The American War in Afghanistan
An invitation to join the Cosmopolitan Globalist Book Group on September 11
Given the somber date and recent events, I asked the Cosmopolitan Globalists to suggest a book—only one—about the war in Afghanistan. It wasn’t an easy choice; one of the only redeeming things that may be said about war is that it gives rise to good writing.
We chose Carter Malkasian’s history, The American war in Afghanistan. It is widely considered the authoritative account. Malkasian, a historian by training, spent years in Afghanistan, first as a civilian official in Helmand, then as a senior adviser to the US military. From Kirkus:
Because the book is quite long, we’ll cover Chapters 1-10 war on September 11, and then reconvene on October 9 to discuss chapters 11-21.
Please RSVP today, because places are limited. From experience, we know that it’s best to keep the numbers low so that everyone has the chance fully to participate in the discussion.
Our last two book club meetings were so impassioned that both ran twice as long as the time we’d reserved. All serious readers are welcome, whether or not they’re subscribers. Reservations will be accepted on a first come, first served basis.
Letters from our readers
From Claire—many readers have written to us about the fall of Afghanistan. Their letters represent a wide spectrum of emotions and views. They speak for themselves, so I’ll reproduce a number of them in the coming days.
An Empire of Graves
Terry Glavin
We will all have to learn, again, what the UN warned about only a few weeks ago: The American capitulation (sorry, but that’s what it was) had set off a caravan of jihadists and crackpots headed for Afghanistan from all over Asia and beyond. You can’t leave an open field strewn with corpses anywhere without maggots being drawn to the carrion. That’s what happened in Iraq a decade ago, that’s what’s happened in Syria, that’s what happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and it’s happening again. This will be no great revelation to anyone here.
The so-called Islamic Emirate and the ISIS-K mass murderers who committed that atrocity at the airport are the same people. They all know one another. There is no disciplined line of Taliban command. ISIS-K/Taliban is a distinction without a meaningful difference. They are all from the same savage upper echelon of a handful of Pashtun tribes that straddle the Pakistan-Afghan borderlands. Karzai is chief of the Durrani Popolzai tribe. Gulbaddin Hekmatyar is the Tony Soprano of the Ghilzai Tribe. Remember the Stalinist PDPA that ushered in the Russians? Columbia University grads. Three successive PDPA presidents—Ghilzai tribe. Ashraf Ghani? Ghilzai tribe. Mullah Omar: Ghilzai tribe.
ISIS-K came from Afghan Talibs, who then went back to Pakistan to join the Haqqanis (Zadran tribe) in the al Qaeda-affiliated TTP confederation, then got thirsty for human blood again and came back as ISIS-K. They marry each other’s daughters, kill one another’s children, form alliances, split and break, and coalesce again. They comprise a tiny minority within a minority in Afghanistan. Their continued hegemony doomed Afghan democracy, even when a proper gentleman like the Ghilzai Ghani is the one on the comfy cushion.
They are the reason why Afghanistan, where nearly 90 percent of the people loathe the Taliban, is strewn with corpses. It is not a Graveyard of Empires. It’s an Empire of Graves. The fratricides and fascism of the Pashtun elites attract all manner of maggots and blowflies and carrion-eaters, and when the vampires are done sucking one another’s blood and enslaving and slaughtering everyone else, the old surplus value of violence will kick in again. The Pakistanis will be the first to bear it, and they’ll soon be turning on infidels everywhere again. Unless they’re confined down in the south and east so they’ll cannibalize each other.
That’s the “problem” nobody really wants to deal with. It is what it is, and it seems to me the very least we could expect of our prime ministers and presidents is that they not lie to us about this. What upsets me about Biden is less the insanely precipitous direction he’s taken “foreign policy.” It’s that he’s a liar. He lied through his teeth about what the ANDSF had endured, all the while pretending this wasn’t essentially an American-concocted coup to overthrow the elected government of Afghanistan on behalf of and in favour of a doomed Ghilzai-Durrani Popolzai khanate.
At a time when China and Tehran are in the ascendant and Venezuela and Myanmar and Belarus and all those other lovely places suffer for the absence of American leadership and we’re coming up to the 18th year of democracy's retreat around the world—sorry, but like I said, it is what it is—Biden is telling the world, fuck you, you’re on your own.
You can agree or disagree with Biden’s posture and have all sorts of fascinating debates about it, but that is what has happened, and what is happening.
Terry Glavin is the author of Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle For Peace in Afghanistan.
The view from France
Cosmopolitan Globalist Arun Kapil has collated an extensive guide to further reading on the debacle; he has now updated the reading list 15 times:
Could America’s Afghanistan fiasco have been avoided? In a rather hyperbolically titled post in The Cosmopolitan Globalist substack site—edited by my good friend Claire Berlinski—”Biden betrays Afghanistan—and the world,” former airborne sergeant Michael Fumento, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, insists that the US could have thwarted a Taliban conquest with an open-ended force presence of several thousand troops—necessitating a formal denunciation of Trump’s 2020 Doha agreement, which Fumento asserts would have been justified—and with the US backing up the Afghan National Army with air power. The stalemate would have presumably lasted indefinitely, with US forces sustaining losses that Fumento deems acceptable (he suggests that the US should have done likewise in Vietnam after 1973).
WADR, in view of how quickly the Afghan army and state collapsed—simply vanished—it is delusional to think that a residual US military presence—for which there was no political support outside the Beltway—could have changed a thing apart from delaying the inevitable.
From the former French Ambassador to Israel, the UN, and the US:
The view from Britain
Cosmopolitan Globalist John Turner suggested the following links:
Rory Stewart: Failure, and the Villains of the Western Campaign in Afghanistan
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab is on his hind feet in front of the Foreign Affairs Committee and it’s not pretty.
It was all a lie
Alan Potkin
Strongly suggest, Claire, that you read this essay. “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken.”
As we all now know, having witnessed the post-invasion debacle in Iraq, the disastrous Arab Spring, the pre-meditated murder of four Americans in Libya, the rise and spread of ISIS, and the ignominious fall of Kabul in Afghanistan, the utopian vision of Frum, Bush, and Krauthammer was a lie. It was a lie that cost two decades, trillions of dollars, and tens of thousands of American lives and limbs, and it was an incalculably destructive lie that was sold by smearing its realist opponents as condescending, racist know-nothings who lacked both the brain and the heart to understand how the new world truly worked.
Alan Potkin is a Mekong River conservationist, Vietnam war veteran, and occasional contributor to the Cosmopolitan Globalist.
Difficult days after the fall of Kabul
From Claire—we have removed identifying details from this letter for obvious reasons. Our correspondent is in Kabul. I have translated his letter from Dari via Google Translate; I apologize for any infelicities or inaccuracies in the translation.
I was a student at the computer science faculty. Our lives were normal. On the day Kabul fell, like all normal days, I woke up and went to work after breakfast. On the way, people sitting in the city vehicle were worried about the security situation and talking about our uncertain future.
When I arrived at the office, the situation was still normal, like every day. It was 11 o’clock, when many people were out and about, when my father called me and told me to leave the office right away and go home, because the security situation wasn’t good.
I immediately left the office. On my way home, everyone looked disturbed, they were moving in every direction, terror was everywhere. It was as if Kabul had fallen, I thought, but I had never experienced such a situation and I thought that maybe tomorrow things would be better. I wasn’t aware that yes, Kabul had really fallen, that Kabul had been sold out by its corrupt Afghan leaders.
It was exactly 2 o’clock in the afternoon when I got home. Everyone was worried that our lives would change a lot. Warplanes flew over Kabul.
It was nighttime when I saw on Facebook that the Taliban had taken over the presidential palace in Afghanistan. From that moment, Kabul was dead. Our hopes were dashed. Yes, all our achievements were lost in one day. Afghanistan turned back the clock twenty years because of the United States’ policy mistakes and the corruption of Afghanistan’s leaders.
I woke up the next day with no hope of going to work because the whole city was closed. Fear was everywhere. I felt we had lost something. Yes, our freedom. Our achievements. Our hopes. Our reason to live. We had lost it all.
All I could think about was surviving and getting out of Afghanistan. My mother worked for many years as a lawyer and advocate for women’s rights. My father also worked for years with the French government and other international organizations. It is clear that the Taliban were opposed to such people. Kabul was no longer a safe place for us.
My father brought me the documents that proved he had worked on French projects for seven years. He said we must contact the French embassy to ask them to save our lives. I was surprised by my father’s words, because he loves Afghanistan very much. He could have left his homeland many times to emigrate to the United States or Europe. But before, he didn’t want to leave Afghanistan.
I took his documents and went to the French embassy, in the Green Zone. When I got there, about 5,000 people had already gathered near the embassy to ask for visas. Most of them had not worked for France in Afghanistan. They were ordinary people. The Taliban were near the French embassy. They didn’t allow people to approach the embassy and they beat people away.
I went home and found the French embassy’s phone number on Google. I called them but they didn’t answer. I tried the French embassy on Twitter, but that didn’t work either. I could not make contact with them. By nightfall, I was sharing our problem on Twitter but could find no one to help.
A few days after the fall of Kabul, I was still unable to make contact with the French Embassy in Kabul. Ms. Claire Berlinski replied to me on Twitter as if she had been sent by God to help us. I told her my problem and sent her our documents and she promised to try to help. She gave me the email of the French crisis center. I emailed the crisis center and sent them my documents. I told them about my family. But I did not receive an answer.
One day after the fall of Kabul, I saw two Taliban men with violent faces near our house, looking toward our house. The Taliban are wild people. I have never been in such a situation before. Fear ran through us, wondering if they had come to kill us, but after thirty minutes, they left. We left the house immediately and went to my aunt’s house. Claire Berlinski tried contacting people in France to help us. But still, the French Embassy did not reply. They left us behind. I emailed them over and over but received no response.
We are currently hiding in my aunt’s house and we are not going out. The Taliban are searching from house to house for people who have worked with foreign institutions and they’re also looking for women who defend women’s rights. We all fear for our survival and our future is unknown. We see anxiety and misery in our parents’ faces. They are not worried about themselves. They are worried about their children’s future.
We are facing a lot of problems right now. We may not have food to eat in the next few days. During the many years that my parents were on duty, they spent all their money on our education and did not make enough money to save.
When I see my sisters, I can’t control my tears. These days are really hard. I cannot do anything for my sisters.
We need urgently to leave Kabul. I don’t know why the French Embassy didn’t place value on our lives. Our lives are in danger. The Taliban are not human, they will kill all of us. Our only hope right now is for the French government to intervene to save our family.
Please, please, please, save our lives.
Claire—if you’re in a position to help this family, please contact me for more information. I have translated the letter into French, below.
Jours difficiles après la chute de Kaboul
Claire—pour des raisons évidentes, nous avons supprimé les détails d’identification de cette lettre Notre correspondant est à Kaboul. J’ai traduit sa lettre de Dari via Google Translate ; je m’excuse pour toute erreur ou inexactitude dans la traduction.
Comme tous les jours normaux, je me suis réveillé et je suis allé au travail après le petit déjeuner. En chemin, des gens assis dans une voiture de ville s’inquiétaient de la situation sécuritaire et parlaient de leur avenir incertain.
Quand je suis arrivé au bureau, la situation était normale comme tous les jours, mais petit à petit il était 11 heures quand beaucoup de gens sortaient. À ce moment-là, mon père m’a appelé et m’a dit de quitter le bureau bientôt et de rentrer à la maison, car la situation sécuritaire n’était pas bonne.
J’ai immédiatement quitté le bureau et je suis parti. Sur le chemin, tous les gens semblaient perturbés et se déplaçaient dans n’importe quelle direction, et la terreur était partout. C’était comme si Kaboul était tombée, mais moi, qui n'avait pas vécu une telle situation, je pensais que peut-être demain la situation serait bonne. Ignorant que Kaboul était vraiment tombée ou que Kaboul avait été vendue par des dirigeants afghans corrompus.
Il était exactement deux heures de l’après-midi quand je suis rentré à la maison et tout le monde craignait que nos vies ne changent beaucoup. Des avions de guerre ont survolé Kaboul.
Il faisait nuit quand j’ai vu sur Facebook une photo montrant que les talibans s’étaient emparés du palais présidentiel en Afghanistan. Kaboul était mort et nos espoirs ont été anéantis à partir de ce moment. Oui, toutes nos réalisations ont été perdues en un jour. L'Afghanistan est revenu aux 20 dernières années en raison des mauvaises politiques des États-Unis et des dirigeants afghans corrompus.
Je me suis réveillé le lendemain et il n’y avait aucun espoir d’aller travailler car toute la ville était fermée. La peur était partout. Je pensais que nous avions perdu quelque chose. Oui, c'était notre liberté. C'était notre réussite. C'était nos espoirs. Nos motivations étaient pour la vie. Nous avions tout perdu.
Je ne pensais qu’à survivre et à quitter l’Afghanistan. Parce que ma mère avait travaillé pendant de nombreuses années dans le département des droits des femmes en tant qu’avocate et défendait les droits des femmes, et mon père avait travaillé pendant de nombreuses années avec les organisations françaises et internationales. Il était clair que les talibans étaient opposés à de telles personnes. Kaboul n’était plus un endroit sûr pour nous.
Mon père m’a apporté ses papiers car il avait travaillé dans des projets français pendant sept ans et a dit que nous devrions contacter l'ambassade de France pour sauver nos vies. J’ai été surpris par les propos de mon père car il aimait beaucoup l'Afghanistan et aurait pu quitter sa patrie dans le passé et émigrer aux États-Unis ou en Europe. Mais à ce moment-là, il ne voulait pas quitter l’Afghanistan. J’ai pris ses papiers et me suis rendu à l'ambassade de France, qui était située en zone verte. Quand je suis arrivé sur place, environ 5 000 personnes s’étaient rassemblées près de l'ambassade de France, demandant un visa à l’ambassade de France. La plupart d’entre eux n’avaient pas travaillé avec la France en Afghanistan et étaient des gens ordinaires.
Les talibans étaient présents près de l'ambassade de France et n'ont pas permis aux gens de s’approcher de l'ambassade de France et ont battu certaines personnes.
Je suis rentré chez moi et j’ai trouvé le numéro de l’ambassade de France sur Google. Je les ai appelés mais ils n’ont pas répondu. J’ai reçu l’ambassade de France sur Twitter, mais cela n’a pas fonctionné et je n’ai pas pu contacter l’ambassade.
Il faisait nuit et je partageais toujours notre problème sur Twitter mais je ne trouvais personne pour m’aider. Quelques jours s'étaient écoulés depuis la chute de Kaboul, et je cherchais toujours quelqu'un pour m’aider à faire entendre nos voix à l'ambassade de France à Kaboul. Dans les mêmes jours, Mme Claire Berlinski m’a répondu sur Twitter comme si elle avait été envoyée par Dieu pour nous aider. Je lui ai expliqué mon problème et lui ai envoyé nos documents et elle a promis d’essayer de m’aider. Elle m’a donné l’e-mail du centre de crise en France pour partager mon problème avec eux. J’ai également envoyé un e-mail au centre de crise et les documents. J’ai partagé ma famille avec eux. Mais je n’ai pas reçu de réponse.
Un jour après la chute de Kaboul, j’ai vu deux hommes talibans aux visages violents près de notre maison, regardant vers notre maison. La peur nous traversait comme s'ils étaient venus pour nous tuer, mais après 30 minutes, ils sont partis, et nous avons quitté la maison immédiatement après leur départ et sommes venus chez ma tante. Claire a essayé de contacter des personnes en France pour nous aider. Mais l’ambassade de France n’a pas répondu. Ils nous ont laissés derrière. Je leur ai envoyé des mails à plusieurs reprises mais je n’ai reçu aucune réponse.
Nous voyons l’anxiété et la misère sur le visage de nos parents. Ils ne s’inquiétaient pas pour eux-mêmes, ils s’inquiétaient pour l’avenir de leurs enfants.
Nous nous cachons actuellement dans la maison de ma tante et nous ne sortons pas. Les talibans cherchent de maison en maison des personnes ayant travaillé avec des institutions étrangères et recherchent également des femmes qui défendent les droits des femmes. Nous avons tous peur de survivre et notre avenir est inconnu.
Nous sommes confrontés à de nombreux problèmes en ce moment et nous n’aurons peut-être pas de nourriture à manger dans les prochains jours. Pendant les nombreuses années où mes parents ont été de service, ils ont dépensé tout leur argent pour notre éducation et n'ont pas gagné assez d’argent.
Quand je vois mes sœurs, je ne peux pas contrôler mes larmes. Ces jours sont vraiment durs. Je ne peux rien faire pour mes sœurs.
Nous devons d’urgence quitter Kaboul. Je ne sais pas pourquoi l’ambassade de France n’a pas accordé de valeur à nos vies. Nos vies sont en danger. Les talibans ne sont pas humains, ils nous tueront tous. Notre seul espoir pour le moment est que le gouvernement français intervienne pour sauver notre famille.
S'il vous plaît, s'il vous plaît, s'il vous plaît, sauvez nos vies.
Claire—si vous êtes en mesure d'aider cette famille, veuillez me contacter pour plus d'informations.
Don't I wish. I'll be travelling on the 11th. I may get the book anyway.
Chapters One and Two, down. A good cigar helps...