From Kabul to Kyiv: The Long Shadow of NATO’s War in Afghanistan

CSDS POLICY BRIEF • 13/2024

By Michael John Williams

4.5.2024

Key issues

• Superficial comparisons of Ukraine to Afghanistan offer little useful insight into the potential outcomes of the current Russo-Ukraine war.
• Ukraine is an educated and industrialised state, with a bottom-up drive for political reform supported by a majority of the electorate. This is markedly different from Afghanistan’s situation. That said, Ukraine faces severe challenges from within, such as corruption and weak political institutions, which were also challenges in Afghanistan.
• The most important takeaway from the comparison, however, is that NATO leaders must not delude themselves about the challenges in Ukraine, like they did in Afghanistan. Only a stark realistic assessment and substantive action will prevent a total Ukrainian “loss”.

Introduction

It is impossible not to draw surface level parallels between Afghanistan and Ukraine. During the Cold War, Soviet assistance to Afghanistan stumbled into full-scale war against the Mujahedeen, a war that the United States (US) supported to drain their Soviet enemy. Moscow would be defeated in Afghanistan, but the seeds of a reciprocal crisis were sown. Only a couple of decades later, elements of the same Mujahideen Washington supported, launched a deadly terrorist attack against the US on 9/11. In retribution, the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and hunt down the perpetrators. As the Bush administration moved on to the invasion of Iraq, NATO was drawn in by allies eager to support the “war on terror”, but against the invasion of Iraq. Despite the best efforts of the allies, after 20 years NATO and the US forces left, like the Soviets, in abject failure. This failure and catastrophic withdrawal, however, were soon eclipsed by Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Now in year three, Washington and NATO allies are once again essentially in a proxy war with Moscow, but this time in eastern Europe. Billions of dollars in aid and weapons are flowing to Kyiv and tens of thousands have died and millions have been displaced. The possibility of escalation is ever present, and given the geographic proximity of Ukraine to NATO allies, the importance of the conflict to European security and the wider international order cannot be understated. But, as this CSDS Policy Brief asks, are Washington and Brussels once again going down a hopeless path that, like Afghanistan, will lead to failure? Is the defeat of Ukraine’s 2023 spring offensive a sign that Washington and Brussels should alter course? Should the West push Kyiv to negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible? Is Ukraine, like Afghanistan, a lost cause? What lessons can we extract from the US negotiations with the Taliban for notions of Ukrainian negotiations with Russia? When the US and NATO allies decided on withdrawal, the danger of Taliban advancement were well known, but few predicted the collapse of the government would happen so quickly – what does this say about the spectre of abandonment in Ukraine? There are lessons for NATO in this comparison, but policymakers should be careful of superficial comparisons.

Ukraine and Afghanistan: worlds of difference?

A comparison of NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan (2001-2020) and NATO’s support to Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression (2014/2022-present) must recognise the differing domestic political environments and wider geopolitical context of the conflicts. Afghanistan, for most of its history, was a rentier state, meaning that it depended on external support to maintain domestic political order. The country essentially never had effective national level government or an effective tax collection structure that allowed the government to centralise authority and consolidate legitimacy. A country composed of minority populations – the largest group totals only around 42% of the total population –, mixed with the failure of central government to consolidate its rule and achieve a monopoly on the use of force, has meant that often since 1926 Afghan politics has been fractious and armed civil conflict has been rife. As if weak central government were not problematic enough, the country also suffers from a lack of education and industry.

The population of Afghanistan is one of the poorest in the world with exceedingly low education and literacy rates. There is no national industry or strong export sector – bar opium, which during NATO’s time on the ground was done off the books and fuelled conflict against the central government. Afghanistan was and is largely a state in name, not in function. Complicating matters, in the 2000s, when the US attempted to build a new Afghan state and convened a Loya Jerga in 2002 to do so, it excluded the Taliban from the talks. It is exceedingly difficult, to put it mildly, to do reconstruction and development when a critical, indigenous actor and key combatant is excluded from a peace and reconciliation process. Making matters more complicated was the fact the mission was never properly resourced. This led one early British Cabinet report during the planning for operation Herrick to conclude that ‘[Her Majesty’s] government objectives in Helmand are not achievable’. None of the political objectives outlined by the international community writ large in Afghanistan were very realistic. This is not to say that intervention there was wrong, or that all NATO efforts failed – literacy was up, educational standards were improving, women’s mortality rates were down – but all of this was done against an unsustainable political backdrop. The internal political instability of Afghanistan was further worsened by its geopolitical position, not least because of the nefarious influence of Pakistan. Continual intervention by neighbouring states with malign intentions made an already difficult job next to impossible. The domestic and regional situation in Ukraine is markedly different.

Unlike Afghanistan, which has a weak, agricultural economy with no industrial sector to speak of, Ukraine is a highly developed, well-educated country with both strong industrial and agricultural sectors. The literacy rate in Ukraine is 99.97% – in 2001, only 27% of Afghan men were literate, and only 5.6% of Afghan women. Among European Neighbourhood Policy-East countries, more than 90% of young adults (20-24 years old) in Ukraine have completed at least an upper secondary education in 2021, compared with 85% in the European Union (EU). Before the 2022 Russian invasion, Ukrainian agricultural exports totalled nearly US$28 billion, and manufacturing output was around US$21 billion in 2021. Russian’s illegal war against Kyiv has hurt the Ukrainian economy, but the economic fundamentals for recovery are present. So are the political ones.

The country does have minority ethnic populations – 85% of the country identify as Ukrainian, up from 64% before the Russian invasion. Russia’s war has helped to solidify Ukraine’s national identity, and its desire to join the EU and NATO. This contrasts greatly with the fractious politics of Afghanistan and the tendency of Afghans to identify along ethnic and tribal lines, rather than a national identity. If Kyiv and the international community can end the war and restart the economy, Ukraine is more than capable of providing the economic foundation – along with international assistance – to rebuild the country and to integrate it into the global economy. And unlike Afghanistan, Ukraine is backed to the west by supportive neighbours that want to buttress its political and economic development. The possibility of EU membership, and perhaps one day NATO membership, offer strong structural supports to Ukraine’s further liberalisation. However, despite these stark differences to Afghanistan, Ukraine is not free of the most deadly vice that plagued Kabul, corruption.

The rot from within: the corrupted state

Throughout the war in Afghanistan corruption plagued reconstruction and development efforts. As one former Afghan diplomat told The Economist, ‘from your birth certificate to your death certificate and whatever comes in between, somehow you have to bribe’. Corruption in the Afghan state was aided and abetted by the US and international community. When the US entered Afghanistan in 2001, it used the existing patronage networks run by warlords to advance short-term US military objectives. The short-term gains, however, were undermined by the long-term damage it created. Naturally, when NATO attempted to curb corruption to reinforce the central state and develop an effective tax structure, the warlords previously strengthen by the US and NATO turned against them – the result was a delicate truce that did little to advance the political cohesion or legitimacy of the central government. The March 2015 report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) noted that around US$45 million in US aid to Kabul before 2010 went “missing”. The Washington Post estimated that around 40% of US Department of Defense assistance to Afghanistan was lost to corruption. But the blame for the corruption in Afghanistan should not be placed on Afghans. Corruption is far from unusual in countries without a functional government or society – in a world where there are no guarantees and no one is looking out for you but yourself, corruption is how business gets done. The real culprit was further afield: as one US official put it: ‘the biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States’.

Like Afghanistan, Ukraine has been plagued by corruption since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the privatisation of state assets in the early 1990s. In 2016, Transparency International, a public sector watchdog, reported that around 38-42% of Ukrainian households encountered some form of government corruption. In 2015, The Guardian ran a long form investigation in the Ukrainian healthcare system titled “Welcome to Ukraine, the most corrupt nation in Europe”. The story detailed to a great extent the patronage networks and graft in the country, despite successive elections focused on rooting out corruption. But unlike in Afghanistan, home-grown efforts to reduce corruption are being systematised in Ukraine. Organisations such as the Anticorruption Action Center (AntAC) and the introduction of the procurement software Pro Zorro to increase transparency in public contracts are positive developments. Nevertheless, corruption remains a concern. In February 2023, President Zelenskyy undertook a purge of systemic corruption, but more must be done and international donors must enforce strict accountability standards. For example, although the weapons tracking system employed by Ukraine has been good, it must be better. Recent reports that around 40,000 pieces of weaponry have gone missing should be a call to redouble efforts. While most of these weapons were probably legitimately used but not tracked, this should be no reason to not do better going forward – oversight is critical to building a Ukraine with less corruption if the country hopes to join NATO and EU. It is also integral to enticing recalcitrant members of the US Congress to provide additional support to Ukraine.

Know thyself: goals, objectives and resources

To be sure, Ukraine and Afghanistan have surface level commonalities, some of which run deeper, such as corruption. But any comparison of these two different cases must also look at the common denominator in each case – NATO. And it is here that the similarity is most apparent and worrisome. For rather than finding fault with war ravaged Afghans and Ukrainians, one must consider how NATO allies thought about the operations, the objectives they set and the resources they committed to the task at hand. In Afghanistan, the soaring rhetoric of western leaders far outstripped the resources any state was willing to commit to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission. As one study concluded ‘the comprehensive approach enacted through [NATO] PRTs [Provincial Reconstruction Teams] really only scrapes the surface of the problem […] it cannot redress the underlying political issues, nor can it undo previous deficiencies in planning’. Complicating matters further were several national caveats for military force deployment by the COMISAF, behind which was a lack of political resolve. Too often assistance to Afghanistan was driven by political needs in Washington, London, Berlin and other capitals than by Afghan priorities. As one critical evaluation put it, ‘NATO is not equipped, nor is it capable, of undertaking the gamut of roles required to conduct sustainable peacebuilding. Indeed, even with regard to military assets, the alliance has encountered significant difficulties in fulfilling the Combined Joint Statement of Requirements (CJSOR) submitted by the theater commander’. The ultimate outcome of terrible initial post-war planning by the US, and equally terrible allied investment in the mission from 2003 on, was a plan doomed to fail considering the expectations created at home by the rhetoric of western political elites.

With Ukraine, NATO leaders are committing many of the same mistakes. In Washington, the Biden administration accurately forecast Russia’s invasion, but their intelligence estimate regarding Ukraine’s ability to resist was wrong. Once it became apparent Ukraine could possibly stave off a total occupation, the White House began to offer military equipment. Although it was sensible in the beginning to be cautious to avoid escalation of the conflict, after the first twelve months of the war caution became an impediment to Ukrainian success. Instead of giving Ukraine what it needed to cause strategic effect, the slow trickle of military aid meant that Kyiv could hang on, but not compel Russia to negotiate, never mind to “win”. The record in Europe is even worse. European leaders continue to say that they will stand by Ukraine “no matter what”, and that they want Ukraine to “win” the war. But instead of ramping up defence production last year, they squandered the time bought with Ukrainian lives. Now, Russia is on a sustainable war footing, but Europe is not and ultimately it is Ukraine that will pay the price. The rhetoric from NATO allies on Ukraine, like in Afghanistan, outpaces their actions – they could have done more from the start, they should have done more, but they did not. This is why notions of Ukrainian victory today are hardly credible. Equally laughable is the idea that Russia should negotiate – why would the Kremlin negotiate now, when it holds the advantage? To compel Russia to talk, Ukraine needs leverage, and right now it has none. NATO has sown the seeds of failure in Ukraine, and in the coming months the continent will reap this deadly bounty.

Hold on: embrace limited victory by staving off total defeat

The situation is unjust – there is no way around it, but this is the reality of the situation. Ukraine is the wronged party, and it understandably wants all the territory forcibly annexed by Russia, including the Crimean Peninsula, returned to its control. But this is not achievable given how Kyiv is resourced. Instead, the international community and Kyiv should view the fact that Ukraine still controls 80% of its territory and that its elected government runs the country, as a major victory. Putin clearly intended to oust the Zelensky government and install a puppet regime. Ukraine should consider 100,000 dead Russian soldiers a victory. Ukraine and NATO should consider subjecting Russia to vassal status under China a victory. And it must preserve these victories. There is no guarantee – as the current political circus in Washington demonstrates – that Ukraine will get the support it needs to soldier on indefinitely. The only hope Ukraine has now is to harden the current line of conflict and dig in for long-term cold conflict, such as on the Korean peninsula.

Ukraine does not need to recognise Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea or eastern parts of Ukraine officially or legally, but the first goal must be to preserve what it currently controls – it must create a stand-off situation that will make it clear to Moscow: further military action will not yield a better outcome than negotiations. A Korean peninsula like situation is unsatisfactory, but it is more realistic and achievable than many current notions of “victory” that are thrown around by pundits. In Afghanistan, NATO allies set out to build some sort of Switzerland in the Hindu Kush – it was an absurd objective from the start and the allies continued to deceive themselves and the public for twenty years about the reality of the situation. Similarly, now, NATO allies should consider just what is achievable in the war against Russia and set Ukraine up for a future in the west, rather than endemic war which is what their limited support has done.