Did you know
that shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban tried to
surrender?
For
centuries in Afghanistan, when a rival force had come to power, the
defeated one would put down their weapons and be integrated into the
new power structure — obviously with much less power, or none at
all. That’s how you do with neighbors you have to continue to live
with. This isn’t a football game, where the teams go to different
cities when it’s over. That may be hard for us to remember, because
the U.S. hasn’t fought a protracted war on its own soil since the
Civil War.
So when the
Taliban came to surrender, the U.S. turned them down repeatedly, in a
series of arrogant blunders spelled out in Anand Gopal’s
investigative treatment of the Afghanistan war, “No Good Men Among
the Living.”
Only full
annihilation was enough for the Bush administration. They wanted more
terrorists in body bags. The problem was that the Taliban had stopped
fighting, having either fled to Pakistan or melted back into civilian
life. Al Qaeda, for its part, was down to a handful of members.
So how do
you kill terrorists if there aren’t any?
Simple:
Afghans that the U.S. worked with understood the predicament their
military sponsors were in, so they fabricated bad guys. Demand has a
way of creating supply, and the U.S. was paying for information that
led to the death or capture of Taliban fighters. Suddenly there were
Taliban everywhere. Score-settling ran amok; all you had to do to get
your neighbor killed or sent to Guantánamo was tell the U.S. they
were members of the Taliban.
Doors would
be kicked in, no questions asked. The men left standing became
warlords, built massive fortunes, and shipped their wealth abroad.
“We are not nation-building again,” President Donald Trump
declared Monday night. Well, we never were, unless building
high-rises with looted cash in Dubai counts.
After a few
years of this charade, after their surrender efforts were repeatedly
rebuffed, the old Taliban started picking up guns again. When they
were driven from power, the population was happy to see them go. The
U.S. managed to make them popular again.
Liberals
then spent the 2008 presidential campaign complaining that the U.S.
had “ignored” Afghanistan — when, in reality, the parts of the
country without troop presence were the only parts at peace, facing
no insurgency against the Afghan government, such as it was. Then
President Barack Obama came in and launched a surge in troop levels
while simultaneously announcing a withdrawal — coupled with a
heightened focus on night raids, relying on the same system of
unreliable intelligence that had netted so many uninvolved people
already.
And now
Trump says he has a new and better strategy. He says the U.S. needs
to get Pakistan more involved — except, of course, Pakistan’s
intelligence service has been propping up the Taliban for decades.
Gopal’s
book is the definitive account of how the war went off the rails. It
reads like a novel, but is an all-too-real portrait of three Afghans
as they lived through the war — a pro-U.S. warlord, a Taliban
commander, and a housewife. I’d suggest Trump read it — the book
provides a dire warning against the sort of war effort the president
is about to double down on — but it’s longer than a page, which
his advisers say is the max he’ll digest. And besides, the only
thing he seems interested in is the fact that Afghanistan has a bunch
of minerals he thinks the U.S. is owed.
Before Trump
spends the windfall he hopes to reap from mining Afghanistan, he
should consider one starting reality: We are now losing a war to an
enemy that already surrendered. That’s not easy to do.
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