Afghanistan: There will be consequences

In just over a month, the last U.S. military combat personnel will have left Afghanistan. Both sides of the political aisle agree that it is time to leave. There are few voices of dissent to warn of the implications of a U.S. retreat from Afghanistan. And make no mistake, in the eyes of our jihadist enemies, America is retreating from Afghanistan.

We can spin it for domestic political consumption, but in warfare your enemy’s reality matters and history tells us that jihadists everywhere will celebrate America’s exit from Afghanistan as a great victory. And that will have ramifications beyond what is generally being discussed now.This isn’t to argue that we should remain in Afghanistan, absent a strategy we must not. Afghanistan wasn’t lost in 2021, or even 2020. Joe Biden didn’t lose Afghanistan. Neither did Donald Trump, who sought a U.S. withdrawal during his entire term in office. Afghanistan was lost early on, when our political leaders failed to formulate a strategy or provide a vision for what success in Afghanistan would look like.

For years it was claimed that Al Qaeda used the prison at Guantanamo Bay, which Biden is seeking to close, as a recruiting tool. But there is little evidence for any such narrative. The reality is that jihadists don’t use failures to recruit new fighters. They use successes. They used the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan in just such a manner, as summarized in this passage from page 64 of the book Mohammed’s Monsters by David Bukay:

“The victory of the Islamic mujahideen in Afghanistan—the defeat of the Soviet Union in battle was perceived by Islamic circles not only as a military victory, but also as a cultural one. It created a broad cadre of seasoned, militant volunteers eager to disseminate fundamentalist Islamic ideas throughout the Muslim world.”

Consider the case of Ibrahim Jama Me’aad, as documented in Inside Al-Shabaab by Harun Maruf and Dan Joseph. Me’aad was a young Somali who spent 9 years in the US in the 1980s on a student visa and then worked as a waiter and a taxi driver in Washington DC. After 9 years he returned to Somalia in 1990 to join the jihad. He was recruited by the then-newly formed Al Qaeda, here in the USA. How did Al Qaeda recruit him? With tales and videos of the mujahideen defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. They portrayed that war as the most heroic resistance a Muslim group had ever mounted against a modern power. Me’aad would go on to be a founding member of the forerunners of Al Shabaab, a jihadist group affiliated with Al Qaeda.

This illustrates the real danger posed by our failure in Afghanistan. A whole new generation of jihadists worldwide will grow up feeding off the Taliban victory.

The next success that the jihadis used to recruit was the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States. This was considered the greatest jihadist achievement. The symbolism of the twin towers falling was an image that they used to energize the cause throughout the Islamic world. In Britain Islamist groups celebrated the so-called “Magnificent 19,” the terrorists who murdered 3,000 Americans. What made those attacks so attractive to jihadists was the fact that it was a crushing blow delivered to America, which was seen as the greatest foe of the global jihadist movement.

Jihadists will have a new success story on which to build, one that combines the elements of their previous big successes: the defeat of a foreign, non-Muslim power on Muslim lands and a blow to America, their greatest foe. Already Al Qaeda propaganda videos are claiming that America is on the ropes, for which they credit “the strikes of the Mujahedeen.”

None of this says that we should stay in Afghanistan. It is too late for us to formulate a strategy to win in Afghanistan, but we must not assume that just because we have left a war has ended. Afghanistan was incorrectly labeled as “our longest war.” Iraq and Afghanistan were labeled two wars, when in reality there was only a single global war. We might consider the Global War on Terror (A name that was flawed for other reasons beyond the scope of this article) to be a thing of the past, but the enemy gets a vote. Unlike the Viet Cong a generation ago, the jihadis will follow us home. In fact, they’re already here. And to them, our defeat is a new beginning, not an end.