Coming to Terms with the Taliban

BY SEAN STEINBERG

The Bush administration launched the “Global War on Terror” in the aftermath of 9/11 as an unambiguous moral crusade framed with damning, unequivocal rhetoric.

Yet today, the United States is negotiating with the Taliban — the very enemy with which President Bush declared “there could be no peace” because the Taliban’s brutality, misogyny, and vision of Sharia law supposedly rendered it incompatible with Western values.

After nearly two decades of disappointment – in their Afghan partners, in their commanders, and in the American people – America’s veterans say they are prepared to accept whatever it takes to end a misguided chapter of U.S. foreign policy.

Good Intentions 

The outlook was not always bleak. Long before they became cynics by necessity, starry-eyed young recruits like Kyle Staron truly believed that the “Global War on Terror” was going to be a “force for liberalization.”

Four years after the worst terrorist attack in American history reaffirmed his lifelong dream of military service, an 18-year-old Staron signed up for ROTC. In 2006, he was commissioned as an officer of the United States Army, just as Rule Johnstone began his undergraduate studies in counterterrorism and national security.

Johnstone supplemented his core curriculum with courses in Islamic history and theology in order to understand the roots of what he saw as a “globalized insurgency.” A few years later, he left law school to become a warrior elite.

When his top choices – the Navy SEALs and Green Berets – didn’t work out, Johnstone found his place as an Airborne shock trooper. His unit, he says, was to be the first line of defense against Russia – the same threat that inspired Tom Juric to enlist a generation earlier, back when it was still known as the Soviet Union.

But after the Soviet Union collapsed, and Juric suddenly found himself without an evil empire to fight, he spent his 35-year career away from the battlefield, supporting the fight through training, logistics, and mission coordination. He loved the work, but still seems disappointed that he was not able to join in his father’s war fighting legacy.

As it was with Juric and “anyone else” who serves, Dr. Jason Dempsey says military service was in his blood.

A “family affair,” he calls it.

Dempsey didn’t plan to follow in his father’s footsteps for more than a few years, but in the end, the job became a 22-year career spanning multiple deployments to the Middle East, a teaching post at West Point, and a White House fellowship.

 Know Thy Enemy

While their mutual employer assigned these men a common nemesis, these Army veterans do not necessarily see eye-to-eye when it comes to the Taliban’s place in Afghanistan.

Juric sees little difference between the Taliban and international terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda or ISIS. As far as he’s concerned, “most of them are nothing but thugs.”

While most of Staron’s pre-war knowledge of the Taliban came from a magazine article detailing their destruction of ancient Buddhist statues, he acknowledges a distinction that Juric does not.

Staron says groups like Al Qaeda have made it perfectly clear that diplomacy will never be an option: “They want to destroy us, we want to live.”

“But the Taliban was different,” he says. “Pragmatically different.” 

The Taliban did not deploy its acolytes across the globe to strike American skyscrapers with jetliners or bomb European subways. Their threat was rooted in the soil of Afghanistan.

Johnstone cites modern insurgency texts and Salafist jihadi history to back up his claim that the Taliban is not a monolith. Its members, he says, are not united by any singular motivation.

Some want to fight Americans. Some seek economic gain. Others merely want to impress tribal elders.

The “religious jihadi” stuff, he says, is certainly “a part of it, but it’s not a central tenet.”

A Misguided and Bungled Strategy

Unfortunately, the brains behind the American operation in Afghanistan saw things differently.

A core problem with their strategy, says Dempsey, was that American officials wrote off the Taliban as “as enemies of the state,” rather than stopping to consider that they might be “an organic Afghan movement.”

Under such a two-dimensional approach, eradication was the only viable solution. But the truth was far more complicated.

“It wasn’t a killing problem,” says Dempsey. “It was a political problem. And we never had the patience or the nuance to go after that.”

Afghans’ hatred of the Haqqani leadership – which controls an aggressive tribal network associated with the Taliban and Al Qaeda – did not necessarily apply to the average Taliban foot soldier.

“After all,” says Dempsey, that guy is “your cousin. Your uncle.”

Sure, he admits that they may be zealots with “batshit political views” but with their deep communal ties, Dempsey doubts the Taliban could ever be seen as the irredeemable “evil” that American rhetoric portrayed.

In spite of this conceptual failure, the U.S. appeared to have the Taliban up against the ropes up until its 2003 invasion of Iraq. Then, as the overextended Americans grew distracted from their original mission, their initial gains plateaued, while the Taliban found room to breathe and regroup. Meanwhile, cooperative nation-building efforts with the Afghans came undone.

Concerned that the locals would just “slow things down,” Staron says the Americans pushed forward ambitious and expensive civil projects, consulting the Afghans only at the very “last minute.” The Afghans, in turn, grew frustrated at the Americans for treating them as burdens to their own development and security.

Meanwhile, financial exploitation marred the campaign’s credibility with the Afghan people, and did little to convince them that the juvenile central government – struggling to establish legitimacy in a region accustomed to being run as a fiefdom – deserved their support. 

“There were hundreds, if not thousands of Afghans in senior leadership positions who, like many Americans, just saw it as a chance to profit. To literally take bags of gold bars and ship them to Dubai and build vacation homes,” says Dempsey. “Meanwhile, you had a class of young fighters who were legitimately, earnestly trying to make the world a better place.”

Granted, the Taliban’s hands were not clean, either, but at least their particular brand of “pious” corruption came with stability, which was in high demand after a bloody and chaotic civil war. Dempsey says that their replacements, on the other hand, didn’t “even have the veneer of religious justification.”

The “Hearts & Minds” Tradeoff

After American war strategists dusted off the old counterinsurgency doctrine that they had tried so hard to forget after the catastrophic failure of Vietnam, averting civilian casualties was no longer just the “right” thing to do – it became a strategic imperative. But Johnstone says the Taliban proved to be “incredibly sophisticated” in exploiting this strategy, which the Americans hoped would win local support and undermine the Taliban’s influence in the region.

Knowing the Americans were under strict orders not to fire upon unarmed civilians, let alone children, the Taliban recruited kids to pelt Humvee patrols with rocks and distract them from ambushes and RPG strikes.

Muzzled out of strategic necessity and political sensitivity, impotent soldiers bristled at their commanders, the media, and the American civilians watching the war play out on CNN. To these troops, they all appeared to value optics, self-righteous judgment, and the lives of foreigners more than those of their own troops. Johnstone says American soldiers came to believe they were nothing more than “political playthings.”

“The vets that I know, most of them don’t give a shit about whether Afghanistan has democracy or not,” he says. “How is some 19-year-old supposed to give a shit about the Afghans’ future when he’s worried about his own countrymen sending him to prison for trying to save his own life?”

Adding to the war’s perceived moral dubiousness was the fact that Americans were stifled from intervening when they witnessed abuses carried out against women and children by locals. Such domestic matters, they were told, were best left to the locals.

Calling It Quits

Afghans were dying in droves. The government the Americans helped create was corrupt and ineffective.

And the Taliban was not backing down.

No matter where you stood – liberal or conservative, civilian or military – the mission felt hopeless. 

“Veterans I think are fairly diverse in terms of what’s to blame,” says Dempsey, but “I have not seen much debate about whether or not the mission was a failure.”

“If there’s anything that’s been proven conclusively over 18 years, it’s that the American military and NATO cannot defeat the Taliban militarily,” he says.

Having accepted the war’s futility, everyone I spoke with says it is time to get out of Afghanistan. All but Juric say they are willing to accept negotiations with the Taliban as a condition to that withdrawal.

“You can only live through Groundhog Day so many times before you start asking questions,” says Staron. “The time spent and the lives lost are…”

He pauses.

“…They’re not justifications for continuing.”

What comes next is anyone’s guess: Juric expects to see the Taliban return to its old ways. Others believe the Taliban will be reigned in by the punishment they have endured, and the prospects of international aid and recognition.

“They don’t want to win the entire country only to be a pariah state again,” says Dempsey.

Little White Lies

Perhaps it is as former U.S.-Afghan policy advisor Richard Biddle says: “The way the war looks in the foxhole and the way that the war looks in the national capital have to be different.”

Perhaps war does necessitate oversimplification. After all, the true, unvarnished, practical objectives of politics rarely inspire people to risk their lives.

In modern warfare, says Biddle, victory and defeat are measured by degree, not totality. So it makes sense that war-waging politicians use words like “evil” and “liberty,” and phrases like “for the good of all humanity,” to sell their vision, instead of talking about the number of “ministries granted to the opposition in a power-sharing deal.”

It is when fairytale rhetoric begins to inform policy, however, that you have a problem.

“It’s the easiest way to justify killing people,” says Dempsey. “It’s not the easiest way to work your way out of a war.”

The 19 years, $975 billion, and nearly 150 thousand lives lost to this war seem to agree.