ARGUMENT: Afghanistan failureWhat Went Wrong for the U.S. in Afghanistan

The Biden administration’s decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan is an admission that the United States has failed in its costly war in Afghanistan. To be more precise, the United States succeeded in preventing al Qaeda from mounting another 9/11-like terrorist attack, and has decimated the organization’s ranks, but the United States has failed to create the conditions in Afghanistan which would prevent the Taliban from taking over the country within weeks of the U.S. withdrawal, thus allowing al Qaeda, or other terrorist organizations, to use Afghanistan as a safe haven, as they did before 2001.

Why has the United States failed? Jason K. Dempsey, who was deployed to Afghanistan as part of the 2009 “surge,” writes in Just Security that

Luckily for those seeking to understand the dynamics of the fight in Kunar beyond the heavily reported battles, and for those wondering how all the heroism portrayed in those stories led to an overall outcome in Afghanistan that fell far short of U.S. aspirations, there are two new books that seek to make sense of the war. The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley by Wesley Morgan and Zero-Sum Victory: What We’re Getting Wrong About War by Christopher Kolenda will both serve as touchpoints for understanding American failures for years to come.

He adds:

Morgan uses The Hardest Place to describe the arc of U.S. military efforts, from the daring hunt for Osama Bin Laden and his deputies in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, to the massive buildup of troops between 2009 and 2011, to the refined use of drones to continue the fight long after most American troops had left. Running through this arc is the evolution of the military’s capability to kill and its attachment to that effort at the expense of the mission at hand. Originally the domain of small, classified special mission units, the concept of blending high-technology assets with specially trained strike forces expanded beyond secretive units to the military writ large over the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Conceived, in Morgan’s words, as a “global counterterrorist decapitation machine,” by the end of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, the military was using these assets on anyone that could be loosely defined as a threat. In that sense, the military’s focus on targeting became not much more than an updated way to pursue a strategy of attrition and body counts, but without the negative baggage such terms had earned in Vietnam.

But, like in Vietnam, the U.S. military could never kill its way to victory in Afghanistan, despite over a decade of massive, conventional military operations and “terrorist decapitation” efforts. Morgan quotes one U.S. Army Ranger, who, observing drone operations in the Pech late in the war, said, “You’ll never run out of people to kill there.” 

Dempsey writes that the United States was also afflicted with political and cultural blindness which hampered U.S, efforts.

By trying to create Afghan forces that were a mirror image of the U.S. military, the United States designed a national army for its own country, not Afghanistan. And instead of accounting for local politics and incentive structures, many U.S. officers assumed that the Afghans should naturally adhere to the chain of command structure that the U.S. military laid out for them and to follow the lead of Americans in tactical and operational decisions

Kolenda concentrates on the larger policy processes that drove U.S. decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Zero Sum, Kolenda places the obliviousness of American military units when it comes to local Afghan political dynamics within the larger context of strategic narcissism, whereby the world is judged only in relation to American interests. He also deftly outlines how the U.S. military’s focus on the goal of “winning decisively” leads, paradoxically, not to clean military victories but, in many ways, guarantees the kinds of quagmires we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. Viewed in isolation, it is admirable that the military would seek to “win decisively” – but only if wars were decided primarily by tactical proficiency and set piece conventional battles.

Kolenda lays out a compelling argument that, in the case of our post-9/11wars, this outlook unfortunately led to “substituting destruction for negotiation.”

Dempsey concludes:

Both Morgan and Kolenda clearly care deeply about the American military and its role in the world, and, with their books, have demonstrated that true respect leads to deep introspection and critical examination, of both policymakers and military leadership alike. That critical examination is the first key step by which the United States can learn from its mistakes and ensure that it pursues a foreign policy that merits the sacrifices and service of its soldiers.