What Happens When Afghanistan Falls?
The Afghan collapse will ripple throughout the world.
The Taliban Resurgent
Afghanistan has come to symbolise both the waste of the military industrial complex and the hubris of imperial projects aimed at countries on the other side of the globe. In total, the US spent some 2.2 trillion dollars on the conflict, which has done nothing but weaken American hegemony.?
Now, the country is in a perilous state. At the time of writing, close to a half of the country has fallen from government control, with the Taliban surrounding and besieging the cities of Herat and Kandahar.
While the cities have been able to resist the Taliban thus far, they have been able to establish a dominant position in the rural countryside, including the borders on both the Iranian and Pakistani frontiers. This allows transit of more fighters into the country and drugs out into the wider world and the blocking of all costumes payments and aid to civilians.??
While the national Afghan army is far better equipped (NATO pays roughly 80 percent of the costs to arm and run it) and outnumbers the Taliban, it is also populated by soldiers whose loyalty to the regime is doubtful and are likely to either switch sides, join private militias, or simply melt away should the tide turn heavily against Kabul.?
In fact, the US believes that the Kabul government could collapse in as little as five months.?This is a very real concern, and it's worth asking what happens then?
Vacuum
Firstly, we should define what we mean by “fall.” Even if the Kabul government is militarily defeated and routed from several cities, perhaps with major politicians fleeing into foreign exile, it is unlikely that the Taliban will be able to exert unquestioned authority across the entire country.?
Afghanistan is an extremely mountainous country, where the rugged topography of the Hindu Kush is marked by dunes, deserts and canyons. This naturally encourages a decentralised form of political country in which the central core struggles to exert their authority upon the peripheral regions.?
This has been a problem that every Afghan government has encountered, including the Taliban when they were in power. One of the only reasons they are doing well now is because they are functioning as a dispersed franchise operation rather than a singular army.?
Add to this, Afghanistan’s patchwork of ethnicities (The Afghan constitution recognises fourteen), and you have a recipe for fragmentation. Again, even the Taliban reflects this problem. The group is a coalition made up of dozens of distinct branches and organisations, drawn from differing ethnic constituencies, making money from differant regions and holding to differing versions of the Islamist ideology.
For a long time, these factions were united against the West, now the Kabul government. When the governments weaken, they could turn on eachother, as militants have done in Syria, and every other conflict similar groups are engaged in.
This is actually worse than complete Taliban control because it will produce a vacuum from which hordes of refugees will flee into surrounding countries and regional powers will be sucked in.?
It seems to be Afghanistan’s unhappy fate to be used as a battlefield by the surrounding powers.?
The country is located in the middle of several major population and economic centres, with China to the east, India and Pakistan to the south and Iran on her western frontier.
This is why the country has often functioned as a buffer zone for countries to resist their rivals. This happened during the Cold War between the Soviets and Americans and the Great Game fought by the Russian and British empire, and this is something which has played out since ancient times.
All the pieces are aligning for a repeat of this historical trend. Reports are already emerging of foreign troops fighting alongside Taliban forces to achieve the national interests of outside powers.?
The Taliban, fearing foreign influence and control over their group, are demanding their members not hire former fighters. However, the distributed nature of the group means that they are unlikely to be able to enforce this.
This means that foreign intelligence agencies will probably be able to embed fighters in the organisation, or find factions willing to work for them.
China & India Clash
A famous oft quoted line from Sun Tzu states that one should “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake,” and Chinese international policy has taken this to heart over the last few years.?
Beijing seems to be content to allow the West to stumble into continuous disastrous foreign wars, expend immense blood and treasure, and generate anger in the Global South. After the West inevitably withdraws, China sweeps in, with an offer to rebuild.?
We are seeing this the world over. In Syria, where Chinese companies are courting the government (still unrecognised by most Western states) to secure the lucrative contract to rebuild the nation.
This time, Beijing hasn’t even waited for the full American withdrawal to begin courting the Taliban and other Afghan factions.
Beijing’s imperial march into the country will probably be more successful than the US’. For one, Beijing holds no illusion of making Afghanistan a liberal democracy or exporting their values to a nation with no history of them.?
Chinese ambition is about little more than raw power politics. They aim to secure Afghanistan’s bounty of industrial materials (including rare earth minerals) and bind it into the BRI project. They also wish to eliminate the possibility that Afghanistan could act as a hub for Uigher separatists and or other forms of Islamic extremists, who increasingly view China as an emerging enemy.
The Taliban, for their part, are likely to find in China a partner and security guarantor who doesn’t interfere in the internal governing of Afghanistan. This will be contingent on the Taliban ignoring the plight of China’s Uigher muslims. This issue could split the Taliban, the more practical faction will be willing to ignore the issue, but there is a large contingent who will continue to sympathise with them.
While the Taliban haven’t “won” yet, it is obvious they will play an active role in future Afghan politics and Beijing is clearly hedging their bets and preparing for such an eventuality.?
And as China steps in, so will India.?
India is surrounded by Chinese influence, and cannot allow Afghanistan to fall into Beijing's orbit
India and China are bitter rivals and New Delhi already feels surrounded by the firm alliance between Beijing and Pakistan, India’s arch rival. Add in, China’s growing influence over Sri Lanka and Myanmar and the broader Indian Ocean and New Delhi is becoming increasingly desperate to resist.
This means the collapse of Afghanistan could mark the start of a more assertive Indian foreign policy. For New Delhi and her Western allies, this couldn’t come soon enough.?
If the Taliban begins to align with Beijing, India could begin a campaign of funding the remnants of the Kabul government. We could even see India become a major supporter of Chinese Uigher separatists.
Mass Migration
Finally, we can expect the effects to ripple far across the map. One of the effects the West will feel will result from increased mass migration. Afghanistan is already a major source of refugees and migrants, and the numbers will continue to climb.
European governments are already making plans for a potential surge onto the continent. This is likely to complicate Europe’s politics further by pushing these governments into adopting more authoritarian policies to resist the movement.?
Faced with the continual threat of Europe’s “populists,” we are already seeing attempts by national governments to discourage this movement. There is a ring of tough anti-migrant states on the continent’s eastern and southern flank who will find renewed vigour in their efforts to resist immigration.?
This doesn’t take into account the concept of “weaponised migration,” where different countries will encourage illegal migration into rival states to destabilise them. Belarus has recently been accused of doing this, by transiting refugees and migrants into Poland and Lithuania. Turkey has also done this several times as a way of exhorting money from the Europeans, and NATO accused Russia of doing it several years ago.?
Much of this is dependent upon the time frame and course of events. We are likely witnessing a slow descent into chaos for the country, rather than a swift war.
It is also possible, if unlikely, that the Taliban will be routed and forced to accept a dimishing truce from the central government.
What is clear is that recent story has not been kind to Afghanistan, and the coming decade won’t be any better.