Watching the news out of Afghanistan is distressing. The Taliban have consolidated their control over the country, taken the capital Kabul, and Afghanistan's President, Ashraf Ghani, has fled to Uzbekistan. The complete collapse of the country is only being held back by the large international presence at the Hamid Karzai International Airport. Once the evacuation from there is complete, we are likely to see the final wrap-up of any remaining resistance, and the start of potentially one of the largest political and humanitarian crises of this generation.
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We have left tens of thousands of Afghans at risk of recrimination, violence and persecution, and condemned a greater number of people to persecution because of their gender and attempts to seek an education. This situation was avoidable, and the fact that it is occurring now, and occurring so quickly, is entirely the West's fault. We caused this mess, and we need to take responsibility for it.
One of the largest military failures since Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan cost Western forces dearly. Over 20 years, America's longest-ever conflict, the United States spent over $US2 trillion, suffered over 2000 casualties, and left more than 350,000 people killed or seriously wounded. Australia itself lost 43 soldiers, and spent at least $10 billion across our time there.
While many lay the blame for the current situation solely at the feet of the United States, or indeed President Biden, whose administration organised and bungled its withdrawal from the country, we all share the blame. Australia, along with all the other allied countries who had a presence in Afghanistan, is just as responsible. We invaded a country with a common goal, but failed to cement any of the changes we sought there.
We failed to form a government that was self-reliant; failed to properly train and develop local security forces to a level where they could support themselves; and failed to develop the economy to be self-sustaining and free of corruption. We also failed to properly solve the problem of Islamic extremism and insurgency in the region. The world was not made safer by the war in Afghanistan.
So it should not be surprising that once our support was withdrawn, the security forces largely capitulated to the Taliban; who promised them food and safety in exchange for surrender. The Afghan government had no real support base amongst its supposed constituents. Afghan security forces felt no loyalty to the central government they served, and the Taliban became more powerful than before. As district after district eventually came under Taliban control, the reality that Kabul would quickly fall was inevitable.
Despite this, we still have a responsibility now to protect the people of Afghanistan, especially those we left behind. By not securing an orderly and organised exit, we have condemned tens of thousands of our allies, including interpreters and human rights activists, to years of violent payback, and in many cases death. The United States had only extracted 2000 Afghan allies as of Monday, and Australia, which abruptly shut its embassy and withdrew all personnel in May, as of Wednesday evening had only gotten one flight out of Kabul, carrying 26 people on a plane built to carry more than 130, still leaving thousands of Afghans at risk.
While we have promised 3000 humanitarian visas to Afghan nationals, the government has ruled out any large-scale change to accommodate intake beyond this, as other nations have done. We have also refused to permanently settle the 4200 Afghan nationals in Australia on temporary protection visas. Defence Minister Peter Dutton even suggested such actions would pose a "security risk" to the nation. While we were never going to have much success waging war in Afghanistan, we owe those who worked with us for decades more than the callous indifference and outright abandonment to which we're treating them now.
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Of course, this raises the question, "Why not stay?"
There are many in the media, as well as politicians and think-tank academics, who think the solution here should not have been to pull out, but to double down - to send more troops back into Afghanistan, and to recommit ourselves to defending (aka propping up) the Afghan government.
This would have been a mistake. There is no timeline as to how long securing "victory", whatever that is supposed to look like, would take. Arguing that, despite the failures of the last 20 years, the West deserves another 20 or 30 more years to get it right is the ultimate in hubris and delusion.
Prolonging an endless conflict and passing the buck onwards infinitely, without mission definition and without support at home, is exactly what got us into this situation. Two decades of failed nation-building, the spending of trillions of dollars, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands, including 43 of our own Australian soldiers, has achieved little. What we must do now is own our mistakes and learn from them.
This does not mean, though, that we should leave innocent Afghans to their fate, simply because we are done with the war. We have an obligation to those we've left behind, to get them out.
It's the responsibility of all the nations that took part in this long conflict to see that we leave. But it is also our responsibility to protect those who worked with us. They helped our troops and saved countless lives; all to try and make their country a better, more democratic, and more prosperous place. Abandoning them to an Afghanistan under the control of the Taliban should be unthinkable.
We may have lost sight of the war, but we should not lose sight of the Afghan people.
- James Blackwell is a proud Wiradjuri man, a research fellow at UNSW's Centre for Social Impact, and a visiting fellow at the ANU's Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs.
