ARGUMENT

An expert's point of view on a current event.

Pakistan and the United States

Have Betrayed the Afghan People
Washington ignored Islamabad funding and supplying the Taliban. Now Afghans are
paying the price.

By C. Christine Fair, a provost’s distinguished associate professor at Georgetown University’s security studies program.

AUGUST 16, 2021, 1:06 PM

U.S. President Joe Biden has defiantly asserted he does not regret his decision to withdraw U.S.
troops from Afghanistan even as Kabul has fallen to the Taliban and as desperate Afghans
scramble for the last flights out of the country. The United States is begging the Taliban for
assurances they will not attack U.S. personnel as Washington scrambles to evacuate its
personnel, leaving its long-standing Afghan partners to fend for themselves as the Taliban
hunt them and their families down.

U.S. officials are busy offering sanctimonious

repines that justify the U.S. exit. They have Leaving Afghanistan
announced to U.S. and international audiences What happens to the country and its
that the time has come for Afghan National people after the forever war ends?
Security Forces to seize the reins of their nation’s
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defense, that Afghan leaders must unite and fight
for their country—that the United States has done
enough. This is rank nonsense, and Biden knows it. The United States did not do enough—and
even enabled the current onslaught.

Biden did not come to this situation unawares. The Obama administration in which Biden
served benefited from a raft of experts, including former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel and
longtime South Asia watcher Peter Lavoy, who was the national intelligence officer for South
Asia. Prior to the 2008 election, there were numerous assessments about the Afghanistan War
and the myriad ways in which Pakistan was undermining U.S. efforts there. Then-President-
elect Barack Obama’s incoming team, led by Riedel, spearheaded the so-called “assessment of
assessments” and offered refreshingly blunt insight into how Pakistan, which benefitted
h d l f US l id d d b d h T lib d d i dUS
handsomely from U.S. emoluments, aided and abetted the Taliban and undermined U.S.
efforts.

Biden, like Obama, understands Pakistan is the major force behind the Taliban. Without
Pakistan’s intelligence and military establishment’s unstinting support for the Taliban, the
group would be a nuisance rather than an effective fighting force. The United States has
steadfastly refused to do the one thing it could have done long ago: targeted sanctions against
those in Pakistan’s deep state who sponsor Islamist militants.

Despite Pakistani authorities claiming al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden was not in Pakistan
for over a decade, he was found hiding in plain sight in Abbottabad, a leisurely stroll from
Pakistan’s premier military academy. Mullah Omar, founder of the Taliban movement, likely
died in a hospital in the Pakistani port city of Karachi. Pakistan’s ties to the Jalaluddin Haqqani
network have been known and enduring. During the last 20 years, Pakistan has continued to
recruit, train, and mission numerous other Islamist terrorist groups operating in India and
Afghanistan. It has feted terrorist leaders as national heroes. Pakistan even requested the
United Nations permit Hafiz Saeed, leader of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and an United Nations
Security Council-designated terrorist, to access his frozen accounts for basic expenses.

The United States remained convinced Pakistan was too dangerous to sanction, too dangerous
to punish, too dangerous to hold accountable. U.S. pundits rehearsed fears that Pakistan may
collapse, provide nuclear weapons to terrorists, or provoke an escalatory and possibly nuclear
war with India while it nursed its militant assets.

Pakistan did not begin its forays in Afghan affairs during the Soviet invasion and at U.S.
prompting and funding. In fact, Pakistan has been using Islamist organizations like the
Jamaat-e-Islami to influence Afghan affairs since the 1950s. At the time, Pakistan had
legitimate concerns: Afghanistan rejected Pakistan’s legitimacy and post-colonial borders,
nursed Pashtun nationalism, and even invaded Pakistan in Balochistan and several Tribal
Agencies.

Pakistan retaliated violently in 1973 when Islamists fled a Soviet-guided modernization

program into Pakistan. In 1974, then-Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto established a
cell of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s formidable intelligence agency, tasked
with rendering effective militia groups for undertaking operations in Afghanistan. Long before
the Russians crossed the Amu Darya in 1979, the ISI, working with Pakistan’s Frontier Corps,
consolidated more than 50 resistance groups into seven major so-called mujahideen groups
that would later fight the Soviet forces.

Americans consistently found expedient reasons to excuse Pakistani malfeasance. Without

experiencing significant costs for its persistent efforts to squash Afghanistan’s emergence as a
experiencing significant costs for its persistent efforts to squash Afghanistan s emergence as a
viable and independent state, Pakistan will continue along the same lines.

But Pakistan cannot be blamed alone. U.S. capacity-building efforts were always deeply
inadequate. Soviet-controlled Afghanistan was a rentier state nearly completely dependent on
Moscow. But Washington built a much larger Afghan state—and one even less capable of
paying its bills.

The failure to create a functioning state was particularly catastrophic when it came to the
Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior Affairs, which controls the police. From the
beginning, the United States and NATO partners struggled to develop efficacious training
programs. Training concepts and doctrines changed often as different parts of the recruiting
and training mission came under different contractors and national oversight. The United
States consistently sought shortcuts, such as opting to train “Afghan local police,” which
Afghans more accurately called militias. Unlike training Afghan police, which was more
resource intensive and provided by contractors, training these militias was still dependent on
contractors but less so. Americans tried to justify equipping militias by applying Afghan names
to them, such as Arbaki, which implied these latest efforts were rooted in Afghan historical
practices rather than a quick and dirty effort to make a reliable and accountable police force.

The United States was adamant the Afghan military use U.S. weapons rather than Russian
weapons, which tend to be easier and far more cost effective to use, maintain, and resupply.
Chronic illiteracy and innumeracy plagued these efforts. In contrast, Moscow trained
thousands of civilian and military personnel either in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe.
Ironically, many of the United States’ most effective Afghan partners were those who trained
with the Soviets.

The United States insisted on the country’s security architecture but has retrenched from its
willingness to pay for it. Since 2014, Washington has provided about 75 percent of the $5 billion
to $6 billion per year needed to fund the Afghan National Security Forces while the remainder
of the tab was picked up U.S. partner nations and the Afghan government. However, for fiscal
year 2021, the U.S. Congress appropriated around $3 billion for Afghanistan’s fighting forces,
the lowest amount since fiscal year 2008. This diminution of U.S. support came after Afghan
President Ashraf Ghani said his government cannot support its army for even six months
without U.S. financial aid.

Although much of the U.S. expenditures pertained to defense, the United States has ostensibly
invested in other sectors of Afghan governance. As of June 30, the United States has spent
about $144.98 billion in funds for reconstruction and related activities in Afghanistan since
fiscal year 2002, including $88.61 billion for security (including $4.6 billion for counternarcotic
initiatives); $36.29 billion for governance and development (including $4.37 billion for

counternarcotic initiatives); $4.18 billion for humanitarian aid; and $15.91 billion for agency
operations.

Although these numbers are staggering, much of U.S. investment did not stay in Afghanistan.
Because of heavy reliance on a complex ecosystem of defense contractors, Washington
banditry, and aid contractors, between 80 and 90 percent of outlays actually returned to the
U.S. economy. Of the 10 to 20 percent of the contracts that remained in the country, the United
States rarely cared about the efficacy of the initiative. Although corruption is rife in
Afghanistan, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction repeatedly
identifies bewildering corruption by U.S. firms and individuals working in Afghanistan.

In many cases, U.S. firms even defrauded Afghans. In 2010, one military official with the
International Security Assistance Force explained to New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall
that “without being too dramatic, American contractors are contributing to fueling the
insurgency.” As it neglected to tackle Pakistan and tried to do security on the cheap,
Washington also strongarmed the Afghan government it into so-called “peace talks” with the
Taliban. More than anyone, the Afghan government understood the Taliban and their
Pakistani handlers could not be trusted to honor their commitments, such as they were.

The spectacle of the peace talks was important in Washington, which hoped to create a fiction
of power transition to cover the process of a negotiated U.S. defeat. There was genuinely
nothing to discuss: The Afghan government was committed to constitutional rule of law—
including elections, howsoever problematic—while the Afghan Taliban were committed to
overturning the constitution and opposed elections as non-Islamic. The Taliban used the
spectacle of the peace process as a recuperative retreat to revivify and emplace their forces
while stashing weapons as they awaited U.S. withdrawal.

As the sham of peace talks faltered in March 2020, the Trump administration threated to
withhold $2 billion in assistance if the Afghan government didn’t return to the negotiation
table. Equally appalling, the United States forced the Ghani government to release more than
5,000 hardened Taliban prisoners in return for hundreds of government officials taken captive
by the Taliban. Many of these released prisoners are now leading the current offense. The
United States also pressured Ghani to postpone or even cancel the 2019 presidential elections
in a bid to mollify the Taliban’s demands that the government be dissolved as a condition of
peace and be replaced with an interim government in which the Taliban had a stake, which
Ghani rightly refused.

The United States walked out of Afghanistan in 1990 and made Pakistan the custodian of
The United States walked out of Afghanistan in 1990 and made Pakistan the custodian of
Afghanistan’s future. Today, it is repeating the same mistake. When the Taliban once again

transform Afghanistan into a base of operations for modern Islamist terrorist organizations,
Washington will only have itself to blame.

C. Christine Fair is a provost’s distinguished associate professor at Georgetown University’s security studies program
within the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She is the author of Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way
of War and the forthcoming book, In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba.

TAGS: AFGHANISTAN, GEOPOLITICS, PAKISTAN, TERRORISM, UNITED STATES