ARGUMENT: Lessons of AfghanistanLearning the Right Lessons from Afghanistan

Richard Haass has correctly distinguished “wars of necessity” from “wars of choice,” but Gregory Treverton, former Chair of U.S. National Intelligence Council (from 2014 to 2016), writes in Just Security that the long war in Afghanistan after the quick defeat of the Taliban in 2001 was neither. It was rather an effort at nation-building, even though the George W. Bush administration eschewed the term.

The immediate victory in 2001 was essentially a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operation, working with Afghan contacts in the Northern Alliance that had been developed in the covert war against Soviet occupation. 

Treverton writes that

From the beginning of the engagement in Afghanistan, it was plain, as it was in the following years in Iraq, that employing the military as the primary means of nation-building was badly mismatched to the task at hand.

….

By the time I left the chair, it was plain to me that we were losing slowly, and that any talk of “reconciliation” with the Taliban was eyewash because what the Taliban meant by the term was hardly a compromise but, instead, a semi-graceful defeat for the government.

Indeed, to speak of the Afghan “government” illustrates the sharpest case in point for another source of error. We are dependent on language but are also imprisoned by it. To talk, as we had to, about the Afghan “government” was to imply that there was one, when we all knew that what existed in Afghanistan was not something that merited the label “government.”

Treverton concludes:

The main lesson of Afghanistan should be an easy one by now, after the sweep of events from Vietnam to Iraq: nation-building requires a nation, or at least a competent, committed government. America’s signal successes at nation-building were nation-rebuilding, in the instances of Germany and Japan. It is not just that nation-building is hard, and we don’t do it very well. In Afghanistan there was never any nation to rebuild, only a collection of warring tribes, clans, and sects.

The second lesson is equally plain – to use the military as the main instrument in nation-building only compounds the error. In Afghanistan, what we attempted was more nation-building through building the military. On its face, as many have commented, training Afghans how to fight is like educating Noah about ship-building. After more than forty years of war, unfortunately fighting is what many Afghans know how to do. More to the point, the metrics about military capability all tended to be American-centric – the quality of arms and quantity of training or weaponry.

As in Iraq, the critical question, as my colleague and former Director of National Intelligence, Jim Clapper, has underscored was: will they fight? That is the greater imponderable. We got the answer wrong in Vietnam, and again in Iraq, and, tragically, yet again in Afghanistan. The answer cycles back to the “government” and whether it is worth fighting for. On that score, the example of the Iraqi army – which quickly collapsed in the Islamic State’s 2014 blitz across northern Iraq – ought to have sharpened the concerns about the Afghan government that were present all along.