It's almost a year since US troops began withdrawing from Afghanistan, marking the end of a two-decade war that ended with almost total capitulation to the Taliban.
It was a chaotic evacuation which saw thousands of Afghan civilians desperately trying to get aboard flights out of the country, followed by jubilant Taliban soldiers taking over Kabul airport within hours of the last flight out.
The withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021 was absolute chaos, counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen tells Kathryn Ryan.
Kilcullen was formerly with the US State Department as senior counterinsurgency advisor to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
He was also counterinsurgency adviser to the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, the NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan, established by the United Nations in 2001.
Photo: supplied
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His latest book, co-written with Greg Mills, The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan, delves into 20 years of mistakes and missteps by the West in Afghanistan.
“After confidently assuring everybody that the Taliban were not likely to come anywhere near Kabul within a year, we saw the collapse of 16 out of the 34 provinces in about two days, and all of the rest bar one in another week.
“So that first half of August, the war seemed to accelerate suddenly. And it very much caught the US government in particular by surprise, or perhaps even you could say they were in denial about how rapidly it was proceeding.”
It was abandonment on a huge scale, he says.
“It didn't just lead to the abandonment of the Afghans. It also led to, frankly, the abandonment of the other 53 countries that had committed to the effort to support the United States, including New Zealand and Australia.
“So, it was a fiasco, there's no really easy way to describe it. Greg [co-author Mills] and I spent multiple days, probably four or five days without any sleep, and then another week, snatching asleep, working with our teams on the ground, and people in the airport and in the city to evacuate vulnerable Afghans.”
They helped many get out but tens of thousands remain, he says.
“Unfortunately, there's no prospect, I think, that the international community is going to take their plight seriously, because of all the other things that are going on right now.
“So, I think it was a moral catastrophe, as well as a humiliating defeat.”
The peace deal signed with the Taliban was a bi-partisan mistake, he says.
“It's a bipartisan screw up that goes back over both parties and, frankly, four presidential administrations back to George W. Bush.
“But certainly President Trump's decision to sign the deal in 2020 with the Taliban, which then led to the Taliban basically encroaching and getting into pole position around every provincial capital, and many of the district centres, by the beginning of 2021, left the Biden administration in a position where they really needed to recognise the extraordinarily severe threat to the Afghan government and do something about it.
“For political reasons, they chose not to do that and chose to pretend instead that everything was going to be fine. And as a result, when the Taliban did begin to move around April of 2021, the districts and then the provincial centres rapidly began to fall.”
From the very beginning mistakes were made, he says, peace could have been brokered 20 years ago.
“It was the night of 7 December 2001 when the last Taliban stronghold in Kandahar fell, and most people that weren't there at the time don't know this, but the Taliban actually surrendered, acknowledged the authority of the incoming government under Hamid Karzai, asked for a peace deal, and promised not to engage in violence against the government as long as they could return safely to their houses.”
When Karzai took this proposal to the US, it was batted away, he says.
“Donald Rumsfeld, who was the US Secretary of Defense at the time said, no, no, we don't, we don't talk to terrorists.
“And the US essentially shut that initiative down, before it even started.”
There were numerous opportunities up to 2004 when peace could have been sought, Kilcullen says.
Photo: Hurst Books
“We never did, we simply took it for granted that once we defeated the Taliban, they somehow ceased to exist as if they didn't need to be taken into account going forward.
“And I described this in the book, and Greg agrees, as the master error, the error from which everything else flowed, that we didn't take any steps towards reconciliation when we had the chance.”
There is still a chance of peace now, he says.
“People need to know, and it isn't widely reported, that there are significant movements against the Taliban in many major cities in Afghanistan.
“The National Resistance Front, otherwise known as the actual government of Afghanistan, is fighting back against the Taliban and has recaptured significant areas of territory.”
Modern Afghanis, the majority of the population, are pushing back, he says.
“The same people, the same women, that want education, the same urban populations that want an opportunity to participate in the global economy, they're all pushing very, very hard back at the Taliban.
“The Taliban don't actually have the manpower to secure the cities and also keep control of the rest of the country and they're already struggling.
“And we're already starting to see Taliban leaders switch sides because they realise that the Taliban government isn't strong enough to hold.”
The problem now is the possibility of chaos, he says.
“The problem is not that the Taliban is strong, and Afghanistan is weak, it's that the Taliban are also weak. It's a problem of chaos and instability going forward.”
David Kilcullen is appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival next month.