Zeeshan Aleem interviews Anand Gopal, an award-winning journalist who reports for The New Yorker and wrote the acclaimed book, “No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes.” He’s a trained sociologist and renowned foreign affairs reporter who lived in Afghanistan for years, embedded with the Taliban, speaks the local languages and is well versed in the history of the war-torn nation.

Zeeshan Aleem: Was there a significantly better way to withdraw from Afghanistan?

Anand Gopal: Well, there was and there wasn’t.

There was a better way to do it if Washington faced certain hard ground truths. What would have been the better way was if the U.S. government had secured a deal with the Taliban that began a process of transfer of power to them, while the U.S. was still in the country. But that would have meant completely undermining the Afghan government to do that; it would’ve meant recognizing the Afghan government, basically, is a creation of the U.S. entirely, and has no real legitimacy on the ground. So that would’ve been a pretty major paradigm shift, almost a greater paradigm shift than just simply cutting and running, I think.

Because the way the Afghan government is structured is that almost all of the funding, something like 80 percent of its revenue, comes from international sources. This is what political scientists call a rentier state. It’s a state that owes its very existence to foreign aid, so it’s not a really sustainable state whatsoever. It’s a creation of Washington and elsewhere.

What the U.S. did is kind of buy into its own fiction that the Afghan government was somehow a sovereign actor and try to treat it as such. So how they sequenced the withdrawal was, “We’re going to have a deal with the Taliban, and one of the conditions of that is that the Taliban are going to have to talk to the Afghan government to come to a peace deal.”

But why would the Taliban talk to a government that’s not a sovereign entity, that has no real stake on the ground? The U.S. should’ve recognized that and used that leverage over the Afghan government to force the Afghan government and the Taliban to come to a deal before they withdrew. And I think, if they had done that — or, at least, if not come to a deal, come to some sort of mechanism that would’ve been better than what we see now — that could’ve also bought time for more orderly withdrawal, especially for all the Afghans who helped the U.S. and want to leave and things like amnesty measures [for people who worked with the U.S. or served in the Afghan government].

The important thing is: What could you salvage from the Afghan government, and have them be part of the new order? Because that would make [the Taliban’s government] even slightly more inclusive. The current order, the danger is, is not going to be inclusive at all, which is the other terrible outcome. [Continue reading…]