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It shouldn’t have happened that way. That the government in Kabul collapsed and the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan even before the completion of the US and coalition military withdrawal made no sense. This was only supposed to have happened a few months, if not years after the withdrawal – according to, at least, according to what seemed to be the most relevant historical analogies: the American withdrawal from South Vietnam and the Soviet withdrawal from South Vietnam. Afghanistan.
The Withdrawal American forces in South Vietnam began in January 1973 and ended at the end of March 1973. Congress reduce (but did not interrupt) the administration’s request for military assistance in Saigon in 1974. South Vietnam fallen into the hands of the Marxists in April 1975 (as did Cambodia the same month and Laos shortly after). In other words, South Vietnam was able to survive a little over two years after the complete withdrawal of the United States.
USSR completed his withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, but Mikhail Gorbachev continued provide military assistance to the country’s Marxist regime even after the collapse of communism in 1989 in Eastern Europe. Boris Yeltsin, however, finished Russian arms deliveries shortly after the collapse of the USSR in December 1991. In the following April, the Afghan Marxist regime had fallen to his Mujahedin opponents. In this case, then, the besieged Moscow ally was able to survive for more than three years after the completion of the Soviet withdrawal.
So why did the US-backed government in Kabul not survive until the completion of the US withdrawal, let alone two or three years after it? Washington did not halt arms deliveries to Kabul, which already had many weapons supplied by the United States. Indeed, the United States agreement with the government in Kabul, Pakistan and Uzbekistan in July 2021 over continued economic relations appeared designed to keep U.S. arms supply routes open.
Pakistani support for the Taliban does not explain the difference either. soviet and chinese military support in Hanoi continued after the 1973 US withdrawal, but the Saigon government held on for two years while Pakistanis – and Americans –support for the mujahedin continued after the Soviet withdrawal of February 1989 and the Najibullah regime persisted for three years. Pakistan’s recent support for the Taliban alone therefore does not seem to explain the rapid fall of the Kabul government in 2021.
So what is that? Instead of looking at historical analogies that don’t match what just happened in Afghanistan, we should instead look for a more similar analogy. And there is one. Despite the many differences between the two cases, the most similar analogy to the recent collapse of the government in Kabul is perhaps the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.
In the summer of 1989, Gorbachev, the reformist Soviet leader who was battling hardline rivals in Moscow, signaled that the USSR was going do not use force defend the increasingly besieged hard-line communist regimes in Eastern Europe. It is not at all clear, however, that Gorbachev foresaw that this would lead to the rapid fall of communism and the emergence of pro-Western governments throughout the region soon after. While he undoubtedly understood that his statement would weaken Communist extremists in Eastern Europe, he seems to have been conceited enough to believe that they would be replaced by communist reformers like him, and that it would both earn the gratitude of the East European public and strengthen its own position in Moscow.
Once it became clear, however, not only that the Eastern European security services were unwilling to defend their communist regimes (with the exception of a part of them in Romania ) Against an overwhelming public demand for political change, Gorbachev faced a difficult choice: turn the tide and use them to preserve communist regimes or let them down. Not only was there no guarantee that the Soviet forces (which were still present in Eastern Europe) could have won quickly against the anti-Communist opposition, but even this attempt would have ended Gorbachev’s detente with the West and perhaps even its pursuit of ambitious reforms in the USSR.
Indeed, Gorbachev was undoubtedly well aware of how the reform efforts of Nikita Khrushchev in the mid-1950s and (admittedly more anemic) Alexei Kosygin in the mid-1960s led to the rise of opposition. nationalization under the communist regime in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 respectively. Not only were Soviet forces used to forcefully crush these movements and put control back on more reliable Communist leaders, the need to do so helped to question Khrushchev’s leadership by several of his colleagues in 1957. and to win the harder line of Leonid Brezhnev. precedence over Kosygin, more reformist. These are the historical analogies that Gorbachev may have had in mind in 1989.
The situation Gorbachev faced in Eastern Europe in 1989 was therefore very similar to the one Joe Biden faced in Afghanistan in 2021: allowing (one or more) regimes that turned out to be more vulnerable than expected. to collapse or to use massive force to support him (them). Such an effort would have been extremely difficult, costly, and a distraction from what every leader saw as more important domestic and foreign policy priorities. Gorbachev and Biden both chose the first course of action.
Historical analogies, of course, don’t necessarily unfold exactly. The question now is whether the recent fall of the government in Kabul will spill over into the fall of other governments such as the collapse of the first Polish communist regime. Cascade in the deaths of others in Eastern Europe in 1989. Jihadists in many countries have certainly taken to heart how the success of the Taliban in Afghanistan increases their chances of doing so in their own country. Yet if the precipitated cause of the Taliban’s recent victory was the US withdrawal, it does not seem likely that something similar will happen in any of Afghanistan’s immediate neighbors. Russia is already signage its desire to defend the republics of Central Asia, China is not going to withdraw of Xinjiang, and Shiite-ruled Iran has shown its willingness to repress any Sunni opposition group within its borders. While the Pakistani armed forces supported the Afghan Taliban, they also fought vigorously to contain the Pakistani Taliban and other anti-government jihadist groups. Equally important, the Taliban now claim want good relationship with Afghanistan’s neighbors.
However, where the withdrawal of foreign forces could lead to the rise of jihadists, it is in the Sahelian countries of Africa. If the French forces present there withdraw in 2022 as President Emmanuel Macron did indicated, relatively weak government forces (such as those in the government in Kabul) may not be able to prevent the jihadists from seizing parts or even all of these countries. But of course that could have happened even if the Taliban had not returned to power in Afghanistan. Because at the end of the day, it’s not what happened before in one country or another that determines what will happen now in a given country, but what the conditions are in that country right now. . Historical analogies from the past are only useful to indicate what might happen in the present and the future, but not necessarily what will happen.
Mark N. Katz is Professor of Government and Policy at the George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government, and Senior Non-Resident Researcher at the Atlantic Council.
Picture: Wikipedia.
