Richard Clarke

Clarke criticized limited American deployments after 9/11 to Afghanistan, where the country’s Taliban rulers had allowed Al Qaeda terrorists to establish bases from which to wage global jihad. Therefore, after the Taliban quickly fell to an American-led coalition, the “new Afghan government of President Hamid Kharzi was given little authority outside the capital city of Kabul,” Clarke wrote. He bewailed a supposedly lost

opportunity to end the factional fighting and impose an integrated national government. Yet after initial efforts to unite the country, American interest waned and the warlords returned to their old ways. Afghanistan was a nation raped by war and factional fighting for twenty years. It needed everything rebuilt, but in contrast to funds sought for Iraq, U.S. economic and development aid to Afghanistan was inadequate and slowly delivered.

James Dobbins, a “career diplomat and expert on military and security issues,” highlighted for Clarke the limited American resources in Afghanistan. Dobbins had “worked on rebuilding Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, and Bosnia. In 2001, he began similar work on Afghanistan,” Clarke explained. He recalled from Dobbins’ comparisons that “in the first two years of the Bosnia and Kosovo rebuilding efforts, funds available totaled $1,390 and $814 per capita” in contrast to merely $52 in Afghanistan.

Clarke also critiqued American support for Afghan security forces:

The goal the Pentagon approved was only a 4,800-man Afghan national army by 2004. Some regional warlords count their strength at ten thousand men under arms. The initial units of the new force were trained by the U.S. but we soon stopped support and supervision. Many of the new recruits departed the force, taking their equipment with them.

Meanwhile the Taliban presented real jihadist threats in Afghanistan, Clarke noted, in contrast to claims that the Taliban remained fundamentally distinct from Al Qaeda. The Taliban showed “effectively little difference between their leadership and that of al Qaeda,” he wrote:

Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, completely agreed with bin Laden and al Qaeda’s goals. There were stories of intermarriage between the bin Laden and Omar families. There were also economic, military, and political ties that were inviolable.

Yet the fragility of the Taliban’s Afghan opponents concerned Clarke, who had advocated before 9/11 American military aid to the Northern Alliance based in Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley and led by Ahmad Shah Masoud:

I had tried to argue that the U.S. work harder to fight against the Taliban in its civil war in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance still held sway over a third of the country but provinces switched sides as a result of combat or cash, and much of the combatants and all of the cash came from bin Laden to help the Taliban. It was only a matter of time before the Alliance crumbled.

Clarke also worried that Masoud, whom Al Qaeda assassinated two days before 9/11 in a suicide bombing, was no liberal saint, whatever his hatred of the Taliban. “Massoud was a good guy now, but later the Congress, or the media, or some other White House staff would focus on the fact that he sold opium, abused human rights, and had killed civilians,” Clarke wrote.

Over $2.3 trillion spent, and 2,400 American war dead, in Afghanistan since 9/11, Americans have learned only too well about the weaknesses of Afghan leadership. As he himself indicated, rival warlords and ethnic groups in a culture dominated by sharia supremacism make any attempt to install a stable, pro-Western government in Afghanistan a fool’s errand. Any Western development aid here will usually only buy temporary support from mercenary, corrupt Afghan leaders.

Only more limited strategies to contain Taliban threats in Afghanistan ever made any sense, such as Clarke’s realpolitik willingness to support the Northern Alliance. Yet he surprisingly departed in Afghanistan from his criticism of President George W. Bush’s overly ambitious nation-building project in Iraq. A strident opponent of the Iraq war, Clarke rejected that “calls from Washington for democratization in the Arab world help if such calls originate from a leader who is trying to impose democracy on an Arab country at the point of an American bayonet.” How his Afghanistan policy recommendations involved any fewer American bayonets than in Iraq remained unexplained.

By contrast, Clarke did provide an insightful account of the various strategic quandaries that challenged American policymakers in confronting Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein over decades, as a future article will examine. Although Clarke expressed longstanding desires to remove Hussein, Clarke favored more limited leadership alterations in Iraq rather than Bush’s grand regime change. As Clarke’s own writings on Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have indicated, political progress in Muslim-majority countries must proceed cautiously to have any chance of success.