Three years ago this month, the United States withdrew from Afghanistan following more than 20 years of armed intervention and institution-building intended to transform it into a vibrant, egalitarian democracy. This effort failed — and Afghanistan is once again ruled by the Taliban. In his new book, “The Last Commander: The Once and Future Battle for Afghanistan,” Lt. Gen. Sami Sadat — the last commander of the army of the Afghan republic — details the consequences of America’s retreat on Afghanistan and the world.
Twenty years after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Taliban were back in power, after a war costing more than $2 trillion and taking the lives of 6,300 brave young service members and contractors from the US and its coalition partners.
The war was lost not because the Taliban were strong but because for 20 years it was not treated as a war but as a short-term intervention. Wise American officials had a saying: “It’s not year 20. It’s year one for the 20th time.”
President Biden has often spoken contemptuously about the capacity of our armed forces, saying that Afghanistan could not expect Americans to die in its cause if Afghans were not willing to fight. But what we see today in Afghanistan — along with the consequences in the wider world — is a direct result of a process that started with President Barack Obama and ended with Biden. Both leaders facilitated the fall and the rise of terrorism as a nation-state in Afghanistan.
The disastrous pullout led by the Biden administration three years ago this month was a humanitarian catastrophe that destroyed Afghanistan and the United States’ reputation globally. The spectacle of Afghans clamoring for space on crowded US choppers and the deaths of 13 US service members in a Kabul terror attack demonstrated the type of American weakness that later allowed despots like Putin to enter Ukraine.
Fast-forward to today and this is what we now have: A humanitarian disaster of a mass migration of 8 million Afghans to Pakistan, Iran, and other regional nations along with the return of international terrorism led by Al Qaeda and its transformation into a militarized political force. Most menacing is the Taliban, whose victory in Afghanistan has boosted the morale of global terror entities all over the world.
Al Qaeda now has the time, space and motivation to attack the global West. After the US deal with the Taliban in 2021, Iran made a deal with Al Qaeda to work together against the US in the Middle East and force the US to abandon the region. Iran, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are the most significant forces inflicting instability from Pakistan to Somalia. All of this would have been completely avoidable if the US made a deal with the Afghan government instead of making a deal with our enemy.
The Taliban have broken the main condition agreed upon in order to secure US and allied withdrawal: that they would not support Al Qaeda, who have been able to regroup and make Afghanistan their most successful international cell. Much as Special Forces Chief Gen. Stanley McChrystal predicted years ago: If the US withdrew, Biden’s timid policies have delivered the world “Chaos-istan.”
Al Qaeda gained credibility among jihadi fighters by supporting the ouster of US forces from Afghanistan— a blow against what their doctrine describes as the “far enemy.” Now from safe and secure bases in Afghanistan they are able to plan attacks on the governments in the Middle East they call the “near enemy.”
We have a patriotic duty to kick out the Taliban, recover Afghanistan for its people, and prevent further terrorist attacks on the world. But mobilizing forces has taken time. The country is tired of war, and the Taliban benefits from the 20 years of peace we enjoyed. But the full horror of Taliban rule has now been realized. The Taliban have proved themselves incapable of running any kind of economy, and savage restrictions imposed on all freedoms, particularly affecting women, have led to widespread discontent. They rule only by fear; their support is shallow.
Still, the Taliban have provoked opposition to their rule. Their failure to include just a handful of non-Pashtuns in senior positions, and no women in any role has faced pushback. All they have is a misguided, misquoted, and misapplied sense of the Quran, deployed against the very people who take pride and honor both in the depth of their religious tradition and their tribal roots. In the Taliban regime, there is no space for women, no respect for a head of a tribe or for a wise man or scholar, no respect for ordinary citizens, and no space for the values and hopes of the modern generation educated since 9/11. The only respect and privileged status is given to Taliban fighters.
This leaves a gap for an opposition movement to mobilize the next generation of Afghans who witnessed a vision of their country during the two decades of the republic. People tasted equality, freedom, democracy, and development, and want a return to them. Afghans are now more willing than ever to coexist with one another to end the cycles of violence of the past 50 years. If we get this right, we can connect the new generation to the traditional pillars of authority — religious and tribal leaders who have been sidelined by the Taliban — and forge a new society.
Afghanistan’s best generation was atomized by the fall of Ashraf Ghani, our final president who was ousted by the Taliban three long years ago. Our former military and civilian leaders now live scattered as refugees across the planet or hide in Afghanistan with no prospect of earning money to keep their families alive. But those of us who left carry with us our education—and a burning desire to return. The new generation, my generation, have the motivation to take back Afghanistan and push it once and for all in the direction of peace and prosperity. We mourn the loss of our republic and constitution.
For now I am a general without an army. And I am constantly meeting politicians without a parliament, women’s leaders who are campaigning for a return to the equality we enjoyed, and businesspeople who mourn the ruin of the Afghan economy. We know what it is like to lose our country, not to have a vote, to stay in places where we do not belong and are often not welcome. And this feeling is translating into a wider commitment among hundreds of thousands of Afghans to take our country back and kick the terrorists out.
For all the faults of our leaders in the 20 years of the Afghan republic, people saw the value of having a government that delivered education, jobs and a functioning economy — along with an army that fought for honor and the flag. That is all now gone.
So I believe this is a strategic opportunity to find an alternative to the Taliban and a lasting settlement to bring peace. And this time we need to do it our way — learning from the mistakes of the past and without American boots on the ground. It is time to raise the banner for a new Afghanistan, based on the foundations of the 2004 constitution that was endorsed by old and new pillars of Afghan power, including Islamic scholars. It was even signed by our revered former king, Zahir Shah, who returned from Rome, where he had been exiled since the 1973 coup, to die in his homeland soon afterward.
Everyone has a view of what they think could be changed in the constitution: it is centralized and perhaps the president is too strong; there should be more power for local government. But we need to start somewhere and base our fightback on a return to constitutional order.
The existing constitution is founded on Islamic principles, but with a liberal view of today’s world, accommodating human rights, the rights of women, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of politics. That should be the basis of a return to order. We have proud traditions of meeting in jirgas (traditional tribal councils), both at the local and national level, to resolve issues. Afghans have ways of finding consensus, and we will do it again. Afghanistan needs reform and capable reformers to liberate the country and encourage international investment.
That is the offer, that is what we are preparing to fight for, and it may be necessary to fight to take back our country. The Taliban are not strong, and internal divisions have weakened them further, but I do not underestimate the scale of the task. There is a risk that the whole country could become a terrorist hub, as schools turn into propaganda machines for the death cult that is the Taliban. They are nihilists who value martyrdom above all else. The best thing that young people can do in their eyes is to die. I see this on social media, where there is far more talk of death than before.
In Taliban Afghanistan, people are being groomed to die.
Excerpted from “The Last Commander: The Once and Future Battle for Afghanistan” by Sami Sadat (Copyright: Sami Sadat/Bombardier Books/Post Hill Press).