With America’s exit from Afghanistan, our longest war is over. Personally, as a historian, I have no interest in rehashing America’s military and political missions during that time. I have no doubt that shortly bookstores will be inundated with books, each detailing exactly what went wrong, with no two such written accounts agreeing on a single detail.
Instead of talking about Afghanistan’s past, I’d prefer to climb out on a limb and make a few predictions about the future of Afghanistan. It should take only a few months for the reader to plumb the depths of my naïveté, fact-checking my predictions, allowing new grist for the people who delight in sending me hate mail.
Historically, one of the hardest jobs for a revolutionary army has been what to do with your military after the revolution is won. A revolutionary army fighting a protracted guerrilla war is vastly different from the military needs of a new government that seeks to defend its borders and protect the very infrastructure it had tried so valiantly to destroy during the previous decades.
Military history gives us numerous examples of the difficulty of transitioning a revolutionary army over to a professional army, almost all of such efforts resulting in failures and either new revolution or protracted civil war. Just off the top of my head, I can think of three main reasons for the failure.
First, there is the difficult problem of military demobilization. Put simply, angry men with guns react negatively to being issued pink slips. Angry men with guns who have few skills other than breaking things and hurting people react violently when being told they have to seek employment in an economy that has been crushed by decades of war. In far too many cases, these men have historically found employment using the only skill they know—they enlist in a new revolution, fighting against the government they have only recently installed.
Demobilization, in general terms, has always been a problem for military leaders. Julius Caesar gave his veterans land in newly created towns along the frontier, thus not only stabilizing the area, but moving potential threats far from Rome. If you read the history of Honduras from the last decades of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century, the same names keep surfacing. Soldiers rarely even stopped fighting long enough to change uniforms as various governments came and went. In Afghanistan, there is another problem: even if the new government keeps all of the Taliban fighters, what do they do with the 300,000 men who were in the Afghan army?
It is inevitable that the Taliban will begin fighting with Al Qaeda, who will fight Isis-K, and all of them will fight groups that we haven't even heard of yet.
Second, there is the problem of what to do with revolutionary leaders, as the skills necessary to lead a small band of guerrilla fighters does not easily translate over to the skills necessary to lead a mechanized unit or to maintain and fly helicopters. The very nature of the skills necessary to be a successful revolutionary officer are not the same skill set required by a professional army trying to defend a nation’s borders.
When Francisco Madero successfully overthrew the Mexican government of Porfirio Diaz, there were simply not enough high-ranking jobs in his new government to reward all of the officers who had led his revolution. As a result, within a year, many of his former trusted officers were now leading a new revolution against Madero. After his successful revolution, Fidel Castro solved this problem by “exporting the revolution” to Africa and South America. Many of his former soldiers who didn’t die in those foreign wars ultimately ended up in Cuban prisons. There is a very good chance that if the Bolivian Army hadn’t killed Che, Fidel would have had to do so.
The next problem with the military is simply the motivation of revolutionary soldiers. Often, the only bond holding a resistance movement together is a shared hatred of the existing government. Once that government is toppled, the various fighting forces frequently realize they no longer have a common cause and turn on themselves. There is a sad truism that most violent revolutions, deprived of an external enemy, eventually form a circular firing squad. There are numerous examples: the French Revolution, the successful slave revolt in Haiti, or even the Republican Congressional revolution of 1994 led by Newt Gingrich. The Taliban is, at its roots, a collection of tribal allegiances and its apparent unified front will soon dissolve into tribalism with no common enemy, ending with numerous warring factions led by tribal strongmen.
Last, but not least, naturally, the Taliban forces are going to expect to be paid. Even the most dedicated army grows restless when its pay is withheld. During the Mexican-American War, Winfield Scott had a very difficult time keeping his army in check when the payroll was not delivered on time. I don’t relish the job of any general facing a horde of angry, well-armed men while he tries to explain why the promised wealth will be delayed…again.
This last point brings up the last of my predictions. The Taliban will never be able to establish a viable economy. Throughout all of history, there are few examples of a successful revolution setting up anything close to a stable economy without the help of a genius like Alexander Hamilton. (Though few have failed as spectacularly as Fidel Castro, who turned most of the Cuban economy over to the untrained hands of Che Guevara. Among the many economic models to follow, Che chose to emulate the economy of Communist East Germany. No, seriously! It will be sort of like a car manufacturer’s deciding to reintroduce the Yugo, but with the fuel tank of a Pinto and handling of a Robin Reliant.)
The Taliban have already started imposing some harebrained economic policies. Banks are forbidden from allowing their depositors to withdraw more than a $100 a day, thus destroying any popular trust in the banks. There is a shortage of money circulating as people begin hoarding (a condition that is guaranteed to worsen when the Taliban begins issuing its own currency). Gresham’s Law states that when a country issues suspect currency; the public supply of foreign hard money vanishes. (Put more colloquially, Gresham’s Law is “Bad money drives out good.”)
Argentina tried to legislate its way out of an economic crisis by restricting withdrawals from banks, forbidding capital from leaving the country, and issuing so many different kinds of money that, for a while, the most popular form of ‘currency’ in the country was a barter coupon that was the equivalent of an hour’s labor. The government issued currency was so worthless that even a few airlines preferred payment in barter coupons.
Afghanistan currently receives financial aid from Pakistan, China, and Iran, mainly because these countries had a vested interest in seeing America tied down in a war with little possibility of a political victory. Now that America has left, there is far less incentive for these countries to continue to aid Afghanistan. Iran is financially broke, and Pakistan, nearly so, and neither country is likely to put Afghanistan’s interests above their own.
I can almost hear the reader saying, “Wait, won’t they just grow more poppies and export opium?”
The Taliban will certainly try, but I doubt it will work as the world has changed since the Taliban were last in power. Not only is the world market already fairly saturated with opium, but the market is shifting towards more powerful and easier to produce synthetic opioids. Somehow, I just can’t imagine the Taliban setting up vast chemical laboratories and competing on the world market. Afghanistan currently does, and will continue to export drugs, but I just don’t believe it can expand its market significantly.
So, the bottom line for Afghanistan a few years from now? A long and incredibly violent civil war, the battles to be fought in a desperately poor country by impoverished people—with expensive modern arms and equipment left them by the US. At least until those start to need maintenance.
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