hat were our failures in the decades leading up to today? What were our responsibilities and what could have been done better? The top lines are evident, and well known. Afghanistan was a war absent strategic vision and objectives. What were the intended outcomes and how did it factor into our greater geopolitical goals? Afghanistan remains a land-locked, resource-scarce environment that serves as little more than a buttress between Iranian-Saudi competition to its west and a third of the world’s population to its east. That this “graveyard of empires'' occupies such a preeminent place in global foreign policy appears counter-intuitive and, after two decades of American interference, begs the question— how did such a remote locale with a history of geopolitical defiance keep the United States engaged till this bitter end?
There was never a traditional ‘war to be won’ in Afghanistan. This statement encapsulates the failure – one where there was never a fixed desired outcome to Afghanistan, but rather an attempt to juxtapose the War on Terror into a geographic and political confines. The two concepts: a war on ideology and stateless actors, forced into the structured borders of sovereign nations (equally attributable to Iraq), were incompatible yet concurrent. Treating this campaign like a war with neatly defined lines was a flawed strategy from the onset, as everything about Afghanistan - the culture(s), ecology, tribal dynamics, geographic isolation, and historically perpetual state of conflict defied western notions of how wars were to be waged.
The failure to define policy outcomes spanned political parties. To critique one administration instead of another in the Afghanistan context does not illuminate the lessons learned from this experience. I spoke with a former U.S. military colleague who served as an AFPAK Hand, an expert on Central Asian affairs, who (on the condition of anonymity) summarized the policy failures by sequential administrations: “From Bush to Obama, to Trump, and now Biden, none could make the case or would spend their political capital to stay in Afghanistan long term, either to nation build or justify why our continued presence would prevent another 9/11.”
The war against a disaggregate enemy was antithetical to a 21st century American society. At the onset of the war, vengeance for attacks on our homeland secured near-unanimous domestic support, even though the average citizen likely struggled to locate Afghanistan on a map. Retribution for America’s bloody nose was an easy check for policy makers to cash with constituents. That raison d'être became unsustainable over ensuing years of American occupancy when an insurgency, a corrupt Afghan government, tribal feuds, and an annual mission creep eroded the constancy of the U.S. presence.
Admittedly, the Afghan version of stability or victor was perhaps not Jeffersonian democracy, but, as noted by National Security expert Joshua Huminski, some form of baseline dignity. Far too many threads became woven into the policy in absentia tapestry that the graveyard of empires swallowed with patient indifference. It was evident in 2001 that the complexity of Afghanistan would require a clear policy outcome, but clarity proved fleeting soon after the invasion.
By the time American and coalition forces had achieved early tactical gains on Afghanistan battlefields, a critical misstep totally changed the vector of the war: the 2003 Iraq invasion. This sudden policy shift drew critical resources away from the early success of a sweeping Taliban defeat, based on the myth of weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq shift was not solid from its early foundations, and Afghanistan suffered for it. The detour to Iraq forsook a golden opportunity to achieve some kind of stability in Afghanistan, an opportunity that would never be regained. By opening a second front in the global war on terror, the following decades in Afghanistan would be marked by a constant change in policy and strategy.
In 2002, reconstruction became the calling card of the mission, with American and NATO forces coordinating the implementation of the “provincial reconstruction teams,” a system that regularly failed to deliver on its promise to foster infrastructural development. The foundations of these problems identified in the damning 2020 SIGAR report may be traced to the ad hoc effort to offset the Iraq shift in Afghanistan. In 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared the end of “major combat.” This shifted NATO’s assumptions about the mission and was weakened by differing levels of commitment by international parties. Before the 2006 start of a decades-long insurgency, democratic elections and a constitutional government were attempted in Afghanistan amidst sweeping corruption and the United States agreed to a long-term strategic partnership with Afghanistan to help “organize, train, equip and sustain Afghan security forces.” This agreement would ultimately lead to the Afghan National Defense and Security Force’s (ANDSF) undue dependence on American technology, portending the rapid surrender of Afghan forces to the Taliban in 2021.
In 2008, a rise in collateral killings marked the early stages of the publicity war that the United States would ultimately lose to the Taliban. The following year saw a cycle of troop surges, peaking at over 100,000 American forces in Afghanistan. The violence of the insurgency would remain a source of diplomatic tension in strategic planning, with U.S. administrations regularly changing out mission commanders in an effort to find a solution despite lacking a clear, stable policy. When security responsibility for Afghanistan was handed over to the ANDSF in 2013, the NATO mission transitioned to a primarily advisory role. From 2017-2018, U.S. offensive operations began again, signaled by the employment of the “Massive Ordnance Air Blast” bomb dropped in Nangahar against the rising Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K) threat, with additional troop surges into insurgents strong holds.
In 2019, peace talks between the United States and the Taliban began in earnest, signaling that the waiting game for the Taliban was nearly over. Amidst the negotiations, combat continued while American forces began the phased drawdown ahead of the well-publicized total withdrawal. Even during the withdrawal, the tragedy continued— an ISIS-K suicide attack that killed another 13 U.S. servicemembers assisting with the evacuation of Afghan refugees, yielding one of the bloodiest casualty events of America’s longest war.
There were many tactical successes in Afghanistan. However, those battlefield victories ring hollow absent a strategy vehicle to a political end. As Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated in congressional testimony: “We need to consider some uncomfortable truths: we did not fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in [Afghan] senior ranks, the damaging effect of frequent and unexplained rotations by President Ghani of his commanders, [or the] snowball effect caused by the deals between Taliban commanders and local leaders.”
America did not understand Afghanistan, in whole or in part. Our lesson here is that no policy decision is still a decision. Accepting a vague status quo and failing to commit to a long-term solution means that the United States spent two decades of blood and treasure without a substantive return. Clausewitz famously called war the erosion of an enemy’s will to fight, and history will show that in Afghanistan, Americans will never rise to the necessary level to see this conflict to an acceptable end.
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Strategy Sans Policy and Failure to Commit in Afghanistan
Photo by Ehimetalor Akhe via Unsplash.
November 18, 2021
U.S. failure in Afghanistan comes down to the inability of four Presidential administrations to define concrete policy outcomes and expend the political capital necessary to commit to a long-term strategy, writes Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress Senior Fellow Ethan Brown.
W
hat were our failures in the decades leading up to today? What were our responsibilities and what could have been done better? The top lines are evident, and well known. Afghanistan was a war absent strategic vision and objectives. What were the intended outcomes and how did it factor into our greater geopolitical goals? Afghanistan remains a land-locked, resource-scarce environment that serves as little more than a buttress between Iranian-Saudi competition to its west and a third of the world’s population to its east. That this “graveyard of empires'' occupies such a preeminent place in global foreign policy appears counter-intuitive and, after two decades of American interference, begs the question— how did such a remote locale with a history of geopolitical defiance keep the United States engaged till this bitter end?
There was never a traditional ‘war to be won’ in Afghanistan. This statement encapsulates the failure – one where there was never a fixed desired outcome to Afghanistan, but rather an attempt to juxtapose the War on Terror into a geographic and political confines. The two concepts: a war on ideology and stateless actors, forced into the structured borders of sovereign nations (equally attributable to Iraq), were incompatible yet concurrent. Treating this campaign like a war with neatly defined lines was a flawed strategy from the onset, as everything about Afghanistan - the culture(s), ecology, tribal dynamics, geographic isolation, and historically perpetual state of conflict defied western notions of how wars were to be waged.
The failure to define policy outcomes spanned political parties. To critique one administration instead of another in the Afghanistan context does not illuminate the lessons learned from this experience. I spoke with a former U.S. military colleague who served as an AFPAK Hand, an expert on Central Asian affairs, who (on the condition of anonymity) summarized the policy failures by sequential administrations: “From Bush to Obama, to Trump, and now Biden, none could make the case or would spend their political capital to stay in Afghanistan long term, either to nation build or justify why our continued presence would prevent another 9/11.”
The war against a disaggregate enemy was antithetical to a 21st century American society. At the onset of the war, vengeance for attacks on our homeland secured near-unanimous domestic support, even though the average citizen likely struggled to locate Afghanistan on a map. Retribution for America’s bloody nose was an easy check for policy makers to cash with constituents. That raison d'être became unsustainable over ensuing years of American occupancy when an insurgency, a corrupt Afghan government, tribal feuds, and an annual mission creep eroded the constancy of the U.S. presence.
Admittedly, the Afghan version of stability or victor was perhaps not Jeffersonian democracy, but, as noted by National Security expert Joshua Huminski, some form of baseline dignity. Far too many threads became woven into the policy in absentia tapestry that the graveyard of empires swallowed with patient indifference. It was evident in 2001 that the complexity of Afghanistan would require a clear policy outcome, but clarity proved fleeting soon after the invasion.
By the time American and coalition forces had achieved early tactical gains on Afghanistan battlefields, a critical misstep totally changed the vector of the war: the 2003 Iraq invasion. This sudden policy shift drew critical resources away from the early success of a sweeping Taliban defeat, based on the myth of weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq shift was not solid from its early foundations, and Afghanistan suffered for it. The detour to Iraq forsook a golden opportunity to achieve some kind of stability in Afghanistan, an opportunity that would never be regained. By opening a second front in the global war on terror, the following decades in Afghanistan would be marked by a constant change in policy and strategy.
In 2002, reconstruction became the calling card of the mission, with American and NATO forces coordinating the implementation of the “provincial reconstruction teams,” a system that regularly failed to deliver on its promise to foster infrastructural development. The foundations of these problems identified in the damning 2020 SIGAR report may be traced to the ad hoc effort to offset the Iraq shift in Afghanistan. In 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared the end of “major combat.” This shifted NATO’s assumptions about the mission and was weakened by differing levels of commitment by international parties. Before the 2006 start of a decades-long insurgency, democratic elections and a constitutional government were attempted in Afghanistan amidst sweeping corruption and the United States agreed to a long-term strategic partnership with Afghanistan to help “organize, train, equip and sustain Afghan security forces.” This agreement would ultimately lead to the Afghan National Defense and Security Force’s (ANDSF) undue dependence on American technology, portending the rapid surrender of Afghan forces to the Taliban in 2021.
In 2008, a rise in collateral killings marked the early stages of the publicity war that the United States would ultimately lose to the Taliban. The following year saw a cycle of troop surges, peaking at over 100,000 American forces in Afghanistan. The violence of the insurgency would remain a source of diplomatic tension in strategic planning, with U.S. administrations regularly changing out mission commanders in an effort to find a solution despite lacking a clear, stable policy. When security responsibility for Afghanistan was handed over to the ANDSF in 2013, the NATO mission transitioned to a primarily advisory role. From 2017-2018, U.S. offensive operations began again, signaled by the employment of the “Massive Ordnance Air Blast” bomb dropped in Nangahar against the rising Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K) threat, with additional troop surges into insurgents strong holds.
In 2019, peace talks between the United States and the Taliban began in earnest, signaling that the waiting game for the Taliban was nearly over. Amidst the negotiations, combat continued while American forces began the phased drawdown ahead of the well-publicized total withdrawal. Even during the withdrawal, the tragedy continued— an ISIS-K suicide attack that killed another 13 U.S. servicemembers assisting with the evacuation of Afghan refugees, yielding one of the bloodiest casualty events of America’s longest war.
There were many tactical successes in Afghanistan. However, those battlefield victories ring hollow absent a strategy vehicle to a political end. As Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated in congressional testimony: “We need to consider some uncomfortable truths: we did not fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in [Afghan] senior ranks, the damaging effect of frequent and unexplained rotations by President Ghani of his commanders, [or the] snowball effect caused by the deals between Taliban commanders and local leaders.”
America did not understand Afghanistan, in whole or in part. Our lesson here is that no policy decision is still a decision. Accepting a vague status quo and failing to commit to a long-term solution means that the United States spent two decades of blood and treasure without a substantive return. Clausewitz famously called war the erosion of an enemy’s will to fight, and history will show that in Afghanistan, Americans will never rise to the necessary level to see this conflict to an acceptable end.
