Why afghanistan matters

Indian development initiatives in Afghanistan experienced a hiatus while the Taliban ruled Kabul, during which time New Delhi supported the non-Pashtun Northern Alliance as a strategic imperative. But with the ouster of the Taliban in , India enthusiastically resumed and expanded reconstruction and development programming throughout Afghanistan. To be sure, the Indian agenda is not devoid of political and economic motivations.

Incentives include security and access to trade, transit, and energy resources. In the recently released World Development Report , the World Bank emphasises the need to introduce creative mechanisms for revitalising socio-economic and political institutions that are both sympathetic to local realities and novel in their approach. It has been acknowledged that, due largely to the risk-averse nature of development programming amongst donor countries as well as international and non-governmental organisations, efforts in this direction have been fairly unsuccessful.

But evidence and logic reveal the faultiness of this assumption. Western aid workers on the ground were not blind to these flaws: in interviews, multiple donor officials observed that Afghan citizens and government officials could be extremely resourceful at communicating when the stakes warranted them doing so and when the power dynamics in question allowed it. Program design continually failed to acknowledge that any missing connection or linkage was not due to inadequate communication facilitation or the result of Afghans not knowing how to talk to one another—instead, the lack of connection often reflected deeper political obstacles.

A second recurrent flaw was that foreign aid programs aimed to build the capacity of district and provincial councils even though these bodies lacked defined authorities. The subsequent surge years witnessed a proliferation of international local governance experts cajoling provincial officials through exercises on citizen consultation and project prioritization to improve the responsiveness of local government officials. The situation at the district level evolved into an even more acute problem.

Despite being mandated in the constitution, district councils were never elected due to various political, logistical, financial, and security challenges. Yet Western officials felt an imperative to install some district-level consultative bodies, ostensibly to improve local accountability and to check the power of the Kabul-appointed district governors.

Thus, the international community set up two major constellations of quasi—district councils—both without any formal legal mandate. They are delivered through programmes that create temporary structures, rather than achieving their results through real institutional development and reform. For years, various notions of how to convert district development assemblies into official district councils were discussed. But ultimately the idea did not take root: the Ghani administration insisted that district council elections would be held soon after its inauguration in By the time that government fled in , the wait was still ongoing.

Finally, Western efforts seemed to principally concentrate on enhancing skills that would make Afghans ideal recipients of donor aid rather than on strengthening capabilities more relevant to local Afghan political life.

Despite the objective of building capacity, donor projects seemed to focus more on replicating Western constructs—thus potentially compounding and perpetuating dependency.

In the immediate term, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has deluged the international community with urgent priorities. But alongside addressing these urgent concerns, the international community must also take stock of the decades-long transformational agenda it pursued in Afghanistan.

It should reap some lessons learned as well—and to this end, the story of subnational governance aid is one part of a broader tale. Further, looking beyond Afghanistan, the international community will likely continue to turn to local governance initiatives as part of stabilization efforts in conflict-affected and fragile states. So-called grassroots, bottom-up governance programs are often seen as a panacea to minimize the influence of problematic central governments or as a much-needed antidote to top-down solutions in fragmented, pluralistic societies.

And could he have persuaded the American people that we needed to stay and to actually plus up our troops? I don't know.

I doubt it. Clearly, his heart wasn't in such a public relations campaign, so I think he did face an extraordinarily difficult decision. And yet, you know, for my money, I think he probably made the right one given the choices he faced. Sorry, Michael. I know what I think this could be, 2, And that's based on conversations with some of the most senior generals involved in this. Bear in mind, 2, would be our figure. We have allies who were still there, still putting up a fight, and there were other elements of the US government actively working the target sets.

I think it could have could have held had the decision been made to maybe delay a bit. You probably could've negotiated that with the Taliban. And I've seen other people say, had they just pushed the departure into the winter months, it could have enabled some time gap separation between our departure potentially and the collapse that ensued.

But to do it at the height of the fighting season, with the Taliban in full vigor, especially when that was being telegraphed to us with the collapse of all the provinces, I think just was - this was a bad decision. I don't think that's fair to those soldiers to do that.

We're talking about a very large percentage of the American public that was just done with this thing.

I mean, you make a good point, Michael. I mean, the vast majority of the American public wanted out. Even after what happened, the majority now also think it was done probably poorly or handled poorly, the departure, but they're still overwhelmingly supportive of being gone. So to your point, that's right, the president had that going for him and was responding to the problems of the American public. So I agree with those points. I find it hard to believe, knowing what has happened, that people don't wish they could revise this decision a little bit, given the cost to America and the world.

We'll just have to see over time. Both Phil and Mike have said that it happened faster than foreseen. We've heard that repeatedly from the administration and the Pentagon, including this week in testimony, that there was no intelligence indicating Kabul would fall in 11 days. Secretary Austin said it was a 'surprise' and it would be 'dishonest to claim otherwise. So does that suggest - and this is to you, Michael Morell -does that suggest that there was a shortcoming in the intelligence?

Assuming that level of precision wasn't there should it have been offered by the IC? That's a very important judgment. And I haven't seen the evolution of that judgment, post-announcement in April through early August. So I don't know what the intelligence community said. I find it hard to believe that the intelligence community got this as wrong, as some people have said.

I'd be shocked at that. In fact, I've - while I haven't seen it, I've heard people say, people who know, say that at least the CIA still feels pretty good about the judgments that it made in terms of the judgment that was made prior to the president's decision. I think one of the things you have to think about is, let's say they said a year, right? Let's say they said six months. I don't know what they said, but let's just say for the sake of argument, they said a year.

The question becomes, when does the clock start ticking? When does that year start? Is it when the last boot leaves the ground? Is it when the first boot leaves the ground? I think it's when the president made the decision, because that's when the psychology changed for everybody in Afghanistan. It was the moment - when the president made the decision in April, it was the moment when the Taliban knew that it was going to win, and it was the moment when the Afghan government knew that it was going to lose.

And if you looked at what happened right in in the immediate aftermath of that announcement, the Taliban accelerated the extent to which they were surrounding provincial capitals. Nobody should be surprised with what they intended to do when they were surrounding those provincial capitals. The number of desertions among Afghan security forces skyrocketed after the announcement. They either went home or they flipped to the Taliban.

And it should be no surprise to anybody that the Afghan senior Afghan government leaders would start thinking about saving their own necks. And I saw the first two things publicly, so that was no secret, and I'd be shocked if the intelligence community didn't see the third one as well. So I think there's a little blame game going on here. People are always very quick to throw the intelligence community under the bus.

Last point I would make is, throughout the history of the 20 years, CIA was by far, by far, the most pessimistic agency about how the war was going. We did two annual reports. We did an annual report called the District Assessments, where we looked at who controlled which district and whether the Taliban controlled it, whether the government controlled it, or whether it was contested.

And we also did an annual report on the Afghan security forces and their capabilities and will to fight. And we were always pessimistic in every single case. And in every case that I was involved in as a senior leader, both as the head of analysis at CIA and then as the deputy director, the United States military pushed back really hard on these assessments, saying, "You're wrong, your analysts aren't on the ground.

They don't understand the progress we're making. Do you think it's fairly described as an intelligence failure? And then can you address a little bit of what Michael was just laying out, which is, there was a fair amount of public messaging about this, that there was a divergence between what the CIA was saying, what the DIA assessments were, about the resiliency of Afghan forces.

The fact that the CIA's were routinely pessimistic by comparison. How much would that or should that divergence of views have affected the choices that policymakers were making? And I don't see how one could call this an intelligence failure.

You know, you start with the knowledge that we're concerned about the durability, how the country might devolve into civil war. That was certainly a plausible scenario. But again, you have the examples of in both Iraq and Yemen about how quickly militaries we had invested in a lot could collapse.

And it's not because of force ratios or anything else, but psychology is what really drives this. And often how our militaries break up. And then, as Michael said, as you walk from April to August, we're on policy autopilot, but the world is not standing still for us.

You have a bunch of events that are showing you that things may be much worse than you think and you ought to be able to adapt to that. And then third, it's not possible for intelligence to tell you that Kabul is going to fall in 10 days. So if you start escalating, what could happen from, say, six months to 30 days? That's a big red light blinking for policymakers. And policymakers live in a world of imperfect intelligence and they have to make decisions.

So to lay the blame on intelligence or, for that matter, on the Afghans, I think, is honestly disingenuous. This whole, 'Nobody told me that Kabul was going to fall in 11 days' line is a total red herring, right? It didn't fall in 11 days. It literally started falling after we reduced our forces after the surge.

And it took a big upward tick in falling after President Trump made his deal with the Taliban and then took a bigger leap forward in falling after President Biden made his announcement. So this didn't happen in 11 days.

And people shouldn't be using that line, right? It's catchy, but it's just not accurate. When those district assessments and those Afghan security assessments from CIA came out, I would be the face of it to the military and you would take a lot of heat because - oftentimes in a good-natured way - but they were diametrically opposed in terms of their thoughts on the readiness of the Afghan security forces.

And I didn't read all of them, but I perused quite a few of them and [they were] very, very negative assessments, scathing at times, on the readiness levels of the Afghan security forces.

And that's over time. And that may be the nature of inspector generals. But people saw this coming and knew this was happening and it was being reported in many channels. MICHAEL MORELL: Can I just say one more thing, Olivia, - I'm probably screwing up your time here - but just as importantly, I think the intelligence community is being blamed here because I think there was a real policy failure, not necessarily in the decision to leave, but in effectuating that decision, right, in the implementation of that decision - maybe we can talk about that next.

But what I wanted to say was back in , when President Obama was trying to figure out what his stay-behind force number was going to be after the drawdown from the surge. And Mike you know how many deputy's meetings and principals meetings and NSC meetings we had with the president on that.

It seemed to go on forever. I prepped for every one of those, and in one of those prep sessions, I actually asked everybody in my office, all of the experts, the analysts and the operations officers: If we left, how long would it take for Kabul to fall? And you know, various people thought a little bit longer - year, year and a half, some people had caveats on it. But the two people at CIA who had spent more time in Afghanistan than anybody else, two chiefs of station who had both served twice as chief of station, and Phil and Mike might know who they are, they both said without hesitation, "Kabul will fall in less than six months.

For three thousand years, armies have struggled through these rocky defiles and camped in its valleys. You can still see the insignia of regiments from the British and British Indian armies, which continue to be carefully maintained, along the sides of the road, overlooked by the forts they once built and guarded.

From the rocks above, Pashtun tribesmen armed with ancient jezails, or flintlock rifles, would snipe at passing soldiers with amazing accuracy. Nowadays trucks laden with agricultural produce from Afghanistan labour round the sharp bends, sometimes with men and boys clinging to the side of them for the ride. On the pathways beside the road, old men trudge along, bent double under boxes of smuggled goods. Several years ago the Pakistani authorities completely revamped it.

Now the crowds waiting there are better marshalled than they used to be, but there's an atmosphere of fear and urgency as people try to escape from Afghanistan's new rulers, the Taliban.

You can see them from the Pakistani side, crowding together behind the wire in the midday heat, waving their documents and begging to be allowed through. For the most part, only people who have permission to leave Afghanistan on medical grounds can cross, together with their families.

The long line, cluttered with wheelchairs and suitcases, shuffles slowly forward through the various checkpoints. On the road, where the actual border runs, a couple of Pakistani soldiers stand face to face with Taliban guards wearing makeshift uniforms. The Taliban had no objection to talking to me.

I asked one of them, a big man with a bushy beard covered by a face-mask, why the national green and red flag of Afghanistan wasn't flying over the border post.

It has been replaced by the white flag of the Taliban, inscribed with the Shahada, the basic statement of the Muslim faith: "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His messenger.