There Is Still a War in Afghanistan
Just Without the United States
If you had any doubts whether the United States was serious about leaving Afghanistan behind, put them to rest. Key infrastructure for waging that conflict has been dismantled. Start with human resources: the two bureaucrats with the most historical responsibility for managing America’s incoherent mission in that hapless country at the CIA and the State Department have both gone out to pasture. Technical means are another key indicator: the demobilization of powerful airborne electronic warfare platforms like the one seen above is the deepest sort of cut that American power projection can take, a true termination of mission.
This is not to say that the war in Afghanistan is over. Quite the opposite, really. The Taliban have reclaimed a landlocked, diverse, aid-dependent patchwork Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, but now they face an insurgent threat themselves. Despite belonging to the same Haqqani Network, the Islamic State of Khorasan (IS-K) is an ideological enemy of the Taliban. IS-K grew after 2015 by absorbing Islamic State fighters who fled the Syria-Iraq theatre but sustained heavy losses at the same time by drawing everybody’s fire all at once. Now that ISAF and the US are no longer involved, IS-K is once again targeting the much larger Taliban group.
Whereas the Taliban returned to Kabul by winning in places where US and Afghan forces could not even admit a battle had taken place, now the proverbial sandal is on the other foot, with the regime caught flat-footed by local enemy successes. A handful of local Taliban commanders have defected, trading the Emirate’s white banner for the Islamic State’s black banner. To be sure, the situation has not gotten completely out of their control, and Taliban spokesmen remain dismissive about the threat that IS-K represents. The Emirate’s private policy, however, is to use the perceived threat of IS-K abroad as leverage to get aid, and perhaps even some level of political recognition from Russia and China. No regional power wants to see Daesh reform as a coherent state, least of all the six nations that share a border with Afghanistan. In this sense, IS-K is a boost to Taliban authority, a helpful crisis that potentially makes them too big to fail. Civilians who fear the Taliban, especially women, may yet turn to the regime out of even greater fear of IS-K.
Nevertheless, to dominate or crush this enemy, the Taliban wants air power. Their previous successes against IS-K were opportunistic, attacking wherever American intelligence and firepower had already softened up the opposition. Cooperation with the United States is an obvious non-starter, as it might inspire mass defections to the black banners; the Taliban have rejected that idea in advance. Nor would Russia or China be particularly interested in taking on the job of Taliban air support. Instead, the regime is trying to scratch together its own air force at bargain-basement prices from what has been left behind and what is available in the region.
Since there is no economy, and hence no Lockheed-Martin, to do this the Taliban will rely on the same democracy of arms that has always existed in that part of the world. During the 1980s, one of my undergraduate professors observed a Pakistani gunsmith copying an Israeli-made Uzi “right down to the serial numbers.” The same arms market can reproduce the tactical radio sets that American taxpayers left behind. Mobile phones are ubiquitous in Afghanistan today, and weaponisable drones are available from online retailers. Talented bomb experts are a storied class of jihadists at this point. As long as we do not deceive ourselves by underestimating the Taliban again, it is not hard to put these pieces together and figure out the shape of what happens next. Call it DIY air power.
That last point bears emphasis. Images of Taliban taking over American bases in tacticool uniforms and equipment, including night vision and radios, disturbed many Americans. Most had not been paying attention to the way the war had been going. Confident in their presumed technological edge, the American public was unprepared to see a national enemy adopt such a mod aesthetic of violence, one that they had thought exclusively their own. While the United States was diverted and distracted, the Taliban had embraced the 21st Century to achieve a technological victory in the information age—the very kind of victory that America thought it could achieve without even trying. In fact, during that same time, the US Army consistently failed to produce the integrated, digitized forces of the much-ballyhooed future, muddling through its electromagnetic challenges.
Another unwelcome surprise in Afghanistan was that the privileges of the asymmetrical opponent applied to the spectrum war. Improvised explosive devices were the dominant mode of harm to US troops for two decades, and no small number of them were detonated remotely with consumer radio electronics such as garage door openers. Having begun the war with jokes about bearded men in caves, the world’s most advanced military now needed jamming equipment for its convoys. An airborne electronic warfare platform such as the EC-130H Compass Call, seen above, can jam every IED in an entire province. Simultaneously, the crew can identify targets, spoof signals, and triangulate the locations of radio transmitters. I had the opportunity to task an earlier version of the Compass Call during a tank war exercise at Fort Irwin, California in the 1990s. They are supremely powerful Cold War inventions that, unlike our tanks, turned out to be perfect for “low-intensity conflicts.”
Taliban and Islamic State fighters both learned that to use mobile phones in battle was to paint targets on themselves. Much of that signal war was fought with Compass Call and other airborne surveillance platforms. Although their own signals intelligence capacity has been limited before, inevitably, the Taliban will now use the same toolset America did, even if it is a more basic version of the toolset. Electromagnetism can be mysterious, but the basic science of direction finding is not hard to learn. Even a small aircraft can carry useful electronic warfare equipment; the rest is just knowing how to wire and solder.
The United States of America lost this war by underestimating the intelligence of our enemy while overestimating our own national staying-power. Now the Taliban will learn from our successes and our failures. Whatever they say in public, the Emirate will have realistic estimates of their own power versus IS-K, and leverage every available advantage, including technical means, because they are clever. The war in Afghanistan is not over yet, nor has it regressed to some previous epoch. It is simply happening without America anymore.
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