Lessons from Afghanistan

What can people who are interested in conspiracy theories learn from a disorderly retreat?

"Norwegian Special Forces Kabul Airport Attack" by Metziker is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 [Photo from 2013]

When you spend time with people who have a hedgehog-like conspiratorial mindset, you often see a number of unstated assumptions about how the world is supposed to work. In particular, they will often assume the following four points:

- There is a shadowy elite behind elected officials

- This elite is free of conflict and has unchanging goals

- The elite is able to implement its plans perfectly

- Amateur researchers are able to discover these goals by working backwards from events to causes

Recent events in Afghanistan are a perfect opportunity to bring these assumptions into the sunlight and see how well they stand up to scrutiny. To do so, we will need to divide the US involvement in Afghanistan into five phases.

Phase One

Afghanistan was only very marginal to American politics until 1978, when the local Communist Party staged a coup and tried to reform society from top to bottom. This proved unpopular. The Soviet Union invaded its neighbour towards the end of 1979 to help the local Communist Party.

Phase Two

The Soviet-Afghan war ran from December 1979 to February 1989. The war spanned the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. During this time, Afghanistan became a proxy war between the US and the Soviet Union. The US backed the Mujahideen, an insurgent group that was fighting the Soviets. Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UK also got involved. The Mujahideen accepted aid and training, but its members also had their own goals.

Phase Three

The Mujahideen won the war in 1989. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Under the presidencies of Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Afghanistan returned to being a half-forgotten backwater for the US. The US decided against rebuilding the country and Clinton ceased all aid to the country. There was a civil war between 1992 and 1996.

In the absence of US interest, Afghanistan’s neighbour Pakistan forged relations with local warlords. The Taliban were founded in 1994, during the civil war. Pakistan was said to be heavily involved in its creation. The Taliban won the civil war and established an Islamic state in 1996.

Islamic terrorist organization Al Qaeda had been founded in 1988 at the beginning of the war with the Soviets, but its founder Osama Bin Laden had returned to Saudi Arabia by 1989. He turned against the US in 1990 during the Gulf War and moved back to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996. He enjoyed the support of the Taliban as he attacked US targets in other countries.

Phase Four

As we all know, on 11th September 2001, Al Qaeda-trained terrorists used box cutters to turn airplanes into bombs during the presidency of the younger Bush. The US invaded Afghanistan the same year to topple the Taliban and was heavily involved in the country until 2021, including a surge of troops in 2009 under Bush’s successor Barack Obama.

Phase Five

The long US involvement in Afghanistan gradually became increasingly unpopular with the general public back at home. Obama’s successor Donald Trump eventually agreed a peace deal with the Taliban in 2020. The withdrawal was executed by his successor Joe Biden in 2021. It was chaotic, as the Taliban took over the country much faster than predicted.

Let’s return to the bullet points at the start of the article. We can take the first two together:

- There is a shadowy elite behind elected officials

- This elite is free of conflict and has unchanging goals

Neither of these appear to fit the facts very well. US goals in Afghanistan have moved from neglect to a proxy war to neglect again to a full-scale invasion to a gradual loss of interest to neglect again. The changes in the goals have ebbed and flowed with changes of administration and events. US policy has mostly been reactive instead of pro-active.

- The elite is able to implement its plans perfectly

Even if you think the withdrawal in 2021 was the right policy, the execution of the idea was appalling. Poor planning, incompetence and wishful thinking would be a much better assumptions than puppet masters skillfully pulling the strings of history.

- Amateur researchers are able to discover these goals by working backwards from events to causes

In a world where big-picture goals change after elections or major events and then are poorly and imperfectly implemented, trying to work backwards from events to causes is much harder than conspiracy theorists might imagine.

People who are interested in conspiracy theories who want to engage in double-loop learning can also learn a second lesson from recent events. Conspiracy theories often hinge on the idea that the news media is corrupt and imperfect. In fact, one of the first acts of the Taliban upon regaining power was to censor the press, shut down media organizations and persecute individual journalists.

Long-time readers of Sharpen Your Axe won’t be surprised by this. A free press is good for society, but tyrants love censorship. If you would like to support journalists who are suffering under the Taliban, please consider a donation to Reporters Without Borders or the International Federation of Journalists’ Safety Fund. See you next week!

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the critical-thinking rabbit hole, which includes links to a free book.

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.