The U.S. Defeat in Afghanistan

After two decades of war and occupation, the U.S. has officially withdrawn from Afghanistan. While much of the U.S. media attention has focused on the abject sloppiness of the withdrawal and evacuation of U.S. citizens and Afghan civilians and collaborators, the truth is that this sloppiness was not an exception, but typical of the way in which the U.S. waged the war and carried out the occupation of Afghanistan from the very beginning.¹ The inability of the U.S. ruling class to secure basic strategic objectives and develop a stable client state—despite spending trillions of dollars over twenty years—shows their overall decadence as a class.² The moribund state of U.S. imperialism is on display for all the world to see. Now, as the U.S. withdraws, the Taliban has indicated that they hope to pursue a closer relationship with the Chinese government—the main imperialist rival to the U.S.—although the exact nature of the Taliban’s relationship with China is still somewhat in flux.³

Many in the International Communist Movement have noted that the defeat of the U.S. shows that a people who refuse to be controlled by a foreign aggressor cannot be held down forever. This is certainly true. However, the Taliban is not a revolutionary entity; they are a reactionary Pashtun-chauvinist force of bourgeois compradors and feudals. They practice a right-wing form of Islam and are working to impose Sharia law throughout the country, creating a chauvinist theocracy. While they played a leading role in defeating the U.S. imperialist occupation, referring to the will of the Afghan people is not sufficient to explain the victory of the Taliban. What’s more, the Taliban won the war in part through a series of alliances crafted with warlords who were formerly allied with the U.S.⁴

To really get a sense of what happened in Afghanistan, and to understand why the U.S. imperialists were unable to secure even their most basic objectives in the country, it is necessary to examine the contradictions internal to the U.S. war effort in general, and between the military and other agencies of the U.S. government in particular. From the start, the U.S. did not have a clear military plan for the invasion of Afghanistan, let alone a comprehensive strategy for setting up a client state that would secure U.S. corporate interests in the country. In fact, from the very first months of the war, different agencies within the government struggled to coordinate on basic tasks, while many within the military repeatedly complained about a lack of any sort of coherent strategy or military objectives beyond orders to “kill the terrorists.” What’s more, many within the U.S. military leadership were too distracted with planning for world war against Russia and China to be bothered with the details of the War in Afghanistan. They failed to grasp, on a basic level, the relationship between U.S. efforts to control Afghanistan and the growing inter-imperialist competition globally, and how establishing a stable client state in Central Asia would have aided their efforts to counter the rise of China.

This confusion was not just about the basic strategy in Afghanistan but also extended to the U.S.’s inability to clearly evaluate its own allies. For example, the U.S. was unwilling to look closely at the role of the Saudi Government in 9/11, and remains unwilling to do so even to this day. Additionally, the U.S. worked closely with Pakistan in Afghanistan under the mistaken belief that because Pakistan was willing to help fight Al Qaeda, they were also helping to defeat the Taliban. In reality, the Pakistani government was working closely with the Taliban to secure their own interests in Afghanistan throughout the entire U.S. invasion and occupation.

The U.S. was also unable to successfully coordinate their military operations with USAID and various related NGO efforts to stabilize their puppet regime in Kabul. USAID and other parts of the State Department were often simply unwilling to coordinate their efforts on the most basic level with the Afghan Government, even when it involved things like road building and developing agricultural production. This led to a patchwork approach to building basic industry and infrastructure, with many of these programs directly benefiting the Taliban, for example, money that the U.S. government spent building roads often ended up being paid to the Taliban.

These problems were never resolved, and over the twenty years of the U.S. occupation they only intensified as the U.S. faced setback after setback. Incapable of understanding their mistakes or addressing the complex problems in Afghanistan, the U.S. ruling class threw more and more money at the problem, hoping in vain that quantity would transform into quality.

Their efforts failed to secure their basic interests in Afghanistan, and they have been forced to withdraw and are now increasingly focused on inter-imperialist competition with Russia and China. However, the war in Afghanistan as well as the withdrawal were carried out in ways that damaged the U.S. imperialists' abilities to effectively compete with their rivals. This is not only because the withdrawal from Afghanistan complicates U.S. plans to encircle China in the region, but also because the sloppiness of the U.S. exit left many of their lackeys worried that they will likewise be abandoned by the U.S. should they face a similar crisis in the future.

The issues in Afghanistan are not unique to how the U.S. government wages war; they reflect the growing dysfunction of a government which increasingly struggles to accomplish basic tasks in the interests of the ruling class.⁵ This is the result of a longer-term trend towards greater freedom for companies, as well as individual departments and agencies within the state, to pursue their own interests even when they go against the overall interests of the U.S. state and the ruling class as a whole. This is closely related to deep divides within different departments in the state, where departmentalism is the norm, not the exception. For example, intelligence agencies only begrudgingly share information with each other, as they compete with each other for prestige and funding.⁶ This has created serious issues for the ruling class not only in military campaigns, but also in competition with rival imperialist powers, and has also led to a series of missteps in working with allied countries. That being said, the U.S. is still the most powerful imperialist country in the world. While internal decadence, incompetence, and corruption hamper the ruling class’s efforts, their strength should not be understated.

With the U.S. empire on the decline, these contradiction are bound to intensify. As the U.S. weakens relative to China, and with the world economy now in the early stages of a prolonged depression, competition internal to the U.S. capitalist class will only continue to increase as they fight for “their share” of a shrinking pie. While there are some efforts to rein in U.S. capitalists' abilities to go against their class interest as a whole—as well as related efforts to combat bureaucratic inertia and departmentalism within the state—these are patchwork initiatives at best, and they face sharp resistance from powerful capitalists, officials, and bureaucrats.

The spectacular defeat of the U.S. in Afghanistan provides a window into the larger disorder and buffoonery that increasingly characterizes the daily functioning of the U.S. state. It is important for communists in the U.S. and around the world to closely analyze the sharpening contradictions within the U.S. state, and the related factors that are contributing to the relative decline of U.S. imperialism globally. This document is a modest attempt to sum up some of these dynamics through an analysis of the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. defeat shows the growing inability of the U.S. state to secure objectives, but at the same time they are far from collapse. They have a powerful military and are in command of a global financial system. However, as inter-imperialist competition intensifies, their inability to set up proper client states points to their global decline and indicates that they will be poorly equipped to deal both with the complexities of competition with China as well as the rising tide of anti-imperialist and communist movements.

“Kill People and Break Things”

There is a saying in military circles that the U.S. lost in Vietnam because it was “fighting the last war” and not the current one. The basic idea is that the U.S. military was trying to fight in Vietnam as they had in World War II, and that the “Green Machine” failed to adapt its strategy and tactics to the realities of a large-scale guerrilla war. Although by itself insufficient to explain the defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam, this assessment rings true in many respects.

One would assume that, given the resounding defeat handed to the U.S. by the Vietnamese people, there must have been some serious reflection and reorganization of the military to prepare it for future wars of this nature, and overcome ideological stagnation within its ranks. However, this was far from the case. In the wake of their defeat, many within the military felt that Vietnam was a kind of conflict that they would never fight again. This was a strange assessment given the recent history of counter-insurgencies (e.g. U.S. in the Philippines, British in Malaysia, Japan in China, and numerous others in the 20^th^ century alone), but this lack of foresight and objectivity is typical among the U.S. imperialists, not exceptional. Many in the military preferred planning for an apocalyptic third world war with the Soviet Union⁷ to taking take a cold, hard look at the reasons for their defeat in Vietnam. So, they did not bother to develop new strategies for counter-insurgency, and unsurprisingly they approached the war in Afghanistan with the same arrogance and lack of basic planning or understanding of the country they were invading.

Despite this arrogance in the military, there were some U.S. officials who were somewhat less stupid. These officials tried to assess what went wrong in the U.S. efforts to conquer Vietnam, and figure out how to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger’s famous speech The Uses of Military Power is an example of one such attempt. In it, he said that the United States “should have clearly defined [its] political and military objectives” before going to war and “should know precisely how [its] forces can accomplish those clearly defined objectives."⁸ And yet, less than three decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. charged headlong into Afghanistan, repeating all of these mistakes, and making a few new ones along the way.

From the start, the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan was plagued by issues, despite the apparent success of the invasion. The U.S. state lacked a clear strategy in the war, had poorly defined objectives, and was fundamentally confused about the basic social realities in Afghanistan. The Washington Post’s reporting on the Afghanistan Papers shows that many officials and military leaders retrospectively noted that “they adopted fatally flawed warfighting strategies based on misguided assumptions about a country they did not understand."⁹ Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, put it more bluntly in his discussions with government interviewers: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing […] What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."¹⁰

Lute’s frank assessment of the basic failures of the war is not unique. Dozens of others within the government and military shared a similar view of the war when they were interviewed in an internal government assessment carried out by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) between 2014 and 2018. However, long before these interviews, officials were well aware of the issues in the war and related efforts to build a stable U.S. client state in Afghanistan.

A review of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s internal memos from the early years of the war show just how inept and disorganized the U.S. plan for the war was from the very beginning. On April 17, 2002 Rumsfeld wrote to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith and a number of generals. His remarks show the total disarray in the U.S. war effort in the initial months:

I may be impatient. In fact, I know I’m a bit impatient. But the fact that Iran and Russia have plans for Afghanistan and we don’t concerns me. I keep getting an answers that “the Deputies are working on it.” Well I can’t believe that it takes many months to figure it out.

If this were something the DoD could do alone, we could get it done. Apparently it is not something that requires an interagency process. Once it goes into the interagency process, it stinks out of sight.

What do you propose we do? How do we get control of the levers so that we can influence what’s going on? How do we decide what ought to happen, and then get all the military, diplomatic, humanitarian threats coming through the needle-head? […]

We are never are going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave.¹¹

These remarks—and many of Rumsfeld’s other memos—show that from the start the U.S. had no clear plan or long-term strategy in Afghanistan, and that many who were leading the war effort were aware of this and the dangers posed by this lack of strategic thinking. And yet, Rumsfeld and others were unable to resolve these basic issues. The memo also highlights the difficulties in coordinating between different government agencies, reflecting the deep divides within the U.S. state. This was a constant reality in Afghanistan, with agencies failing to coordinate on a basic level and often working at cross purposes.

Rumsfeld’s view that if the DoD was going at it alone they would be able to handle the situation better should be viewed with some skepticism. This reflects the typical arrogance within the military, an example of the departmentalism and stupidity of those who believe that it was possible to control Afghanistan by military force alone.¹² The challenges of interagency coordination only heightened the DoD’s disdain for working closely with other agencies, and many in the military came to view it as little more than an annoyance. And yet, despite their complaints about other government agencies, the U.S. military hardly had anything worthy of being called a strategy in Afghanistan.

Army Lt. Gen. Dan McNeill, who was commander of U.S. forces in the early part of the Afghan War, noted that even within the military “there was no campaign plan in the early days, in 2002,” and that “the instructions were to kill terrorists and build the ANA [Afghan National Army]. Also, don’t fracture the alliance, and that was it. There was no NATO campaign. There was lot of verbiage[…] There was no campaign plan. It just wasn’t there."¹³

This basic strategy of “kill terrorists” was similar to the “kill anything that moves” strategy the U.S. military employed in Vietnam; it amounted to little more than indiscriminate slaughter of the Afghan people.¹⁴ Lieutenant General Michael Flynn noted in his SIGAR interview that basically every single battalion and brigade commander in the Afghan War for years had the same mission (to kill terrorists), and when they finished their rotations they all reported “mission accomplished,” perhaps seeking to emulate Bush’s infamous announcement.¹⁵ Drone pilots were given similarly brutish training with instructors telling them that “your job is to kill people and break things” and the standard operating procedure was to kill civilians first and ask questions later, with many civilian deaths never being officially recorded.¹⁶ This indiscriminate slaughter only served to turn the Afghan population more and more against the U.S. imperialist occupation.

This initial lack of a clear plan in the military was related to the overall disorganization of the U.S. state. During his campaign Bush had promised not to “nation-build,” and in the first few years of the war his administration was hesitant to open the money spigots or develop an overall plan for cultivating a client state in Afghanistan. In fact during 2002, the European Union provided around double as much aid money to Afghanistan as the U.S. did.¹⁷ The CIA worked to fill this vacuum. They handed out huge sums of weapons and money to the Northern Alliance and other warlords, with whom they had long-standing ties dating back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. These warlords were heavily involved in opium production, the child sex trade, and other black-marketeering which would flourish after the invasion. This dependence on regional warlords undermined the strength of the client state set up in Kabul, and facilitated the rapid growth of opium production which quickly became the staple of the economy.

After initial setbacks in Afghanistan, high ranking members of the military grew increasing uninterested in fighting the war. Many in the Department of Defense saw preparing for World War III with Russia and China as “the real deal,” and considered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as little more than a distraction. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates elaborated on this dynamic in his memoir Duty (in a chapter titled “Waging War on the Pentagon”):

Beginning in the spring of 2007, I resolved to make senior civilian and military leaders in the Pentagon lower their eyes from future potential wars and turn aside from day-to-day politics and bureaucratic routine to focus on the wars right in front of them, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Effectively waging war on our enemies on those battlefields would also require successfully waging war on the Pentagon itself. […]

All the services regarded the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as unwelcome military aberrations, the kind of conflict we would never fight again—just the way they felt after Vietnam. The services all wanted to get back to training and equipping our forces for the kinds of conflict in the future they had always planned for: for the Army, conventional force-on-force conflicts against nation-states with large ground formations; for the Marine Corps, a light, mobile force operating from ships and focused on amphibious operations; for the Navy, conventional maritime operations on the high seas centered on aircraft carriers; for the Air Force, high-tech air-to-air combat and strategic bombing against major nation-states.

The truth is that the U.S. state has done a very poor job planning for the rise of China as its major strategic rival. Before 9/11 the Bush administration was developing some basic plans to contain China’s rise, but these were scrapped after 9/11 when the U.S. charged headlong into Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, under the Obama administration, a series of plans were developed to withdraw significant numbers of U.S. troops from the Middle East and engage in a “Pivot to the Pacific” to focus more of the state’s resources on inter-imperialist competition with China. However, throughout this whole period the Obama administration and the Pentagon failed to grasp the relationship between these wars and the competition with China and Russia.¹⁸

After the U.S. invasions, when insurgencies began in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. fell back on the Marines' Small Wars Manual—which was written in 1940 and does not account for the capabilities of a modern military or related developments in insurgencies since the early 20^th^ century—to guide the strategy, such as it was, for counter-insurgency. Even when both wars were going south for the U.S. imperialists, many within the military had little interest in making basic adjustments to the overall strategy. A bureaucratic inertia in these departments was described by Gates as a “peacetime mentality”: an unwillingness or inability of the generals and admirals to grasp the basic reality of the fact that they were in fact fighting wars and that the stakes of those wars had implications for the future of U.S. imperialism. Michael Flynn, in his SIGAR interview, contrasted the approach taken in World War II, when the U.S. military trained around 2,000 members of the military to speak Japanese, with the approach taken in Afghanistan, where they failed to train even five people to speak Dari (the numbers of people they trained for other languages spoke in Afghanistan were similarly abysmal). He noted that the one general who spoke Dari was self-taught and was only in Afghanistan for a few months in the Summer of 2009, before he was transferred to Japan.¹⁹

Given the fact that China now controls the majority of the oil production in Iraq, that Iran also has huge influence in the country, and that the Taliban are now at least partially aligning with China as well, the shortsightedness and stupidity of these military leaders is now on display for all the world to see. Their neglect of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—which they justified by planning for World War III—has weakened their position internationally and allowed the Chinese imperialists to develop significant influence in these regions as a direct result of the U.S. ruling class' arrogance and idiocy.

Narcotics, Corruption, and Departmentalism

The CIA has a long history of involvement in and control of the international drug trade,²⁰ and has for decades used this as a source of revenue outside of the control of Congress. They have been involved in every aspect: production, distribution, smuggling, and sales. In Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan (known together as the Golden Crescent of opium production) the CIA has played a central role in poppy production and the heroin trade. After the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979—who had worked closely with the CIA to promote opium production and consumption in Iran—the CIA saw collaboration with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan as a key way to recover their lost production from Iran (the new Islamic regime took a hardline stance against opium and other drugs) while simultaneously countering growing Soviet influence in the region. They worked closely with the Pakistani government to get this opium and heroin to international markets, and the Mujahideen used some of this revenue to purchase hundreds of millions of dollars of American weapons through intermediaries in the Pakistani military.²¹

However, after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, internecine warfare broke out between the various warlords in the Mujahideen, and the Taliban ultimately emerged victorious. In line with their interpretation of Sharia law (and also in a bid to receive international aid from the U.S. and IMF), the Taliban worked to systematically eliminate poppy fields and opium production across the entire country. By early 2001 there was almost no opium production in Afghanistan according to both UN and U.S. inspectors.²² However, the U.S. invasion opened the door for a revival of the drug trade, with opium production in Afghanistan going from 185 tons in 2001 to 8,200 tons by 2007, and 9,900 tons by 2019.²³ By the mid-2000s, Afghanistan produced around 90% of the non-pharmaceutical-grade opiates in the world. This shift was supported by the CIA, working closely with their long-time allies, the warlords of the “Northern Alliance,” many of whom were integral to CIA drug smuggling rings during the 1980s.²⁴

The CIA’s influence in Afghanistan was not limited to the drug trade; it went to the highest levels of the government. Hamid Karzai, who became the first leader of the U.S.-backed puppet state, had a long-standing relationship with the CIA during his exile in Pakistan in the 1990s. Immediately after 9/11 he was solicited by the CIA to play a central role in Afghanistan after the upcoming U.S. invasion. Once the war began, the CIA worked with Army Special Forces to bring Karzai into the country and set him up as the President of Afghanistan.²⁵

Given the skyrocketing growth of poppy production in Afghanistan, many elected officials in the U.S. came under intense public pressure to show quick results in eradicating opium production, as it was hard to sell the American people the lie that the U.S. had brought freedom and democracy to Afghanistan when the invasion had so obviously turned the country into one of the largest producers of narcotics in the world. They tried a series of ham-fisted responses, including paying farmers to burn poppy fields—which lead to many peasants planting poppy fields just to burn them and receive the cash payment—and hiring 1,200 security contractors (including mercenaries from South Africa, veterans of the Balkan wars, and Gurkha soldiers from Nepal) to eradicate poppy largely by walking through the fields with sticks and hitting the buds off the plants.²⁶ Needless to say, these strategies were not very effective. The U.S. government spent billions of dollars on these programs, but opium production in Afghanistan continued to soar to ever increasing heights, in large part because the CIA and nearly everyone in the Afghan government were heavily involved in the drug trade.²⁷

While this enriched warlords and drug traffickers, and helped the CIA pad their off-the-books budget, it undermined the ability of the U.S. imperialists to establish an effective client state in Afghanistan. In 2006 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that 52% of the country’s GDP came from the drug trade.²⁸ In this same period, 80-90% of the heroin consumed in the U.S. was produced in Afghanistan.²⁹ The drug trade was closely connected to the hawala system, a traditional Islamic network of money transfer agents in Afghanistan and around the Muslim world.³⁰ The U.S. state department estimated in this period that 80% of all Afghan financial transactions were conducted through the hawala system.

This situation is not so unique and is actually part of long standing pattern in which the CIA, as well as others in the U.S. state, work closely with drug cartels to secure some U.S. state interests (e.g. working with the Contras to crush the Sandinistas in Nicaragua) and line the agency’s pockets. However, turning puppet regimes into narco-states does not foster long-term—or often even short-term—stability. Turning the country into the main supplier of opium and heroin to the world worked at cross purposes to other U.S. state endeavors to develop Afghanistan into a stable base for extracting rare earth metals and projecting U.S. power across the region.³¹

One key figure in the drug trade was Hamid Karzai’s half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, who ran the city of Kandahar and much of Southern Afghanistan and was a well known CIA asset.³² Hamid was relatively impotent politically and heavily dependent on the protection of U.S. forces to travel outside his presidential palace. In contrast, Ahmed Wali was a major power broker in the country, had a series of paramilitary forces under his personal command (including the CIA-trained Kandahar Strike Force, notoriously one of the most brutal forces in the country), and was referred to as “The Godfather” by many in the U.S. army because of his huge role in the heroin trade, child sex trafficking, smuggling operations, and more.³³ A 2006 U.S. embassy cable described Ahmed Wali to the State Department in D.C.:

As the kingpin of Kandahar, the President’s younger half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai (AWK) dominates access to economic resources, patronage, and protection. Much of the real business of running Kandahar takes place out of public sight, where AWK operates, parallel to formal government structures, through a network of political clans that use state institutions to protect and enable licit and illicit enterprises. The overriding purpose that unifies his political roles as Chairman of the Kandahar Provincial Council and as the President’s personal representative to the South is the enrichment, extension and perpetuation of the Karzai clan, and along with it their branch of the Popalzai tribe. This applies equally to his entrepreneurial and his alleged criminal activities. AWK derives authority and legitimacy from his relationship to President Karzai, from the relative discipline and elite position of the Popalzai tribe and from this access to resources. In Kandahar’s political realm, he is the unrivaled strongman.

In this and many other cables the Embassy recommended that Ahmed Wali be dismissed and banished from Afghanistan. Many in the military and DEA agreed; they saw him as a key obstacle to establishing a stable client state subordinate to U.S. interests, instead of what they were actually building: a narco-state run by unreliable elements who put personal enrichment above all else and could not easily be reined in.

During the early years of the Obama presidency, Ahmed Wali was seen by many in the administration as the key obstacle to U.S. efforts in Southern Afghanistan. After some deliberation, the administration decided that he had to go. However, even when the Pentagon, the DEA, the State Department, and others (including the British Military) combined forces through an International Security Assistance Force³⁴ (ISAF) investigation led by Generals McCrystal and Flynn as well as American diplomat Bill Harris, they were unable to oust Ahmed Wali from his de facto rule of Southern Afghanistan. After more than a year of investigation, in March 2010, the investigation into Ahmed Wali folded, nominally because of lack of evidence of his role in illegal activities.

This was in large part because the CIA supported him by refusing to share intelligence on Ahmed Wali’s role in the drug trade and other illicit activities with the ISAF investigators. Bill Harris noted that “what went unsaid was that a really in-depth excavation of this guy’s life and past would of course unearth his CIA connections, and I think that’s what really put the brakes on any serious investigation."³⁵ The CIA worked closely with Ahmed Wali from the start of the war, and any serious investigation of his involvement in the drug trade and other organized criminal activities would potentially implicate the CIA, or at least damage their highly profitable ventures in these fields. They also stood to lose a valuable asset and collaborator.

After the ISAF failed to oust Ahmed Wali, the Obama administration decided that they had no choice but to work more closely with him at every level. Within months Ahmed Wali went from being the target of a major criminal investigation to the closest collaborator for the U.S. in Southern Afghanistan. This shift came despite years of assessments from the State Department and others that Ahmed Wali was a major obstacle to U.S. state and corporate interests. He was consulted on everything from the sentiments of rural Afghan villages to plans for major military offensives against the Taliban. At each stage, Ahmed Wali provided advice aimed primarily at enriching himself and expanding his influence. Needless to say, his advice was not regularly helpful to the U.S. imperialists, and impeded their ability to understand the situation in the country and carry out successful military operations.

During this period it was estimated that each year $3-4 billion in cash and gold was smuggled out of the country, most of it bound for bank accounts in the UAE, through the Kandahar airport, which was at the time under Ahmed Wali’s direct control. This number dwarfed the total revenue of the government of Afghanistan which amounted to around $250 million per year at the time. Much of this money leaving the country was American aid to the war and nation building effort; “aid” of which, it is estimated, around half disappeared through corruption of one form or another.

While corruption is a standard part of any imperialist effort, losing 50 cents on every dollar spent in a war effort to bribes, skim, and other forms of corruption is a tremendous waste, even by U.S. standards. Ahmed Wali played a central role in this corruption, especially in Southern Afghanistan. When the U.S. ruling class came to the conclusion that it made sense to stop working with him and find a cheaper and more compliant lackey, they were prevented from doing so by the CIA, which placed its own internal interests above those of the U.S. state and ruling class as a whole.

Ahmed Wali’s corruption is far from unique. Mahmood Karzai (Hamid’s older brother) was the founder of Kabul Bank, which was a massive Ponzi scheme that allowed him and other Afghan capitalists to siphon billions of dollars out of the country and into UAE bank accounts.

Kabul Bank was the main institution which handled the U.S. government funding for the salaries of officials of the Afghan government, and played a central role in the country’s overall economy. But for the first six years of its existence, U.S. officials were largely unaware of the fact that the bank was cooking all of its books and that Mahmood and his business partners were using the bank as cover to steal as much as they could. When the Ponzi scheme fell apart in 2011, it triggered a major bank run, and the country’s economy nearly collapsed. It took bailouts from the U.S. and the IMF to stop the collapse of the Afghan banking system. Kat Woolford, who led the IMF investigation into the Ponzi scheme, noted “I’ve seen some really, really bad banks, but I’d never seen one with so much fraud…I’ve never seen anything like it.” This highlights just how much corruption there was in Afghanistan. This corruption repeatedly and routinely created crises which undermined the most basic aspects of the Afghan government and U.S. state and corporate interests in the country.

Despite ignorance and arrogance typical of imperialists, many within the U.S. state were aware of the dangers the unrestrained growth of the drug market and related corruption posed to securing U.S. interests in the region.³⁶ However, much like in the case of ISAF’s investigation into Ahmed Wali, efforts to curtail the drug trade and address corruption within the Afghan government were often thwarted by other parts of the U.S. state itself.

Corruption and the drug trade have historically been essential components of imperialist maneuvers to subjugate other countries. This has been true from the British pushing opium into China to the U.S.-backed Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, the latter of which famously embezzled billions of dollars. The exceptional thing about Afghanistan was not that there was corruption and drug trafficking, but the scale of it, and the fact that various sections of the U.S. government were unable to coordinate to rein it in even when it became a real threat to U.S. corporate and state interests. In fact, they were often working at cross purposes, with one section trying to stamp out some poppy production while another worked closely with the major drug producers in the country to increase production, all the while shielding them from prosecution.

This led to intense arguments within the U.S. state. One anonymous SIGAR interviewee notes that “There was violent competition in Washington not only within Congress, between the Hill and the administration but also between different parts of the administration” on how to handle the drug trade in Afghanistan.³⁷ This gives a sense of the deep divides that existed among the U.S. ruling class on how to address (or not) the fact that the drug trade had become the centerpiece of the Afghan economy and how completely the Afghan government was tied up in it. Ultimately, the dominance of the drug trade in the Afghan economy played a significant role in the defeat of the U.S. in the war, as it consistently undermined the legitimacy of the Afghan government and curtailed the development of the country’s economy to an extreme degree.

USAID, NGOism, and Imperialist Arrogance

While the CIA is notorious internationally for its role in the drug trade, torture blacksites, orchestration of coups and genocide, and much more, USAID and its associated assortment of NGOs are generally far less infamous. Despite this, they form an integral part of the imperialist machinery for dominating other countries and transforming them into neocolonial domains that can be easily plundered for the benefit of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class and their allies. This includes working to transform feudal and even pre-feudal production into capitalist enterprises and expanding household debt through microloans to ensure multinational banks are able to extract surplus value from informal economies before they can be transformed into more regular commodity markets under the direct control of multinational corporations.³⁸ These NGOs also play a key role in structural adjustment programs pushed by the IMF and World Bank.

These initiatives are often cloaked in progressive language, portraying them as “women’s empowerment initiatives” to cover over their fundamental imperialist nature; however, communists should have no illusions that these programs are essential to the U.S. ruling class’s efforts to establish neocolonial regimes and maintain their dominance globally. USAID is a key means by which the U.S. state ensures that oppressed countries develop economically in line with U.S. corporate interests.

It was not just the military, CIA, and State Department which struggled to secure these interests in Afghanistan. USAID and their related army of NGOs were also fairly inept in carrying out their efforts due to their imperialist arrogance and ignorance about Afghanistan. USAID generally drew up its plans for the country independent of consultation or coordination with the Afghan government. As a result, numerous initiatives and projects failed to get off the ground, or were unable to provide any sort of meaningful results which would have helped to stabilize Afghanistan into a more reliable client state. Another related issue was that the various NGOs which ran USAID programs were very territorial about their projects, and rank departmentalism plagued the entire USAID effort, with different NGOs competing with each other for funding and resources.³⁹ All of this resulted in a series of piecemeal and diffuse programs which often worked at cross purposes and were never united in an overall plan for transforming Afghanistan in line with U.S. state and corporate interests.

The rapid rate of turnover of the leadership of USAID in Afghanistan only exacerbated these issues. In his SIGAR interview, Paul O’Brien—a USAID official who worked in the Afghan Finance Ministry from 2004-2007 and is now the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA—explained how this played out during his time in the country:

A big lesson from 2004-2007 is that on both sides, there was no continuity of strategy. There was a dysfunctionality of strategy and this made formulating a development plan/economic strategy problematic. During this [sic] three years, there were five mission directors [of USAID]. Jim [Brever] comes in at a time when there was a lot of tense relations, too much money, and no Afghan Government capacity. He has got five Ambassadors.⁴⁰ Jim goes exhausted. Patrick [Fine] comes in and breaks some rules[…]

Contractors were rotating so quickly. There was no particular disagreement on private sector led growth. Everyone agreed on the ends, but there was no agreement on who controlled the agenda. The problem was not disagreement. If you want a strong private sector, then you need public institutions to regulate and incentivize. We didn’t put a lot of energy in devising a coherent strategy. We needed a collective effort to get the Afghan ministries to get this going. The incentives were misaligned with how success was measured.⁴¹

The testimony of O’Brien and other USAID officials in their SIGAR interviews paints a clear picture of overall incompetence, departmentalism, and a lack of basic strategic thinking. In particular, USAID’s inability to understand the dialectical relationship between private enterprises and public institutions is quite striking. Such confusions are tied up with the U.S. ruling class’s ideological adherence to the “free market” and a related belief that developing state institutions is “communism.” While some in the ruling class have promoted these ideas cynically, many do believe them to one extent or another. O’Brien also notes that the unwillingness of USAID and other parts of the U.S. state to focus more on the development of public institutions in Afghanistan was also tied to the hesitancy of the Bush Administration to engage in nation or state building given their electoral promises not to do so. As a result, not only were public institutions not developed to the extent that was needed to oversee the Afghan economy, the private sector also floundered in numerous ways without a clear regulatory framework and coherent state strategy for economic development. This incentivized Afghan businesses to operate through various informal and criminal networks, including those tied up with hawala system and Kabul Bank. Relatedly, it strengthened the influence of power brokers like Ahmed Wali Karzai. This in turn contributed to corruption and weakened the legitimacy of the Afghan government. In short, without a coherent and organized state structure in Afghanistan to provide basic public institutional guidance to the private sector, the economic situation in Afghanistan was something of a free for all, with little coherence or cohesion.

As part of the SIGAR process, the U.S. state tried to understand what went wrong with USAID. Senior program directors and other high ranking members of USAID who worked in various initiatives were asked a specific set of interview questions. One such initiative was called Stability in Key Areas (SIKA) program. This was created under the Obama Administration and ran from 2012-2017. It aimed to address the early issues with USAID efforts, build up government capacity, and in particular strengthen U.S. control and influence in sections of the country deemed unstable and insecure. On paper, SIKA emphasized the importance of USAID and “Implementing Partners” (IPs, which were various NGOs and corporations) working closely with the Afghan government at the national and regional level. The whole effort was dressed up progressive sounding language of “providing gender-focused leadership training and capacity building,” working to “increase community engagement,” and “implementing community-led developments and government initiatives that respond to the population’s needs and concerns in order to build stability."⁴² In practice, SIKA differed little from earlier USAID efforts.

The SIGAR interview of Gulla Jan Ahmadzai, a former program manager for USAID and the UN, is quite instructive in this regard. When asked about biggest challenges in the SIKA program his response highlights a number of issues:

First, most of the implementing partners didn’t have relevant experiences, for example, AECOM [an American engineering and architecture firm] was implementing the Stabilization program but they didn’t have experiences in jointly working with the local governance, stability and community development, all the same time [sic]. Second, most of the times USAID designed programs without full involvement of the government. USAID programs didn’t follow the government agenda in the relevant sector. Large part [sic] of the cost used to go to the operation, if you analyze the SIKA program, more 50% got to [sic] the operation cost which affected the program delivery. In the case of SIKA, it is written in the documents that the Afghan partner ministries will be in the lead but in real [sic] the whole program was managed by the implementing partners, operations, human resource, finance, sub-contracting and procurement was all done by the IP. According to the agreement, the ownership of the program was with the Afghan government but in fact, everything was managing by the IP with the consultation of the USAID. On one occasion the government proposed to bring IP in to the government compounds to work closely with its counter parts in the government. But the IP and USAID rejected the idea and the IP worked independently in the center and in the provinces.⁴³

Ahmadzai also notes that the SIKA suffered from only focusing on the “least stable” areas (those largely outside of U.S. control) instead of working to also develop more stable areas that the U.S. had a stronger grip on. As a result, by the end of the SIKA program in 2017, more than half of the districts the program had operated in were under Taliban control. The dams, irrigation projects, poultry farms, roads, and more that were built under SIKA thus fell into the Taliban’s hands.⁴⁴

The SIGAR interview questions for USAID officials involved in SIKA are quite striking, and reveal the underlying arrogance and idiocy of the U.S. ruling class. For example, question 8-a asked if the programs failed in part because Afghans “didn’t understand the concept of instability.” As if the people of Afghanistan were too stupid to understand what stability is! The implicit assumption in this question is, of course, that the U.S. occupation was a source of peace and stability in people’s lives.

Question 9 wondered, “If the Taliban only provided security and dispute resolution, was it necessary to build up government capacity in the dramatic way that we did? Could we have just focused on security and dispute resolution to compete with the Taliban?” It seems the SIGAR interviewers really believed that the Taliban had no governmental structure, was not tied to various tribal leaders, didn’t do any sort of economic or social programs, and provided nothing other than “security and dispute resolution.” Even more stunning is that they were earnestly wondering if the U.S. should have tried to run Afghanistan without setting up any sort of government or public institutions, showing that they had completely failed to understand that so many of their efforts had failed precisely because they had not set up stable and well run government institutions.

Question 14 asked “How much security does a community need to feel safe enough to turn against the Taliban? Daily police presence? Weekly? Why?” This question ignores the clear mass outrage against the U.S. soldiers and the Afghan Police who they trained. Even in the U.S. media there were a myriad of stories about the role of the Afghan police in the kidnapping of young children for molestation, regular rapes of women, massacres of villagers, corruption and demanding bribes, and many other issues. As if the key question of security for the people in Afghanistan was simply a matter of the police showing up enough! By the time of these interviews, significant sections of the population preferred living under the Taliban to the U.S. occupation.

These questions and the failures of SIKA betray the overall confusion within the U.S. state about the reasons for their failure in Afghanistan. They are unlikely to achieve clarity on the matter anytime soon. Instead, they have shifted their focus to the New Cold War with China, without realizing that proxy conflicts and counter-insurgencies will doubtless be a central part of this inter-imperialist conflict for years to come, and that the U.S.’s inability to set up stable client states will hamstring their efforts to outmaneuver China on a global stage.

Conclusion

The U.S. defeat in Afghanistan has wide-ranging implications for both countries, Central Asia, and the world. For example, many U.S. lackeys in oppressed countries are increasingly concerned that they will suffer a fate similar to that of the collaborators in Afghanistan and be left out to dry in one way or another. While this document analyzes some key contradictions in the U.S. state which were integral to the defeat of the U.S., it is far from a comprehensive analysis of the war, or the implications of the U.S. withdrawal. Despite these limitations in the scope of our analysis, it is clear that the basic inability of the U.S. ruling class to secure their interest in Afghanistan (and also in Iraq), despite spending trillions of dollars, does not bode well for their fortunes in their growing competition with the Chinese ruling class.

Inter-imperialist competition requires strategic thinking and coordination at a level that increasingly appears to be beyond the U.S. state. This is not to say that the U.S. ruling class is incapable of doing anything, but rather that they will likely continue to be outmaneuvered by China as they have been for the past few decades. Russia has also made significant grounds internationally due in part to U.S. incompetence (for example, Russian support for Assad in Syria has stymied U.S. regime change efforts, and Russia seized Crimea without paying too steep a price).

At present, contradictions internal to the U.S. ruling class and state appear to be growing, not diminishing, and there is no clear force capable of reforming the decadence, departmentalism, and discord that plagues the state at all levels. While the U.S. is far from collapsing, these issues indicate that it is likely to continue its relative decline internationally and suffer related challenges domestically. In the face of falling global fortunes (and also out of concern for their economic dependence on China), the U.S. ruling class is already trying to devise schemes to increase domestic production and offload some aspects of their decline onto the masses of this country. Combined with the deepening crisis of overproduction and related spike in inflation, the situation for the masses of people in this country is becoming increasingly dire, which will in turn lead to more instability and rebellion domestically. Faced with growing rebellions (as well as emergencies from climate change) at home and with more failed states, inter-imperialist competition, and setbacks abroad, the U.S. military will be stretched increasingly thin, something that they are quite worried about. In this sense, the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan heralds an increasingly favorable situation for communist organizing in this country and around the world.

In Afghanistan itself, the situation is somewhat less clear. To achieve victory, the Taliban has collaborated with many warlords who were former U.S. allies. These warlords are generally very unpopular, given their corrupt and oppressive practices, and many have historically been mixed up in the drug trade and other illicit markets. The Taliban itself is going forward with its plans to create a chauvinist theocracy, imposing Sharia law throughout the country, and generally carrying out its reactionary political program. For example, they have shut down eighty percent of existing media outlets, and women have been barred from working outside, except for in health facilities.⁴⁵ In the face of this program, many have fled the country, especially non-Pashtuns.

The Taliban also faces a dire economic situation domestically, as 20 years of U.S. occupation have left the country devastated. Now U.S. sanctions block Afghan businesses' access to international markets, and a domestic food and inflation crisis threatens to spiral out of control.

While initial signs after the U.S. withdrawal pointed to a developing relationship between China and the Taliban, the Chinese ruling class has been somewhat hesitant to work too closely with the Taliban given their fears about how such a relationship could affect the situation in Xinjiang, which remains something of a powder keg. To its north, the Taliban has clashed with Russian-backed forces on the border with Tajikistan, which has reinforced its border with Chinese and Russian help. While it is doubtful Russia would try a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan, even with Tajik proxy forces, this threat of invasion and military pressure can be used to leverage the situation in Russian favor in various ways. To the west, Taliban forces recently clashed with the Iranian military. Both governments have downplayed this as an accident and sought to sweep it under the rug; however, this could be the harbinger of future tensions, as a section of the Iranian ruling class still views Afghanistan as a breakaway province given its historical ties to the Persian Empire. What’s more, prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, relations between Iran and the Taliban were very tense, with the two dissolving diplomatic relations in 1998. Now they remain held together in part by a tenuous agreement crafted by the late General Qassem Soleimani in 2015.⁴⁶ However, the Gulf states are competing sharply with Iran for influence in Afghanistan, and should they secure a significant foothold, this would likely sharpen tensions between Iran and the Taliban.⁴⁷

To Afghanistan’s east lies Pakistan, which has historically supported the Taliban, to a degree. However, tensions between the two have grown in recent years, especially with the decades-long insurgency of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, commonly referred to as the “Pakistani Taliban”) in the Northwest of the country. While a recent truce has been struck between TTP and the Pakistani government, the basic disagreements, especially on the question of imposing Sharia law throughout the country, remain wide and do not seem likely to be resolved anytime soon.⁴⁸ Should the talks between the TTP and the government of Pakistan collapse, this would further isolate the Taliban regionally.

In this situation, it is unclear if the Taliban will be able to prevent an internal collapse, or if they will be able to navigate a tenuous diplomatic situation and secure the foreign financing necessary to keep their country afloat. Given that they have not taken the path of genuine social revolution or pursued economic self-reliance, they remain dependent on foreign imperialist sponsorship. They have kicked out the U.S., only to invite in other imperialist and junior imperialist powers to plunder the country. While it is a victory for the Afghan people to be free from U.S. occupation, their ultimate liberation cannot lie with a social force such as the Taliban, which represents the interests of a section of the landlord class, as well as the conservative religious forces, warlords, and domestic capitalists (who are lining up to become compradors for the highest imperialist bidder).