Bedlam of U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan a far cry from orderly Soviet exit

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/08/2021 (1131 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Feb. 15, 1989, Geordie Elms walked over the Friendship Bridge that spans the Amu Darya River, crossing from Afghanistan into Uzbekistan.

He watched Gen. Boris V. Gromov, commander of the Soviet troops, step into the embrace of his wife.

Gromov, who’d traversed the bridge at the rear of the last armoured column of the 40th Army to leave Afghanistan, turned to a TV camera crew. “That’s it. Not one Soviet soldier or officer is behind my back.”

There was neither celebration nor chaos, as Elms recalls. Just beleaguered soldiers glad to be going home after nearly a decade-long fraught occupation of Afghanistan. Upwards of 15,000 Soviet troops had been killed during the ill-fated mission to bring Afghanistan to heel — out of its medieval darkness and into the light of modern civilization as a satellite Communist state. Defeated by the American-supported mujahideen.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had signed a peace deal with Afghanistan nearly a year earlier. It took 10 months to complete the orderly withdrawal, leaving behind a puppet government.

“They were in complete control before they left,” Elms tells the Star, of the political and military suzerainty the Soviets still maintained over Afghanistan, even in full retreat.

At the end, not a shot was fired, no mad scramble for the exits, no frantic fleeing of the citizenry and certainly no helicopters evacuating diplomatic staff from the embassy in Kabul, echo of the fall of Saigon. Even if the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan would henceforth always be known as their Vietnam.

“They had just decided they didn’t need to win this war and they couldn’t win this war. The time had come to go.

“It was an orderly transition, under a fairly well-crafted plan, the whole purpose to help the Russians get out. I was kind of surprised because nothing happened.”

Compare that to news footage of the bedlam in Kabul over the past few days, civilians hanging on to a U.S. C-17 taxiing toward the runway, military choppers launching smoke grenades to disperse a crowd of thousands at the civilian airport, desperate to escape the triumphant Taliban following a blitzkrieg advance that saw the capital sacked within mere days.

If the Americans ever had a plan for an efficient bug-out, it was never implemented. They were caught in a frenzied helter-skelter bolting, embassy staff still shredding important documents, as if the Pentagon and the State Department hadn’t seen this coming. Putting the lie to President Joe Biden’s assurance, as recently as a week ago, of an “orderly and secure” drawdown; that the Taliban could not lickety-split overrun a country with some half a million security forces trained by the U.S. and NATO.

“Some people made a Cold War win out of it,” continues Elms, of the Soviet extraction from a self-created dilemma. “But I remember going back to Kabul and nothing had changed, nobody was leaving, embassies didn’t close, the international community went on as before.”

Elms, who would eventually retire from the Canadian Forces as a colonel — first resident defence attaché to the Canadian Embassy in Afghanistan — had initially gone to Kabul in 1998, part of the United Nations Good Offices Mission to Afghanistan and Pakistan created by the Geneva Accords. It was a small mission, no more than 60 members from 10 countries, their assignment to monitor the Soviet departure.

Elms was the architect of that plan and the only Canadian present when the Soviet withdrawal was completed, flown back to Kabul the next day. Astonishing to appreciate how the 40th Army could pull out upward of 100,000 troops without Afghanistan immediately collapsing. Although it certainly did within a few years as the Talibs, religious “students of God” — originally no more than 50 of them, followers of one-eyed founder Mullah Omar in Kandahar City — grew into an internal insurgency that seized Afghanistan not once but, now, twice.

“It is over,” Elms stated in an email that accompanied his interview with the Star. “Pundits, armchair critics and any modern veteran called on by a local station will have something to say when asked. There will be lots of finger-pointing and comparisons backed up and buttressed by quotes from Kipling and pictures of helicopters landing on the U.S. Embassy in Saigon — and unfortunately very little research or analysis.”

He has no illusions about a reformed Taliban. “They are terrorists, there’s no doubt about that. We’re putting a lot of faith into the Taliban 2.0. What we missed is that they are a constituency and a force within the country.”

And much more savvy than they were the first time around. After being routed by the U.S.-led coalition that pummeled Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, they dispersed, laid low and reconstituted in the wild, lawless border areas, primarily along the Durand line separating Afghanistan from Pakistan completely ignored by tribal societies.

“They had 3 million Afghans in the border regions and they totally took over the transport industry.”

Fuelled by customs revenue money and the heroin monopoly that the puritan Taliban had once claimed to abhor.

“We basically went on payback,” says Elms, avenging Sept. 11. That was a successful mission because the Taliban were trounced. “But then they stayed.” The U.S. and NATO, including eventually a Canadian military deployment. “We thought we were going there to build a Jeffersonian democracy, in our own image, and hoped they would embrace it.”

Tolerated endemic levels of government corruption that has invalidated every Afghan leader from Hamid Karzai — now allying himself, repugnantly, with genocidal warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, internationally wanted for war crimes — to President Ashraf Ghani, who flew into exile on Sunday, purportedly to Oman.

Twenty years building, training and equipping Afghan security forces — army, police force, intelligence — and they bottled within two months. But what were they expected to do after then-U.S. president Donald Trump signed a peace deal with the Taliban last year (implemented by Biden), basically promising that military offences against the insurgents would cease if they stopped attacking troops, and never again provided sanctuary to al-Qaida or any other terrorist organization?

“I hoped that after 20 years, we would have built some institutional rigour,” says Elms.

The counter-insurgency doctrine to which the U.S. and the UN cleaved stressed the need for “local partners, which legitimized both powerful warlords and successive crooked central governments loathed by the populace.

Peter Galbraith, former UN deputy general representative for Afghanistan, delineated in a just-published screed on social media a score of explanations for what has turned into a catastrophic failure by the West.

“The Afghan political and military leaders who were more interested in staying in power than doing anything while in office except for stealing as much as they could. The U.S. government which pumped so much money into Afghanistan that there was a lot to steal and it was easily stolen.”

Massive fraud behind both presidential elections of Karzai; UN tolerance of that fraud for the elections it sponsored; USAID, which built roads intended to raise rural incomes by getting farm products to market “but actually enabled corrupt police to shakedown families,” which won the Taliban more support among the public while affording them speedy access to previously defensible areas such as the Panjshir Valley that had remained a redoubt for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance; U.S. and UN architects of a new, highly centralized constitution “utterly inappropriate” for a county of deep ethnic and geographical diversity, where tribal leaders had enjoyed local autonomy; and what was fundamentally a surrender agreement signed by Trump.

The Taliban insist they won’t invoke summary justice — executions — for Afghans who “collaborated” with the invaders. But already we’ve seen photos of slain men in the streets.

When the Taliban first swept across a country wracked by civil war, in 1996, the Soviet proxy president, Mohammad Najibullah, had taken refuge in the UN compound, waiting upon negotiations for his safe passage to India. Instead, the Taliban stormed the compound, castrated Najibullah, dragged his bloodied body through the streets of Kabul and then hanged him from a traffic light pole.

That’s who they were. That’s who they still are.

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno