I bet you've been trying to understand how or why the Afghan military we spent a billion trying to build over 20 years folded like a house of cards. I know I have.
Politico has an article that goes a long way toward explaining what happened. The author, one Anatol Lieven, spent years on the ground there as a journalist for, among others, the Times of London. His description of the tribal culture and leadership is, to say the least, enlightening. I view this article as one of the year's few "must reads."
Lieven makes it very clear that when President Biden announced several months ago we were leaving, every regional government leader who hadn't already done so immediately sat down with the Taliban and cut a deal. Doing this is their culture's standard operating procedure, they also did it when the Soviets were leaving.
The central feature of the past several weeks in Afghanistan has not been fighting. It has been negotiations between the Taliban and Afghan forces, sometimes brokered by local elders. On Sunday, the Washington Post reported “a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces” that resulted from more than a year of deal-making between the Taliban and rural leaders.
In Afghanistan, kinship and tribal connections often take precedence over formal political loyalties, or at least create neutral spaces where people from opposite sides can meet and talk. Over the years, I have spoken with tribal leaders from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region who have regularly presided over meetings of tribal notables, including commanders on opposite sides.
Afghan society has been described to me as a “permanent conversation.” Alliances shift, and people, families and tribes make rational calculations based on the risk they face. This is not to suggest that Afghans who made such decisions are to blame for doing what they felt to be in their self-interest.
If Lieven knew all this twenty years ago, why didn't our intelligence services learn it? And if they did and reported it, why did no one listen? And if policy makers listened, why didn't they act on the knowledge?
It clearly would have been cheaper to bribe regional leaders and ignore nation- and army-building. It is the Afghan way, it is their culture, which (sarcasm alert) multiculturalists will assure you is sacred, inviolable, and as wonderful in its own way as our own.
