The Great Experiment: A Marshall Plan for Afghanistan

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America’s fighting force has now left Afghanistan, except for the continuing threat of the odd drone strike or bombing run to keep terrorists in check. So a great experiment is now beginning. The question it poses is simple but profound. Do you have to have won in order to execute a Marshall Plan? Or can such a Plan turn defeat on the battlefield into something resembling a moral, human and practical victory?

As I’ve outlined elsewhere, our Marshall Plan was unique in human history. World War II had killed an estimated 50 million people before their times, over ten times as many as Covid has to date. Yet at its end we were the luckiest victor, with our homeland largely intact. (Soviet Russia, in contrast, had been devastated.) So we did something unprecedented. We invented the Marshall Plan and loved our former enemies, much as Jesus had advised.

After our constructive occupation of Japan and our Marshall Plan in Europe, our two former enemies have become the world’s third and fourth largest economies. Both are thriving and hugely productive democracies. The energy and efficiency that had made them such terrible foes have now made them global sources of innovation and great places to live and work. The first hybrid cars came from Japan, and the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine came from Germany. These two nations are now our strongest allies, independent sources of power and backbone.

We didn’t set out to do good. Our motives were entirely practical and selfish, albeit enlightened. We wanted to avoid another war, perhaps an even more terrible one. We knew that poverty, misery and resentment are the sources of war, and we wanted to reduce them in war-devastated lands. We also wanted to limit the breeding grounds for Communism in postwar Europe and Asia.

George C. Marshall was hardly an idealist or a dreamer. He had been a Five-Star General and Army Chief of Staff. He had organized the United States’ military victories in Europe and Asia. You can’t get much more practical than that.

It was only later, in the postwar period and as Secretary of State, that Marshall conceived and implemented the Plan that bears his name. A practical man, he loved our former enemies because that was what worked to build a better world. In fact it worked spectacularly. The peace and prosperity that have prevailed in most of Europe and East Asia for 75 years are largely Marshall’s legacy.

Of course it’s easier to remake societies when you have total control. Wartime Japan and Germany had both surrendered unconditionally, giving the US’ occupying forces plenary power to remake them. No similar situation pertains in Afghanistan. But oddly enough, our earlier ignominious defeat—in Vietnam—may provide a model.

Today, 46 years after our defeat in Vietnam, we have friendly relations with Hanoi. Vietnam now makes our underwear and docks our cruise ships. Our industries are increasingly transferring production from China to Vietnam, which doesn’t steal our technology, hack our computers, plan global commercial domination, or threaten international shipping and maritime peace. Like China’s, Vietnam’s “Communism” has morphed from classical Marxist central control to a form of regulated state capitalism, but without China’s aggressive, expansionist globalism.

Our current good relations with Vietnam grew out of a sense of moral obligation, albeit a somewhat selfish one. Our military had left a lot of their own behind in Vietnam—the so-called “missing in action” or MIAs. Those among us who had fought the war felt a strong moral obligation to leave none of their own behind, living or dead. So “return the MIAs” became a national movement, with strong political support in the Republican Party and at the highest levels of our government.

Our late Senator John McCain had languished for half a decade as a prisoner of war in a North Vietnamese prison camp. Motivated to get our war dead out, he helped lead our “return the MIAs” effort. But he was only one of many.

In the course of innumerable visits to Vietnam and negotiations with Vietnamese leaders, McCain and others learned just how terrible the war had been for the other side. The defoliant Agent Orange had disfigured and maimed Vietnamese children. Myriad landmines and unexploded bombs, decades later, still killed and maimed rural people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

So our MIA negotiators gained respect for the Vietnamese, seeing just how costly the war itself had been for them and their neighbors. (The war had killed an estimated 3.3 million soldiers and civilians in the three Southeast Asian nations.) That sense of moral obligation and respect became the basis for our current friendly relations with Vietnam, despite our humiliating loss in the war.

Could our relationship with Afghanistan follow a similar trajectory? MIAs are not an issue there: the peculiar nature of the Afghan terrain and battles there let us extract nearly all of our war dead and wounded in real time. But an even stronger moral obligation has arisen in Afghanistan: an obligation to the living.

Today the bond we Americans feel with Afghans has nothing to do with MIAs. Instead, it involves the Afghans who helped us in our battles and in our diplomatic and civilian efforts to improve Afghans’ lives. Our moral obligation to them sparked much of our extraordinary last-minute evacuation effort, which has just ended. Thousands of our military survivors, as well as interested civilians, helped and are still helping evacuate Afghan friends, working virtually, online and even in person. They and we all have a moral stake in the fate of the Afghan diaspora and in the Afghans who, willingly or not, remain under Taliban rule.

Our moral obligation doesn’t stop there. Until the recent collapse, grants from the US and international institutions like the World Bank reportedly provided three-quarters of the Afghan nation’s public spending. The real prospect and fear of that money-flow stopping was one of the strongest factors in the collapse of the Afghan Army and government.

So now, it seems to me, we have a far stronger moral obligation in Afghanistan than we did in Vietnam. We have an obligation to thousands—maybe millions—of Afghans who looked to us for protection, sustenance and the prospect of a brighter future. We have a moral obligation to prevent the collapse of the Afghan economy and the humanitarian catastrophe that would follow. And yes, we have a moral obligation, within limits, to work with the Taliban to persuade and help them to govern their country well.

As for means, we have them, too. The prospect of American warriors coming home in body bags is ended. The fighting, wounding and dying are ended. We and our wartime allies have enormous leverage in money, on-ground experience, and knowledge of the place, the time, and the people. We have enduring personal bonds of American warriors, civilians and emissaries with Afghan soldiers and civilians.

So what we should do now is organize a new Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. As the richest country on Earth, we must try to show the world that “soft” power can still help improve a society after military power has failed.

Of course much depends on the Taliban seizing the opportunity that we proffer. But they would be crazy to miss chance to build a better, happier and more prosperous nation on the foundations of a kinder, gentler Islam and cooperation with their erstwhile enemies. And who knows? If we succeed, we will have taken a giant step along the hard trail blazed by George Marshall toward making war itself obsolete.

Afghanistan is still there. Millions whom we have educated, trained, enriched and given the vision of a brighter future are still there. Many of those who have left will return when and if conditions improve. Our military equipment may be gone, but the hotels, theaters, businesses, roads, schools and hospitals that we financed or built are still there. The Taliban, let alone under its currently restored leadership, will not want to destroy them. If we are humble enough to let Afghans accept new leadership and a different God, we can see to it that all our sacrifice (and theirs!) will not have been in vain. Let the diplomats take over after the warriors have departed.

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