Implications of the Afghanistan disaster
The latest Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) webinar was given a pessimistic and damning account of the “Implications of the Afghanistan disaster” by resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and former Pentagon official Michael Rubin.
Rubin’s views are best summed up by his final words at the webinar, that “when it comes to, terrorism, I’m afraid we’ve just opened the flood gates. We have shown that jihadism works. We’ve shown that allying with the United States can be a lethal mistake. We’ve encouraged not only great powers, but lesser powers, to take pot shots at the United States and perhaps its allies…We need to be much more robust in our defence. We need to stop the moral equivalency which so blights our reactions in the United States and elsewhere. I mean the stakes have never been higher [than] right now. I can’t underline just how great a disaster strategically and morally this is and how we can’t even imagine the ramifications that are going to emerge.”
He explained that, prior to the US withdrawal, “What we had very much was just an amplifying presence of our troops, which formed the backbone and enabled the Afghan military to do what needed to be done to hold the Taliban at bay. And they had done so remarkably well.”
He said the US hadn’t needed to pull out, given more Americans were killed in car accidents in the US town of Bethesda (where Rubin lives) over the last five years than in Afghanistan, and financially, the cost was similar to the continuing US troop deployments in Germany, South Korea and Japan.
He dismissed Joe Biden’s claim that the Afghan forces lacked the will to fight, noting that 68,000 of them had died fighting the Taliban. However, the US had knee-capped the Afghan forces on the way out, while the Taliban continued to be supported by its patron, Pakistan, he said. The US had enabled the Afghans to fight by providing them logistics, medical evacuations, air support and intelligence, and the Afghans had been trained to fight with that support, which has now been withdrawn.
The quick collapse was also because people fight in Afghanistan when they feel they have momentum, so the armed forces chose not to. Also, for the last year, the Taliban had been making deals with Afghan military commanders and political chiefs, without US intelligence noticing.
However, he said, there is some military resistance to the Taliban, and if Afghanistan’s neighbours start helping those warlords, or others, the Taliban could also lose power.
He said no-one should believe the Taliban PR campaign that they were more moderate now, noting that they have been going door-to-door looking for the houses of Afghan Special Forces members, and killing them after raping their children.
He urged the US not to recognise the Taliban, and also to sanction Pakistan and Turkey as state sponsors of terrorism while supporting India militarily.
Rubin is concerned that US enemies, both countries and terror groups, will feel inspired and empowered by what they will see as the US defeat, while its allies, especially Taiwan, won’t be able to rely on it for security. He worries that the US Administration, not having understood the gravity of its errors in Afghanistan and the ramifications for its allies, will make the same mistake in Iraq, strengthening Iran and its militias there.
He said it’s important that America’s closest allies, including Australia, give the US a pep talk about staying engaged internationally and “hold its feet to the fire,” as Margaret Thatcher did when she urged George H W Bush, “Don’t go wobbly on me.”
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