This weekend, U.S. forces quietly turned Bagram airfield over to the Afghan military. Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah had just returned to Kabul after meeting with President Biden and members of Congress in Washington, where they were assured that vital U.S. support would continue.
But, since Biden’s April announcement of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban has surged its military campaign, capturing districts beyond its traditional strongholds. On Wednesday, the insurgents took their first provincial capital, Qala-e-Naw. Even as Afghan security forces moved in a few hours later, the audacious attack left observers asking: Does the Afghanistan government face an existential threat?
Five things to watch as the U.S. prepares to exit Afghanistan
While the Taliban presents the most obvious challenge to Afghanistan’s state-building project, contention among defenders of the republic also explains why the government finds itself in such dire straits. Many who see themselves in the vanguard defending against a Taliban return — from journalists, professors and activists to civil servants, tribal elders and militia commanders — feel excluded from the current political order. So long as these discontents go unheard, the government’s position vis-à-vis the Taliban, on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, will remain tenuous at best.
Political control is heavily centralized
Critics of the government have long argued that Kabul holds too much political, administrative and fiscal power over the diverse countryside. Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution makes it one of the world’s most centralized governments. A handful of people close to the president control everything from provincial budgeting and district governorships to local battle plans and security sector appointments.
Since taking office in 2014, President Ghani has restricted decision making to an exceptionally small clique. His rhetoric of technocratic reform falls short when even government employees describe a kind of institutional hollowing out from within. This gap has left strongmen and public intellectuals alike asking if this government’s institutional design is worth preserving.
Domestic negotiations over the distribution of power make for healthy debate in peaceful democracies. But in Afghanistan, conversations about the government’s architecture carry especially high stakes as the country enters its fifth decade of war. The Ghani administration’s micro management has alienated local leaders and citizens at a time when their support is the most viable bulwark against a Taliban takeover.
Afghanistan’s ethnopolitics leave some out
Afghan politics have long juggled a plurality of identities and associations that coexist within the nation’s larger “imagined community.” But as the war grinds on, the government’s centralized decision-making means particular ethnicities and regions receive privileges — and protections — while others are left out.
The central government’s move this spring, for example, to replace a governor in the northern province of Faryab — the sphere of influence of one of Afghanistan’s fiercest strongmen, Abdur Rashid Dostum — provoked bewilderment as Dostum’s supporters took to the streets. Dostum, Ghani’s former vice president, now estranged, has long employed a heavy-handed influence in defense of Uzbek, Turkmen and other ethnicities historically underrepresented in Kabul’s halls of power.
The U.S. is pulling out of Afghanistan. Don’t expect an al-Qaeda reboot.
Dostum had recommended a gubernatorial candidate, but the presidential palace opted to transplant a loyalist from its eastern Pashtun base into this heartland of non-Pashtun politics. The threat of violence forced the appointee to take shelter in a local army base, only to be called back to Kabul thereafter.
Another minority group, the Hazaras, has come under increasing attack from the Islamic State, including a 2020 massacre of two dozen in the maternity ward of a Kabul government hospital, and a cluster of bombings in May that killed dozens of school girls in West Kabul.
The ubiquity of terror attacks — and the government’s failure to prevent them — leave many concerned about the government’s ability to defend citizens, especially those who suffered acutely under the Taliban. As one Hazara militia leader told a New York Times reporter, “Hazaras get killed in cities and on highways, but the government doesn’t protect them. Enough is enough. We have to protect ourselves.”
A republic for those who will stay
Less obvious than ethnic, regional and tribal differences is a divide that may prove as significant: those who will leave versus those who will stay. Many powerful decision makers in Kabul have families abroad and multiple passports; they can depart if the Taliban closes in. Alarm about the failure of the U.S. Special Immigrant Visa Program to protect thousands of Afghans who worked with the U.S. government only underscores the fact that millions will remain behind.
Foot soldiers and civil servants alike may well wonder for what and whom they risk the ultimate sacrifice. New alliances between young and old, urban and rural, military and civic are likely to emerge, drawn together to defend shared communities under threat. As those with access to guns and money deem that the republic no longer represents them or cannot protect their constituents, the risks of militarized fragmentation grow.
What’s ahead?
The return of militias recalls Afghanistan’s devastating descent into civil war after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal. But the Ghani-Abdullah government has advantages the communist regime in Kabul at the time did not. Even as U.S. and NATO soldiers head home, outsiders will continue to wield influence through aid and diplomacy.
Don’t miss any of TMC’s smart analysis! Sign up here for our newsletter.
Unlike the 1989 regime’s reliance on the collapsing Soviet Union, the Ghani administration’s main benefactor, the United States, is both able and willing to sustain military, civilian and humanitarian support. Meanwhile, the Taliban cannot claim the kind of popular grassroots support the mujahideen insurgency of the1980s did.
Seventy percent of Afghans are under the age of 25 — and democracy has demonstrable resonance in a country where this generation expects the very freedoms and opportunities that run counter to the Taliban’s extremist vision. Even as they debate the details of how a constitutional republic should work, these citizens make clear they will resist the imposition of another Islamic emirate.
Can the besieged Afghan government translate its imperative to survive into a genuine state-building project that represents and includes the needs and visions of the Afghan population? This is the question that will determine whether or not the republic persists.
Professors: Check out TMC’s expanding list of classroom topic guides.
Dipali Mukhopadhyay is associate professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and a senior expert with the U.S. Institute of Peace. She is the author of Warlords, Strongman Governors, and the State in Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 2014).