So far this month, at least four U.S. service members have been killed in Afghanistan by the Taliban.
In October, three other U.S. soldiers died in this forgotten war.
And, according to U.S. military accounts, there are still at least 10,000 U.S. troops stationed in the South Asian nation a full 15 years after the 9/11 attacks.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) official combat operations in Afghanistan ended back in 2014, supposedly leaving the Afghan forces to fend for themselves.
But that hasn’t kept the United States from maintaining a strong military presence in the country, and despite promises by the Barack Obama administration to cull the number of boots on the ground down to 8,400 by the end of the year, there seems to be no end in sight for this tedious conflict.
So why has the Afghan war drugs gone on for so long?
For starters, because Afghanistan is not a real country.
And anyone with even the slightest knowledge of international relations will recognize that trying to impose nation-building on a country that, for all intents and purposes, never really was, is an act of futility.
From Hamid Karzai — who led Afghanistan in quasi-legitimacy for nearly a decade — to the newly instated and equally corrupt Ashraf Ghani, who rode to power in 2014 as a result of a U.S.-brokered agreement following deeply flawed elections — the country has been so dysfunctional and disarrayed that the last semblances of political order are on the verge of inevitably disintegrating.
By most accounts, Afghanistan today is worse off than when the United States first invaded, with the Taliban currently controlling more territory than it has at any point since 2001.
Afghan migrants — fleeing the deteriorating security and a surge in Islamic State (I.S.) activities — now make up the second-largest group of refugees to Europe.
Trying to resolve the problem by throwing money at it, the Obama administration in October pledged an extra $791 million in United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) assistance, even though U.S. government sources have presented evidence that the lion’s share of foreign funding is being pocketed by corrupt officials who in turn use the money to finance terrorist groups, including the Taliban.
Meanwhile, ethnic tensions are mounting in the capital city of Kabul with surging outbreaks of violence and repeated runs on Afghani banks as nervous residents rush to withdraw their funds.
With a minimalist economy based on primitive agriculture and foreign aid, both Karzai and Ghani have aligned themselves with drug lords and gun runners in order to survive.
In order to fully understand the precarious state of Afghanistan’s political future, historical reality must be taken into account.
Afghanistan is and has always been a hodgepodge state of warring feudal tribes hobbled together — against their own will — into a pseudo-nation by invading armies and encroaching neighbors.
There are at least a dozen major ethnic groups in Afghanistan, most of which still live in tribal communities and view each other with deep-rooted mistrust and suspicion.
Centuries of a static and constraining land ownership system have discouraged any attempts to unify these tribes.
According to U.S. intelligence sources, the Kabul government controls less than 30 percent of the country’s territory.
Because there is no sense of unification of the region, it is virtually impossible to conquer.
That’s a lesson the British learned the hard way when they tried their hand at nation-building in the 1800s only to discover that Afghanistan is a place where empires go to die.
The Russians also tried to take control of Afghanistan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The end result was a collapse of the Soviet Union.
And now, the United States is trying to foist a democratic system upon a country that has no tradition of democratic practices.
The Western political model cannot be merely transplanted into a region that has for generations operated on an elaborate arrangement of cronyism and tribal alliances motivated by personal enrichment rather than national unity.
Trying to thrust democracy onto a system and people to which such concepts are alien simply will not work.
For democracy to thrive, it must spring forth from within a territory as a result of social and political evolution and the will of its people.
It cannot be imposed from abroad.
Thérèse Margolis can be reached at [email protected].
