To begin with, we must remain engaged with, if not in, Afghanistan. That requires facing up to our painful role in enabling last year’s traumatic turn of events. That history is something Americans want to forget, and the Taliban’s active repression of media and human rights defenders make it hard for even the closest observers to see the full extent of their iron rule. We have a moral obligation to the Afghan people we left behind to endure the rule of the Taliban. We also have a strategic self-interest in preventing Afghanistan from becoming, once again, a destabilised environment where terror groups freely live, train and recruit. Moving ahead, our engagement should be multilateral, principled and clear in its application.
The era of unilateral US policy leadership on Afghanistan is over. The UN, World Bank and Asian Development Bank are examples of the appropriate faces of international community involvement with Afghanistan. Imperfect as these institutions are, they at least represent broad world opinion and include Afghanistan’s neighbours and other regional actors. The US is, admirably, the top financial donor to Afghanistan, but it is not now in a position to cut the best deals. The US should therefore get out of the way of those who can make effective contributions. It must throw its weight behind a well co-ordinated international effort.
We also have to stick to our principles as indivisible elements of policy. Having an “ideology” is not only the Taliban’s prerogative. We should fight without reservation for the essence of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Afghanistan signed decades ago and which calls for respect for human rights, freedom from fear and individual liberty.
Finally, Afghanistan has to be clearly linked to, and nested within, broader US strategic goals. Beyond the siloed and unworkable vision from the past of either total success or complete policy failure in Afghanistan alone, we should incorporate it back into our other international imperatives. These include stability in the nuclear-armed neighbourhood of south Asia, counterbalancing Chinese and Russian influence in central Asia, worldwide counter-terrorism co-operation, atrocity prevention, global principles of women’s rights, peace and security, and diversification of mineral and energy sources.