Afghanistan Was—And Is—Worth Fighting For

Why Afghanistan matters

It is now a little over a year since the Taliban re-took control of that most benighted of modern nations, Afghanistan. At that time, you could hardly glance at the news without seeing images of the fall of Kabul and the disastrous American withdrawal. The media was ablaze with the whole sorry spectacle, the whole terrible tragedy of it all. But news cycles move fast, and new dramas take the spotlight.

This isn’t entirely wrong, of course; the invasion of Ukraine, for one, certainly deserved all the coverage it got (and then some).¹ But it does mean we move on from tragedy remarkably quickly. How often is Afghanistan in the news now? The awful images of those who clung desperately to aircraft departing from Kabul only to fall to their deaths soon faded. Then, as the Taliban re-installed a brutal theocracy, the world hardly even bothered to watch. Afghanistan? That was last week’s story, old news, move on.

I should say that there was indeed one big Afghanistan story lately: I speak, of course, of the killing of the al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri by U.S. drone strike in Kabul last month. Cheering as the news of this old bastard’s death was, the self-congratulatory tone of President Biden irked me. Had he not, a year earlier, said that the withdrawal was justified because America had achieved its mission “to make sure Afghanistan can never be used again to launch an attack on our homeland”? And yet here Biden was, posturing as the vanquisher of an old and deadly enemy, while apparently unfazed by the contradiction: the leader of al Qaeda was in Kabul, that is to say, and let’s make it as clear as possible, the capital of Afghanistan. His presence there was almost certainly sanctioned by the Taliban, with whom al Qaeda has retained the closest of relationships.

Is this not why America invaded Afghanistan to begin with—to oust the regime that openly harboured the murderers of September 11, 2001? Zawahiri had been on the run for decades, yet here he was, relaxing in Kabul, probably hosted by his Taliban allies, who now happen to possess billions of dollars worth of American weaponry. If the mission to cleanse Afghanistan of terrorists was successful, as Biden claimed, then Zawahiri would have been nowhere near Kabul last month.² In other words, it is directly because of the withdrawal that Afghanistan is now, once more, a place where terrorists can “launch an attack on our homeland.”

Am I just fearmongering? Are not al Qaeda’s glory days long gone? So what if Zawahiri was in Kabul; even with Taliban friends, al Qaeda couldn’t possibly conduct an operation like September 11 ever again, surely? Well, you don’t need to believe me. After all, what expertise do I have? So here is Professor Barbara Elias, writing in Foreign Policy last year:

[W]hile U.S. counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan have certainly weakened al Qaeda, the group has nonetheless survived and evolved. Down but not out, al Qaeda maintains a diverse range of violent expertise, as the expert Rita Katz recently wrote in Foreign Policy, and are quickly rebuilding in Afghanistan. Current intelligence suggests that al Qaeda could have the capacity to threaten the United States by 2023, an alarming projection that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency called a conservative estimate.

Mission accomplished, indeed.³

How about the argument that we couldn’t stay in Afghanistan forever, that we’d failed to help the Afghans build a stable, democratic government? Was it not necessary to leave? I mean, why bother staying?

To this sort of shortsighted pseudo-profundity, so beloved by isolationists on the right and “anti-imperialists” on the left, I’d say, first, that America, and the West, had and have a special responsibility to Afghanistan.

“Ah, but did America not arm the mujahideen?”

This is often trotted out as a clever riposte to those of us who think America was right to invade in the first place, but it actually buttresses the moral case for intervention. If we did so much wrong, why then, we have a responsibility to right that wrong, do we not, rather than leaving the Afghans to their (oh, to be sure, regrettably) horrid fates? And this point also applies to the 2021 withdrawal: if we failed so badly, then who the hell do we think we are, abandoning the Afghans, who have bled in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, to theocratic subjugation?⁴

Second, while the failings of Western forces and of the Afghan regime itself over the past 20 years or so are many and various, it is simply false that nothing was achieved, or that there was nothing worth fighting for. Yes, Afghanistan was hardly an advanced liberal democracy, yes, corruption was rife, and so on, yes, yes, yes—but it was still a democracy.

And then there are the material achievements. I can’t put this any better than my friend Matt Johnson, who has kindly given me permission to quote from his forthcoming book for Pitchstone Publishing How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment. Here, Matt is responding to Ben Burgis’s view that the Afghanistan war was self-evidently wrong:

To Burgis, there’s only one story to be told about Afghanistan: the story of pitiless American imperialists holding the population down by force. He doesn’t mention the gains made by Afghan women and girls over the past two decades. Or the fact that millions of Afghans returned to their country after the invasion, while tens of thousands of desperate Afghans tried to flee when the United States departed (in one especially horrifying episode, an Afghan teenager clung to the landing gear of an American transport plane before falling to his death). … Burgis doesn’t say a word about the massive international effort to build a functioning civil society in Afghanistan or the opportunities for women or the collapse in the maternal mortality rate after the removal of the Taliban. He doesn’t want to discuss the female judges who now fear for their lives or the female journalists who can no longer report the news or the women who’ve been thrown out of government and every other important position in Afghan society.

And now all of these achievements, and the possibility to build on them, have been thrown away. They have been tossed aside casually, almost contemptuously. Those who automatically, even mindlessly, throw out the argument that the withdrawal was sad but necessary—after all, we failed, what more could we do, there was no point in staying, boo hoo—well, don’t believe them when they pretend to care about the Afghans. They have no idea. None whatsoever.

“Ah, so you’re just callously willing to throw away more of our soldiers in a forever war, huh?”

Well, no. More people will die as a result of the withdrawal than if we had stayed. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently put it in UnHerd:

[I]t would have been relatively inexpensive to keep a small force of a few thousand stationed there for a few more years, a fraction of the 100,000 troops stationed there in 2010–11. Even before the 2020 peace deal, US casualties in Afghanistan had been extremely low for years, with fatalities averaging in the low double digits since 2015. A small US force would have been more than enough to keep the Taliban out of total power.

Complaints about casualties are, as with so many of these arguments, shortsighted, if not deluded or even dishonest. We have seen what a resurgent Taliban has wrought on Afghanistan, and know that it once more harbours terrorists, including al Qaeda. These terrorists once again have the support of a nation-state behind them.⁵ The Taliban’s oily promises to moderate their policies on, for example, women’s rights, have proven hollow—and who could possibly have expected that?—so why should we shrug our shoulders at their hosting of the butchers of al Qaeda?

Much more blood, civilian and military, Afghan and Western, will be spilt now that the Taliban has returned. Once more, do not believe those who ignorantly or deceivingly claim to have only cared about the “pointless” casualties. If nothing else, the horrified, disgusted reactions to the withdrawal of soldiers who served in Afghanistan ought to shut them up.

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So, what now? If I had my way, the withdrawal would never have happened. And lest my above comments appear partisan, let me say that Donald Trump must share the blame. It was his administration, after all, that came to a deal with the Taliban (behind the back of the Afghan government) and agreed to withdraw in the first place.⁶

Of course, the option to send the troops back is a non-starter (though I suspect that, in the long run, another invasion, or at least some kind of military intervention, will become necessary).

Is there, then, anything to be done?

I said above that news cycles are short, and indeed they are. Zawahiri aside, Afghanistan has little purchase in the media these days. There just isn’t enough drama any longer; that Afghanistan is now the property of the Taliban has been, to use an ugly word, normalised. Again: old news, it’s done, move on.

And yet, there exists a brave resistance to Taliban rule. The National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF), led by Ahmad Massoud, is still fighting for a free Afghanistan, still shedding blood while the West looks the other way. As its head of foreign relations has recently stated, the NRF receives no help, none at all, from other nations. While the democratic nations rightly support Ukraine, the NRF gets nothing.⁷ This is something that could easily be remedied. Democratic nations, America in particular, ought to recognise the NRF and provide it with all the help they possibly can.

Now, the NRF is not a perfect organization. For one, their statement of basic principles places belief in a “moderate interpretation” of Islam at the top of the list. The NRF’s Afghanistan, like the imperfect democracy that preceded the return of the Taliban, is not likely to be a fully secular liberal democracy, in other words. But they also explicitly believe in freedom of religion, gender equality, free speech, and other such liberal values. This is hardly Taliban-lite stuff.

I’m no fundamentalist: I don’t believe we need to wait for an “ideal” of Afghanistan to arise anytime soon. That’s not the point. The NRF have a democratic vision, however imperfect, and one that has learned the lessons of the previous democratic regime: it supports a decentralized democracy, while Ashraf Ghani’s Afghanistan was marked above all by its cronyism and centralization.

When it comes to Afghanistan or Ukraine or any other such conflict, whatever the subtleties and wrinkles involved, I find, as with so much else, that the words of George Orwell are as instructive as they are relevant:

When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of war – and in this particular case [the Spanish Civil War] of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings – there is always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. [My emphasis.]

So the NRF continue to fight bravely, without any real international support, against one of history’s most barbaric regimes. Their valour and persistence are at least equal to those of the Ukrainians fighting Putin’s imperialist invasion. And also like the Ukrainians, these Afghans are fighting not just for themselves but for us: as I hope to have shown, the Taliban regime is not just a catastrophe for Afghanistan, but a threat to the world, and the democratic world in particular. The withdrawal was shameful, yes, but the lack of support for the NRF is perhaps an even more shameful shame.

In other ways, too, we can help. The NRF are not alone among Afghans in fighting the Taliban. The women of Afghanistan, who achieved so much in the past 20 years through their own brilliance and bravery and with our help but who are now being forced back into the burqa and into slavery, are, for my money, the most inspirational of all those resisting the Taliban.

If the democratic nations want to support freedom, if they want to make good on the noble stand they have taken against Putinism, then they must not, they must never, forget Afghanistan.

In that spirit, I end with a lengthy quote from a recent interview with Ahmad Massoud, which I can only hope will work to shame those in the West who think that Afghanistan is not worth fighting for⁸:

What made America America…was certain values embedded in the soul of this nation and country by the Founding Fathers and then the continuation of them. I truly believe that unfortunately the national interest to some extent, it took over those sort of broader values that America was always carrying…America had this image of trying to do something good for many other countries…[but] when it was the time to actually see the benefits and all the effort and investment of America in Afghanistan, the Americans left without any consideration of what would happen…and how damaging it would be to the image of America…

Many have tried to argue with this that it has been 20 years America was in Afghanistan, well, a country that has been in the world for 40 years, of course, it requires a generation to get back to normality and the new generation such as myself and many others, we finished our studies in the West and we came back to Afghanistan and we were hoping to do something good for our country instead of just staying in the West. We lost that chance. And forgetting about all of that [the benefits America brought to Afghanistan] just for the sake of short-term interests in America and winning votes, to just pull the troops and forget about the circumstances and the consequences…I believe it was a true error and a big blow to the image of that sort of America….

[The situation of women in Afghanistan now] could not be worse. I do not truly find any other country on this planet to be a worse country for women. I do not see any other country where it is worse to be different ethnicities, groups, religions, than Afghanistan.

[Afghanistan] needs the attention of not just America, but the world… Again, Afghanistan can become another place…that can once again become a hub for terrorism, that can affect the other countries. If the debacle, if the catastrophe of the Afghanistan government’s fall, had not happened, I don’t believe the situation in Ukraine would happen right now. So you see how things are connected in this world.

“You see how things are connected in this world.” An important reminder, I think, of why it is so important to defend, to fight for, freedom and democracy everywhere, and consistently.

Just as we fight for a free Ukraine, then, let us not forget Afghanistan, for it too is on the front line of the fight for freedom.

Afghanistan matters, today and forever.

1. And yet, have we not become too accustomed to the invasion? A few months ago it was, according to some, unthinkable, a horror of a thought, and yet here we are now, and the news cycle just spins around and around, and the continuing plight of Ukraine is just another news piece jostling for position among all the other awful dramas of the world.

2. I wrote about Zawahiri, and the world of jihad in general, for Areo Magazine two years ago. Of Zawahiri, I said that he was “a pitiable figure: the yesterday’s man of jihad, whose stodgy writings are dull by comparison with IS’ [Islamic State’s] lively propaganda. But he is a veteran, who has survived while many other holy warriors, including bin Laden, at least two Taliban leaders and Baghdadi, have been cut down…”

When rumours of Zawahiri’s killing broke, I did reconsider my rather sneering view of him a little, in light of an article by Tore Refslund Hamming. But I think I was still right: Zawahiri was certainly the grand old man of jihad—but let’s put some emphasis on the “old man” part.

Incidentally, in that Areo article, I also wrote, long in advance of many others, about the sheer idiocy of withdrawing from Afghanistan:

Whether or not you think that the US and its allies should have ousted Saddam in the first place (a decision I defend elsewhere in this magazine), the 2011 US withdrawal from Iraq was, in part, responsible for the rise of IS. This is a lesson we should heed as the already disintegrating 2020 peace deal with the Taliban may open the door for a renewal of that organisation. Without a strong and committed anti-Taliban force to assist the reasonably democratic Afghan government, we risk a resurgence of the theocrats- and can anyone honestly say they would trust the fucking Taliban to keep to any half-decent deal?

3. Also, al Qaeda are only the most well-known of the terrorist groups now using Afghanistan as a safe haven. A UN report on the issue stated that “terrorist groups enjoy greater freedom there than at any time in recent history.”

4. As Matt Johnson and I have discussed at length before, the view that the Afghans just gave up their country in 2021 is as idiotic as it is insulting. The sheer number of casualties inflicted upon the Afghan security forces since 2001 is wincing, and far more than those visited upon Western forces—and this is not even to mention the suffering inflicted upon the people, especially the women, of Afghanistan,

5. You might respond that this is “merely” the support of a poor and corrupt nation-state. Well, the last time they had such “measly” support they managed to slaughter thousands in the heart of America; and besides, this nation-state now possesses, as I have already mentioned, billions of dollars worth of the most advanced American weaponry.

6. This deal also, by the way, included a provision whereby the U.S. would cease anti-Taliban air attacks which, according to current U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, meant that “the Taliban got stronger, they increased their offensive operations against the Afghan security forces, and the Afghans were losing a lot of people on a weekly basis.”

Again (see footnote 4 above): the Afghans didn’t just abandon their country. They simply couldn’t stand without us; all their sacrifices over the past two decades showed that they were willing to oppose the Taliban, but the withdrawal meant that they were not able to do so.

So enough of the nasty little slur that the Afghans didn’t fight hard enough for their country. As I state below in this essay, their courage in fighting for their nation—and for all of us—was at least equal to that shown by the people of Ukraine.

7. You might respond that the NRF has no chance against the Taliban, to which I respond that Ukraine, without Western assistance, would likely have fallen to Putin within weeks or even days. And anyway, here is the argument of the NRF’s head of foreign affairs, Ali Maisam Nazary, himself, which I believe is quite convincing:

First, we enjoy legitimacy and popular support. We see people accepting resistance as the only option right now for them to acquire their freedom again.

The second strength is having capable forces. The military wing of the National Resistance Front isn’t made up of ordinary citizens. It’s made up of the former Afghan military who were trained, advised and funded by the US and NATO for the past 20 years. They’re professional soldiers and officers who have fought against the Taliban for two decades. They know the mindset and mentality of the Taliban. Our numbers are around 4,000 right now.

More, I would argue that, important as it is, the question of the likelihood of victory isn’t the point: we should do what is right, regardless.

Finally, as Orwell also said of the Spanish Civil War:

Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly did, to encourage the Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win is a question hard to answer. I myself think it was right, because I believe that it is better even from the point of view of survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting.

8. This is my own transcript of a section of the interview, very lightly edited for clarity.

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