Afghanistan: A History of Failed Foreign Occupation

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The United States and its allies rush to evacuate Kabul join a long list of the world’s greatest powers whose missions in Afghanistan have ended in failure.

Since the days of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, many have sought to conquer the region now known as Afghanistan. The country has long been known as the “graveyard of empires,” which spurs its reputation for thwarting the expansionist ambitions of occupiers from the British Empire to Soviet Russia.

The United States has spent an estimated $1 trillion in the country since it invaded in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, toppling the al-Qaeda-linked Taliban regime.

However, two decades later, the Islamists were back in power again after an attack that within weeks dismantled the republic that the United States had tried to leave in place.

Rumen Malejak, a professor of political science and author of The Survival of Warlords, said of Afghanistan’s nation-building, Afghanistan is “a graveyard for colonial or neo-colonial foreign powers aiming to rule.”

Anthropologist Thomas Barfield wrote in his 2010 history of the country that “Afghanistan got rid of its foreign occupiers by making the country so ungovernable that they wanted to leave.”

Unfortunately, however, this strategy eventually “came to haunt the Afghans themselves” because each conflict left state institutions weaker and the rising groups more brutal.

The Anglo-Afghan Wars, 1839-1919

The British Empire viewed Afghanistan, a landlocked country along the ancient trade route of the Silk Road, as a vital barrier between its Indian colony and Russia.

Fearing that the Russians would use Afghanistan to attack South Asia, the British moved first, invading in 1839 and installing an obedient local ruler. This ended in what historian William Dalrymple called “Britain’s greatest imperial disaster”.

Britain was repeatedly thwarted in its attempts to add Afghanistan to its empire. © Universal Images Group / Getty

Revolts forced the British withdrawal in 1842. They marched with a force of nearly 20,000 men outside Kabul only to be wrested by tribal forces along the way. The only British survived to recover it.

Britain continued to try to integrate Afghanistan into its empire, and fought two more wars in 1878 and 1919 before ending its ambitions.

Soviet invasion 1979-89

Afghanistan became a Cold War battleground after a communist coup in 1978.

The new regime’s brutality provoked fierce local resistance, with further uprisings leading to an invasion by Soviet forces the following year.

With the support of the United States and Pakistan, loosely organized factions of local insurgents known as the Mujahideen launched jihad against the Soviets and the Afghan Communists.

Soviet forces were unable to defeat the local rebels known as the Mujahideen who used guerrilla tactics © Robert Nickelsberg / Getty

The civil war that followed was devastating to Afghanistan. However, the vast resources of the Soviets proved insufficient to crush the Mujahideen, as guerrilla tactics led to a painful and costly stalemate.

One million Afghans were killed and 4 million more displaced. Barfield wrote: “The Soviets reached the same conclusion as the British a century ago: the direct occupation of Afghanistan had a high cost with few benefits.”

After the Soviets left, the Mujahideen factions turned on each other. Ultimately, this chaos gave rise to the Taliban-ethnic Pashtuns who vowed to impose their doctrinal interpretation of the Islamic system on a war-weary population.

The US and NATO invasion, 2001-21

The Taliban regime drew international outrage for its cruelty – wiping out women’s rights and imposing harsh punishments – while providing sanctuary to Islamic extremists.

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But harboring Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda before 9/11 proved to be an exaggeration. Within a month of the Twin Towers attacks, the United States began bombing the country, mobilizing local warlords to defeat the Taliban on the battlefield before a full-scale invasion.

By December 2001, the Taliban had collapsed, and she and bin Laden fled to the mountains. President George W. Bush later announced plans to rebuild the country, while his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared in 2003 that “major fighting” was over.

Then-President Donald Trump agreed to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan in a 2020 peace deal, with his successor Joe Biden later setting a departure date. © Luke Sharrett / Getty

But the Taliban insurgency only gained momentum in the ensuing years, leading President Barack Obama to increase the US military presence to more than 100,000 troops.

Withdrawal plans were delayed, and the Taliban gathered strength all the time. This turned into violent violence under President Donald Trump, who agreed to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan in a peace deal struck in February 2020.

President Joe Biden, aware of the local fatigue in the so-called eternal war, went ahead, and announced that the United States would be leaving by the end of this month. The United States had not even finished withdrawing before the Taliban overcame all remaining resistance last week.

Historians and political scientists will long debate how and where the United States went wrong. Mallijk says the United States, like other powers before it, mistakenly believed it could reshape the country using force.

The aim of this intervention was not to build a democratic state. . . It was about fighting terrorism.

Video: How 20 Years of War Changed Afghanistan | FT . movie

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