Afghanistan’s Crisis Is the Result of Decades of Foreign Intervention

The “peace” that the United States brokered in Afghanistan wasn’t expected to last, but it seems few officials in the Biden administration thought the government would collapse so quickly. Within a week, a rapid offensive by the Taliban captured nearly every major urban center in the country and led to the fall of the government this Sunday. Armed Taliban fighters swept into the presidential palace, and chaotic scenes from Kabul’s main airport show thousands of Afghans desperately trying to flee the country.

In all likelihood, the reimposition of Taliban rule will be a nightmare for the Afghan people. Anybody who collaborated with the U.S. or allied organizations is at serious risk, and many of them were left in limbo as the government fell apart. The reimposition of their brutal interpretation of Sharia law seems likely.

The growing humanitarian crisis and the conspicuous failure of a 20-year effort to build a viable alternative to the Taliban has unsurprisingly set off a blame game. Where did the more than $2 trillion spent by the United States for this war ultimately go? Former president Donald Trump is keen to blame President Biden and lie about the peace deal he created. Commentators are dusting off their think pieces on the “graveyard of empires,” shorthand for the historical failure of foreign nations to conquer the country. The stories blame Afghanistan’s tribalism for making the country “not ready or willing” to embrace democracy. There already are comparisons to the fall of Saigon in 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War, ignoring profound differences between the two moments so that Americans can make the unfolding crisis about their own sense of defeat.

That the former Afghan government was flawed and deeply corrupt isn’t in question, but these other explanations don’t go deep enough, and many are frankly offensive. Much of this rhetoric puts the blame on the Afghan people, hence the current administration’s repeated pleas for Afghans to “fight.” Similarly, evoking the “graveyard of empires” casts Afghanistan as fundamentally primitive, unstable, and violent. Corruption isn’t intrinsic to Afghanistan’s society. It’s become normalized through decades of war and privation. There’s a much simpler explanation for Afghanistan’s problems: They were created by foreign intervention, and the United States needs to own that.

Afghanistan’s current turmoil was not historically inevitable. One need look no further back than the 1960s, when visitors to the country called Kabul the “Paris of Central Asia.” Women received the right to vote in 1964 after an aborted attempt at granting them suffrage in 1919. Afghanistan was a poor country, but its GDP per capita was ahead of India, China, Indonesia, and Kenya in 1970. Afghanistan saw a coup that ended the monarchy in 1973 and precipitated much of the coming instability. Just a year earlier, South Korea had undergone a coup called the October Restoration that led to years of authoritarian rule. Afghanistan had problems, but its problems were hardly unique, and they were not necessarily worse than what other countries faced.

So why has the country suffered so much over the past several decades? Outside interference that began in the 1970s. The republic that came out of the 1973 coup could not stimulate economic growth and alienated the Soviet Union. In 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) launched a coup that brought a Marxist government to power. While U.S. observers and President Jimmy Carter worried about growing Soviet influence in the country, in reality the coup caught the Soviets by surprise. The PDPA did not bring stability to the country, and infighting between different factions threatened the government’s survival. The Soviets, meanwhile, feared that the collapse of an allied government would make them look weak. On Christmas Day 1979, Soviet troops entered the country, setting off a nine-year war.

The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was extraordinarily violent: At minimum, 500,000 Afghans died in the fighting, and the death toll was likely higher, possibly closer to 2 million. Millions of people were forced to flee the country for Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere, many of whom never returned. The Soviets were guilty of war crimes in their attempts to try and end a hostile insurgency. For the United States, Afghanistan represented an opportunity to force the USSR to fight a punishing war. Through the CIA and by getting Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to help fund the Afghan fighters, or “mujahideen,” the United States directed billions of dollars to sustain the conflict.

These are the conditions that helped to create the Taliban and leave Afghanistan where it is today. Academics and journalists have called into question the easy story that the United States solely armed the Taliban or al-Quida to fight the Soviets. They’re right: Osama bin Laden, the Saudi Arabia–born al-Quida founder, never directly received money from the U.S., and the number of foreign fighters like Bin Laden who came to fight the Soviets was not significant in the war. Pakistan directly trained and worked with most of the mujahideen, and not all of the mujahideen went on to support the Taliban.

But these details should not let the United States off the hook either. This episode represents much of the U.S.’s careless approach to foreign policy: seizing on a crisis in another country for its own ends, working with whomever might be at hand as an ally, and then walking away once it’s convenient. When the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the fighting didn’t stop. It continued until 1996, when the Taliban finally came to control a devastated country. The U.S. paid little attention to what happened. Former Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin was left to fume that “Don’t we [the United States and Russia] have some responsibilities there, after all of our involvement?”

Seeing how the U.S. behaved (and the extent of the damage in Afghanistan) during the 1980s, the failure of the U.S. war in Afghanistan is not so shocking. U.S. intervention in Afghanistan failed to create a stable economy. Economic aid failed to solve poverty, which increased during the occupation, and much of it disappeared into a pit of corruption. Washington and its allies insisted we were engaged in nation building but had no coherent strategy to try and hold the country together.

Afghanistan is no graveyard of empires: It’s just one graveyard that empires feel the need to create whenever they worry about image or credibility or their own declining power. We get to go home; the Afghan people have to live there. These are the fruits of U.S. foreign policy, and Americans need to rethink how we engage with the world.

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue