The myth of a light footprint

Just as the Afghan National Army was a hollowed-out shell, unable to act without the U.S. acting for it, so was the Afghan national government. State capacity was provided by thousands of contractors, NGOs, and consultants — the people who were dreaming about coming up with imagined redesigns of the Pashto and Dari languages to help Afghans understand gender equality. Layered on top of this was a simulation of a national government — but it was populated by leaders who were notoriously corrupt. The government had no real-world legitimacy in or beyond Afghanistan. All the legitimacy in the Afghan countryside remained — as it has for centuries — in the tribal and clan structures.

Propping up such a government was an unworthy mission for America. The war in Afghanistan had at one time brought George W. Bush and General Stanley McChrystal to say that America would not be safe until Afghanistan was a liberal democracy. But within a few years we were propping up tribal warlords and a judicial system that required so many bribes to operate that it made the Taliban look like they offered a more just and efficient justice system. In the end, it was Afghanistan that converted the U.S. We began to accept the tribal system as legitimate, and we even accepted that the Afghan practice of child rape, bacha bazi, was ineradicable: The U.S. was left paying for and legitimating groups and tribal leaders whom we knew to be child sexual predators. This was another form of corruption that the Taliban dealt with effectively and roughly.

A liberal democracy in Afghanistan was not possible without ending the practice of cousin marriage that sustains and reproduces a clannish society. This was an unworthy, unworkable morass, and it could not have been sustained without another massive surge to throw back the Taliban to the hinterlands. It was not morally sustainable without confronting the darkest recesses of Afghanistan’s tribal culture. It was not politically sustainable without confronting Pakistan. We left because we set ourselves impossible missions at which we were destined to fail.