9/11 anniversary: democracy was not doomed to fail in Afghanistan – the US did not live up to its promises

After the signing of the Munich agreement in 1938 that allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia, Winston Churchill spoke of the fate of that country in a powerful speech in the House of Commons: Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness.

The same could now be said of Afghanistan, 25 years after the September 11 attacks and subsequent US invasion that forever changed the country.

Sadly, there is now little inclination in Western policy circles to reflect deeply on Afghanistan’s experiences since then.

All too often, one instead encounters orientalist stereotypes that imply the post-2001 experiment with democracy was always doomed to fail, depicting the Taliban as somehow the true embodiment of “Afghan culture”.

This is despite the fact the Asia Foundation, in its highly regarded Survey of the Afghan People, reported that 88% of respondents in 2021 had “ no sympathy at all ” for the Taliban.

Afghanistan’s experience after 2001 deserves more careful study than this, if only because it offers useful lessons for the future.

What went right – and wrong In all the postmortems on the US-led mission to oust the Taliban from power and bring democracy to Afghanistan, it is easy to lose sight of what was achieved during the two decades of the Afghan Republic.

As I recount in my book , coauthored with Afghan researcher and lawyer Ahmad Shuja Jamal, much went wrong, but a great deal also went right.

A generation of young Afghans was raised in an era of globalisation.

By 2021, nearly 70% of the population used television to get news and information.

Average per capita incomes increased and a vibrant civil society developed, fostered by the freest media in the region .

Health outcomes improved across a range of indicators and access to education for girls also expanded (spectacularly in urban areas).

These achievements were sometimes exaggerated by Western donors, but they were real nonetheless, and not trivial.

However, much went wrong.