Fortress Kabul: Thinking Outside the Box and Running Down the Clock with the Taliban

In Afghanistan these last few weeks, we’ve seen just how effervescent 20+ years of assumptions about nation building can be.

The collapse of the Afghan government may or may not have been inevitable, but now, it certainly is a reality. However, the Biden Administration’s hands-off and resigned approach to Afghanistan’s demise seems to neglect a smaller strategic and operational footprint that can support US goals of undermining and containing the Taliban.

Is there an obvious reason why US military force could not rapidly concentrate in Kabul and protect it from the Taliban long enough to turn it into a heavily fortified city? Such a small geographic area could carry an outsized punch in terms of how it could threaten the Taliban’s legitimacy and capabilities to support international terrorism for many years to come. It would also provide America with a small yet firm position from which to influence Central Asian security dynamics, and add additional leverage against China’s ambitions in the region. Lastly, and most importantly, it could help avert one of the gravest humanitarian crises of the last several decades.

This would not be nation-building. Afghanistan is gone. Instead, what holds together Fortress Kabul would be the raw arithmetic of concentrated power and the life support it provides to refugees and residents alike.

There are reasons to think that even this would prove a serious threat to the Taliban regime in the long term. Fortress Kabul could forever serve as a bastion for those fleeing in fear from the regime and its benighted government. Even more immediately, stopping the Taliban’s advance would probably deflate some of the mania and self-doubt that naturally springs up when someone is on a winning streak. And finally, by doing away with the need to enforce an impractical cartel on political power in an extremely broken landscape, the United States could focus exclusively on pacifying this urban center and its immediate supporting peripheries — policing only 1% of its original mission scope and still meaningfully in reach of hitting many of its core strategic imperatives in Afghanistan.

Can Kabul be put on life support in this way? The risks are undoubtedly pronounced and difficult to quantify. Can sufficient American ground forces deploy in time to save the city? I honestly don’t know. Doing this could push us to the limits of our logistical capabilities. But this in itself would prove an important metric to consider for future American security needs. There are other logistical risks as well. What happens if there is a lack of sufficient food, housing, or military equipment? Or, could this simply become some more massive repeat of Dien Bien Phu?

The window for stretching the conceptual boundaries of this problem is now. The world is watching, and the fate of generations of Afghans hangs in the balance.

At the least, after 20 years of the same thing, Fortress Kabul is the Hail Mary pass policymakers should be seriously considering right now.