Putting the defeat in Afghanistan in perspective
Author’s note: This story was written and published via email on August 16th
It is said that success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan; President Kennedy sought wisdom from Tacitus when explaining the Bay of Pigs disaster. Kennedy’s ratings suffered, his relationship with the defense and intelligence hawks soured, but ultimately he got a second shot at Cuba 18 months later where his judgement prevailed over the hawkishness of his advisors. President Joe Biden should bear this lesson from history in mind as he looks back on his own foreign policy debacle only a few short months into his presidency. The decision to withdraw was Biden’s, against the advice of his national security team, and while the foreign policy establishment takes a victory lap in the opinion pages of The Post and The Times, they should remember that they are the parents of this particular foreign policy failure.
To read the writings of the commentariat, one would think that Afghanistan had been a united entity with a powerful army, a strong civil society and a competent government. None of that is true. If you read the articles of foreign policy columnists, you would think that the Taliban had stagnated and that a residual US force of 2,500 with air support was holding the entire country together. That is a lie. The Taliban were in control of most of the countryside, and conducting attacks on urban areas when it suited them. If those 2,500 US troops were the difference between a stable state and total takeover, then the Afghan state was not fit for purpose. The Taliban had stopped attacking US personnel and had slowed some of their offensives because they were negotiating with the US in Qatar; that was good strategy, yes strategy, that critical element in war-fighting that all those who clamour for an American presence seem to be clueless about. Why attack your enemy today and risk reprisals when you know he will leave and can make a swift and score a relatively casualty-free victory? That was what the Taliban realised and acted upon. Two successive US presidents were set on withdrawal; the agreement that Biden is implementing was negotiated under the Trump administration.
Yet the problems with America’s mission in Afghanistan extend even further back than Presidents 45 and 46. The person who bears responsibility for the calamity in Kabul is former President George W. Bush. The intelligence failures that led to 9/11 have been well documented, but Bush reacted decisively to root out Bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Taliban were routed but then instead of focusing on the country, Bush and Cheney decided that Saddam Hussein, who bore no responsibility for 9/11 was a necessary target. The price of that decision can be measured in the hundreds of thousands of lives that have been lost, the trillions of dollars spent, or in the web of disastrous Middle East interventions and policies that successive administrations have attempted to weave. Bush was cheered on by those same commentators who now lament the US abandonment of our allies in Afghanistan. They called for a focus on state-building in Iraq despite the monumental distraction it proved to be from the same effort in Afghanistan. They supported troop surges and called for a permanent presence despite the total lack of a strategic purpose for us being in Afghanistan. With the US retreat they have decided that this proves that the foreign policy establishment was right, they weren’t. If Biden’s team is responsible for the last 30 days, they are responsible for the last 20 years of catastrophe.
We must put the defeat in Afghanistan into a wider perspective in the canon of American military history. Despite being the most powerful nation on earth, the United States is remarkably bad at winning wars. (For more on this read Harlan Ullman’s book, Anatomy of Failure). Stalemates (Korea), outright defeats (Vietnam and Afghanistan) or costly victories that end in a state of permanent conflict (Iraq, Libya, and Somalia). There is a notion, popular in media circles, that the American military wins wars frequently, they don’t. The First Gulf War, Kosovo, and operations against ISIS in the Levant have given an air of credibility to this notion that we should win wars, when in reality defeat or permanent warfare are fixtures in American security policy. What is needed is a radical process of introspection to ask ourselves, why victory is a rarity for America’s armed forces.
The most obvious answer is poor political leadership. The last president to fight in a war was Bush Sr., he also oversaw the last comprehensive American victory in a war. Clinton was so focused on domestic policy that when a plane crashed on the front lawn of the White House, it was joked that it was the CIA Director trying to get a meeting. Bush Jr. stocked his administration full of alums of his father’s administration and rising war hawks. The result, thinking from the 1980s not the 2000s, he didn’t meet the moment, and one- extemporaneous speech amid the smouldering wreck of the Twin Towers doesn’t make you a war-time president. Ken Burns’ documentary on the Vietnam War outlines how successive presidents allowed themselves to be sucked into the country until finally President Johnson sent 1 million troops to a small nation in East Asia to fight an unwinnable war. President Obama, confronting myriad problems, most of them ensuing from the Bush administration, backed his generals on Afghanistan but ultimately began to negotiate with the Taliban to find a way to end the war, his instinct was correct but the talks lacked credibility in part because of his inconsistency on the application of military force around the world. Trump, a serial liar (among other things) never had any credibility, his bloviating over threatening to nuke North Korea or attack Iran because of slights on Twitter was all bark, no bite. This is not to argue that presidents who fought in war are better commanders-in-chief, (Rutherford B. Hayes is a case in point), but we pick the wrong people at every level of our foreign policy and national security setup. Ambassadors are chosen for the size of their campaign donations, State Department officials are no longer diplomats but special advisors, and the national security and intelligence agencies are consumed by the same groupthink.
Changing this requires wholesale changes that must come from above. Changing recruitment at State, CIA, NSA and for the White House would put different voices in the room and therefore lead to new perspectives and better decision-making. Increasing pay to keep the best staff so that they don’t start looking for a cushy job in the private sector in order to pay their child’s college tuition would be a start. The agency most in need of changes is the Department of Defense, this being the agency that spent $1.5 trillion on the F-35 and gets gouged on just about every contract it outsources to cash hungry defense contractors who do 60% of the work for 120% of the budget. These are systemic problems and they extend to Congress and other parts of the government apparatus, whether it is financial regulation (see 2008 and mergers), healthcare (see COVID and the opioid crisis) or education (see the average conversation on Twitter and Facebook). We have not fundamentally changed our government since the Second World War, besides the creation of new agencies, and that is a recipe for disaster. Rot begins from within and unless we reform, the rot will consume us.
Failure in Afghanistan has many fathers even if it is Biden’s bad luck that he must own it. Three previous presidents played their part in the failure but even though the buck stops there, America’s entire foreign policy setup must do some soul-searching. Whether it’s the State Department, intelligence agencies, joint chiefs or commentators in the press, everyone who has at one point or another called for a continued US presence, troop surge, or championed the state-building efforts in Afghanistan, this is your failure too, and blaming Biden won’t absolve you of responsibility for a calamity two decades in the making.
