When President Ashraf Ghani fled from Afghanistan in August 2021 and the Taliban took control of Kabul, the Americans were suddenly surrounded by victorious Taliban who now walked proudly in the streets of Kabul with newly captured American tanks and weapons. The disastrous withdrawal of American forces and the evacuation of a limited number of Afghan allies – while leaving thousands of others under the control of the Taliban – marked a dark chapter in American foreign policy.
The results of approximately 20 years of American military and civil engagement in Afghanistan have been the subject of both of the two independent research and the evaluations of the main governments involved (as GermanyTHE United Kingdomand the UNITED STATES). The results reveal how mismanagement, bypassing the Afghan government in the United States, deals with the Taliban, the lack of institutional capacity, corruption, the absence of contextual knowledge and the lack of local respect values All contributed to the collapse of the Afghan government. However, there was another factor at stake, which is often overlooked in these studies: the degrading treatment of American officials and abusive verbal behavior towards Afghan leaders, who have caused deep animosity towards the United States in Afghanistan.
Judging by the current attitude of the Trump administration to the Russian-Ukraine war, and more recently his treatment of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, these bitter lessons from Afghanistan have not sank.
The two former presidents of the Afghan Republic, Hamid Karzai (2004-2014) and Ashraf Ghani (2014-2021), understood the importance of American financial and military support in Afghanistan. Due to its limited resources and its dysfunctional tax system, Afghanistan was a more rental state during its more than 100 years of modern history. Ghani and Karzai also understood that when the Afghans are treated with respect, they can be great allies and friends; Nevertheless, if they are subject to humiliation, they can turn into ferocious opponents arranged to sacrifice everything for revenge – perhaps the source of the reputation of Afghanistan as “cemetery of empires”.
Karzai, accompanied by dozens of us special forceswent down to a mountainous area in southern Afghanistan in the first months after September 11, even before the American military invasion, to start the fight against the Taliban. Karzai succeeded in his campaign and quickly became the head of the interim government and later president of Afghanistan. However, the cooperative relationship did not last long. Karzai, of a friend, has become an adversary and a critic of the American presence in Afghanistan. To many, in 2013, he refused to sign the US Safety Pact-Afghan And tried to establish direct contact with the Taliban leaders.
There are several accounts From why Karzai went from an American ally to an opponent. According to the relatives of Karzai, this change was due to the fact that he was treated by American officials as a puppet and considered the president of a poor and corrupt country. The former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rangin Dadfar Spanta (2006-2010), who was present at this critical moment during Karzai meetings with American officials, drawn up in his Persian memory On such meetings. According to Spanta, a disastrous In Kabul between the new American vice-president, Joe Biden and Karzai, in 2009, was an important part of the rupture: “When Joe Biden … hit the table with a towel and died from dinner, he not only exposed the supremacy of the United States to President Karzai, who was perceived as an animosity of Profound, but also failed in the recognition of the after-France States. »»
Subsequently, Karzai avoided going to visit President Barack Obama In Bagram aerodrome and rather asked Obama to visit him in his palace in Kabul.
Years later, Karzai’s successor Ashraf Ghani was unable to avoid visiting Donald Trump in Bagram. In Afghan eyes, it was disrespectful that the Americans expect the Afghan presidents going to a military camp to welcome an American president. However, American officials were not willing to recognize the negative impact that these optics have had on the relationship between Afghanistan and the United States.
According to Spanta, Karzai was so irritated by this unbalanced relationship that each time there was a disagreement between him and the US officials, he would refer to an American newspaper who called the American strategic agreement an agreement between a “mouse” and an “elephant”. He said to his loved ones: “Well, the Americans should now know who is the mouse and who is the elephant.”
Although there are significant differences between the participation of the United States in Afghanistan and Ukraine, there are also many similarities and common lessons. More importantly, like Afghanistan, Ukraine is cut off from negotiations to end a conflict on its soil. The Afghan government was bypassed by Trump by doing a peace agreement with the Taliban; Ukraine appears in a similar situation after Trump started direct talks with Moscow. Washington is not impatient to listen to Zelenskyy and treats him as a person whose survival depends on American support – the same disdainful attitude that has so offended Karzai, Ghani and most Afghanity.
After the signing of the United States of a peace agreement with the Taliban in February 2020, Ghani raised concern on various aspects of the agreement. However, he was not heard by Washington, and his dependence on support in the United States left him few options – as Trump could say, Ghani “did not have the cards.” In the end, Ghani took the only bitter revenge at his disposal: when the Taliban entered Kabul, he did not retaliate. He forced the United States to harvest what he had sown while leaving the Americans face to face with the Taliban. The United States has withdrew into total military and diplomatic failure while leaving billions of dollars in military equipment to the Taliban – the same equipment as Trump is now holding to recover.
This mismanagement and chaotic withdrawal can have enthusiast Russia Vladimir Putin later invaded Ukraine. But if Moscow learned from this American failure, it seems that Washington did not do it. Trump now treats Zelenskyy in the same way as the United States has treated the former Afghan presidents, thus sowing the seeds of a similar disaster in Ukraine.