OMAHA, Neb. (CN) — These are grim days at the Center for Afghanistan Studies.
The center’s offices in Kabul were destroyed by a bomb blast. Efforts are underway to pull its academics and their loved ones out of the country — one slipped out the weekend of Aug. 21 and is now back in Omaha, where the center’s main offices are — as fellow scholars and experts on Afghanistan watch the United States fumble through yet another debacle.
“There are some feelings that are beyond words,” said Sher Jan Ahmadzai, director of the center. “It’s grim, angry and sad. Very emotional, for all of us."
Ahmadzai’s mostly cheerless outlook is shared by Morwari Zafar, an adjunct assistant professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University.
The past two weeks have left her “gutted," said Zafar, who has also been working long hours helping Afghans to flee. "And just feeling absolutely numb. It’s been incredibly difficult. I expected more from this administration."
The Center for Afghanistan Studies dates to 1972, when Afghanistan was a peaceful country. When it was created at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, the center was the world’s sole permanent research institute dedicated to studying Afghanistan, according to its website. It bills itself as “America’s primary cultural and scholarly link with the nation of Afghanistan.”
Zafar is a social anthropologist who also runs a company called The Sentient Group, which does research, education and training. She has done 15 years of research on the Afghan war, refugees and resettlement. Both she and and Ahmadzai are Afghanistan-born U.S. citizens and can rattle off a list of errors made by the United States in Afghanistan.
According to Zafar, the United States didn’t understand Afghanistan’s history. Americans also tended to see Afghanistan as embroiled in tribal wars when it had actually hosted proxy conflicts, like between the United States and the Soviet Union, or between India and Pakistan.
“There have been periods of substantial growth in peace in Afghanistan’s history," she said.
Afghanistan had a nationalized economy, but the social and economic landscape became muddied, and success elusive, when Americans came in 20 years ago with a focus on privatization.
“We didn’t look at it as an outcome of our ignorance of the environment and the history,” she said. “We were ignorant, and we continued to plow right ahead.”
And when it didn’t work, the United States blamed Afghans. “I think there was just a lot of our policies driven by hubris and misplaced optimism,” Zafar said.
Afghan Americans were rarely, if ever, part of devising policy in Afghanistan and the region, Zafar said. Foreign policymaking seems to be monopolized by very few people with the same ideas.
“It’s a Washington, D.C., echo chamber,” she said, “with the same experts and the same policy makers.”
In 2001, after the rapid overthrow of the Taliban by the U.S., the Taliban offered to surrender if they were given amnesty, according to The New York Times. But the U.S. government was in no mood at the time to deal. Ahmadzai described that as one of many blunders on the part of the U.S.
“Listen: We had defeated them," Ahmadzai said. "Al-Qaida was out of Afghanistan. It was in Pakistan and not in Afghanistan. The Taliban did not want to go to Pakistan They came to us.”
“When you tell your enemy that you are leaving the battleground by a certain date, why would they come to a conclusion that they can work with you when they can wait you out?” Ahmadzai said.
As for the 2020 treaty that the Trump administration negotiated directly with the Taliban — cutting out the government of Afghanistan — Ahmadzai called it "a blunder."
“It undermined the very government that we supported for the past 20 years. It undermined its legitimacy," he said. "If we wanted to get out of Afghanistan, we could have signed a deal with the Afghan government without undermining it. No one was stopping us from getting out of Afghanistan.”
Ahmadzai strongly believes the U.S. left Afghanistan too soon. He cited the bipartisan Afghanistan Study Group report from this year, which recommended a diplomatic effort to extend the previous May 2021 withdrawal date to give the peace process time to produce an acceptable result and not “simply hand a victory to the Taliban.”
“The Afghans didn’t want the United States to stay forever. They wanted the U.S. to stay until the ground conditions were appropriate so we could strike a … dignified peace deal with the Taliban," he said.
Zafar agreed that cutting the Afghanistan government out of the negotiations was a mistake.
“It is an error that was akin to what happened to the dinosaurs,” she said. “It feels irreversible. There is sort of an extinction of life, the social landscape that had developed in Afghanistan, all the progress that had been made.”
But that progress may affect how the Taliban will govern. While they may have been shooting rifles in the air in celebration as the last American cargo jets departed, they now face a new challenge.
“They have to accept the reality that the Afghans will not accept the way they ruled in 1996,” Ahmadzai said. “In 1996, they inherited a destroyed Afghanistan. In 2021, they inherited a very built and robust Afghanistan.”
The Taliban now rule over a society where many have enjoyed a certain amount of freedom, cellular phones and television.
“Government cannot be done by only one means — violence,” Ahmadzai said. “It means services to the people, and the people are used to good services. But I don’t know if the Taliban can provide them.”
Zafar agreed. “The only thing that gives me hope is that this isn’t Afghanistan of 1994, 1996,” she said. “The fact that there is a segment of society that will continue to contest this sort of rule is great.”
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