How Afghanistan Fell: Follow the Money

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How did all of Afghanistan fall to the Taliban so fast that it left our distinguished military and diplomats with mouths agape and pants down? Virtually every American involved, from President Biden down to military commanders and diplomats who had left the field years ago, seems to consider the debacle a mystery.

But is it really? Two things are crystal clear. First, no one in the West predicted that the whole nation would fall within two weeks of withdrawal of the last big tranche of American troops. Second, there appears to have been far more surrender than fighting. Not only did the Afghan Army and police surrender territory. They also surrendered ammunition and equipment.

The first point follows from the second, doesn’t it? The whole country fell so fast became many—if not most—of the people “defending” it essentially surrendered. Why was that?

Nothing similar happened in Iraq. There were real, pitched battles between the jihadis, who were nearly exclusively Sunnis, and the Shiites and Kurds who had endured Saddam’s brutal dictatorship. People didn’t surrender territory or equipment without a fight because they fought to win. In Afghanistan, the vast majority of the Taliban comes from the same Pashtun group that makes up a near-majority of the whole country. In most places, ethnic identity and historical grievances were and are not as much a factor as in Iraq.

So what was? In retrospect, it appears that our leaders ignored the most glaring reality about Afghanistan: it is one of the world’s poorest countries. When we Americans came in our numbers, with our expensive equipment, our high standard of living, and our money, we created an economic mismatch of world-historic proportions. The $1,000 a month that our translators earned may have been a small amount for a domestic American worker. But it was an impossible sum for most Afghanis. In comparison, a mere $70 a month was enough to support a soldier or policeman and induce him to risk his life.

We Americans brought a fire hose spraying money every which way. So it’s no wonder that many Afghans saw opportunities that come once in a lifetime. By selling some ammo or a military truck, they could command sums that would have taken them years to accumulate in the normal, pre-war Afghan economy. And by selling or giving something to the Taliban, they could allay (or at least hope to allay) fear of punishment and reprisals, constant threats of which were part of the Taliban’s “charm.” Afghan leaders, who worked closer to the source of the fire hose, probably diverted some to secret foreign accounts, just in case.

Then, all of a sudden, the Americans announced that the fire hose of money would be shutting down. No more unaccustomed salaries. No more ammo and equipment to sell. Nothing more to give the Taliban to placate them and allay their threats.

Is it so hard to imagine that that’s precisely when the “corruption” swung into high gear?

I put the word “corruption” in quotes because that’s what it sounds like to us in the West. But what it was in Afghanistan was a by-now-accustomed way of surviving in a country wrecked by forty years of internal and civil war, twenty of them under the twisted generosity of the richest nation on Earth. Is it so hard to understand that the soldiers and police, many of whom had not been paid formally in as many as six months, sold what they could while they could, before the fire hose of money shut down forever, and then sought jobs on the other side?

All this seems pretty easy to understand. The hard questions come when you look at the other side. The Taliban come from the same impoverished country. They, too, suffered and survived. They, too, endured they same forty years of chaotic and grinding war. So where did they get the money to essentially buy out their rivals and end their enemy’s decades-long national military campaign in a handful of weeks?

Good reporters have to answer this question now. It’s clear that, if our government or military knows, it’s not telling. It may be that they know nothing, for they seem to have utterly neglected the economic side of this strange war in one of the poorest nations on Earth.

Answer this question and you’ll know not only why the Afghan nation that we had propped up for so long fell so fast. You’ll also know who our real enemies are.

It’s not hard to find probable candidates. For decades, the Saudis had funded the extremist/jihadist madrassas (religious schools) that teach extreme Islam throughout the Middle East and South Asia. Why not also the Taliban, which, after all, are just the military and governmental adjunct of the madrassas in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Some of the Taliban’s money may have come from the Saudi government, but more likely it came from so-called “private” parties (with plausible deniability), including individual members of the Saudi royal family.

If this is so, then our best “ally” in the Middle East (after Israel) may have been secretly funding the troops who were recently fighting and killing us, and who now have handed us our worst and most humiliating defeat since Vietnam.

It gets even more humiliating. Where does all the Saudi oil money come from? We Americans are virtually self-sufficient in oil, thanks to our self-invented “fracking” technology. But Europe and China are not. Europe has some offshore oil, but China has far less. What are the chances that some of the money China pays the Saudis for oil got recycled in part to the Taliban to produce our humiliating defeat and end our two-decade-long nation-building project? I’d say the chances are pretty good.

These very questions make me even happier to drive an electric car. I time its charging to coincide with the Sun on my solar array, so as to drive on the Sun, not on natural gas or coal, let alone oil. And it makes me feel even closer to the Germans, our long-ago enemies, who are far along on the road to Energiewende (“energy transformation”) and so to dumping fossil fuels, including Saudi and Russian oil.

If we want to be part of, let alone lead, the coming global carbon-free economy, we’d better mind more precisely who our natural friends and enemies are, and where the money used to fight and weaken us comes from. And in the Nuclear Age, when all-out war is a thing of the past, we’d better stop seeing cyberwar as the only moral equivalent to actual combat. Economic warfare, concealed by cryptocurrency, may be an even more potent means of harming a rival, especially one too prone to engage in limited actual warfare. If we rely too much on military strength and limited actual combat, we may, as in Afghanistan, never see or know the hand that actually brings us down.

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