From Tora Bora to wartime fatigue, the U.S. legacy in Afghanistan was just one failed endeavor after another.
BY Stephen M. Walt Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where he served as academic dean from 2002-2006. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as master of the social science collegiate division and deputy dean of social sciences. He has been a resident associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, and he has also been a consultant for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
FEBRUARY 3, 2014
America's long war in Afghanistan isn't likely to end well, and the American people seem to know it. Despite a wholly predictable effort to portray the war as an American victory, the United States isn't going to defeat the Taliban between now and the scheduled departure of most U.S. troops later this year. Meanwhile, relations between the United States and the Karzai government are going from bad to worse. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is not only refusing to sign a security agreement that would allow the United States to leave a residual force in country, he is also making increasingly strident accusations that the United States is to blame for recent civilian deaths.
This depressing outcome is not what most Americans expected following the rapid toppling of the Taliban back in 2001. It is therefore important that we draw the right lessons from the experience, if only to partly redeem the sacrifices made by the soldiers who fought there. In that spirit, here is a list of the top 10 mistakes made in America's Afghan War.
1. Trying to Go It Alone After 9/11, America's NATO allies invoked the mutual defense clause of the NATO treaty and offered to help the United States go after the Taliban and al Qaeda. Convinced that the job would be easy and that allies would simply make things harder, the Rumsfeld Pentagon responded with a brusque "No, thanks." Instead of making Afghanistan a collective project from the start, the Bush administration wanted to show it could do the job all by itself, with an assist from the Afghan Northern Alliance. That decision seemed justified when the Taliban fell quickly, but when Bush & Co. marched off to Iraq (see below), there was hardly anybody left to keep the Taliban from coming back. By the time NATO got involved big-time, a new civil war was underway and the best opportunity to build a stable Afghanistan had been squandered.
2. Blowing It at Tora Bora The United States invaded Afghanistan for one reason: to get Osama bin Laden and as many of his followers as possible. Unfortunately, poor coordination with local Afghan forces and a reluctance to commit sufficient U.S. troops at the Battle of Tora Bora allowed bin Laden to escape into Pakistan, where he remained at large for another eight years. Had we caught him then and there, al Qaeda might have been dealt a fatal blow and the United States could have declared victory in the "war on terror" instead of watching al Qaeda morph into a global franchise. Yet despite this costly failure, the U.S. commander at Tora Bora -- Army Gen. Tommy Franks -- was later chosen to command the invasion of Iraq.
3. The Afghan Constitution The Bonn Agreement in December 2001 established an interim government for post-Taliban Afghanistan and was, in many ways, an impressive diplomatic achievement. Unfortunately, the Constitution adopted in 2004 was an ill-conceived misstep. It created a highly centralized state that ignored Afghan traditions of local autonomy and gave the president too much formal power. The new government was supposed to run the entire country from Kabul and appoint all the key local officials, but the Karzai regime lacked enough competent civil servants and the new structure created irresistible opportunities for patronage and corruption. Moreover, the Afghan economy could not support an elaborate governmental structure or large security forces, which made the fledgling Afghan state permanently dependent on outside support from the start.
4. The Detour Into Iraq The Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq was not just a disaster for Iraq and for the United States, it also diverted military and intelligence resources from Afghanistan and allowed the Taliban to regroup and resume the war.
Sadly, we will never know what might have happened had the United States and NATO kept their eyes on the ball back in 2003.
Sadly, we will never know what might have happened had the United States and NATO kept their eyes on the ball back in 2003.
5. The 2009 Surge In the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama burnished his national security street cred by declaring that he was going to end the war in Iraq so that he could focus on the "real war" in Afghanistan. He then succumbed to military pressure and sent additional U.S. troops, starting with 17,000 shortly after taking office and adding another 30,000 in the fall of 2009. But the decision to escalate was fatally flawed, because the Taliban still had sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan and were never going to be defeated by military force alone. To succeed, the surge would have had to be far larger and much longer in duration, and Afghanistan simply wasn't worth that level of effort. The surge also led to a sharp uptick in Afghan and American casualties, which gradually undermined support for the war back home.
6. Setting a Time Limit The mistaken decision to escalate was compounded by a second error: Obama made it clear from the start that the surge would be a temporary measure and gave the Taliban a pretty good idea when the United States would begin to get out. As critics noted at the time, telling your adversary exactly when you were going to quit was hardly the best way to persuade them to give up the fight. Instead, it told the enemy exactly how long they needed to hang on in order to wait us out.
7. Downgrading Diplomacy Ending the war and building a functioning Afghan government required a reconciliation process that would integrate the more moderate elements of the Taliban back into the Afghan political community. Unfortunately, the United States didn't get serious about a peace process until it was too late. As U.S. special envoy James Dobbins acknowledged last year, "it was probably a mistake to delay a serious effort at reconciliation until 2011." Washington should have pushed hard for serious discussions while the surge was at its peak, instead of waiting until its role (and therefore its leverage) was declining. The United States also failed to engage regional powers that might have helped put together a stabilization deal, in part because it wasn't even talking to some of them (e.g., Iran).
8. Losing Public Support When the Taliban refused to give up bin Laden, the United States had no choice but to go after the man who had orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. The American public signed up for that war with enthusiasm, but not to an open-ended effort to transform an impoverished, land-locked, and ethnically divided Muslim country that had never been a vital U.S. strategic interest before. And neither Bush nor Obama ever managed to persuade them that the war was worth the cost, mostly because the American people aren't completely gullible. By 2008, the war was costing the American taxpayers an amount several times larger than Afghanistan's entire GDP, and neither Bush nor Obama could come up with a convincing rationale for continuing to pour money and lives into distant strategic backwater.
To be sure, Obama tried to justify the war as necessary to prevent al Qaeda from establishing a "safe haven" again, but al Qaeda already had better havens by 2009 and was barely in Afghanistan by that point. Moreover, a long and costly war against the Taliban was increasingly a distraction from the broader campaign against al Qaeda itself.
Bottom line: the American people will support a war when vital interests are at stake and there is a plausible theory of victory, but by 2009, neither of those conditions had been met.
9. Failure to Manage Unruly Allies Winning the war in Afghanistan depended on getting at least two foreign governments to play ball. The first was the Afghan government itself, which was corrupt, inefficient, and increasingly unwilling to listen to well-intentioned U.S. advice. The second was Pakistan, which continued to play footsie with the Taliban and sometimes put roadblocks (literal ones) in the way of the U.S. military. Unfortunately, U.S. leaders never fully appreciated that the war could not be won if we didn't get more cooperation from these supposed allies, and that we wouldn't get that support as long as they were convinced that Washington would never call their bluff. It's a sad but familiar story: a once-powerful patron becomes too strongly committed to a weak client with its own agenda, that client extracts many concessions by threatening to collapse or by telling us one thing while doing another.
10. Strategic Contradictions Finally, the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan was bedeviled by strategic contradictions that were never fully recognized or resolved. Although many American soldiers fought with skill and heroism, achieving our stated war aims was an uphill battle from the get-go.
For starters, the United States and NATO couldn't win without a much larger investment of resources over a much longer period, but it just wasn't worth that level of investment. And for all the talk about COIN, Army Field Manual 3-24, and supposedly brilliant commanders like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. Army was never designed for or adept at this kind of operation and isn't likely to get much better at it with practice. And finally, building a new Afghan state and fighting a counterinsurgency war required outsiders to pour billions of dollars into an impoverished country, but the flood of poorly managed money merely fueled corruption and ensured that much of the aid money was wasted.
No one should take any pleasure in contemplating these (and other) mistakes, especially when one considers how long the United States fought there and how shallow its learning curve was. One at least hopes that some larger lessons have been learned, and that U.S. presidents will be a lot warier of this sort of quagmire in the future. Or as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in 2011: "In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have 'his head examined.'"
Comments
The writer of the article has missed to mention the other two critical and strategic mistakes that the U.S-led alliance in Afghanistan made. The most important of the two was the appointment of Karzai to lead the interim government. That is to say, during the first Bonn conference in late 2001, there were two candidates to lead the post-Taliban Afghanistan - Karzai and Abdul Sattar Sirat. After votings, Abdul Sattar Sirat, ex-justice minister of Uzbek origin, won the majority of the votes to lead the war-torn country. The question is, then how come and why Karzai got the post? Thus, the foundation of democracy in Afghanistan was laid through consultations and assumptions that only a Pushton leader should lead the country rather than basing it on democratic values - the rule of the majority. The worst is that it happened in front of the eyes of those who claim to be the defenders and pioneers of democracy (Westen countries).
The second strategic mistake was the repetition of the mistakes of the USSR by the U.S-led forces. And, that was NOT controlling the Eastern and Southern borders of Afghanistan with Pakistan effectively and efficiently. The mistake cost the USSR its collapse and defeat in Afghanistan, which in my opinion, has still the potential to do the same to the U.S-led forces in my country. It is not up to the alliance in Afghanistan to correct these mistakes on way or the other.
Kona - You are factually incorrect. ISAF was established by the UN and for its first two years covered only Kabul.
Secondly even in the early days of Afghanistan we had British, Australian, Canadian forces present and even more throughout Afghanistan before IFOR moved out of Kabul.
OEF 11A - Well done response!!!
ISAF was established in December 2001 as a result of the Bonn Conference by UNSC Resolution 1386 (20 December 2001). It was not established prior to U.S. actions in September/October 2001. That Joint or Combined SOF efforts contributed to the initial war effort cannot serve as a place-holder for 'coalition'. A quick google search illustrates this timeline.
All previous USNC Resolutions post 9/11 ( 1368, 1373, 1383) do not authorize or support action in Afghanistan (nor condemn U.S. action.)
Not sure where my original reply went but it has been deleted, FP?
Agreed on Aussies and Brits Majrod, Kiwis in Bamian, Germans in Konduz, French SOF and Jordanian SOF all in 2002 and 2003- and others well before Italians assumed RC West in '05. Kona14, you're missing the point, how many takers are we going to get for rapid entry in 2001? Regardless, is it appropriate to say "we went it alone" after years of contribution by dozens of other foreign troops and the 5 pillar Security Sector Reform approach?
Same on Reconciliation. I think saying we "didn't work on it seriously until 2011" is inaccurate. Mil planners were working on it years before the surge and 2011. One must appreciate there are political roadblocks to something like reconciliation, like the Karzai government. But like foreign troops supporting the Afghan War, it isn't accurate to say we weren't working on it hard until 2011. I pointed out shortcomings in DoS and USAID because I think they're among more significant policy points on the Afghan War than when we got traction with reconciliation- and there are others.
And my reply pointed out that point by point made in Walt's Op-ed are either not well researched or not truly top 10 strategic blunders. FP just posted a more formal reply and I have to say I agree with several points made- especially similar points on foreign troops and the central government. I especially agree with his comments on Pakistan- we were well aware of the dynamics and challenging situation with Pakistan.
Uusing a limited number of and CIA operatives and Special Forces on the ground directing B-52 bombing raids, the U.S. rapidly drove Al Qaeda’s forces from Afghanistan and drove back the Taliban forces fighting against the troops of the Northern Alliance -- as Professor Walt notes. The U.S. should have been prepared to position troops in an attempt to block the retreating Al Qaeda and dispose of them, but apparently General Franks failed in that effort.
The Taliban were simply being punished for hosting Al Qaeda in the part of Afghanistan they then controlled – similar to the U.S. once hosting of Cuban anti-Castor operatives on this country's soil.
Once American forces had driven Al Qaeda from Afghanistan and punished the Taliban, our effort in that country should thereafter have been limited to enabling the Northern Alliance forces to sustain themselves against the Pashtun. That would have provided base areas for American forces from which to conduct anti-terrorist operations and nothing more.
Instead, the Bush National Security Team came to the belief post-9/11 that "Failed States" such as Afghanistan were the underlying cause of terrorism – which problem in the instant case could be cured by occupying that country and establishing a democratic government with a military and police force needed to sustain it in power. A belief that was shared by many Foreign Policy experts, both the Republican and Democratic. (See The Rise and Fall of the Failed-State Paradigm: Requiem for a Decade of Distraction, By Michael J. Mazarr, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2014 Issue
The above was the first and major strategic error on the part of the Bush Administration / the U.S.
The U.S. (and some other nations such as our NATO allies continue entering into conflicts wherein the prevailing cultural, moral, social, economic conditions of the post WWII era have precluded our being able to totally destroy the military and economic structure of our enemy, and by removing the possibility of achieving that strategic objectiveprecluded our being able to impose on the civilian population of an occupied land the political and economic will of the victor – such as we were in our brief 2001 conventional conflict with the Taliban.
In this post World War II geopolitical and cultural environment, defeated peoples / groups instead repeatedly rise up against foreign forces (military and civilian) occupying their lands – even if the historical actions of that conquered country brought about that occupation or (in a given area) they patiently sit and wait until those intervening or occupying depart. They then undo all the cultural and political changes imposed on their society.
The nationalistic spirit of peoples around the globe; the awaking and acceptance in their mindsets that they are of a unique culture of their choice, and the hold on the peoples of many once colonized lands of their religious faith combined with their willingness to unremittingly struggle (politically or violently) to obtain or maintain their independence combined with the fact that warfare will never again be conducted on the all out scale of World War II precludes producing the results from a forced military occupation that occurred directly after World War II in Germany and Japan.
Thus, while the U.S. military has preformed across the globe at an operational, logistical, and tactical level at a historical unmatched rate of success, while pursuing its interventionist goals In the above noted operating environment, this country has achieved at best a mixed record of “strategic” success and failure – because both our political and often our military leaders fail to recognize the cultural changes that have occurred throughout the world.
Further, the peoples of forcefully occupied countries and the leaders of their resistance have learned to dilute the military "power" of intervening Western military forces through application of the Sun Tzu noted impact of the protraction of "time" on warfare and its causal deteriorating result on an invading nation's internal political and economic state. They thus have reduced the technological and engineering power of Western intervening forces to (for them) manageable levels knowing that as our power erodes due the cost of attempting to sustain our application of force over an extended time we will eventually give up the effort as being not worthy of the cost, i.e. due to an absence of a perceived Return on investment (ROI). Those being forcefully occupied are contrarily willing to expend their people's lives and resources to obtain their independence from foreign rule. It is their land and way of life, whether we like it or not, they thus now have the method of warfare and patience to outlast and thus defeat Western military efforts.
The COIN (operational or tactical) Doctrine, and its apparently accompanying need for a surge in the number of troops assigned to a theater of war, has failed in Iraq and will fail in Afghanistan. (See Front Row Seat: Watching COIN Fail in Afghanistan, January 28, 2014, by Captain Evan Munsing, USMC, War on the Rocks at http://warontherocks.com/2014/01/front-row-seat-watching-coin-fail-in-afghanistan/’). In fact, the COIN doctrine will fail every time it is applied in a situation where the U.S. acts militarily to destroy an existing government and political structure and to destroy its military and then attempts to replace it with one that is de facto of our (foreign) creation.
All the other problems noted by Professor Walt are certainly accurately stated, but they stem from the above strategic and situational errors made by the U.S. in Afghanistan. America's Foreign Policy experts and COIN indoctrinated Generals and Admirals are failing in much the same way they failed in Vietnam -- demonstrating that history (at the conceptual level) can repeat itself.
. . . , while we have heard of stupid haste in war, we have not yet seen a clever operation that was prolonged. for there has never been a protracted war which benefited a country. Therefore, those unable to understand the evils inherent in employing troops are equally unable to understand the advantageous ways of doing so.
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Ch. 2
"... the literature on counter-insurgency is so enormous that, had it been put aboard the Titanic, it would have sunk that ship without any help from the iceberg. However, the outstanding fact is that almost all of it has been written by the losers."
- Martin van Creveld, in The Changing Face Of War, 2006
At first, the Northern Alliance was an ally of US who actually helped in ousting Taliban from Kabul. Instead of keeping NA as an ally Washington dropped it as a hot potato and choose Pakistan-ISI-Taliban instead. You cannot fight and fund the enemy!!
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in 2011: "In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have 'his head examined.'"
A lot of people a few in the military but most outside it said this in 2001-2002. The fact that this became only apparent to most a decade later says much about the fecklessness of those that inhabit the realms of power in Washington, Gates included.
About Stephen M. Walt
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