What would a US withdrawal from Afghanistan mean for the country?

As President Trump threatens to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, Kim Sengupta asks whether the decision could lead to the same volatility that prompted the initial invasion

Protesters march last month against the country’s 17-year war with placards stating: ‘No war’, ‘We want ceasefire’ and ‘We want peace’ (Getty)

In 2002 the Taliban had been defeated in the field. There was a general mood of celebration in Afghanistan after decades of harsh, primitive theocratic rule; many women were throwing off their burqas, some even in Kandahar, the birthplace of hardline Islam.

Standing beside George W Bush, Tony Blair declared “this time we will not walk away”, as the west had done after using the Mujaheddin to drive out Soviet forces in the battles of the Cold War, and then abandoning Afghanistan to poverty and becoming an incubator for terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks on America.

A year later Britain and America did precisely what Mr Blair vowed would not happen – they walked away from Afghanistan to an Iraq invasion based on the concocted justification of Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Precious civil and military resources were moved away from Afghanistan, just at the time when there was a desperate need for stability and reconstruction to be poured into the bloody quagmire of Iraq. The Taliban, fed and watered by their sponsors, elements of the Pakistani armed forces and secret police, the ISI, came back across the border in this security vacuum and began the long war which continues now.

Now Donald Trump, if he is to be taken at face value, is proposing pulling out the vast majority of US forces, itself a fraction of the size of Isaf (International Security and Assistance Force) which ended operations six years ago. Talks are being held with the Taliban – the latest in a long series – apparently for them to come into a power-sharing process.

The more likely scenario is a power struggle between the various shades of Islamists now in the country, including the Haqqani Network and Isis with those not agreeing with them, including those currently engaged in politics, getting a violent short shrift .

That is certainly the view of the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani who invoked the memory of his predecessor Mohammad Najibullah who was dragged away from the UN compound, tortured, murdered and left hanging from a lamp post by the Taliban when they took Kabul in 1996.

“The victims of the war are Afghans, so the initiative for peace should be in the hands of the Afghans”, said Mr Ghani. “ We insist on [safety] measures because we are aware of the experience of Dr Najib. We all know he was deceived. The UN guaranteed him peace, but it ended up with a disaster.”

The lamp post is still there, quite near the presidential residence, we used to pass it on the way to and from the airport.

Mr Ghani had himself made mistakes which has led to deterioration of security in his country. After winning the presidential election with a bitterly disputed result he went to Pakistan – not to see members of the government in Islamabad but the military and ISI leadership in Rawalpindi. The idea was to go directly to those who supposedly control the Taliban and the Haqqani Network to try and persuade them to stop the bombings and shootings.

Mr Ghani’s trip sidelining the Pakistani government was not only a breach of diplomatic protocol, it proved to be ineffective. At the behest of the Pakistani army and ISI he removed, it was reported, a number of people from the hierarchy of the Afghan military and the intelligence service, NDS (National Directorate of Security). The bombings did not stop, but became, in fact, more intense with Kabul getting repeatedly hit ever since.

But the west, too, has made repeated mistakes. In December 2003 returning to Afghanistan from covering Iraq, I heard Donald Rumsfeld, one of the key architects of the Iraq war, on a flying visit to Afghanistan, tell us the Taliban would never be allowed to return to power.

After meeting warlords in the north of the country he told us in Mazar-e-Sharif: “Those who have been defeated would like to come back, but they would never have that opportunity.” Two hours after he stated the Talibs were finished, rockets exploded a couple of hundred yards from the US embassy in Kabul.

It was also around that time some in the Taliban leadership wanted to hold talks over Afghanistan with the Americans and the British. The Americans were not interested and the Pakistani ISI, who wanted to control the negotiation process, soon put a stop to the initiative.

There is now genuine trepidation among Afghans that Mr Trump will sell them out, doing a secret deal with the Taliban and their backers.

But it is worth bearing in mind that there is no clear and logical direction in foreign and defence policy under the current US administration. On coming to power Mr Trump had berated Pakistani support for the Taliban and cut aid to the country’s military. Now he is basically following the Pakistani line on talks with the insurgents. Many issues remain unresolved. There is no clarity from the White House, for instance, on how the stated aim of keeping behind a counter-terrorism force in the country will work with troop withdrawl and the Taliban in the government.

There are other examples of contradictory policies. Mr Trump is doing his best to sabotage the nuclear deal with Iran, one which the other signatories to the agreement – Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China – plus the UN and US intelligence agencies are confident was working. Yet he has announced the pulling out of American troops from Syria which would help preserve and spread Iranian influence in the country.

It may well be that Mr Trump will not get his way. His demand that American troops leave Syria within a month has been quietly shelved by the Pentagon. The Senate majority leader, the Republican Mitch McConnell, wants congress to have a say in pull-outs from both Syria and Afghanistan, with a “thorough accounting of the risks of withdrawing too hastily”.

But President Trump, who has just had to climb down humiliatingly over the government shutdown, has to cope with a Democrat-majority House of Representatives blocking his programme, faces possible impeachment and record unfavourable ratings in the polls, and appears to be falling out even with his right-wing media mentors, may well be tempted to carry out an Afghan withdrawl and declare it a victory.

In 2005 I interviewed five independent women in Afghanistan who were supposed to be the brave new face of the country. Four of them were murdered as the Taliban extended their reach across swathes of the country. They were among the many victims of their vengeance.

The future looks uncertain for the country, and, as President Ghani points out, his people know only too well they are by far the largest victims of the decades of vicious strife, the ones who suffer the most. That will continue to be the case as the west dips in and out of Afghan wars.