THERE IS no chance of military victory over the Taliban. Nor, without a U.S. commitment to withdraw its troops and accept a major share of power for the Taliban, does there seem any serious chance of a peace settlement (the brief truce to mark a religious festival notwithstanding). Nor, with 100 percent of the Afghan security budget and around 60 percent of the civilian budget funded by the United States and other outside donors, is there any chance of the Afghan state standing on its own feet.

Financially and militarily, the existing U.S. commitment is sustainable. With U.S. military actions reduced to air support for the Afghan national forces and limited interventions by U.S. special forces, casualties have been vastly reduced. Only four U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year, and seventeen in 2017, compared to 496 at the height of U.S. operations in 2010. At around $4.94 billion in military aid to the Afghan state and $1.3 billion in civilian aid in 2017–18, the financial cost is a tiny proportion of the current U.S. military budget of almost $700 billion. There have been strong complaints from the U.S. Congress and the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), John Sopko, about the corruption and waste in these programs. To some extent, however, this misses the point. If the intention is to prop up the existing Afghan state, rather than to perpetuate fantasies about turning that state into an economically successful democracy, then just because the U.S. money was stolen does not mean that it was wasted. It went to provide the patronage on which the Afghan state depends to keep local power brokers on their side, rather than joining the Taliban or setting up as independent warlords.

And if the U.S. goal is limited to maintaining the Afghan state at its existing very circumscribed level, then from a purely military point of view the U.S. strategy is working. As was the case with the (much better armed) mujahideen rebels during the period from the Soviet military withdrawal in March 1989 to the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Taliban guerrillas have been able to conquer large areas of the countryside (mainly, but not exclusively, those inhabited by ethnic Pashtuns).

When, however, the Taliban concentrate to try to capture defended towns, they are beaten back or forced out with heavy casualties under pressure from the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. Air Force and Afghan artillery. If the danger to Kabul were restricted to the Taliban threat on the battlefield, then despite poor training, corruption, low morale and high desertion rates in the Afghan army, this situation could persist for a very long time indeed; since it also corresponds to a pattern of most of Afghan history whereby states have controlled the towns but had only a very limited presence in the countryside.

IF, HOWEVER, the American people are to go on making this commitment, it is politically and morally desirable that they should be told the truth about the real interests of the United States in Afghanistan, and the dangers in that country—since both of these have been significantly (if often unconsciously) misrepresented. If there is ever to be stable and long-lasting peace in Afghanistan, the most important external actors will be not the United States and the West, but Afghanistan’s neighbours, China, Pakistan, Iran and to a lesser extent Russia. The issue of war and peace in Afghanistan therefore needs to be introduced to wider thinking on U.S. foreign and security policy, as it illustrates one of the costs that the United States suffers from a strategy of confrontation with other powers.

As to U.S. interests in Afghanistan, these have been stated as preventing the country from re-emerging as a base for international terrorism and a threat to regional stability; combating heroin production in Afghanistan; developing democracy, human rights and women’s rights in Afghanistan; and (though this is not so often publicly stated) keeping U.S. bases there as potential instruments against Iran, Russia and China. In terms of threats, these are said to be the prospect of Taliban military victory leading to the establishment of an Islamist state supportive of terrorism. All of these propositions are either partially true or altogether false.

When it comes to the international terrorist threat, it is worth remembering that, after the United States, the country that has suffered by far the worst from extremists trained in Afghanistan has been Russia. The Taliban government was the only one to recognise the independence of Chechnya in the 1990s. The international militant force led by the Saudi “Emir Khattab” (Samir Saleh Abdullah), which did so much to radicalise the Chechen fighters and inspire them to jihad against Russia, was trained in Afghanistan. So too was their ally, the Chechen commander Shamil Basayev, whose fighters carried out two of the worst terrorist actions of modern times—the attack on the Nord Ost theatre in Moscow and on the school at Beslan.

Russian national interests are also permanently, and even existentially, threatened by Islamist extremism in a way that those of the United States are not. The Islamist terrorist threat to the United States stems from America’s hegemonic role in the Middle East and alliance with Israel. Whatever the crazier parts of the U.S. political spectrum may believe, there is no danger of the establishment of Sharia law in Tennessee. In Russia, Muslims make up some 15 percent of the population, and their numbers are growing. Apart from the restive North Caucasus, two Muslim republics—Tatarstan and Bashkortostan—lie in the very heart of Russia. Islamist militancy also threatens the stability of Russia’s Muslim neighbours, with the accompanying risk (as in the European Union) of a wave of Muslim refugees to Russia.

Yet the Russian government today has been holding exploratory talks with the Taliban, and, together with China (also threatened by Islamist militancy and separatism in Sinkiang), is seeking to draw them into a peace settlement (it has been alleged by U.S. officials that Russia has also provided aid to the Taliban, though this is strongly denied by Moscow). If not yet entirely convinced by repeated Taliban statements that they do not support international jihad and will not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for attacks on other countries, the Russians are persuaded enough to take a diplomatic risk on this proposition—if only because Moscow has become convinced that the Taliban cannot be beaten and that the United States may in fact withdraw (as Russia itself did in the 1990s), leaving Afghanistan’s neighbours to deal with the resulting mess.

Moscow’s change of heart reflects growing hostility to the United States but is predicated on the reasonable belief that the Islamic State (ISIS) now represents by far the biggest threat of international terrorism and extremism, and that since the appearance of isis in Afghanistan, the Taliban are compelled to fight against isis as rivals for the Islamist mantle in Afghanistan. Indeed, the leadership of isis in Afghanistan is chiefly composed of defectors from the Taliban (in the case of one Uzbek commander in northern Afghanistan, Mufti Nemat, after being ousted from the Taliban for oppressing the local population, he initially tried to join the Afghan government forces before moving to isis). While the United States has conducted successful air strikes against ISIS, the bulk of the fighting on the ground against the group has been carried out by the Taliban.

As for the idea that the U.S. military presence contributes to combating the heroin trade, this is self-evidently absurd. Poppy cultivation and heroin production exploded after the U.S. invasion of 2001, and were only somewhat reduced again during the height of U.S. military operations in 2008–12. In 2017, opium production reached a record estimated 9,000 tons. And while the poppies are mainly grown in areas controlled by the Taliban—and the group derives part of their income from taxing the heroin trade—much of the trade itself is in the hands of figures allied with the Afghan state or even serving in the Afghan army and police. Efforts by the United States and its allies to combat the trade have proven almost totally ineffective while managing to alienate parts of the rural population.

Certainly, the efforts of the Afghan state to combat the trade, insofar as they have existed at all, have been completely ineffective. The only force to have suppressed the heroin trade effectively over the past thirty-five years was the Taliban government in 2000–01—mainly because they were the only force during that period to have exercised effective political and moral authority over the Afghan countryside. They did so in the hope of international recognition and aid—and Russia, which (like Iran) suffers terribly from Afghan heroin, is attracted by the idea that such a deal with the Taliban might be possible in future.

Almost as questionable are the propositions that the U.S. military presence contributes to resisting extremism in the region and acts as a lever against Iranian, Russian and Chinese power. By far the greatest threat of extremism in the region is in Pakistan, because of its population of 200 million people, nuclear weapons and large army. The Pakistani Taliban revolt was itself a product of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and was stoked—not restricted—by Washington’s actions there.

Should the Taliban ever take power in Kabul, the key to preventing them from destabilising the region will lie not in Washington but in Beijing. This is above all because such a Taliban regime would depend heavily on Pakistani backing, and Pakistan depends critically on Chinese backing. China, while it does not necessarily oppose the Taliban as such, has a vital interest both in the survival of Pakistan and in regional stability more widely. This interest is inherent to China’s ethno-religious makeup and geographical position, and will last long after the United States has gone home.

As to the idea of U.S. forces in Afghanistan as a useful tool against Iran, Russia and China, this is almost the opposite of the truth. In these terms, they are not U.S. assets but liabilities—even hostages. Iranian contacts with and limited help to the Taliban are not due to any affection for them (Iran’s natural allies in Afghanistan are the Shia Hazara, and Tehran almost went to war with the Taliban in 1998 in their defense) but simply because Iran sees the Taliban as perhaps the best way to hit back at the United States if Iran is itself attacked by the United States and Israel. Moscow too may be interested in this possibility.

THE GREATEST threat to the present Afghan state comes not from the Taliban but the country’s own internal divisions. This state was cobbled together by the United States in 2001–02 on the basis of elements which had previously formed part of the mujahideen groups that fought the Soviets and their Afghan allies in the 1980s. For several years, former Communist officers and officials were ignored and rejected by the United States, considerably delaying the creation of an effective Afghan army. Even more disastrously, Taliban commanders who wished to make a deal with the new regime were often not just rejected but targeted by U.S. forces on the advice of local rivals.

None of this would have mattered so much if the former mujahideen forces on which the United States did rely had been united. But as the dreadful example of their rule in the mid-1990s demonstrated, this was very far from being the case. The present Afghan state is split internally along multiple lines, but the most important are ethnic. In the wars of 1979 to 1992, and again after 2001, ethnicities that had previously played a subordinate role in Afghanistan—notably the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks—were able greatly to improve their position at the expense of the Pashtuns, the ethnicity that had always seen itself as the people of state. “Afghan” is indeed the traditional Farsi word for Pashtun. In a curious twist, however, because of the historic prestige of Persian culture, the government language and lingua-franca of Afghanistan was always Farsi, not Pashto, even though the dynasty and senior officials of the army and state were Pashtuns; and the mass of the bitterly poor Pashtun rural population never derived any real benefit from their “privileged” position.

The rise of the Tajiks and even more the previously downtrodden Hazara (despised by the Pashtuns as Shia heretics) in turn caused deep anxiety and resentment among the Pashtuns, which contributed to mass support for the Taliban among Pashtuns both before 2001 and today. In particular, the role played by the Tajik-dominated “Northern Alliance” forces in overthrowing the Taliban state in 2001 allowed them to gain a predominant role in the armed forces. Visiting Afghanistan in recent years, I have been depressed by the echoes of ethnic tensions that I experienced before the collapse of Yugoslavia and of Soviet rule in the Caucasus: the way in which every disputed issue and state appointment is portrayed in ethnic terms; the constant falsification of ethnic proportions of populations and government jobs; the constant appeals to mythical histories, and endless battles over symbolic issues. Thus, in Afghanistan, the state has attempted to limit controversy over the new national identity card by describing everyone as “Afghan.” This then led to protests from Tajiks and others who declared that “Afghan” is simply another word for “Pashtun.”

A very large part of U.S. political activity in Afghanistan since 2001 has been devoted to managing these ethnic tensions. In the wake of the Taliban’s overthrow, the Tajiks and others were able to block a return of the former (Pashtun) king, Mohammed Zahir Shah. But with the greatest Tajik leader, Ahmed Shah Masoud, assassinated, the other ethnicities had to accept the U.S. choice of a Pashtun from the old royal elites, Hamid Karzai, as president. Washington turned a blind eye to the corruption and heroin-dealing of the Karzai regime, and the rigging of presidential elections by Karzai in 2009 which contributed to the defeat of the Tajik-backed candidate, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah. In the presidential elections of 2014, the United States acquiesced yet again in what was almost certainly rigging in favor of the Pashtun candidate, Ashraf Ghani, resulting in another defeat for Abdullah.

What will happen in the 2019 presidential elections (if they happen), God alone knows. Following the 2014 elections, after long and bitter negotiations, then Secretary of State John Kerry persuaded Abdullah’s supporters (which included some Pashtuns, just as Ghani’s supporters were by no means solely Pashtun) to accept the result by initiating what was in effect an informal, unstated kind of ethnic power-sharing, in which a Pashtun took the presidency but Abdullah was recognised as a kind of prime minister, and government jobs were to be shared equally between them (something for which there is no provision at all in Afghanistan’s “democratic” constitution).

In practice, however, Ghani and his supporters have dominated the government, leaving Abdullah’s former supporters seriously aggrieved. It is likely to be even more difficult to broker such an agreement after the next elections, even supposing that the Trump administration has the knowledge, commitment and stamina to do so. Meanwhile, Kabul is full of unemployed individuals, products of the boom in “higher education” over the past seventeen years, convinced that their “degrees” entitle them to government jobs—perfect fodder for ethnic protests. To hold the Afghan state together, therefore, it is not enough for the United States to give military support and aid. It will also have to go on managing the internal political problems of the state and providing the financial patronage that keeps the elites more-or-less loyal.

DESPITE THIS miserable picture, it is still on balance worth the United States hanging on in Afghanistan for a variety of reasons. The first is what in the U.S. foreign and security establishment is called “credibility,” and which used to be called by the more straightforward word “prestige.” A senior U.S. general put it very well to me back in 2008. When I asked him to define victory in Afghanistan, he said that he couldn’t, and nor in his view could anyone else in Washington. But, he added, they could all define defeat. Defeat is a repeat of the fall of Saigon in 1975, with panic-stricken Afghan refugees clinging to helicopters on the roof of the U.S. embassy in Kabul as the Taliban storm the city: “Do not underestimate the determination of the U.S. armed forces to fight on for a very long time indeed to prevent images like that appearing again,” he told me.

Since then, the U.S. military has fought on for another decade. It was on the basis of the argument that U.S. prestige would suffer terribly from a Taliban victory that the Pentagon persuaded first Obama and then Trump to reverse their previous positions and continue the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. It is worth remembering in this context that the Communist victory followed a peace agreement with North Vietnam and U.S. military withdrawal, which in turn provided the cue for a parsimonious Congress, disgusted with South Vietnamese waste and corruption, to radically reduce military and financial aid to the South. This, like the end of Soviet aid to the Afghan state in 1991–92, then ushered in a speedy victory by the other side.

There is a very cogent response to the “credibility” argument and the Vietnam analogy. The loss of U.S. prestige as a result of the fall of South Vietnam was only temporary and was followed not too long afterwards by the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan and then the collapse of the ussr itself. The real damage done by the Vietnam War was not by the Communist victory, but by the disintegration of the domestic U.S. consensus and the growing unwillingness of ordinary Americans to fight endless wars for unclear ends in far-off countries. Moreover, far from leading to the famed “domino effect” and the fall of more U.S. allies, ancient national hostility to China meant that within four years of the fall of Saigon, China and Vietnam were at war. Today, Communist Vietnam is moving towards becoming a U.S. ally. Can the same thing not happen in Afghanistan?

The answer is most probably no. The Vietnamese Communist party, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army were (and are) formidably disciplined and united institutions with an iron determination to build a modern, united Vietnamese state. Ethnic Chinese were driven out for ethnic chauvinist reasons and because as the local commercial class they had taken sides against the Communists—producing the tragic spectacle of the “boat people.” The same happened to America’s allies, the ethnic Hmong. With these exceptions however, the Vietnamese state after the Communist victory was able successfully to impose enduring national unity and stability, albeit by ruthless means.

Afghanistan is very different. The Pashtuns—whatever they themselves may say and think—are less than 50 percent of the population. As already stated, other ethnic groups have immensely strengthened their political and military power over the past four decades of war. The Afghan state tradition has always been weak, and outside limited elites have never managed to generate a strong common sense of state nationalism.

After the fall of the Communist state in 1992, Afghanistan descended into horrendous ethnic warfare, in which the city of Kabul was destroyed and the country was divided up into warlord fiefdoms. It was because they promised to end this catastrophe that the Taliban—representing rural Pashtun conservatism but also Pashtun traditions of state-building—gained so much support. They were bitterly resisted by forces representing the non-Pashtun nationalities, and even though these had little outside support (except from Iran), the Taliban never managed to conquer the whole of Afghanistan.

RATHER THAN a clear-cut Taliban victory, the collapse of the existing Afghan state and the fall of Kabul to the Taliban would almost certainly lead to a civil war. This would pose real dangers. The greatest threat to America’s global position and the ideological basis of U.S. soft power in the world does not come from the rise of China or even the rise of right-wing populism in the United States itself. It comes from the impact of Muslim migration on Europe, and (reinforced by the socio-economic decline of the white working classes) the resulting swing of European populations to chauvinist positions hostile to the European Union and often sympathetic to Russia. In Germany, the wave of Syrian refugees has largely wrecked the Social Democratic Party and forced it into what looks like a permanent coalition with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The cdu, and the coalition, are now in danger as the CDU’s more right-wing sister party, the Bavarian Christian Social Union, moves to more and more anti-immigrant positions in a bid to save itself from being overtaken by the new and quite radical Alternative for Germany party.

Afghans already make up the second largest group of refugees to Europe after Syrians. A collapse of the Afghan state and intensified civil war would greatly increase their numbers, while adding to Europe’s moral dilemma—for on what legal or moral grounds, given the Western role of the past seventeen years in Afghanistan, could eu members refuse to grant asylum to refugees from the Taliban? To prevent masses of Afghan refugees heading to Europe would require not only a new deal with Turkey, but one with Iran as well—at which point the eu would find itself completely at odds with the United States.

In his latest book, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Edward Luce of the Financial Times has written that European democracy will not survive another decade like the last one. He has a point. The greatest threat from Afghanistan to the West is not terrorism, Islamist revolution or regional instability, but its potential impact on the political systems of European countries three thousand miles away (of course, a U.S. citizen might well reply that in that case European countries should be doing the fighting in Afghanistan—but realistically speaking there is no point in even suggesting this).

This danger is an entirely sufficient reason for the United States to go on fighting in Afghanistan, at least as long as costs in U.S. blood and treasure remain at their present level and the Afghan state does not implode for its own internal reasons. This military strategy should in no way exclude peace overtures to the Taliban and serious, realistic American thinking about what a peace settlement would entail.

The most disagreeable result of such thinking for the U.S. establishment is not the prospect of the Taliban with a major share of power in Kabul. It is that any Afghan settlement can only be established and maintained if China plays the leading role—something that would most probably require a commitment eventually to withdraw U.S. bases from Afghanistan. This is because only Beijing now has the kind of influence over Islamabad that can bring the Taliban’s backers in the Pakistani army fully on board, and because Chinese (and Russian) influence is also necessary to gain full Iranian acquiescence. Chinese money will also be necessary to prop up the Afghan state if the United States makes a peace settlement the excuse to slash financial aid. Afghanistan may therefore become a test-case both for the relative decline of American power and for Washington’s willingness to respond to this decline by seeking cooperation with other great powers.

Nor, in the case of Afghanistan, should this be seen as a tragedy. After all, U.S. interest in Afghanistan was virtually nonexistent until the late 1940s and the start of the Cold War. The U.S. role remained extremely limited until the Soviet intervention of 1979. Nor did the subsequent U.S. involvement bring the United States anything good. Afghanistan may be a good opportunity for the United States to remember that it is not in fact a Central Asian power, and that there may be advantages to leaving messes for local powers to sort out.

Anatol Lieven is a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and author of, among other books, Pakistan: A Hard Country.