The Last Helicopter out of Kabul

 

Mohammed Zahir Shah, last king of Afghanistan, 1914-2007

The American war in Afghanistan is ending badly for the US; it looks like a debacle, evoking memories not just of the rise of ISS in Iraq, but of the fall of Saigon. A massive blow to American prestige.

Could it have ended differently? Was the US mad to go in at all? After all, Afghanistan had already proven too much for the soviets, and for the British Empire. Could they have improved matters by staying longer; or would this only have delayed the inevitable?

I thought in 2001 it made sense to go in; but only for a fast, surgical operation. My thinking was to they go in, overthrow the Taliban government, punish the ringleaders, and pull out. Then let the chips fall where they may. Rather on the model of how the British reacted to the Boxer Rebellion in China. I thought the same about Iraq. And I still think this could have worked.

If the Taliban then regrouped and retook government, as they now look about to do anyway, it would not have looked like a debacle for the Americans. A punishment would have been delivered, at relatively little cost to the US. Its power would have been asserted.

And there was a second easy and obvious step, that the US could have taken, which would have made this outcome much less likely. 

The Americans cannot seem to understand that Afghanistan is not now, and has never been, a nation. It is geographically like the Balkans, each valley developing an independent culture, with purely local allegiances. There is no ethnic unity around which to build a national consciousness.

In Afghanistan, therefore, there are only two ways to unify the country: either around a shared religion or ideology, or around allegiance to a royal family. The latter exploits the instinctive attachment to family—the king becomes everyone’s father. That means, either the Taliban, or a king. 

Convert the entire country to liberal democracy instead? Not a realistic goal; if possible, it would take generations, and in the meantime you, an alien, are attacking the one thing that holds everyone together, that everyone agrees on.

The US had available to them a candidate with legitimate historical claims to the throne. The former king was still alive. It could have quickly and easily been done, and they might have made an early exit.

They should have done the same thing, for roughly the same reasons, in Iraq. 

Americans hear “king“ and think it means an oppressive, authoritarian government. This is obviously, objectively, wrong. Some of the least authoritarian governments on earth are monarchies: the UK, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain. The most stable, benevolent, and least authoritarian governments in the Middle East are monarchies: Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, Jordan, Morocco. 

Indeed, under Zahir Shah, by the 1950s, Afghanistan was peaceful, developing economically, and becoming a modern constitutional monarchy.

It should have been a no-brainer.