The global interest in Afghanistan should not be a matter of surprise; Afghanistan’s strategic location, wedged between Iran, Central Asian states, and the trade routes of the Indian Sub-continent, has made it attractive to big powers.

Soviets’ March into Afghanistan: The Haste and the Dire Consequences
A seasoned farmer rarely blunders, as he rarely puts the right seeds in the wrong ground; the consequences of that bungle can be devastating in terms of him denting his image and losing his livelihood. Regretfully, this is close to what the Soviet Union did in 1979. The Cold War witnessed the Soviet Union, the second ‘protagonist’ emulating the U.S. to pick up the ‘cudgels’ to enlarge the frontiers of its ‘ideology’, but blundered in its ‘planting’ and faced devastating costs. In 1979, it invaded neighboring Afghanistan, a state very different in the region of its domestic makeup. For centuries, Afghanistan's multi-lingual and multi-ethnic makeup took pride in its fiercely independent tribal society, which loathed ideas and systems inspired by societies abroad, and in the case of foreign forces, they were met with brute force. Not surprisingly, the land took the nickname of ‘graveyard of empires’. The global interest in Afghanistan should not be a matter of surprise; Afghanistan’s strategic location, wedged between Iran, the Central Asian states, and the trade routes of the Indian Sub-continent, has made it attractive to big powers. 
A 'peep' into the 1979 Soviet blundering in its immediate neighborhood reveals that the Soviet Union was watching with some unease as the 1973 peaceful palace coup by Daoud Khan, a cousin of the Afghan King, toppled the constitutional monarchy of King Zahir Shah, with whom his people were comfortable, as the King took care that the manner of the governance of his country's delicate multi-ethnic and multi-lingual makeup of the society was not disturbed. Abolishing the monarchy, which in one form or another, had existed since 1747, was a 'slight' to the Afghan populace. The conservative Afghans had immense respect for both the institution of the monarchy and the monarch. Daoud’s so-called republic, by contrast, was alien to most Afghans. Daoud’s carelessness continued, and this imprecision was more pronounced in tackling sensitive foreign policy issues. He upset the delicate balance the King had maintained in the country’s foreign policy, where no one’s interests were threatened by its competitor. He created problems with the neighboring Pakistan pertaining to the state boundaries and got close to the Soviet Union. It was too late when Daoud tried to ‘re-fix’ the tilting ‘applecart’ in 1979. Another serious domestic jolt followed this, and the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), the country’s pro-Soviet communist party, which had supported Daud Khan, killed him in 1978, possibly with Soviet consent. This was the beginning of the Saur Revolution, which witnessed many violent changes in Afghanistan and alarmed the Soviet leadership. By December 1978, a number of Soviet advisers were working in different political and military components of the Afghan Government. Still, they could not stabilize the domestic infighting, raising concerns in the Soviet Union about Afghanistan, a pro-Communist neighboring state falling under the U.S.’ influence to compensate for the ouster of the pro-U.S. Shah of Iran.  
Various reports have been circulating on the decision to send Soviet troops into Afghanistan in 1979. As far as the backlash of the public opinion was concerned, it was virtually non-existent. The Stalin era had ruthlessly stamped out dissent in the Soviet Union, and his successors believed that the Communist Party 'represented' the aspirations of the country did little or nothing to gauge the opinion of the people on issues of significance. While the people of the vast country stood like a rock behind their soldiers as they fought courageously to protect the motherland against the German ‘fascist’ forces during the Second World War, the Soviet leadership either sceptical or in a haughty manner blundered in taking for granted ‘acquiescence’ of the people to sending troops to a foreign land, where its sons’ lives shall unnecessarily be endangered. The legislature in the country ‘The Supreme Soviet’ was a representative body in name only, as in reality, all important state decisions were made by a few chosen members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, i.e., by the heads of the Communist Party, under the leadership of the General Secretary, who in fact, was the head of the state. Various books written by known authorities on Afghanistan have shed light on the circumstances leading to the Soviet intervention of December 1979. Other experts invite attention to that period, during which the U.S. and the Soviet Union’s relationship was going through the roller coaster mode and, coupled with the U.S. Senate, reflected less than the desired interest to ratify the SALT II Agreement between the U.S. and USSR. The U.S.’ decision to deploy Tomahawk cruise missile and Pershing II missiles in West Germany, a NATO member was considered as an affront by the Soviet Union to the steps  taken towards détente. These developments caused the Soviet leadership to rethink U.S.’ intentions and were a cause of serious concern. 
Riaz M. Khan, former Foreign Secretary whose authoritative book on Afghanistan, Untying the Afghanistan Knot, states that the ‘circumstances and underlying motivation’ of the Soviet decision to send its troops to Afghanistan ranged from ‘supporting’ the Marxist-leaning PDMA Government, which shall assist the Soviet Union in enlarging its influence in the country, containing the local resurgence of radical Islam (which was not to be ignored due to the Islamic revolution that took place in Iran during the same period) to exhibiting its military muscles to its rival, the U.S. The decision to send troops lacked consensus; there was a split in the top leadership of the Soviet Communist Party’s Politburo and within the military leadership. However, hardliners led by the party’s Secretary General Brezhnev carried the day for the 'fateful' move. A 1989 Supreme Soviet Inquiry Report on the decision to send troops to Afghanistan corroborates the secrecy. It adds that the 'Politburo did not assemble in its full complement to discuss the matter, and Brezhnev and few others met in secret, circumventing the supreme organs of the state power and presenting the rest of the Politburo, the Central Committee and the Supreme Soviet with a ‘fait accompli’. Regarding the division within the Soviet Union leadership, Diego Corodovez, UN mediator on Afghanistan, and Selig Harrison, a South Asian expert, are unanimous in their opinion that the decision to send Soviet troops was ‘a reckless last act of a narrow Stalinist in-group that was starting to lose its grip even in 1979. Not surprisingly, the world reacted with shock and alarm of a possibility of Soviet Union using the invasion as a springboard to seize control of Persian Gulf oil.   
Whatever may have been the ‘circumstances’, the decision to send Soviet troops was taken in haste without taking into consideration the internal dynamics of Afghanistan, and also ignored was the reaction of neighboring Pakistan and Iran and the world community, especially the Muslim states, to the ‘aggression’ meted out to a brotherly Muslim state. After a decade of the Soviet Union’s occupation, sources estimated that as many as 15,000 Russian troops died in Afghanistan, and the economic cost to the struggling Soviet economy ran into billions of dollars. The image of a hurt superpower significantly contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union. This also provided the U.S. with the opportunity to 'bleed' the Soviet Union, mirroring the defeat inflicted on the U.S. in Vietnam. Above all, one million innocent Afghan lives were lost, and millions of others had to flee to neighboring Pakistan and Iran: the people who were never consulted in this ‘flexing of muscles game’ of the superpowers.
Stuck in a Crevice:  Ideology Experiment Grinds On
The failure of its forced ideological ‘experiment’ in Eastern European states in the post-World War II with a majority Christian population should have been a stark reminder to the Soviet Union, where communism and all its related governing systems were opposed right from the outset and was reflected in the uprisings in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Poland in the eighties. Most of the people of Eastern Europe were against Soviet interference and the presence of the Red Army in their countries. The regret is that big powers rarely reflect on the past and take pride in carrying their ‘standard’ in states where they have little in common and are confident that they shall weather the storm, be it a hurricane or a tsunami. The Soviet ‘blunder’ to enter Afghanistan, in the context of foreign policy, was reflected in the Brezhnev Doctrine’s foreign policy that proclaimed any threat to "socialist rule" in any state of the Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe was a threat to them all. And therefore justified the intervention of fellow socialist states’ (left-leaning Afghanistan included), although the policy at the end was in tatters. A combination of neither learning from history, ignoring the legislature, even though a weak institution, and the ultimate pitfall of disregarding its people, who had to live with losing their sons in a country that posed no threat to them; the crucial interdependence of the legislature, public opinion to the foreign policy was shattered, with dire consequences for a superpower to bear. 
US Boots on Ground in Afghanistan: The Quicksand
Repeating the Past  
The series of attacks by a group of terrorists on 9/11 (September 11, 2001) targeting globally known U.S. iconic public and private buildings shook the United States and the world at large; the assaults on U.S. soil remain ‘one of the most traumatic events of the century.’ In the last century, a U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, was the scene in December 1941 of a devastating attack by the Japanese Navy, killing more than 2000 U.S. sailors, which in U.S. history is remembered as a ‘date on which we will live in infamy.’ The U.S. did not forget that “infamy’ and was forced to enter the Second World War and avenged that attack by defeating the Japanese, which ended the war in 1945. 
The 9/11 attacks caused a massive ‘wakeup’ call for the U.S. intelligence agencies and were a serious cause of concern globally. More than two thousand innocent lives were lost in these terrorist attacks. U.S. allies and even those states who had never agreed with the U.S. policies were unanimous in condemning the terrorist attacks. They sympathized with the U.S. Government and its people. U.S. President Bush, after being briefed and advised by the intelligence agencies, assured his people and allies that the terrorists should be 'hunted' down, and named Osama Bin Laden, who was living in Afghanistan, as the prime target. The U.S. had been keeping tabs on Osama bin Laden since the twin bombing of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the bombing of the USS Cole, a U.S. Navy destroyer that was docked in Aden Harbour. In October 2001, when the U.S. Invasion of Afghanistan began, polls indicated that about 88 percent of Americans backed the military action. On December 20, 2001, the United Nations authorized  International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to help the Afghans maintain security in Kabul and the surrounding areas. 
For its first years, ISAF consisted of a fairly small contingent of American and coalition soldiers, and its mandate did not extend beyond the Kabul area. The outposts were established in eastern provinces to hunt for Taliban and Al Qaeda fugitives. According to the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, the aim was to ‘carry out operations in Afghanistan rapidly and leave as fast as possible.’ He thus wished to focus on kinetic counterterrorism operations and building up a new Afghan Army. Rumsfeld announced in mid-2002 that ‘The war is over in Afghanistan,’ to the disbelief of the country's State Department, CIA, and military officials. Afghan watchers consider Rumsfeld’s downplaying the need for an Afghan army of even 70,000 troops, far fewer than the 250,000 envisaged by President Karzai, as a serious error in judgment; the U.S. forces were not planned to stay in Afghanistan with no return deadline. Historians also cite the failure of ISAF to be deployed beyond Kabul that drove President Karzai to offer positions within the state to ‘potential spoilers whose activities did great harm to the state's reputation.’ Not surprisingly, the rise of the Taliban insurgency was linked to grievances over governance, the bane of a serious problem that the Taliban used very effectively in areas they had occupied, comparing their ‘governance’ to the ‘occupiers and their stooges’. The situation on the ground before the U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan was of the Taliban virtually controlling the country. According to observers, while the Taliban regime’s hands were soiled with 'gross' human rights violations, the regime successfully established law and order throughout the country. The U.S. State Department acknowledged that ‘on the plus side, the Taliban have restored law and order in their areas of control.’ Karzai and his successor, Ashraf Ghani’s report card on governance was quite poor, and the Taliban used it as propaganda of Afghanistan, aptly summed up by critics that 'lack of professionalism' among Afghan provincial leaders had undermined the government's legitimacy, creating opportunities for the insurgency. Data on provincial governors reflected that those most effective at deterring insurgent attacks tend to have qualities associated with "warlords" rather than professionalism. Decentralization that could harness these characteristics to improve governance was ignored, and corruption was rampant. 
The Withdrawal: Limiting Options
The United States Armed Forces withdrew from Afghanistan on August 30, 2021, marking the end of the 2001-2021 war. This was followed by the Taliban, which swept into Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. The militant group faced almost no resistance. The country's now former President, Ashraf Ghani, fled to the United Arab Emirates– accused of personal corruption–and the Afghan military melted away without a fight. Corruption in Afghanistan has long been an open secret among international observers and its citizens. In 2020, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan among the world's top 20 most corrupt countries. One reason the Afghan military collapsed so quickly was that, in part, it did not exist. President Biden claimed that the Afghan army had 300,000 troops in July, but the Pentagon knew those numbers were inflated. Afghan military commanders had been pocketing extra money allocated for fake soldiers. According to John Sopko, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, “The number of ghost personnel may go into the tens of thousands.” A West Point report estimated the Afghan Government had a real fighting force of only 96,000. By the time Kabul fell, these soldiers were reportedly no longer receiving a salary or even food. Not only did the Afghan military exist largely on paper, but through U.S. military contractors, the Pentagon was advertently financing the Taliban. At best, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was haphazard, sending wrong signals domestically and to its allies and adversaries. However, to be fair, one also cannot disagree with President Biden, who stated that the ‘costs to the United States would have been even higher if he had allowed the nation to remain mired for years in a civil war that has dragged on for decades and the only alternative to the departure of the troops was another escalation of the war.’
In Hindsight: Naivety 
The U.S. operation in Afghanistan’s ‘Enduring Freedom’ started with a boom with full domestic and generally global support, but on the way, it seriously erred. The U.S. forces were sent into Afghanistan in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks and to fight Al Qaeda, and the results were not disappointing; within six months of the War, Al Qaeda's leaders had either been captured, killed, or fled to other countries, including Osama bin Laden. The U.S. successive administrations erred in ignoring the ground realities, and that was the Taliban. This was a missed opportunity to negotiate an enduring peace with the Taliban. The Taliban were on their heels. It was a force pushed back, but some of the Taliban leaders were ‘realists’ and were willing to discuss and negotiate their role in some kind of future Afghan political system or government. But the United States saw itself as the conquerors at that point and brushed aside any suggestion to negotiate with the Taliban, which it had ‘vanquished’. Rather it equated them with terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. Ironically, the Trump administration took the lead and signed with the Taliban in February 2020 "an agreement for bringing peace" to Afghanistan after nearly two decades of conflict. The U.S. and NATO allies had agreed to withdraw all troops within 14 months if the militants upheld the deal. The Taliban represent, tribally and religiously, a certain sliver of Afghan culture and society. It remains a force that has to be reckoned with, but cannot be absolved of the blunder it committed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks; the Taliban leadership refused U.S. demand to hand over Osama bin Laden, the 'honored guest' at the time, to the United States Government, triggering the invasion of the country.
The notion of some of the policymakers in Washington that the United States could win the hearts and minds of the Afghan population was doubtful because many Afghans saw the United States as foreign occupiers, and many of them, supported the Taliban. They saw them as religious men, many of whom were Afghans. So it was hard to persuade many people in the countryside that the United States and the Afghan Government were a better alternative. Many Afghans saw the successive U.S.-supported Afghan governments as corrupt, largely brutal, and a worse choice than the Taliban. So it was hard to win those hearts and minds from the perspective of Afghan Government.
Unfortunately, the U.S. House of Congress, the country's legislature, which also had a constitutional role in controlling the 'purse', was nowhere to be found. The only time Congress joined in making big decisions was shortly after September 11, 2001, authorizing the presidential use of force against those who "planned, authorized, committed, or aided" the 9/11 terrorist attack. From the earliest days of the republic, the founders sought to protect America from the mistake of unchecked executive war-making power, ‘It has accordingly, with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature’, but in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Congress abandoned this constitutional separation of powers.
There was a period during which there was a feeling that the U.S. would contribute to reconstructing war-torn Afghanistan. President Bush, on April 17, 2002, publically declared that on the ‘Marshall Plan’ pattern while talking about Afghan reconstruction. Historians later saw the decision against a significant expansion of international presence and development assistance as a major error. The dichotomy was that Congress-approved ‘use of military force’ was for Afghanistan, while the U.S.' growing commitment was to Iraq, which it had invaded in March 2003, and was absorbing more and more resources, which in hindsight would have made committing such resources to Afghanistan impossible. Senator Edward Kennedy is on record of having interpreted it as, “All of America deserved better than the misuse of U.S. power… the President and his men lost no time exploiting that trust and goodwill the Americans had given them following the September 11 attacks.” One opinion is that when Congress passed the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), they went far beyond initiating the war in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda. However, Congress gave near limitless and indefinite authorization for the executive branch to wage war against anyone, anywhere in the world. This broad grant of war-making power was counterproductive to the mission of justice for the 9/11 attacks, setting the stage for twenty years of mission creep in Afghanistan and multiple sequels.
As years passed, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan was like being on the Titanic without the lifeboats. By 2003, the U.S. had completed its mission of pushing Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. Still, the war would meander with no clear mission, strategy, or victory conditions for another twenty, becoming what the 2019 Afghanistan Papers termed ‘existing only to perpetuate itself’. By the war's end, it would drain America of USD 2.2 trillion and rack up a death count of more than 6,200 U.S. military personnel, contractors, and 170,000 Afghan people (not counting the war sequels in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen). On top of that, successive Afghan corrupt governments of Karzai and Ashraf Ghani dented their image and that of the U.S., which had supported them all these years. 
The U.S. Constitution gives the President wide powers in foreign policy, and the U.S. Congress has powers, including to 'declare war'. However, in the last many years, it seemed the presidents decided on foreign policy issues without Congress’ legal concurrence.   In democracies, of which the U.S. is one of the oldest and most robust, the public expects are to be informed of 'hot' foreign policy issues, including sending forces abroad to fight wars in distant lands. Still, in the case of the Afghan War, a trove of government documents reflected that the U.S. officials systematically misled the public about the war in Afghanistan during three presidential administrations. The documents showed distorted statistics to make it appear that the U.S. was winning the war in Afghanistan. Thus, the interdependence, of legislatures, public opinion and foreign policy in the case of the Afghan War remained a dream, rather the longevity of the U.S.' boots on the ground’ was such a factor amongst the public that some took their troops remaining there ‘forever’ for granted while the others lost interest in the subject matter. 
War casualties have long been identified as a primary factor in determining public support for conflicts in the post–September 11 context in response to the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars; casualties received renewed attention as factors affecting public opinion, which expressed less support for the war. Successive U.S. Administrations must align U.S. foreign policy with American public opinion. This shall ensure that, in the long run, U.S. foreign policy will be more effective if it has the support of a large majority of the public. The United States has been undergoing a slow changing of the guard since World War II as successive generations of Americans have come of age during conditions less conducive to the embrace of expansive foreign policy goals and the frequent use of military force. The changing conditions have led to a slow but steady decrease in American support for international engagement from generation to generation, especially in the form of military intervention. World War II was also the last popular war Americans fought. 
Some Afghan watchers are of the opinion that American planning was always with ‘one foot out of the door’. The focus remained on a 'limited counterterrorism mission'. A point of view also emerged that America must learn history lessons to avoid a similar fate. The U.S. must leave the 'Graveyard of Empires' once and for all and resist temptations to be drawn back. Finally, to apply the lesson, Congress must repeal the 2001 AUMF that made this whole quagmire possible and never again grant such unchecked war powers to the executive branch.

(To be continued…)

The writer holds a Master's in Political Science (Punjab University) and a Master's in Diplomatic Studies (UK). He has served in various capacities in Pakistan's missions abroad and as an Ambassador to Vietnam and High Commissioner to Malaysia. He is on the visiting faculty of four mainstream public universities in Islamabad and is an Adviser to the India Centre at the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad.
E-mail: [email protected]