Losing Afghanistan Was a Choice

Will the Afghanistan War Commission miss that forest by examining every tree?

America decided to needlessly lose the war in Afghanistan. Other lessons can be learned. But they should not obscure that basic reality. The Afghanistan War Commission is looking at the Afghanistan campaign’s surge now. We’ll see if the commission tackles the reality that the surge offensive was truncated before it planned final act, which I did not see taking place as expected. That decision symbolizes America’s decision to lose the war long before 2021’s actual defeat.

America needs to understand why we lost the Afghanistan campaign:

The American memory of Afghanistan is receding in the rearview mirror. Increasingly, the potential to learn lessons from the twenty-year campaign is being wasted, replaced instead by bumper stickers and slogans that pass for knowledge but are either incorrect or largely useless without a great deal of further reflection.

Three of the most common bumper sticker lessons are “don’t do democracy,” “don’t build an army in our own image,” and “don’t do nation-building.” The problems with each of these suggest the need for deeper reflection if we are to profit from the past and get beyond slogans for future policy decisions.

“Nation-building” has become a shorthand term of derision for everything bad that happens after major conventional combat operations are over. And I’ve been guilty of not being precise even though I understood the issue.

Yet I don’t think America was trying to build a nation in tribal Afghanistan—that is, trying to create a national identity. But unless you believe anarchy is a viable form of governance after doing a drive-by shooting of the rulers we define as our enemies—as we did in Libya—I believed a decentralized state structure of some sort was needed:

The end result in Afghanistan, if all goes well, will be a nominal national government that controls the capital region and reigns but does not rule local tribes and which actually helps the locals a bit rather than sucking resources from the locals, who in turn do not make trouble for the central government or allow their areas to be used by jihadis to plan attacks on the West. We press for reasonable economic opportunities, with bribes all around (I mean, foreign aid), to keep a fragile peace.

I think voting was the only way to establish state legitimacy—even thug regimes simulate that:

If democracy is so unsuited to non-Westerners, why do thug regimes bother going through the motions of democracy? Iran, for example, actually pretends to have elections. Pre-screened (by the most rigid mullahs) candidates have a pretend campaign for president. Voters go the polls. And election results are announced. The mullah regime continues.

If democracy is so ill-suited to Iranians, why doesn't the regime just announce that the mullahs are selecting the president and jump right to the announcement without bothering the voters to go out and cast a meaningless vote? Isn't that just accepting alien Western ideas about the relationship between the people and the government? Yet Iran accepts the forms of democracy even as it rejects the substance of democracy.

Could America really justify going to war to put some brutal thug ruler in charge and associate ourselves with whatever that friendly dictator does to stay in power? Voting and rule of law didn't have to be perfect—but it had to be started.

But I concede that excessive hopes for more than the minimum needed to wage and win the war may have dispersed and wasted resources despite my modest hopes that I thought guided our efforts. I’m open to changing my mind on this issue, but during the war it didn’t seem like America was that deluded, practically speaking.

And I strongly disagree that we built the Afghan military in our image:

Basically, Afghanistan had a light infantry and paramilitary force. This is not in any way a military built "in our image".

Nor did it operate like the American military. …

I guarantee our troops wouldn't fight as well as they could if we suddenly cut them off from air and logistics support.

We didn't build a smaller scale mirror image of our military. We built a military in Afghanistan that still needed our help to fight as we designed it to fight.

I think the emphasis on blaming the outcome on 20 years of "duplicating" the American military is propaganda designed to hide the responsibility of the government and military this year for needlessly losing the war.

Don't pretend that what we provided Afghanistan was a mirror image of our sophisticated and well-trained military. Cessnas don’t drop MOPs.

FFS, building a rival insurgent army wasn't an alternative. Being the government requires certain forms of security power to hold what you have. Do we organize city police forces like criminal gangs, blending in with—and strong-arming—the civilian population and using secret hideouts instead of police stations with phone numbers to reach police help? Do the police execute criminals without a supporting judicial system? Any similarities between America's military and Afghanistan's was because of the basic reality of being the defender of the status quo governing entity.

And seriously, how many of our advanced allies could wage a war for long without American support?

The real lesson of our defeat in Afghanistan is we decided to lose:

America screwed up well before Trump or Biden:

America must not fool ourselves that the Taliban victory was the Afghan government's fault. You go to war with the ally you have and not the ally you wished to have. We knew what we had and we stopped doing what we needed to do to compensate for our ally's weaknesses.

We screwed up critically either 6 or 12 years ago, depending on how you define it.* And then we screwed up a lot in the last several months when we trusted the Taliban "peace process" and abandoned the Afghanistan government while loudly speculating on the speed of their inevitable defeat.

That note read:

Did we screw up with the decision to surge forces in Afghanistan in 2009 or did we screw up with the decision about 6+ years ago to withdraw Afghan forces into larger bases and cities, and cede the initiative to the Taliban?

I was very worried about advising the Afghan security forces to pull back into the cities and cede the countryside and initiative. With their backs to the wall, the Afghan forces had no depth to fall back in case of reverses.

I was also unconvinced that we needed the surge because my objectives were much lower than nation-building. Did the price we paid to carry out the surge with 100,000 American troops in combat provide the excuse for leaving now and creating a disaster?

Maybe we did enough good to have been a significant part of the defeat of jihadi-inspired Islamism. Maybe, like the Korean War, in seventy years we will be able to call the Afghanistan campaign a clear victory.

But until then, it sure feels like a defeat. So by all means, understand why America lost to the Taliban. Do read the initial article.

NOTE: Image by Lance Cpl Tommy Bellegarde, U.S. Marine Corps.