Media accounts of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan have been accompanied by pundits of all political stripes asking the question “why did the Afghan forces just give up as soon as the US started pulling out?” In this essay I’ll give a brief explanation as to why, and describe how, if the US Military is smart, they’ll continue the engagement in Afghanistan via asymmetric means, rather than by any boots on the ground occupation.

In a country like Afghanistan, you cannot hope to defeat a radicalizing force like the Taliban without fostering some kind of nationalist sentiment. That sentiment would be modeled on anti-colonialist efforts such as Ghandi’s protests to stoke nationalist sentiments that led to the British leaving India, and should focus on ideals of gender and religious equality, and the benefits of public education. That effort should be coordinated via social media by teams that would observe the social media efforts of the Taliban, and “bird-dog” Taliban social media appeals with rhetoric that undermines their arguments, and points out the group’s violent nature, and it’s poor treatment of women. Bird-dogging efforts must use emotional appeals that ask men to think of how they would feel if they saw the women in their lives subjected to the Taliban’s sexual violence. This kind of an effort must be broad-based, and focus on an entire country, and not just a country’s urban centers. In short, we are taking lessons that have been learned from studying how the Russian government influenced the 2016 and 2020 Presidential election in the United States, and applying those lessons to the conflict in Afghanistan. This kind of an effort should be executed primarily from outside of the country, relying on the reach of digital media, with only a handful of “on the ground observers” to provide intelligence regarding adoption of views promoted by the social media campaign.

Click here to read the rest of this essay at the Otter Globe & Intelligencer.