Perceptions of Weakness Provoke: From Afghanistan to Ukraine to Russia’s ‘Shadow War’ Against Europe and Implications for the War Against Iran

I hope everyone had a great summer.

I recently had the opportunity to engage in a discussion hosted by my former National Security Council Staff colleague, Lisa Curtis, at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Before the disastrous self-defeat and humiliating, deadly U.S. withdrawal in August 2021, I had a telephone conversation with a senior Biden Administration official to share my view that, unless there was a dramatic change in approach to Afghanistan, that country would once again become a haven for terrorist organizations that threaten not only the people of South and Central Asia, but also the United States and our interests abroad. Moreover, I asked, “How does it make sense to evacuate our military before U.S. civilians and foreign nationals who took great risks on our behalf across more than two decades of war?” I warned that there would be broad geostrategic consequences; the specter of a terrorist organization defeating the world’s superpower would embolden enemies and adversaries. In particular, regimes hostile to the United States in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang would conclude that the United States was weak and did not possess the will to prevail even though the costs of sustaining support for the Afghan government and armed forces had fallen dramatically.

My plea for a reconsideration of the Biden policy of ‘withdraw at all costs’ was unpersuasive. The senior official noted that doing what I suggested, reopening Bagram Air Base and establishing a protected corridor between Kabul and that air base, would require more troops. President Joe Biden, he told me, had already made the decision to withdraw all troops regardless of the consequences and would not waver. So the outcome was not only predictable; it was predicted. The President and his advisors, despite claims of an intelligence failure, not only should have known better, they did know better and forged ahead anyway on the path to a humiliating self-defeat.

In early 2020, more than a year before the Taliban takeover, I wrote the following in the book Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (pp. 215-219) as President Donald Trump abandoned the South Asia Strategy that he had approved in August of 2017 and initiated negotiations with the Taliban without the Afghan government present.

As I had feared, however, the strategy did not last. Those who were deeply skeptical about America’s long war in Afghanistan convinced President Trump to abandon it. Soon after I departed the White House in 2018, those who misunderstood the nature of the war, underappreciated the threat, and were ideologically predisposed toward disengagement from “forever wars” convinced him that a sustained and sustainable military effort in Afghanistan was futile and wasteful.

In July 2019, Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, visited Washington. Khan had strong anti-U. S. credentials and had been the clear choice of the Pakistan Army to be the country’s nominal leader. When President Trump asked publicly for Khan’s help in bringing the war to a conclusion, it seemed as if another American leader had fallen for a Pakistani counterpart’s effort to pose as a partner in counterterrorism. Khan even got a bonus as the president offered to mediate between Pakistan and India on Kashmir. President Trump went so far as to claim that Prime Minister Modi had asked him to mediate. But any observer of South Asia knows that Modi would never have done any such thing, as India had long-opposed outside mediation of the Kashmir dispute, primarily because past initiatives by the United Nations on the issue had proven disadvantageous to India. India is the status quo power when it comes to Kashmir, while Pakistan seeks to weaken India’s grip over the territory. The visit must have gone better than expected for Khan, as Pakistan regained its role of both arsonist and fireman in Afghanistan and South Asia.

Shortly after the Khan visit, President Trump, indulging in a common misconception of the war, said, “I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people.” His statement betrayed a misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. America and the broad international coalition were not fighting against Afghans in an effort to subjugate popular will; they were fighting with the vast majority of Afghans to prevent the forcible return to power of a small, unpopular minority that had governed Afghanistan through terror and brutality. The Afghan peoples, like peoples across South and Central Asia and the Middle East, were the principal victims of the Taliban and jihadist terrorists. Despite this obvious distinction between the twenty-first- century war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and historical Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation in the twentieth century and in the First and Second Anglo-Afghan Wars of the nineteenth century, the narrative associated with Afghanistan as the “Graveyard of Empires” persisted.

Sadly, the president’s statement cheapened not only the sacrifices made by the more than 58,000 Afghan soldiers and police who died defending their country and their families from the Taliban, but also the sacrifices of the more than 2,300 American servicemen and women who lost their lives in the war. The loss of will to sustain the effort in Afghanistan led to rationalization of the decision to withdraw and the resurrection of the flaws and contradictions that undercut U.S. policy there almost from the start.

In September 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appointed Zalmay Khalilzad, former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, as special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban. The self-delusion that the Taliban would forswear any connection to Al-Qaeda and other jihadist terrorist organizations had returned. In January 2019, the same month that Khalilzad told the New York Times that the Taliban would restrain Al-Qaeda, a UN report observed that Al-Qaeda “continues to see Afghanistan as a safe haven for its leadership,” and the U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment noted that Al-Qaeda continued to provide support for the Taliban. Another UN report, in June, warned that the Taliban “continues to be the primary partner for all foreign terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan.” Meanwhile, as the United States pursued talks, the Taliban intensified its attacks. In July, as Khalilzad sat down with Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar, a truck bomb in Ghazni city killed 12 and wounded 179 others. At the eleventh hour, the U.S. administration avoided the embarrassment of hosting Taliban terrorists at Camp David to finalize America’s surrender and abandonment of its partners on, almost incomprehensibly, the eve of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The president canceled the planned meeting with a tweet on September 7 after learning of a Taliban car bomb attack that killed one American soldier and eleven others. Trump would go on to demand a Taliban cease-fire and a sharp reduction in violence as a precondition for resuming negotiations. Although there would be no immediate U.S. withdrawal, Trump made his intentions clear, stating that “We’ve been policemen there for a long time. And the government is going to have to take responsibility or do whatever it is they do.”

Later that month, the first emir of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), Asim Umar, was killed in a joint Afghan-U. S. raid on a Taliban compound in Helmand Province. Haji Mahmood, a Taliban military commander, the AQIS chief for Helmand, and Umar’s courier to Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, fell next to him. The Department of Defense suppressed a press release that would have announced the death of Umar because of concerns that it “would complicate further negotiations” by exposing once again the interconnected nature of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Self-delusion was back in full force.

It got worse. Khalilzad resumed negotiations with the Taliban, and after a “one-week reduction in violence” to demonstrate the Taliban’s control over its fighters and terrorists, would sign an agreement that offered the conditional withdrawal of U.S. forces in exchange for a sustained reduction in violence and other promises from the Taliban. These dubious promises include the commitments from the Taliban not to host, cooperate with, train, recruit, or fundraise for Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations that threaten the U.S. and its allies. The Taliban also agreed to take immediate action against threats that the U.S. deemed as urgent. It is difficult to understand how any American familiar with the nature of the Taliban, its ideology, and its record would believe those promises.

In the run-up to the agreement, the New York Times lent its editorial page to the deputy emir of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and specifically designated (by the FBI) global terrorist Sirajuddin Haqqani. The man who leads the Taliban military arm, facilitates Al-Qaeda, and who has the blood of perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocents on his hands blamed America for the war that began, in part, because his father helped cement the relationship between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The author’s assurances to permit women’s education and employment were tepid. And the failure, in the agreement or in the op-ed, to recognize the Afghan government or the Afghan Constitution indicates that the Taliban has not given up its ambition to regain power through violent means.

What was particularly tragic was that the Trump administration strategy announced in August 2017 was working. The Afghans were taking the brunt of the fighting. Although every U.S. loss is a tragedy, casualties per twelve-month periods fell from a high of 499 in 2010 to fewer than 20 in the twelve months prior to the president’s statement that he intended to withdraw all forces. The annual cost of the war fell from a high of $120 billion in 2011 to an estimated annual cost of $45 billion per year in 2018. The plan was to reduce that cost by half again as allies pledged to assume more of the financial burden. Afghanistan had not become Denmark, but government reforms, especially in the security ministries, were progressing. Amrullah Saleh, a no-nonsense leader, had taken over as interim minister of the interior. The January 2018 suspension of security assistance to Pakistan meant that Pakistan, at least, could no longer have it both ways, posing as a U.S. ally while supporting our enemies. The Taliban was under significant military pressure and no longer could simply wait out the U.S. withdrawal time line. Afghanistan was not a pretty situation. It was still a violent place, and Afghan, U.S., and coalition soldiers were still taking risks and making sacrifices; however, the United States had set conditions for its entering a future negotiating process from a position of strength, not desperation.

The September 2019 Afghan presidential election was not pretty. The Afghan government conducted the election under duress. The Taliban threatened anyone who voted. In addition to charges and countercharges of fraud, voter turnout was low. After nearly five months, Ghani was declared the winner by a slim margin. But the election happened. The result presented the United States and other nations with an opportunity to support an elected government and the 82 percent of Afghans opposed to the return of the Taliban and to bolster the will of those fighting on a modern-day frontier between barbarism and civilization. It seems the Trump Administration chose not to take advantage of that opportunity.

Khalilzad continued to pursue negotiations in 2020, perhaps to get the best deal possible given the American president’s desire to withdraw. But any deal meant primarily to fulfill that desire was bound to rest on the self-delusion that the Taliban would be an effective partner in countering terrorist organizations. Such an agreement would also empower the Taliban and weaken the Afghan government and security forces as the U.S. exited. That is why if the decision is to withdraw all U.S. forces, regardless of what happens afterward, it would have been preferable to do so with no deal.

In the last sentence of Part III (South Asia) of Battlegrounds (p. 220), I predicted that “the results of striking a deal with the Taliban for the purpose of withdrawing from America’s longest war are likely to be far worse than a sustained commitment under a sound strategy.”

On February 4, 2022, less than six months after the humiliating and deadly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met on the eve of the Beijing Olympics and issued a joint statement that declared

the establishment of a new kind of relationships (sic) between world powers on the basis of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation. They reaffirm that the new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ”forbidden“ areas of cooperation, strengthening of bilateral strategic cooperation is neither aimed against third countries nor affected by the changing international environment and circumstantial changes in third countries.

The overall message was that the United States-led world order was over; Russia and China would lead in this new era. Twenty days later, Russia initiated its massive unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The connection between the events of August 2021 in Afghanistan and February 2022 in Ukraine was not hard to make.

It was perceived weakness associated with the Taliban victory over the world’s superpower in Afghanistan that emboldened the two Eurasian revanchist powers and emboldened an expanding axis of aggressors as Moscow and Beijing deepened partnerships with the theocratic dictatorship in Iran, the hereditary communist dictatorship in Pyongyang and other kleptocratic authoritarian regimes such as those in Havana, Managua, and Caracas in the Western Hemisphere. And it is Vladimir Putin’s belief that the transatlantic relationship between the United States and Europe is strained combined with his overall perception that Europe and the United States are weak, decadent, and divided that has impelled his intensifying shadow war that threatens European security and the future of the NATO alliance.

U.S. CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a surprise visit to Moscow on August 25 against the backdrop of an intensifying Russian campaign of sabotage and subversion which has combined the cutting of undersea cables with the bombing of warehouses, attacks on rail lines, assassinations and assassination attempts, drone incursions, and various forms of cognitive warfare. On August 4, a drone packed with explosives was discovered near a Ukrainian cargo plane parked at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany after it had struck another aircraft and failed to detonate. Last week, German investigators revealed that the drone was intended to be part of a larger, three-vehicle operation controlled by a radio relay station. It seems clear that Ratcliffe’s mission was to deter further Russian aggression with a warning that the United States would defend NATO nations that come under further attacks.

But to deter further Russian aggression, it will be important to impose costs on Moscow that go far beyond those that the Kremlin factors in when they approve operations such as the attack on Leipzig’s airport. In At War with Ourselves, I described President Trump’s desire for a deal or entente with Vladimir Putin as consistent with the initial policies of the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden Administrations as well as the approach that Chancellor Angela Merkel took toward Putin for sixteen years. The intensifying shadow war against Europe, however, should finally convince President Trump and European leaders that Putin, Xi Jinping, as well as the Islamic Republic of Iran act against the United States and our allies when they perceive weakness. And the axis of aggressors retreats when it encounters unity and strength.

Bolstering the transatlantic relationship (and the relationship between the United States and Canada for that matter) while imposing costs on the Kremlin and expanding support for Ukraine would enhance the prospects for restoring peace and preventing more wars. And because perceptions of weakness provoke, persevering in the war against Iran to ensure the world’s largest supporter of terrorism does not possess the most destructive weapons on earth and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is no longer able to project power effectively outside its borders is vital to U.S. and European interests.