
More broadly, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan has shown Europe and NATO to be military impotent without the Americans. The UK has been with the US in Afghanistan since 2001 and more than 450 British soldiers have been killed. Cutting short his holiday, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced fierce criticism in parliament over the withdrawal. Johnson’s only reply was that the UK could not stay in Afghanistan ‘without American might’.
To protect its interests and manage instability Europe may need to develop its own capacity for diplomatic and military intervention, separate from the US. This will take time and may be expensive, but for perhaps toο long Europe has been shielding under the American military umbrella. Following Afghanistan, Europe needs to think how it can exercise influence in a world that looks set to be dominated globally by the US, China and Russia, and, in the Middle East, by Iran.
