“You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it,” Seraj added. He had always wanted to model the NDS on the CIA and focus purely on intelligence-gathering, but this soon proved impossible. Instead, Ghani tasked him with strengthening citizen militias that could resist the coming Taliban onslaught. But accepting the task, which he felt should be the military’s remit, made the NDS cumbersome. They were now working with local mayors and tribal and security chiefs on sourcing weapons instead of being the eyes and ears of the republic. And as government forces neared collapse, more problems piled up on Seraj’s desk. Instead of focusing on the enemy, the NDS were forced to investigate corruption allegations against these militias. “80% of our work fell to investigating those charges, while the enemy was at the gates.”
“You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it.”
The US withdrawal also meant reducing the air support given to Afghan forces. “Our forces,” said Seraj, “had become so addicted to air support, that without it, it was very difficult for them to fight.” It meant that the Afghan army could not stop the Taliban advance, resulting in the swift collapse of the republic. The Taliban made the situation even more difficult by deliberately targeting Afghan pilots and many were unwilling to fly. Due to a domestic skill shortage the Afghan government tried to source foreign contractors who could service their aircraft, but with little success. In December 2020, National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib flew to Azerbaijan to buy drones which Baku had used to devastating effect against the Armenians in the second Nagorno-Karabakh War weeks earlier, but to no avail. Kabul also reached out to Turkey and the US, wanting to set up a special operations team that could deploy Predator and Reaper drones, but the US was reluctant to accede to their requests.
Meanwhile, Pakistan was working to undermine the Afghan government. Although the US and Pakistan were allies, Islamabad had always viewed the US presence in Afghanistan as a threat to its nuclear arsenal, which it needed to counter its hostile neighbour, India. As a result, it could not support the US-backed government in Kabul and instead provided sanctuary to the Taliban. Seraj had confronted his Pakistani counterparts on the issue many times, but they would often deny or deflect the issue.
The Trump administration aggravated the situation in other ways. After the US assassination of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, the situation in Afghanistan became more volatile. Tehran wanted revenge and allowed the Taliban to open up an office in Mashhad in north-eastern Iran. “There was a strong commitment from the Iranians to help the Taliban,” Seraj said. “It’s not that the Taliban are very friendly to them, it was just to see the US leave, and Taliban were used as a tool to expedite that process.”
When Biden came to office in January 2021 he pledged to “lead not merely by example of our power but by the power of our example. We will be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress and security.” However, as Alexander Ward shows in his new book, The Internationalists, Biden had always been consistent about getting out of the nation-building business. After a review, he pressed ahead with Trump’s withdrawal policy, albeit with a slight delay. American troops would now leave by the end of August 2021.
Biden made the hand that Trump had dealt him even worse, at least from the perspective of his Afghan partners. The fact that they kept on Khalilzad, Trump’s special envoy, was a sign to Mohib that they would get more of the same. “He would be their fall guy,” Mohib told me. Moreover, as if to rub salt in the Afghans’ wounds, a scathing letter from the new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was leaked. It urged Ghani to return to the negotiating table, humiliating and alienating the Kabul government further. It showed the world how the US treated their “partners” and destroyed any goodwill left between Washington and Kabul. Afghan government delegations visited both Moscow and Tehran, apparently exploring other political options.
In February 2021, Seraj invited regional intelligence chiefs to a secret conference and urged them to support his government, warning that many of the extremist groups that plagued them, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), had close ties with the Taliban. The response was muted. “Those were the days when the popularity of the government was so low in Afghanistan,” Seraj recalled, “the neighbours didn’t take us seriously because they knew the government was dying.”
Four months later, Biden gave the order to withdraw. It was to be done as fast as possible: Washington wanted to reduce the risk to its own troops, but in its eagerness to leave, created the conditions for suicide bombers to flourish and move undetected. The US assessed that the Afghan army would hold out long enough to come to a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. But they didn’t take into account Pakistan’s role.
Intense clashes between the Taliban and the Afghan army immediately broke out in Wardak and other areas. In June 2021, the Taliban took more territory and there was fighting in 26 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Speaking two years later, Fazli Rafi, the former Deputy National Security Advisor, told me that the government assessed that these attacks had a professional command and control structure. “The Taliban knew guerrilla warfare, but this time the Taliban were attacking in 24 different provinces with three different districts in each. That was over 100 battle fronts. We assessed that the Taliban could only attack five provinces. This was the work of a professional army – and Pakistan was implicated.”
On 22 June, Seraj’s overwhelming fear was realised. Sher Khan Bandar, the main crossing point on the border with Tajikistan, fell to the Taliban. The dam had been breached. The Afghan government could no longer control its own borders. It was now a case of salvaging whatever one could from the flood.
Even at the height of the crisis, the president tried to sidestep ministers he felt were close to the Americans. Ghani had become very suspicious of ministers and political leaders. According to insiders, he felt that many Afghan leaders had private back channels with the US and the Taliban and were pursuing their own agendas. But marginalising the ministers only led to more chaos. When they ordered the commanders to do something, the latter responded by saying that the president had told them otherwise.
On 2 July, US troops withdrew from Bagram air base, the key entry point for American hardware and personnel for 20 years. Only a few troops stayed behind to protect the US embassy. By the end of that month, the southern cities of Herat, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah were scenes of intense fighting. In the first week of August, the Taliban assassinated Dawa Khan Menapal, President Ghani’s public relations chief. Reports of Taliban fighters settling old tribal scores on the Spin Boldak border crossing with Pakistan heightened the fear.
By the time the president fled Kabul on 15 August, all the major cities had fallen. It was on that day that the Taliban opened the gates of Pul-i-Charkhi prison on the outskirts of Kabul. Taliban militants, as well as hardened criminals, emerged into the sunlight to taste freedom. And among the throng was Logari.
Seraj was shocked by the president’s departure. Moments earlier, Ghani had called him personally saying that “we should not allow thieves and people to create chaos, we should use whatever force we still have to control the situation”. At the time, Seraj was in Kabul scrambling to secure the release of the governor of Herat, Ismail Khan, as well as trying to relieve Mazar-i-Sharif — the largest city in northern Afghanistan. When the Taliban entered Kabul, he made his way to the presidential palace with his side arm at the ready, intending to protect the Commander-in-Chief of the republic until the end. He expected a call from the president to join other ministers and officials at the palace and then wait for him to take a final decision on the right course of action. Ghani’s departure stunned him. He returned to the office and sat on his desk, numb. “I was speechless for 20 minutes.”
One by one, his WhatsApp groups also fell silent, as ministers and senior civil servants started to leave them. He received messages from his colleagues asking for instructions. But what could he tell them? Should he ask them to fight the Taliban? “The elected government that we’re fighting for has collapsed,” Seraj said. “So what was our legitimacy to stay on?” He continued to receive panicked messages from his colleagues asking for orders, but he had none to give, except that they should lie low and find safety as best they possibly can. The republic was no more and they were now on their own. A US State Department contact got Seraj out of the country, and he joined his wife who was already in London.
As August passed and Seraj began to piece his life together, the chaos of Biden’s withdrawal became apparent. Today, there are already many reports that al-Qaeda are rebuilding, unimpeded. The UN security council recently noted that eight new camps had been established in 2024 alone. An organisation that appeared to be on life support, looking for a reason to exist, appears to be suddenly revived: in a piece published this month, al-Qaeda’s new leader, Sayf al-Adl, called for attacks on Western and Zionist targets.
In such a world, it’s hard not to be reminded of Seraj’s earlier warning: “You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it.”
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SubscribeBlaming so much on Biden is partisan propaganda. It is obvious (in hindsight) that only the flood of US aid and assistance kept the Taliban down. As soon as the US was leaving, it was clear to everyone, most of all in Afghanistan, that the Taliban was going to win and there was no point in trying to prolong the agony. Biden could not have helped the Afghan government, any more than Nixon could help the South Vietnamese one. The only US choices were to keep fighting, or to cut their losses, abandon their allies, and slink away.
Ukraine will learn the same lesson…eventually
It was under Biden that the US military fled Afghanistan under the worst possible circumstances. Having people hanging off plane wings does not make for good optics.
Not good optics, no. But it was no better in Saigon. I still think the only way Biden could have avoided it happening ‘under him’ would have been to keep fighting the war for another eight years. How do you think he could have bailed out of Afghanistan while looking good?
He looks dead.
@rasmus – you are half right. The decision to leave Afghanistan as the author points out, was made in the previous administration. And to be fair, Biden made it no secret that departing Afghan was going to be a priority. He simply executed the previous administration’s plan.
However the manner in which we departed was well within the administration’s control and their prioritization of speed over any other consideration is what created the legacy and the well-deserved criticism. While we we never know what could have happened had a more orderly withdrawal had been executed, it’s likely it would not have led the mess that ensued.
To your first point, everyone on the ground knew that the Afghan government was going to collapse in days after a US withdrawal. Unfortunately, that information was massaged on its way up the chain and by the time it made its way to policy makers, the impression was much rosier than the reality. Which also helped fuel some of the bad decisions.
Maybe. But if everyone on the ground knew that the Afghan government would have collapsed within days once the US had started withdrawing, it is hard to see what the US could have done to make the withdrawal orderly. Once all the Afghans stop fighting and either flee or surrender to the Taliban, is the US supposed to hold the line alone while the evacuation goes on? The final evacuation of Saigon was not much less messy that the evacuation of Kabul, after all. The higher levels may have had a rosy idea that it would all have worked, and it is obviously not a good look for the result to be so different from expectations. But apart from admitting openly that they were abandoning Afghanistan to chaos what could they have done?
Biden didn’t have to do anything the previous administration had planned. He could have changed withdrawal dates and specifics of the agreement. The botched withdrawal was Biden’s administration alone.
“ However the manner in which we departed was well within the administration’s control and their prioritization of speed over any other consideration is what created the legacy and the well-deserved criticism.”
>> far, far too easy to say in hindsight without offering an alternative withdrawal exercise that kept US casualties to a minimum.
Biden doesn’t know what day it is or what his son’s name is,let alone where Afghanistan is.
Tragic beyond words.
5* Unherd article.
A comment worthy of pre-Lusitania Woodrow Wilson.
Articles like this are a necessary tonic to the all-too-convenient amnesia that exists in the halls of power and the short attention spans of the public. We stayed there well past the project’s expiration date and managed to, again, leave a country worse off than we found it. How many times does this make? Whatever the number is, get ready to add Ukraine to the tab.
There’s no “we” about it, unless by that you mean our rulers.
The amnesia is a feature, not a bug. Our (US) founders specifically designed a system to put the policy in the hands of people who would change out every 2-4 years. While that makes for responsive domestic politics, it also means that foreign policy will change under similar timelines. Hence our founders warnings about foreign entanglements and their deliberate design of a weak military and foreign policy apparatus. Unfortunately, our massively increased engagement in the post-WWII world has really exposed that design.
I don’t think it can be fairly called a flaw, since it was baked in on purpose and the alternative (a strong, consistent foreign policy establishment that is not responsive to elected officials) poses its own set of problem.
It does not have to be a foreign policy establishment that is not responsive to elected officials.. Other democratic nations have managed to have pretty consistent long-term foreign policies. The European colonial powers, for instance, back in the day. For that matter, post-WWII US policy was stable and consistent for a long time. Might there be something about your system that makes it particularly problematic even compared to other democracies?
Good point.
The USA took over leadership of the Western World in 1943 but lacks people who understand how other peoples perceive the World, their desires and interests. Few Americans have lived and worked outside of the USA ; run an office, construction, site, oil rig, mine, farm, factory etc, and one needs to know how people perceive the World and are likely to react to events.
To understand why hard intelligence warnings might be ignored by the CIA and the Department of Defense, one should read John Nixon’s book Debriefing the President. In it he retells how he conducted the first US intelligence interviews with Saddam Hussein. What he discovered was the CIA’s decades of “intelligence” about the man, his motives, and his government, were utterly wrong. What is revealed is an intelligence community filled with hungry analysts desperate for promotion. Analysts stay in position for perhaps only 18 months before agitating for a new assignment to help them climb the ladder. Not only is there no time to properly understand their assignment, the incentive is to write analysis that confirms the bias of superiors. Any intelligence that runs counter to policy is downplayed. As a result, the CIA now largely acts like a very expensive political think tank finding partisan evidence to support State Department policy. Perhaps it was ever thus, but the CIA’s failings are becoming ever more obvious.
Great comment. Inside the CIA Red Cell
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/30/inside-the-cia-red-cell-micah-zenko-red-team-intelligence/
I’d like to know if the Red Cell program initiated by the CIA Director after 9/11 would help in this situation. Is the program still in existence?
Red Cells are tactic / mission specific so they don’t exist as a programme as such but instead are setup on an ad hoc basis in response to events. The 9/11 one for example assessed novel ways to attack the USA – only after the USA has been attacked in a novel way. Since Red Cells are setup only once an issue has been identified they are not as contrarian as they first appear. For example, one of the original Red Cells was used to find weaknesses in physical security, simply confirming the supposition that there were weaknesses but not establishing if these weaknesses were in fact threats, the overarching concern. Classic confirmation bias. A standalone contrarian unit or project would find itself in constant opposition to the main organisation and quickly shut down, which is why meaningful and effective contrarian analysis needs to be from within an organisation.
The Afghan project was doomed from the start. Instead trying to stabilize the country and build something that was culturally aligned with the population, the coalition (an important point, as the Europeans are as much to blame for this as US policy makers) insisted on flooding the country with money, in an attempt to modernize the infrastructure.
Additionally, we attempted to import many well-meaning priorities (women’s rights, transparency, western style military, separation of powers, etc. etc.) that distracted from the core problem – GIROA (the previous coalition-propped Government of the Republic of Afghanistan) delivering a crappy product to its people.
Meanwhile the Talibs, while brutal & terrible, offered less corruption, stability and a return to “traditional” values. While many (most) people weren’t crazy about their product either, it resonated more.
Why restate the obvious ? Because people like Seraj are trying to rewrite history. The fact is GIROA leaders were (and many still are) unwilling to confront the fact that their government was setting conditions for most of the problems.
Because of this lack of effectiveness, the coalition had to deal with the Taliban. It wasn’t abandonment, it was a reality forced on the coalition by GIROA’s failure to run a country. Yes, Khalilzad’s approach may have “ruffled some feathers”, but the bird was already dead at that point. Ultimately it wasn’t Biden nor Trump who failed; it was the Afghans themselves. We just threw a lot of money on that dumpster fire.
I am not proud of Europe’s involvement in this fiasco, but to say that Europe had any agency in the mess is silly. This was always a US-led adventure, Europeans were only there to somewhat alleviate the strain on US manpower and add a veneer of internationalist respectability.
In fact, European armed forces were re-shaped to better serve Imperial US colonial wars, to the extent that they are today no longer in any shape to fight the type of war they’d have to fight if they wanted to attack Russia, as they seem determined to do.
Excellent article, long overdue.
A very astute American told me ” The business of the America is business and this where the best brains go. Also very few Americans have lived and worked outside of the USA and speak the languages. ” Afghanistan shows that lesssons from the failure of Vietnam have not been learnt.
The pro Western cultural outlook of the Pakistani ruling class changed to a more Islamic view under Butto, then Zia al Huq and now the Deobandists dominate ISI who created the Taleban.
If one thinks rebuilding a country is like turning around a business they are wrong. Books by Rashid are very informative as is The Great Game by Hopkirk . To be in the Indian Civil Service one needed to speak at least four languages, Richard Burton spoke twenty nine. To join the Indian Army, one was on probation for a year and the Senior Indian Warrant Officer made the final decision, not the colonel. When John Masters ex Gurkha and Chindit officer left India he was the fifth generation of his family to serve in the Indian Army.
In reality to understand the complexities one needs to work in these countries for decades, inherit an understanding fron one’s family and have a genuine desire to learn and respect the the culture. The simplest step would be to teach soldiers the language and serve them the local food. The re-creation of the USA in their camps prevents service personnel from developing an understanding of the host country. If the Americans played cricket, hockey or squash they would have something in common their host country. It is these informal discussions over a meal when a person can have a great insight into the country.
The Great Game (Hopkirk book) – Wikipedia
Ahmed Rashid – Wikipedia
Supposedly, at least $22 million of taxpayer dollars was spent trying to inculcate American feminism into the traditional Afghan cultural values. What a sorry and embarrassing and arrogant effort in nation building.
Excellent comment. I would have done it for $20million.
In The Old Testament, collecting water is women’s work which is why in Beduin society they can move freely to water wells and rivers. Also cultivating vegetables, medicinal plants and herbs around the home. What could have been done is to set courses, teaching water treatment and supply, sewage treatment and horticulture specifically for women. Also set up women only factories and kitchen s where they can weave cloth and makes clothes and bake. Then teach them to repair machines. Pashtun men want healthy sons which means disease free living conditions. The issue for the Taleban was mixing of the sexes. One could teach maths, physics, chemistry, botany and zoology to women. One would use local methods to construct the buildings. Teaching would be done by women.
Clement Attlee said in Britain one had to put new wine in old bottles. Britain learnt how to transfer technology using traditional customs.
Pashtun women had more freedom pre 1979. It was the influence of Debandi/Wahabi Islam starting with Butto in 1970, followed by Zia al Huq and then the USSR invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 which pushed out the Sufi influenced Islam. Look at newsreels of women in late 1960s in Muslim countries, there are women wearing miniskirts. Where secular Arab nationalism and Beduin customs were the dominant political creeds, women had far more freedom.
The US had to get out of Afghanistan to get ready for Ukraine.
Partly at least because only one thing at a time happens in the world,that is on the mainstream media news agenda. You can’t have a war here,and a war there,here a war,there a war,everywhere a punch up. It has to be one war at a time,
Because collapse was the plan,just as Ukraine losing in their conflict is the plan,just as….a lot of other things I can’t specify right now.
I’d like to know anyones’ thoughts on the CIA’s “Red Cell” program initiated by the Director after 9/11. Do you think the group has been utilized or done any good? I wonder if it still exists or has been abandoned?
Inside the CIA Red Cell
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/30/inside-the-cia-red-cell-micah-zenko-red-team-intelligence/
“ Two days later, a US drone strike killed an entire Afghan family in the mistaken belief that the target was Logari. ”
What? It was Logari who blew himself up!
I am not one of those foolish people who believe in western or US imperialism, but I do say that if the West is to lose its present position of global leadership (as looks increasingly likely), then the reason it deserves to lose it comes in the form of having done things like this.
The Afghanistan withdrawal wasn’t just strategically misguided and tactically inept. It also involved throwing under the bus the lives of thousands of Afghans who responded to the prospect of democratic freedoms and rising living standards by becoming loyal to an occupying force that promised such things. They were taking a huge risk in doing so, and we – the West and the USA in particular – betrayed them.
What has happened to them now? Or shouldn’t I ask?