So Pakistan, in its own narrative, went from being the most allied of allies to the most sanctioned of adversaries. On the way out, we stopped helping Pakistan in a key way: We ended security and economic assistance because of its nuclear weapons program, something we’d exempted before. But that was not our problem - we were leaving. We could see the Afghan civil war coming - the only thing holding the disparate Afghan groups together was a common enemy. After the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan at the hands of U.S.-trained and armed mujahedeen in 1989, training that was facilitated by Pakistan, we decided we were done. Sadly that view proved accurate - the Taliban outlasted us and our impatience. I recall the comment attributed to a captured Taliban fighter from a number of years ago: You Americans have the watches, but we have the time. It took us time to grow the institutions and legal structures that would eventually make corruption the exception rather than the norm. Corruption was endemic in New York, Boston and Chicago through much of the 19th and into the 20th centuries. A look at our own history is instructive. It is to recognize the ubiquity of the problem and our role in it. When vast resources are poured into a country without established institutions and rule of law, corruption is likely to be a significant byproduct.
Karzai, and later President Ashraf Ghani, presided over governments where corruption was rampant. Afghans on their own launched private initiatives in education, especially for girls.Ĭlearly, there were also problems, chief among them corruption. It is important to note that this progress was not by any means exclusively the result of U.S. When I left as ambassador in 2012, a decade after that first school visit, the number of students was nearly 8 million, about 37 percent girls. estimates that when the Taliban were defeated, there were some 900,000 children in school, all of them boys. While statistics in Afghanistan have never been reliable, U.S.A.I.D. He understood the importance of societal change, and he understood that it takes time and requires patience. We visited a girls’ school that had just opened thanks to U.S.A.I.D. The first of that wave was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden.
This concept had strong bipartisan support on the Hill, as a wave of congressional visitors to Kabul would attest. Helping Afghans create a stable, open society could also be the best way to further our own national security objectives. And the development of those means would require patience. But the means to that end became much more complex. Once the Taliban were defeated, our fundamental mission of ensuring that Afghanistan was never again the base for an attack on the United States did not change. The message from the Bush administration to the Taliban after 9/11 made this clear: If you hand over Al Qaeda leadership, we will leave you alone.
It was not about nation building as an end in itself, or building a new democracy, or even regime change. The United States’ objective in Afghanistan has always been clear: to ensure that Afghan soil is never again used to plan attacks against the American homeland. It has also flouted 20 years of work and sacrifice. It has damaged our alliances, emboldened our adversaries and increased the risk to our own security. There is one overarching answer: our lack of strategic patience at critical moments, including from President Biden. How did this happen? How could we not have foreseen it? Why didn’t Afghan security forces put up a fight? Why didn’t we do something about corruption? The list goes on. And it certainly has not been on display in Afghanistan as the world watched the Taliban storm into Kabul.Īs the enormity of the events in Afghanistan this past week sinks in, the questions start.
In Korea, nearly seven decades after an inconclusive truce, we still have about 28,000 troops. We have been able to summon it at critical times such as the Revolutionary War and World War II, where, for example, Congress did not threaten to defund the war effort if it wasn’t wrapped up by 1944. As Americans, we have many strengths, but strategic patience is not among them.