By Joseph S. Laughon
Wednesday, August 18, 2021
It’s over. After 20 years, trillions of dollars, over 2,300
Americans and 200,000 Afghans killed, the Taliban won. What comes next is difficult to say. While it seems
unlikely that the Taliban will suddenly become a responsible stakeholder in
Afghan society, any confident predictions are likely to be defied by events.
What is certain is that Afghanistan, despite how much
President Biden dislikes comparisons to Vietnam, will become the new Vietnam of our political
discourse. “Who lost Afghanistan?” will become the new rhetorical hand grenade
tossed between politicians. As this develops, the lesson to American voters
should be clear: The foreign-policy and military establishment has failed and
failed miserably. The ostensible “smart set” was anything but. As they offer
excuses with their newly acquired hindsight, the American people should realize
that there were specific mistakes that led to this disaster. None of this was
inevitable, but the establishment made it so. Their manifold errors should be
remembered and their self-justifications should be emphatically rejected.
It is true that Afghanistan always posed a major
challenge for any strategic planner. It has a varied terrain, a tangled
relationship with Pakistan, and a society left broken in the wake of the Soviet
invasion. Yet in the face of these challenges, the establishment committed
several mistakes originating from either wishful thinking or a complete lack of
knowledge. The ignorance started early, dating back to the anti-Soviet campaign
before 9/11. Steve Coll in his book Ghost Wars explained that
the CIA had to ask Afghan mujahideen how many Stinger missiles the agency had
given them, as it had no idea. This kind of elite obtuseness continued to the
beginning of the invasion, as the then secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, a
Princeton-educated former envoy to the Middle East, had to ask even what languages were spoken in Afghanistan. Given this
level of illiteracy among our supposed experts and leaders, is it any wonder
that they perpetuated as many mistakes as they did?
While there are many, three errors stand out as critical;
the American role in feeding Afghan corruption, the failure to commit to a
working strategy for victory, and the failure to withdraw in a responsible
manner. In each of these, it was not inevitable or something in the air of
Afghanistan that forced these failures. It was the fault of our leadership.
The first major policy failure was in actively
undermining our own interests by promoting corrupt governance in Afghanistan.
While the new narrative from the Biden administration is that “no
nation has unified Afghanistan,” in reality policy-makers ensured that
corruption would corrode any potential for the country to return to the
comparatively calm era before the Soviet invasion. To begin with, the
U.S. blocked the return to power of the former king, Zahir
Shah, in favor of our client, Hamid Karzai. The Business Integrity Network of
Afghanistan noted in 2015 that the Karzai administration resembled a mafia clan more than a democratically elected
government. The U.S. then poured billions into this swamp, more than any
developing country could reasonably absorb. According to our own special
inspector, this double mistake stoked endemic corruption, which then
“undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fueling grievances against the
Afghan government and channeling material support to the insurgency.” Combined with
our protection for abusive and criminal elements in the Afghan military,
is it any shock no Afghan was particularly enthusiastic to die to keep them in
office?
Second, the U.S., when given the chance, dithered when
the time came to choose a strategy for victory. Carter Malkasian, a former
senior Pentagon official, now blames our defeat on the Afghans, arguing that
the Taliban could never be defeated. However, this too was not foreordained but
the result of specific policy choices made by the “adults” in Washington.
In reality the war effort in Afghanistan was not doomed
by some mythical “graveyard of empire” but rather by two dual decisions. After
invading Afghanistan, less than two years later, the U.S. government was
preparing for an even grander enterprise of invading Iraq, allowing the mission
in Afghanistan to wither on the vine for years, until the 2008 election.
Early on in his administration, Obama ordered a review of
our policy. In broad terms, the administration was split between those who
advocated withdrawal and those who advocated a new surge, a beefed-up security
presence and switch to a population-centric strategy. Rather than commit,
Obama, cheered on by his vice president, chose neither. The president authorized
troops, but fewer than what the military requested. A smaller surge was ordered
but immediately undercut by the timetables for withdrawal. Colonel Ali Jalali,
former Afghan army officer and interior minister, explained in his book A
Military History of Afghanistan that the new troops were in place for
barely a year before being withdrawn.
This move demonstrated that we were already looking for
the exits. Instead of being forced to reckon with a changed situation on the
ground, the Taliban realized it could simply wait us out. Years of neglect,
followed up with one year of competent, albeit frenetic, effort immediately
undercut by mixed messages to the enemy does not make for a winning strategy no
matter where the war is being fought.
The last mistake responsible for the current state of
events was the bungled withdrawal. After 20 years of failure, it was hard to
argue that America had a vital reason to spend more lives and money on a
botched effort. Once again, this current disaster was not inescapable. While
this particular withdrawal has many shameful details, from the abandoned Afghan
translators to a lack of meaningful counterterrorism options left after the
fact, the worst is that it is predicated on a shambolic peace process with the
Taliban.
Senior officials in both the Trump and the Biden
administrations assured us that the Taliban could be dealt with to achieve an
honorable peace. This was always a fiction. The regime that refused to bend in
the 1990s is the same group that conquered Kabul today. Despite this obvious
fact, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad allowed
themselves to be gulled into thinking otherwise. Khalilzad promised that the
peace process was “making strides” and that the Taliban would not overrun the
country because they needed legitimacy. Even more foolishly, Pompeo, in an
interview in March 2020, told the American people that the Taliban would cut
ties and “destroy” al-Qaeda. This was simple wishcasting. Despite Secretary
Antony Blinken’s lectures to the contrary, the Taliban clearly believed there
was a military “solution” to the conflict. Moreover, earlier this year the U.N.
Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team reported the obvious. Al-Qaeda
and the Taliban remained joined at the hip. Biden-administration officials will
insist they were bound by the ridiculous process started by the Trump
administration, and former Trump officials will pretend their policy is somehow
different from what is unfolding today. Neither deserve to be listened to.
The American people deserve an honest accounting of what
happened. Commentators and scholars will debate counterfactuals, policies, and
premises. Some of the establishment have begun to blame factors outside of
their control, casting Afghanistan as some unsolvable Gordian knot of policy.
For American policy-makers across four administrations, there is something
falsely comforting in the idea that the Afghan mission was doomed from the
start. Like a salesman after blowing a tough sell, they will justify themselves
with a variety of tropes and excuses. This is self-serving. In reality, the
establishment made concrete decisions. These decisions turned a difficult
situation into a complete disaster. Their policies empowered corruption,
indecision, and finally failure.
For other experts, they will become more brazen in their
blame shifting. Tom Nichols, self-appointed defender of experts, proclaimed that it is not they
who are to blame but rather the American people. Nichols believes Americans are
responsible because they were never “serious.” They once supported the war and
now they don’t. The reason why the American people now support ending a failure
20 years in the making never seems to enter Nichols’s calculation. He even
admits that the policy-makers failed when they “only tried pieces of several
strategies, never a coherent whole,” but somehow the villains in his piece are
never those responsible for their policy choices. This self-exculpation also
needs to be rejected. As is usual, the simplest explanation is best. Those who
made the decision to implement failed and incoherent strategies are responsible
for the results of those strategies. Not those who looked to them for
leadership.
The culpability for the tragedy unfolding in the news today is not in some malevolent energy deep in the soil of Afghanistan, as some imagine it, or in the apparent, ungrateful fickleness of the American people. The experts need to look inward. To paraphrase the French statesman Talleyrand, “It was worse than fate, it was a mistake.”
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