America’s longest war also was one of its most senseless. Comparisons to Vietnam dogged it from the start and only seemed more accurate when then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld caustically dismissed them when raised by the media.
Many of us who served in Afghanistan knew the likelihood of lasting success was slim to none. Still, we diligently pursued a policy that now has delivered us back to the beginning. The premonition of failure grew exponentially after almost every meeting I had with Afghan officials in Kabul or in conversations with local councils around the country.
Ideology was never the issue. Credibility was, and few believed the United States would succeed in its effort to install a functioning democracy built on stable institutions. They had little doubt about the Taliban’s credibility.
Insecure armchair patriots (the kind that bristled when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley defended in a congressional hearing the military’s willingness to learn about critical race theory) criticize our withdrawal as a betrayal of the sacrifice already made — as if sending more Americans to kill and die in a hopeless cause is somehow more honorable than acknowledging reality.
At least Vietnam occurred within the strategic context of the Cold War. U.S. military force in Afghanistan occurred in a strategic desert. Magical thinking does not produce coherent policy.
Soldiers and diplomats repeated at least two critical Vietnam-era mistakes:
First, our military training overlooked or was unable to accommodate social and political reality. Afghans historically may be the best mountain fighters in the world. They beat empires. Replacing the Afghans’ native organizational and leadership structures and introducing foreign strategic and battlefield concepts only succeeded in producing a poor imitation of a modern military. The CIA had better luck meeting its objectives with the Northern Alliance than ISAF did with the Afghan National Army. We out-sophisticated ourselves.
The second mistake was the appropriation by diplomats and development officials of the body count mentality that supposedly assured skeptical Americans we were winning in Vietnam. We may have been winning the numbers, but we were losing the war — both in Vietnam and in Afghanistan. Counting how many girls are in school or females were elected to parliament or held ministerial positions in a propped-up government was not an accurate measure of democratic nation-building.
The issue in Afghanistan is personal power ruthlessly exercised. After 20 years of blood, sweat and tears, institutions supporting human rights, the rule of law, judicial integrity and transparency in government had only shallow roots. The warlord ethos, even the supposedly “westernized” variety, is dug in deeply. A few elections were unlikely to uproot it.
The post-mortems, after-action reviews, lessons-learned and a blizzard of papers and analyses of what went wrong in Afghanistan are already starting to accumulate among think tanks and government circles. I have read some of them and often am blinded by the dazzling charts, graphs, metrics and methods they employ.
At the same time, I wonder how many graphics the Taliban used to engineer its success, or, as a military colleague who also served in Afghanistan added, how many helicopters, MRAPS, drones or even actual fighters the Taliban fielded.
The contest was militarily weighted toward the United States. Regional politics leaned heavily toward the Taliban. Clausewitz’s ghost is smiling; war — at least limited war — is about politics, after all.
As I watch our military pullout and see the suffering we leave behind — especially among the Afghans who worked with us and the families of the military members, diplomats, development officials and contractors we lost — I struggle to find some redemptive message or meaning in our quixotic crusade. Their sacrifice ought to produce something besides immeasurable sorrow.
Afghanistan may not simply revert to the worst of the Taliban’s depravities, but neither is it likely to survive as an emerging democracy. Whatever the outcome, it will be a reflection of the strategic void the United States entered after winning the Cold War. It would be comforting to believe the current administration is forging a new strategy. But maybe that’s just magical thinking, too.
Ambassador David Robinson a retired emissary to Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Guyana.