Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at HKS and Professor of History in the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences. A specialist on U.S. foreign relations history and 20th century international history, he won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book “Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam.”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Harvard Political Review: Given the Biden administration’s recent decision to pull out of Afghanistan, it is an opportune moment to reflect on the failures and successes of the United States in Afghanistan. How successful do you think the US has been in accomplishing what it set out to do in Afghanistan 20 years ago?
Fredrik Logevall: It’s actually a somewhat harder question to answer than one might think. The broad effort has not succeeded because it was an effort to try to make the Afghan government and its security forces self-reliant and able to defend itself and its interests. But it hasn’t really been able to do so — hence the presence of American troops over 20 years. On the other hand, we’ve seen important progress in certain areas that has been made possible, I think, at least in part because of this 20-year American presence. So that’s notable, and I suppose we could add that in the early going in 2001, during the initial months, there was tremendous success in terms of ousting Al Qaeda, ousting the Taliban from power. It’s really been the subsequent years that have been more mixed.
HPR: Given the imminent threat of a Taliban takeover upon US withdrawal, do you think there was a strong moral case for the US to continue to stay in Afghanistan?
FL: I think, yeah, you certainly could make that argument. And critics of President Biden’s decision have made that argument. I think it’s important to consider his rationale for the decision. I think what he basically concluded, as far as I can tell, is that he doesn’t think that US military presence has or can turn Afghanistan into a stable democracy. Therefore you have a choice: you can either stay indefinitely and prop up the government and the security forces or you can leave. And he decided, as we know, on the latter course. I think he’s been a skeptic on this one for a long time. In that sense, we shouldn’t be surprised by his decision. He sat through a lot of meetings over the years as a senator, vice president, presidential candidate and then president-elect. I gather they had several high-level meetings since he became president, four of them at least, so he’s heard all these arguments. And again, there are critics of this decision who make reasonable arguments, whether one buys them or not, but he’s heard these arguments. And, yeah, I think he decided that it wasn’t going to work. Even if the Taliban attacked Kabul, what are 3000 or so US troops going to be able to accomplish? I don’t think he had a good answer to that question from the generals. Hence this decision.
HPR: Could Taliban prove to be a security threat for the US if it does indeed end up controlling Kabul again?
FL: I think so, you know, there are people who know more about this than I do, and I come at this as a historian so I’m better able to talk about what’s happened in the past than I am able to predict what’s going to happen in the future. The Taliban has that opportunity. Without US forces, it’s a long shot arguably for the government in Afghanistan to survive. But I am also at the same time skeptical that you will see the Taliban able to roll into Kabul in the same way that they did back in the late summer of 1996 when they first took power. I think it’s a different environment now for them. And therefore I don’t think we should just assume that this would be some sort of cakewalk for the Taliban. This time around it’s a different situation, and maybe if Ashraf Ghani can keep control of his elite forces, perhaps it’s possible for him to retain power, if not in the long term then at least in the short and medium-term. But I think that remains to be seen.
HPR: What implications will the withdrawal have for the broader region, and do you think regional powers will assume a more expanded role in the conflict after the US bows out?
FL: I’m not certain. It would seem to me that Pakistan with its powerful military establishment is going to be a beneficiary here. On the other hand, if you see civil war returning to Afghanistan in a very serious way, if you have chaos developing in Afghanistan, I think that’s going to be a problem for Pakistan. And they’re going to have to grapple with the implications of chaos right next door. That happened once before, in the 90s, after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. Pakistan saw what that meant, and it was not necessarily a pretty picture from their perspective. And if you see a kind of spiral into chaos, a large question would be to what degree could Pakistan control the Taliban and other groups that could emerge. I think that’s an unknown, so in terms of the regional implications, the one that I would look for most closely would be Pakistan.
HPR: Is there any hope for successful negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government in the near future?
FL: The Taliban have made it pretty clear that they were really not wanting to talk with any other entity than the Americans. Obama had insisted basically that initial negotiations should occur between the Afghans. The Trump administration, I think, waived that precondition, so then you have the resulting agreement. I think it’s an open question now — whether the Taliban would honor an agreement to talk with the Afghan government, or would they simply pursue a military solution. I think this is one of the great uncertainties going forward — what does it mean for diplomacy if the entity that the Taliban have always thought to be the most important entity, namely the United States, is no longer either figuratively or literally at the table.
I guess there’s a part of me that is skeptical that you will see negotiations work. A lot of my research has been on the Vietnam War, and you see some pretty interesting parallels between the two conflicts. This is an instance where you might see a connection. Diplomacy moved in fits and starts in the Vietnam case and took a long time to reach an agreement. And once the agreement was reached in January of 1973 for the United States to withdraw all of its forces from Vietnam — so quite similar to the current situation — then you had to start wondering whether the North Vietnamese would be willing to commit to long term negotiations for a political solution to the Vietnam War. We know that, two years later in 1975, they launched an invasion of South Vietnam, and they conquered South Vietnam in pretty quick order.
I find the comparison between the Afghanistan case and the South Vietnam case interesting for several different reasons — pertaining also to the situation in Kabul and in Saigon is lots of endemic corruption at the highest levels and a tension between wanting to impose a kind of top-down security while battling an insurgency that was drawing its power from the bottom up. That was a problem in Vietnam, and I think it’s a problem today. I think it’s going to be very important to see to what degree there is any kind of commitment on the part of the Taliban to diplomatic engagement.
HPR: Finally, should we be hopeful about democracy in Afghanistan?
FL: Always be hopeful. It may be that we’ve made more progress, more lasting progress than a skeptic might say. And you’ve seen, for example, hugely important steps with respect to education for young people and for women in terms of their rights. And, of course, those are threatened, and I think what we’ve seen from the Taliban is there is no guarantee that they would maintain those. On the contrary, it seems to me that one has to worry about those developments and about the prospect for democracy more broadly, at least in the short term. I think we have to see, and I think, from Joe Biden’s perspective, he did not feel assurances that maintaining a presence of a few thousand men and women was going to meaningfully move you closer to a robust democracy in Afghanistan. I think we’re going to be debating for a long time whether he was right in that judgment, but I think that’s the conclusion he drew.
Image Credit: Photo by Miller Center is licensed for use under CC BY 2.0.
