Cultivating Dependent Clients Is a Recipe for Failure

When the U.S. props up a client state, it should not be a shock when the client state cannot sustain itself once the U.S. departs.

Anatol Lieven explains how the failure to anticipate the collapse of Afghan government forces illustrates how little the U.S. understands Afghanistan even after twenty years:

I remembered this episode three years later, when the Communist state eventually fell to the mujahedeen; six years later, as the Taliban swept across much of Afghanistan; and again this week, as the country collapses in the face of another Taliban assault. Such “arrangements” — in which opposing factions agree not to fight, or even to trade soldiers in exchange for safe passage — are critical to understanding why the Afghan army today has collapsed so quickly (and, for the most part, without violence). The same was true when the Communist state collapsed in 1992, and the practice persisted in many places as the Taliban advanced later in the 1990s.

The Biden administration has said that the collapse of Afghan government forces is proof that they were unwilling to fight for their country, but this misses the point. It is true that these forces were not willing to fight for their corrupt government, and they had no interest in dying in a failing cause, so it made more sense for them to cut deals. A weak and corrupt government kept afloat with foreign money and military power is not going to command the loyalty of many people, and no one is going to want to risk dying to defend it when there is another option available. The fact that our government apparently didn’t understand this in Afghanistan is just more proof that our leaders never knew what they were doing there and were never going to learn.

Furthermore, the Afghan military had been designed to rely on the U.S. The U.S. haphazardly built up an Afghan military modeled on ours and trained to fight in the same way, but that model and training make no sense when U.S. air support isn’t available. The U.S. built up an Afghan military on the assumption that our forces would never fully leave. That was a very poor assumption.

The U.S.-backed government was also always at a political disadvantage in part because it was U.S.-backed. Carter Malkasian commented on this last month:

The Taliban had an advantage in inspiring Afghans to fight. Their call to fight foreign occupiers, steeped in references to Islamic teachings, resonated with Afghan identity. For Afghans, jihad — more accurately understood as “resistance” or “struggle” than the caricatured meaning it has acquired in the United States — has historically been a means of defense against oppression by outsiders, part of their endurance against invader after invader. Even though Islam preaches unity, justice and peace, the Taliban were able to tie themselves to religion and to Afghan identity in a way that a government allied with non-Muslim foreign occupiers could not match.

This is something that most American policymakers have difficulty grasping. Interventionists think simply in terms of bolstering “our” side in a foreign conflict, and it does not occur to them that the connection with the U.S. is a significant political liability for the forces that our government supports. U.S. policymakers not only don’t think of themselves as imperialists, but they also have trouble believing that other people genuinely see the U.S. in these terms. Some of this comes from believing our own propaganda, and some of it comes from an inability to see things as people in other countries see them.

When the U.S. props up a client state, it should not be a shock when the client state cannot sustain itself once the U.S. departs. David Sylvan writes about the long history of weak clients that quickly fell when the U.S. wasn’t propping them up anymore:

Over and over, observers of the collapse emphasized the blow to government forces’ morale in the wake of Washington’s decision to draw a line. But to focus on that decision is to ignore the utter reliance of the regime on active and continuing U.S. aid. Had Washington pulled the plug a year or a decade before or after, the outcome would have been the same. Put simply, these regimes had no capacity on their own to survive against domestic foes…

Indeed, the U.S. makes a habit of cultivating the dependence of clients. These governments usually don’t have much domestic legitimacy and support needed to survive on their own, and their heavy reliance on a foreign sponsor makes sure that they won’t have these things. These clients are not capable of standing on their own, and that is by design. The weakness and dependence of clients underscore how much of a long-term liability they are. If our government learns anything from this latest failure, it should be that it needs to stop creating and propping up dependent client governments like the one that just collapsed.