Afghanistan has barely featured in next week’s United States presidential elections except in the most minor way, as a political football kicked about by the two candidates seeking to blame the other for the debacle of the 2021 withdrawal and the Taleban’s capture of power. Even so, will who wins the 5 November election – former Republican president and current contender Donald Trump or current Democratic vice president Kamala Harris – have an impact on American policy towards Afghanistan? AAN’s Kate Clark (with input from Thomas Ruttig) has been looking back through the archives and seeing how, in earlier elections after the 2001 intervention, when the US became the single most powerful foreign player in Afghanistan, the country featured heavily in presidential debates and asks how much influence the outcome of US presidential elections has had on Afghanistan.
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris shakes hands with former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during their one debate, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP, 10 September 2024
The original text has been amended to explore why Afghanistan’s presidential and parliamentary elections were split and whether the driving force for that was the US president wanting at least one Afghan election to boast about ahead of his own.
Americans, famously, do not vote on foreign policy issues, so the fact that Afghanistan has been mentioned so often by presidential contenders over the last twenty years is significant. Sometimes, the debate between the two candidates has been about policy. Sometimes, Afghanistan has been used to symbolize something else, for example, George W Bush holding it up in 2004 as evidence that “freedom is on the march.” Determining whether US policy towards Afghanistan might have differed if a different man (or, in 2016, woman) had won successive presidencies since 2001 is tricky and strays into the counterfactual. Also, as will be seen below, not everything promised ahead of elections, in the US as elsewhere, gets delivered – sometimes, the opposite. However, the question is at least worth asking.
2004: Bush v Kerry, freedom and the unyoking of Afghanistan’s presidential and parliamentary elections
2004 was supposed to see elections in both the US and Afghanistan. The plan was for Afghanistan to hold parliamentary and presidential elections simultaneously. This did not happen. The two Afghan polls, due to be held in June 2004 (the deadline, according to the Bonn Agreement), were delayed to September and then further delayed and split. The presidential election was held on 9 October 2004, while the parliamentary was postponed to 2005 (initially scheduled for April and finally taking place on 18 September). Was there a push by the US to hold at least one election before George W Bush’s bid for a second term? There was certainly pressure. For example, in March 2004, as insecurity and the slow registration of voters by the United Nations were blamed for the initial postponement of the polls from June to September, The Guardian reported:
[The delay] comes despite Washington’s insistence to President Hamid Karzai that the vote be in June. Commentators say George Bush wanted to present Afghanistan as a foreign policy success in good time for the US elections in November.
On 11 July, when the second postponement and split were announced, according to The Business Recorder:
The White House issued a statement saying that President Bush welcomed the scheduling of the elections as “a critical step forward in Afghanistan’s transition to democracy”. [Chair of the UN-Afghan Joint Electoral Management Body, JEMB, Zakim] Shah said that political parties, scholars, tribal elders and others feared a drive to disarm factional militias was going too slowly to allow early parliamentary elections. He said the JEMB had considered delaying both polls but concluded “that the interests of stability would not have been served by further postponement.”
Andrew Wilder, writing for the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) in September 2004, said that holding the presidential election the following month necessitated substantial compromises which inevitably meant that “corners have had to be cut that will reduce the quality of the elections which, in turn, could reduce the perceived legitimacy of the result.” Wilder was, however, relieved that at least the country had not tried to hold both elections that autumn. The parliamentary elections were certainly trickier to hold than the presidential, but if the decision to split them, rather than delay both, was due to US pressure to have at least one ballot for Bush to brag about ahead of his own re-election, it would be the most egregious example of a US election affecting Afghanistan.
The split-timing did lasting harm to Afghanistan, exacerbating the power imbalance within the Afghan political system: parliament, as the International Crisis Group reported in November 2004, was supposed to provide both “a check on presidential power” and “political representation to all Afghans.” This was particularly important, it said, given the constitutionally strong executive branch, which made it crucial for the “multi-ethnic, multi-regional” population to have “pluralistic and participatory avenues to express its demands and articulate its grievances through parliamentary elections.” The decision to delay the parliamentary elections undermined the institution from the start, devaluing its importance. The split-timing would continue throughout all the years of the Islamic Republic, with two elections having to be held every five years, rather than one big election, and all the greater, ongoing expense and disruption that brought. The split also meant that MPs were always elected after the new president, in effect, augmenting his already strong, centralising powers; if there was any corruption in the system, the president could use his powers of patronage and access to finance to help friends and allies into parliament.
George W Bush certainly boasted about the Afghan elections, using them as a symbol of his belief in America’s liberating mission. During the presidential debates against his Democratic rival, John Kerry, he repeatedly held up the Afghan presidential election – polling day was a month before the US elections, on 9 October – as evidence of the United States’ great destiny in bringing freedom to other nations, for example, in the first debate, held on 30 September (transcript here):
This nation of ours has got a solemn duty to defeat this ideology of hate [al-Qaeda’s]. And that’s what they are. This is a group of killers who will not only kill here, but kill children in Russia, that’ll attack unmercifully in Iraq, hoping to shake our will. We have a duty to defeat this enemy. We have a duty to protect our children and grandchildren. The best way to defeat them is to never waver, to be strong, to use every asset at our disposal, is to constantly stay on the offensive and, at the same time, spread liberty. And that’s what people are seeing now is happening in Afghanistan. Ten million citizens have registered to vote. It’s a phenomenal statistic. That if given a chance to be free, they will show up at the polls. Forty-one percent of those 10 million are women.
The yoking of Afghanistan and Iraq – and elsewhere – into a single theatre of battle and the portrayal of the US as a liberator, saving other nations from a poorly defined ‘the enemy’, bent on evil, was classic Bush-era War on Terror rhetoric. It was a narrative that had catastrophic real-world consequences for the citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq, but Bush used it to good effect on the 2004 campaign trail. In that first debate, he hammered the point home.
In Iraq, no doubt about it, it’s tough. It’s hard work. It’s incredibly hard. You know why? Because an enemy realizes the stakes. The enemy understands a free Iraq will be a major defeat in their ideology of hatred. That’s why they’re fighting so vociferously. They showed up in Afghanistan when they were there, because they tried to beat us and they didn’t. And they’re showing up in Iraq for the same reason. They’re trying to defeat us. And if we lose our will, we lose. But if we remain strong and resolute, we will defeat this enemy.
Bush held up the forthcoming Afghan election again in the second debate, on 8 October 2004, this time, casting it as one item on a list of the efforts he was undertaking to make America safe:
We’ll stay on the hunt of al Qaeda. We’ll deny sanctuary to these terrorists. We’ll make sure they do not end up with weapons of mass destruction. It’s the great nexus. The great threat to our country is that these haters under up with weapons of mass destruction. But our long-term security depends on our deep faith in liberty, and we’ll continue to promote freedom around the world. Freedom is on the march. Tomorrow, Afghanistan will be voting for a president. In Iraq, we’ll be having free elections and a free society will make this world more peaceful. God bless.
The third debate was held on 13 October 2004, following the Afghan poll, meaning Bush could then brag: “As a result of securing ourselves and ridding the Taliban out of Afghanistan, the Afghan people had elections this weekend. And the first voter was a 19-year-old woman. Think about that. Freedom is on the march.”
Kerry’s take on Afghanistan – he pretty much ignored the election, merely scorning its having been delayed three times – was to focus on what he called Bush’s “colossal error of judgement,” his distraction from what Kerry called the “centre of the war on terror,” Afghanistan, and his 2003 decision to invade Iraq. In the first debate of the 2004 contest, for example, Kerry accused Bush of having been so bent on invading Iraq that he left the Afghan battlefield open to America’s enemies, after foolishly allying the US with untrustworthy Afghan allies:
Saddam Hussein didn’t attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn’t use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world’s number one criminal and terrorist. They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords, who only a week earlier had been on the other side fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other. That’s the enemy that attacked us. That’s the enemy that was allowed to walk out of those mountains. That’s the enemy that is now in 60 countries, with stronger recruits.
Did moving troops to Iraq so that there were ten times more soldiers there than in Afghanistan mean that “Saddam Hussein was 10 times more important than Osama bin Laden”? Kerry asked.
One could today ask if Kerry’s reading of the situation, so different from Bush’s, would have led to a different US policy being pursued towards Afghanistan (and/or Iraq) had Kerry, not Bush won the 2004 election. It is at least possible that Kerry might have deployed more US troops to Afghanistan, as Barack Obama would do very decisively when he came to power in 2009, in the so-called surge (itself a copy of the second Bush term counter-insurgency surge of General David Petraeus in Iraq). Yet it is hard to see how more US fighting troops in Afghanistan on the ground could have been beneficial, given their actions were part of why an insurgency began. Another question is whether the US, under a Kerry presidency, might have pulled back from working with ‘the warlords’. Here, it is difficult to see how, by this point, the civil war era strongmen could have been dislodged from the Republic’s political system: Bush’s decision in 2001 to work with anti-Taleban commanders and factions in toppling the first Islamic Emirate had put them firmly at the heart of the Islamic Republic.
Presidents Obama and Karzai on the White House Colonnade after meeting in the Oval Office. Photo: Pete Souza/White House photographer, 11 January 2013
2008, 2012: Obama v McCain, Obama v Romney, the ‘good war’, the surge and the transition
In 2008, Obama hammered home the very same message his fellow Democrat, John Kerry, had done four years earlier, this time against Republican contender, John McCain. Bush, he said, had fought the wrong war when he invaded Iraq in 2003. In the first presidential 2008 debate, held on 26 September, Obama promised to shift troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, “as quickly as possible, because it’s been acknowledged by the commanders on the ground the situation is getting worse, not better.”
We had the highest fatalities among U.S. troops this past year than at any time since 2002. And we are seeing a major offensive taking place – Al Qaida and Taliban crossing the border and attacking our troops in a brazen fashion. They are feeling emboldened. And we cannot separate Afghanistan from Iraq, because what our commanders have said is we don’t have the troops right now to deal with Afghanistan. So I would send two to three additional brigades to Afghanistan. Now, keep in mind that we have four times the number of troops in Iraq, where nobody had anything to do with 9/11 before we went in, where, in fact, there was no Al Qaida before we went in, but we have four times more troops there than we do in Afghanistan. And that is a strategic mistake, because every intelligence agency will acknowledge that Al Qaida is the greatest threat against the United States and that Secretary of Defense Gates acknowledged the central front – that the place where we have to deal with these folks is going to be in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
As well as the extra deployment, Obama said he would “press the Afghan government to make certain that they are actually working for their people” and deal with the “growing poppy trade.” He also promised to deal with Pakistan:
because Al Qaida and the Taliban have safe havens in Pakistan, across the border in the northwest regions, and although, you know, under George Bush, with the support of Senator McCain, we’ve been giving them [Islamabad] $10 billion over the last seven years, they have not done what needs to be done to get rid of those safe havens. And until we do, Americans here at home are not going to be safe.
Had John McCain won in 2008, however, US policy would probably not have been so different. Unlike Obama, he fully supported the war in Iraq, but he also wanted to copy the Iraq surge in Afghanistan and expand the US military presence there as well. McCain also spoke about the ‘problem’ of Pakistan. In that first debate, he said the US had to work with the Pakistani government, acknowledging that “the new president of Pakistan, Kardari (sic), has got his hands full” and that “this area on the border has not been governed since the days of Alexander the Great.” McCain had been to Waziristan, he said, and could “see how tough that terrain is. It’s ruled by a handful of tribes.” He said they would have to “help the Pakistanis go into these areas and obtain the allegiance of the people. And it’s going to be tough. They’ve intermarried with Al Qaida and the Taliban. And it’s going to be tough. But we have to get the cooperation of the people in those areas.”
Pakistan would remain a thorn in the side of the US military until it left in 2021 – it proved impossible to ‘deal’ with it when the bulk of US supplies to Afghanistan came over its land routes. Obama’s surge (opposed at the time by his vice president, Joe Biden, who pushed for a ‘light footprint’, counter-terrorism policy – see our 2008 reporting on his stance here) would prove futile and costly in both Afghan and foreign lives. Nevertheless, four years later, in 2012, Obama would assert the success of his Afghan policy. In the second presidential debate with his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, held on 16 October 2012, Obama said:
We ended the war in Iraq, refocused our attention on those who actually killed us on 9/11. And as a consequence, Al Qaeda’s core leadership has been decimated. In addition, we’re now able to transition out of Afghanistan in a responsible way, making sure that Afghans take responsibility for their own security. And that allows us also to rebuild alliances and make friends around the world to combat future threats.
Romney described the strategy he would pursue if he became president as “pretty straightforward”: “Go after the bad guys, to make sure we do our very best to interrupt them, to – to kill them, to take them out of the picture.” He also said US policy had to be broader than that. The key, in his opinion, was to pursue “a pathway to get the Muslim world to be able to reject extremism on its own.” To ensure there was not “another Iraq … another Afghanistan,” they had to go after “these – these jihadists,” but also “help the Muslim world.” That meant promoting economic development, better education, gender equality, the rule of law and helping “these nations create civil societies.”
Romney did agree with Obama that the surge had been successful, though, and asserted that Afghan forces were now stronger, larger in number and ready to “step in to provide security.” He explicitly said he would withdraw US troops by 2014, the date established by then President Hamed Karzai, the US and NATO to end the International Stabilisation and Assistance Force (ISAF) mission, when security would be fully in the hands of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). The transition did indeed happen at the end of 2014, but under Obama’s leadership, the foreign troops morphed into NATO’s non-combat ‘train, advise and assist’ mission, Resolute Support, with the US retaining an additional can-be-combat mission until the end.
2016: Trump v Clinton, when Afghanistan fell off the agenda
In the three 2016 presidential debates, Afghanistan was mentioned just once and then only in passing by Democrat Hilary Clinton. The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall was scathing about the two candidates ignoring what had become the US’s longest war. Clinton, he said, was keen not to “draw attention to unfinished business in Afghanistan,” given the war was “deeply unpopular with voters,” while for his part,
Trump seems to understand little and care less. He once said the war was a “terrible mistake” but has no known policy. Even the Taliban feel affronted. A Talib spokesman, quoted by analyst Yochi Dreazen, commented after the first debate that Trump says “anything that comes to his tongue” and is “not serious”.
If Clinton had won that election, we wrote, Obama’s Secretary of State could have been expected to maintain his policy as president. However, she lost and Trump had given no idea during the campaign as to what he would do in Afghanistan. We scrutinised tweets from his official account and other comments to try to glean his policy after winning the election. In 2013, he had favoured withdrawal: “Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis [sic] we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.” He had also tweeted: “It is time to get out of Afghanistan. We are building roads and schools for people that hate us. It is not in our national interests.” Interviewed live on CNN in October 2015, he had said the US had made a terrible mistake getting involved in Afghanistan in the first place, but asserted that he had never said the US made a mistake going into Afghanistan. Wondering whether US troops were “going to be there for the next 200 years?” he said, it would be a long time, but that:
OK, wouldn’t matter, I never said it. Afghanistan is a different kettle. Afghanistan is next to Pakistan, it’s an entry in. You have to be careful with the nuclear weapons. It’s all about the nuclear weapons. By the way, without the nukes, it’s a whole different ballgame.
Trump’s past comments had given little away: they were typically incoherent and contradictory, but did suggest he might favour ending the intervention. His plans, as president, did eventually materialise, far later, on 21 August 2017 (transcript here) when he admitted he had not followed his instincts. US forces would be staying in Afghanistan, he said, although he insisted the US would not be “nation-building,” but “killing terrorists.” It upset his conservative base. His former chief strategist, Steve Bannon’s Breitbart website, condemned the president for coming up with a strategy that was little different from Obama’s: the president, had “flip-flop[ed” (reporting here). “My original instinct,” Trump announced, “was to pull out.” Once in power, however, and having studied Afghanistan “in great detail and from every conceivable angle” and holding “many meetings over many months,” he had changed his mind about what America’s “core interests in Afghanistan” necessitated.
Taleban security personnel stand guard the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in Kabul, Afghanistan. Photo: Wakil Kohsar/AFP, 16 October 2024
Trump’s Afghan strategy looked to be what had been drawn up by the US commander on the ground, General John Nicholson, in partnership with then President Ashraf Ghani and the Afghan government, seven months earlier. (Read a transcript of Nicholson’s testimony to Congress in February 2017 here and our analysis of the plan here). After months of mulling over what to do, Trump had accepted his military advisors’ counsel on the need to stay in Afghanistan.
If he had been a different man, so much of what Trump decided then might have come back to haunt him. He said the sacrifices already made by US servicepeople meant they “deserve[d] a plan for victory.” The US was going to fight to win and it would win, said Trump, because “the consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable, he said. “A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists, including ISIS and al Qaeda, would instantly fill, just as happened before September 11th.”
A core pillar of our new strategy is a shift from a time-based approach to one based on conditions. I’ve said it many times how counterproductive it is for the United States to announce in advance the dates we intend to begin, or end, military options. We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities. Conditions on the ground – not arbitrary timetables – will guide our strategy from now on. America’s enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out. I will not say when we are going to attack, but attack we will.
His words were a reaction to Obama’s announcements of withdrawal dates as the US army went from surge to drawing down and handing authority for the security of Afghanistan to the ANSF. This move had satisfied anti-war Democrats, but effectively helped the Taleban with their war planning. His later fixed timetable for withdrawal under the 2020 Doha agreement would help the Taleban in just the same way.
Trump’s second U-turn committed the US to a withdrawal of troops, on a fixed timetable and with specific numbers being drawn down at each stage. The only real condition placed on the Taleban in the 29 February 2020 Doha agreement, reached by Trump’s Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, the Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad, was that the insurgents should cease attacking foreign military and civilian targets. Their promises on foreign fighters were vague in the extreme. The deal had been reached by Khalilzad directly with the Taleban and, at their insistence, had excluded the Afghan government from negotiations. As we wrote at the time, the US, by contrast, signed up to many specific obligations in addition to withdrawing its troops – albeit many of the promises were what the Kabul government would have to do, such as releasing thousands of Taleban prisoners. (see our analysis, and the simultaneously released Joint Declaration between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States of America for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan).
The ‘intra-Afghan talks’ between the Taleban and the Republic, also promised in the Doha agreement, given the waning and ultimately ending threat of US military power, always looked like a futile exercise. As the deal played out, the US threatened Ghani into compliance with the agreement, including a warning that Washington would cut USD one billion in aid unless the Afghan government released 5,000 Taleban prisoners. It also forced the ANSF to take up a defensive posture, only relenting to allow ‘active defence’ (that is, pre-emptive strikes against the Taleban were allowed, but not offensive strikes). These were intended to be confidence-building measures aimed at fostering an atmosphere conducive to the ‘intra-Afghan talks’. Not surprisingly, ANSF morale plummeted, while Taleban morale soared. (For our analysis of this period, see The Taleban’s rise to power: As the US prepared for peace, the Taleban prepared for war and Afghanistan’s Conflict in 2021 (2): Republic collapse and Taleban victory in the long-view of history.)
2020: Trump v Biden, the withdrawal continues
When Americans went to the polls to elect their next president in November 2020, the Doha agreement had about six months to run. Trump had committed to withdrawing all US forces by the last day of April 2021. This was a momentous time for Afghanistan, with the US playing an outsize role. Yet, in the 2020 election debates, Afghanistan was, again, barely mentioned – just one passing reference by Joe Biden in the third debate, held on 20 October, who used the situation in Afghanistan to criticise Trump over his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In spring 2020, Biden had written that he wanted to end America’s “forever wars,” albeit presenting a more nuanced stance in a 10 September 2020 Stars and Stripes interview, which reported: “Biden said conditions in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq are so complicated that he cannot promise full withdrawal of troops in the near future. However, he supports a small U.S. military footprint whose primary mission would be to facilitate special operations against the Islamic State, or ISIS, and other terror organizations.”
In the end, the 2020 election exemplified how who won the US presidential contest had no effect on US policy. By the time Trump left office in January 2021, troop numbers were down from 15,500 to 2,500: indeed, he had hurried to withdraw troops in greater numbers than his deal with the Taleban merited ahead of the election and a month before the poll, on 8 October, had even promised to bring all the troops home by Christmas (tweet here). Trump had left Biden little room for manoeuvre, should he not have wanted to go ahead with the Doha agreement (see our analysis of his choices after his victory here). However, Biden embraced the deal. He kept Zalmay Khalilzad on and pursued Trump’s policy in full, only extending the deadline for the “final withdrawal” from 30 April to 11 September, in an announcement made on 14 April 2021.
President Biden chose to end his country’s military intervention on a date meaningful to Americans. They would “be out of Afghanistan before we mark the 20th anniversary of that heinous attack on September 11th,” he declared. As so often, US Afghan policy was shaped by what an American president assumed would be good news for his domestic audience, rather than taking into account the possible consequences for Afghanistan – good or bad. Others at the time were urging caution: many of his NATO allies were unhappy with the withdrawal, as were some of Biden’s advisors. However, he followed the Trump plan, with little thought for how it might actually play out, as we wrote:
How to keep crucial tasks going, such as maintaining aircraft, had not been considered. US air support to the ANSF fell away. Although it was eventually ramped up, it came late in the Taleban’s offensive, too late to demonstrate the support which might have helped rally Afghan troops on the ground. The withdrawing US forces appeared to coordinate more with their enemies than with the allies they were leaving behind: witness the unannounced overnight vacation of the Bagram airbase, with the electricity left on a twenty-minute timer. The US appeared driven by a desire just to get the withdrawal done and over, a ‘ripping-off of the Band-Aid plaster’ and a hope for the best.
In response to Biden confirming that US troops would be withdrawn, the Taleban intensified their attacks and, facing a demoralised and poorly led ANSF and a population which had grown to have little faith in their government, began to capture districts and then provinces, slowly at first and then, like dominoes (see an overview written in December 2021 here). They captured the capital on 21 August 2021. The troops left earlier than planned, on 30 August, presumably so as not to besmirch the 9/11 anniversary.
Schoolgirls walk home at the end of their classes in Khost province, Afghanistan. Photo: AFP, 21 October 2024
For Biden, rather than being able to boast that the long war was successfully over on the twentieth anniversary of the 2001 attacks, which had brought the US to Afghanistan in the first place, he could only try to defend his decision by blaming the Afghans for the looming Taleban victory on 16 Augustand when it was finally over on 31 August, casting the evacuation itself as an “extraordinary success.” It was an extraordinary claim, given the chaos at Kabul airport, as for days, massed crowds of Afghans had struggled to get on evacuation flights, the 26 August suicide bombing by ISKP which killed about 170 Afghans and 13 US servicepeople and a US airstrike in response, supposedly targeting ISKP planners, which killed 10 civilians. The shambles of the final withdrawal symbolised what a complete and costly failure America’s two-decade-long intervention had been: its allies had collapsed before US forces had even left, while its enemies, the Taleban, were back in power.
The aftermath of the withdrawal
A joke in Washington DC in the months after that fateful withdrawal asked what Biden’s policy on Afghanistan was. The punchline: not to have the country mentioned in a Washington Post or New York Times headline. The world’s superpower had, in the end, dropped Afghanistan as swiftly and wholeheartedly as it had picked it up. In the single Trump versus Kamala Harris debate this year, held on 11 September 2024, Afghanistan was mentioned only eventually, after the moderator asked the candidates about Afghanistan three times before they responded.
Harris said she agreed with Biden’s decision to pull out: it had saved American taxpayers USD 300 million a day that they had been paying “for that endless war.” Donald Trump, she said, had “negotiated one of the weakest deals you can imagine,” one that even his national security adviser had said was “a weak, terrible deal,” He had “bypassed the Afghan government,” she said and negotiated directly with a terrorist organization called the Taliban. The negotiation involved the Taliban getting 5,000 terrorists, Taliban terrorists released.” She also recalled the September 2019 Trump invitation to “the Taliban to Camp David,” an example of how he “has consistently disparaged and demeaned members of our military, fallen soldiers.”
In response, Trump defended what he called a “very good agreement”, saying it had stopped the Taleban killing lots of US soldiers with snipers (not true) and that he had decided to negotiate directly with “Abdul … the head of the Taliban” (presumably, Head of the Taleban Political Commission, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar). He also appeared to claim that his administration had broken off the deal because the Taleban had not met various conditions: “The agreement said you have to do this, this, this, this, this, and they didn’t do it. They didn’t do it. The agreement was, was terminated by us because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do.”
As to any thoughts on forward-looking policy on Afghanistan, there were none, from either candidate. Whoever wins the race in November, neither has given any sign that US policy on Afghanistan might change, that American hostility to the Islamic Emirate might relent or ramp up, that sanctions – or waivers – be raised, or humanitarian aid stopped, rather than just, as it is now diminishing. One can envisage Trump taking a harder line on the Emirate than Biden has done and that he would also stop Afghans settling in the United States as refugees, currently possible for some under the Refugee Admissions Programme. Yet, it is also difficult to imagine Harris softening the US line on the Emirate and risk enraging the feminists among her domestic backers. However, there is no evidence of what either Trump or Harris might do, or that they have even given the matter any thought, should they win on 5 November.
The Guantanamo exception
The one area of policy most likely to be affected by the outcome of this year’s US elections is something not yet touched on in this report, the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, which has held detainees outside the laws of war or criminal justice since January 2002, established as part of Bush’s War on Terror. Since 2009, changes in the presidency have affected not only Guantanamo, but also the United States’ use of torture.
When Obama came to power in 2009, he banned torture – which Bush had authorised – although he declined to bring anyone to justice for past abuses. He also vowed to close Guantanamo, but was thwarted by Congress, and his own poor planning (for more on this, see the author’s 2016 report, ‘Kafka in Cuba The Afghan Experience in Guantánamo’ and 2021 report ‘Kafka in Cuba, a Follow-Up Report: Afghans Still in Detention Limbo as Biden Decides What to do’). At the end of his second term, as the implications of the victory of the pro-torture, pro-Guantanamo Donald Trump in the 2016 election became clear, the outgoing administration scrambled to get as many detainees out of Guantanamo as possible – some with just hours to play. During Trump’s presidency, just one inmate was to leave Guantanamo. Again, in 2020, with the election of Joe Biden, more inmates were to leave the prison camp, including the second but last Afghan to be held there, Asadullah Harun Gul. He was released in June 2022, partly because of earlier efforts of Hezb-e Islami elements within the Ashraf Ghani government before it collapsed to get their comrade home and also due to the tenacity of Gul’s American lawyers (see the author’s report, Free at Last: The Afghan, Harun Gul, is released from Guantanamo after 15 years).
30 men still remain in Guantanamo, including the last Afghan, Muhammad Rahim, who was also the last man to be rendered and tortured by the CIA (our latest report on him can be read here). If Trump wins, transfers out of the camp would likely dry up again. If Harris is victorious, Rahim might be freed. As to the camp itself, the two previous Democratic presidents promised but failed to close it down and administrations of both stripes have fought in the US courts in the dirtiest of fashions (for examples, see the author’s two ‘Kafka in Cuba’ reports) to keep men detained when detainees have petitioned for habeas corpus. Almost a quarter of a century after it opened, the closure of Guantanamo is still not in sight. Its existence has fallen off the US political agenda even more so than Afghanistan.
Conclusion: Afghanistan forgotten
Reading through the transcripts of the presidential debates, what is striking is that the leaders of the United States, who have held so much sway over Afghanistan for two decades, so often got their facts about the country wrong or have used them to promote whatever tack they were taking with American voters, from George Bush holding up Afghanistan as a symbol of liberation, onwards.
As to whether changes in the presidency made a difference to US policy, it seems that, until part-way through the 2016 Trump presidency, policy on Afghanistan was largely driven by the military and the perspective of generals on what was needed to fight the Taleban – and rationalised by the politicians. Biden had been an early advocate of withdrawing forces and argued for this when he became vice president in 2009. Obama, at that time, insisted that Afghanistan was ‘the good war’ and embarked on the surge. In the US, it is always more difficult for Democratic presidents to be seen to be shirking a fight: they risk a domestic backlash for being seen to be weak. Perhaps not surprisingly then, it was the Republican president, Donald Trump who withdrew the bulk of US troops, before Biden, as he had long wished, pulled the final soldiers out.
As for what lies ahead, the presidential campaign for 2024 has given no indication of whether current policy will be maintained or changed. What is certain, though, is that Afghanistan is no longer on the US political agenda.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour
Revisions:
This article was last updated on 4 Nov 2024
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