When President Ashraf Ghani fled from Afghanistan in August 2021 and the Taliban took control of Kabul, the Americans were suddenly surrounded by victorious Taliban who now marched proudly on the streets of Kabul with newly captured U.S. tanks and weapons. The disastrous withdrawal of U.S. forces and evacuation of a limited number of Afghan allies – while leaving thousands more under Taliban control – marked a dark chapter in U.S. foreign policy.
The outcomes of around 20 years of U.S. military and civilian engagement in Afghanistan have been the topic of both independent research and evaluations by the major governments involved (like Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The findings reveal how mismanagement, bypassing the Afghan government in the U.S. peace deal with the Taliban, lack of institutional capacity, corruption, absence of contextual knowledge, and disrespecting local values all contributed to the collapse of the Afghan government. Yet there was another factor at play, which is frequently overlooked in these studies: U.S. officials’ demeaning treatment and abusive verbal behavior toward Afghan leaders, which engendered profound animosity toward the United States in Afghanistan.
Judging by the Trump administration’s current attitude toward the Russia-Ukraine War, and most recently its treatment of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, these bitter lessons from Afghanistan have not sunk in.
Both former presidents of the Afghan Republic, Hamid Karzai (2004-2014) and Ashraf Ghani (2014-2021), understood the significance of U.S. financial and military support for Afghanistan. Due to its limited resources and dysfunctional tax system, Afghanistan has been a rentier state in its more than 100 years of modern history. Ghani and Karzai also understood that when Afghans are treated with respect, they can be formidable allies and friends; nevertheless, if subjected to humiliation, they may transform into fierce adversaries willing to sacrifice all for vengeance – perhaps the source of Afghanistan’s reputation as a “graveyard of empires.”
Karzai, accompanied by dozens of U.S. special forces, descended into a mountainous area in southern Afghanistan in the first months after 9/11, even before the U.S. military invasion, to start the fight against the Taliban. Karzai was successful in his campaign and soon became the leader of the interim government and later president of Afghanistan. However, the cooperative relationship did not last long. Karzai, from a friend, became an opponent and critic of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. To the surprise of many, in 2013, he refused to sign the U.S.-Afghan Security Pact and tried to establish direct contact with Taliban leaders.
There are several accounts of why Karzai turned from a U.S. ally to an opponent. According to Karzai’s close companions, this shift was due to the fact that he was treated by U.S. officials as a puppet and looked down upon as the president of a poor, corrupt country. Former Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta (2006-2010), who was present at this critical point in Karzai’s meetings with U.S. officials, elaborated in his Persian memoir on such encounters. According to Spanta, a disastrous dinner in Kabul between incoming U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Karzai in 2009 was a major part of the rupture: “When Joe Biden… struck the table with a napkin and departed from the dinner, he not only exhibited the supremacy of the United States over President Karzai, who was perceived as a U.S. puppet, but also failed to recognize that he was inadvertently sowing the seeds of profound animosity among Afghan leaders toward the United States.”
Afterward, Karzai avoided going to visit President Barack Obama in Bagram Airfield and instead requested that Obama visit him in his palace in Kabul.
Years later, Karzai’s successor, Ashraf Ghani was not in a position to avoid visiting Donald Trump in Bagram. In Afghan eyes, it was disrespectful for the Americans to expect Afghan presidents to go to a military camp to welcome a U.S. president. However, U.S. officials were unwilling to acknowledge the negative impact these optics had on the relationship between Afghanistan and the United States.
According to Spanta, Karzai was so irritated by this imbalanced relationship that whenever there was a disagreement between him and U.S. officials, he would refer to a U.S. newspaper that called the U.S.-Afghan Strategic Agreement a deal between a “mouse” and an “elephant.” He used to say to his close comrades, “Well, the Americans ought to know now who the mouse is and who the elephant is.”
While there are significant differences between U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Ukraine, there are many similarities and common lessons too. Most importantly, like Afghanistan, Ukraine is being cut out of negotiations to end a conflict on its soil. The Afghan government was bypassed by Trump in making a peace deal with the Taliban; Ukraine appears in a similar situation after Trump began direct talks with Moscow. Washington is not eager to listen to Zelenskyy and treats him as a person whose survival is dependent on U.S. support – the same dismissive attitude that so offended Karzai, Ghani, and most Afghans.
Following the United States’ signing of a peace agreement with the Taliban in February 2020, Ghani raised concerns about various aspects of the deal. However, he was not heard by Washington, and his reliance on U.S. support left him few options – as Trump might say, Ghani “did not have the cards.” In the end, Ghani took the only bitter revenge available to him: When the Taliban entered Kabul, he did not fight back. He forced the U.S. to reap what it had sowed by leaving the Americans face-to-face with the Taliban. The U.S. pulled out in total military and diplomatic failure while leaving billions of dollars worth of military equipment to the Taliban – the same equipment Trump is now keen to recover.
This mismanagement and chaotic withdrawal may have emboldened Russia’s Vladimir Putin to subsequently invade Ukraine. But if Moscow learned from that U.S. failure, it appears that Washington didn’t. Trump is now treating Zelenskyy in the same way that the U.S. treated the former Afghan presidents, thereby sowing the seeds of a similar disaster in Ukraine.