What do you think of the argument that the US shouldn’t have tried for regime change in Afghanistan at all, and that Bush should’ve just gone for Bin Laden? After all, it was partly for the sake of regime change that Bin Laden got away.
At the Battle of Tora Bora, the CIA requested 1,000 army rangers to cut off Bin Laden’s escape, but Bush feared that US boots on the ground would undermine the Northern Alliance’s perceived legitimacy at a crucial early stage of the new regime.
The fundamental problem with Afghanistan was that we weren't willing to commit to remaining there for an indefinite amount of time and running the country until they were ready to do it themselves. At the same time we weren't willing to shoot lower and allow a Taliban light government to run the country while we were there. Basically, we weren't willing to make the hard choice of either admitting we were going to act as benevolent long term colonialists (yes the excuse is often used...but plenty of empires like the Romans did good relative to the alternative) or that we were party to a state that was violating human rights or not democratic.
We were shooting for a modern, democratic egalitarian state. That doesn't happen overnight, you need people to build their lives around it, for people to change what they think is appropriate for their female children and choose to stay in the country. Without such a commitment the incentivizes were never going to be for Afghanistan to develop a truly robust civil society and administration since anyone making long term plans about their life and career knew that there was a very good chance that the Taliban would eventually regain power and not only would their investment be nullified they might be punished if they did too much to fight for human rights and to create a modern egalitarian state.
It doesn’t add a ton to the overall picture here but the book The Hardest Place- the American Military adrift in the Pech Valley really leaves you gobsmacked at various aspects of this war. Separately but related I think everyone should watch Restrepo and read Sebastian Jungers accompanying book. If people can check their priors I honestly think it’s good for all Americans who live through 9/11 and the wars thereafter.
You gotta love the guy who thought Trump's kidnapping of Maduro went pretty well accusing the Taliban of having "terrible values." If that's not sufficient, then asserting that we could have emerged victorious over indigenous armies reveals a hegemonic hubris, not to mention a degree of ignorance, that should have even Yglesias loyalists scratching their deluded heads.
My overall opinion is that Iraq guaranteed our loss in Afghanistan but whether Afghanistan could be won depends highly on the definition of victory.
Which brings me to my main complaint about American military usage in modern times: unclear war aims! If our only goals were the Taliban's surrender and for us to be allowed to go after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, I think these were imminently achievable goals. It's not obvious to me that those were the goals of the Bush administration, since they wouldn't accept surrender from the Taliban initially.
I think since Korea that our war aims were not to conquer or convert, but to cripple our opponents. If our goal since Korea was to make our enemies as economically and socially as dysfunctional as possible, we have done very well. If that was our goal we were victorious.
But that's not the kinda "aims" that would sell. So it's not put that way.
Freedom sells. Defence sells. Liberation sells. But are they believable?
Proposals to subject tens of millions of people, most of them just civilians, to long term desperation and dysfunction doesn't sell, even if it is a fairly cheap way to reduce the ability of people targeted to be a threat compared to traditional wars and winning traditional victories.
It is not the mandate of the US to make Afghanistan a better place. We fail. They care more than we do. We should focus less on what's good or bad for Afghanistan and far more on why we screw up so very much.
Starting with Vietnam our hope to make a number of places better fails miserably. We have no understanding of why our efforts in Germany, Japan, South Korea or Chile basically worked and why we have failed so miserably elsewhere. We have no theory of the case just failure.
Further, we have far too often enabled presidents to reach for our weapons of war and then we wind up with dreadful domestic politics, an ever more imperial presidency, the loss of lives and the exhaustion of the Treasury.
"And it’s driven me crazy for years that the media gave so much more scrutiny to the implementation details of the Biden administration’s withdrawal of forces at a point when the war was already unwinnable and had no public support than it gave to the prior 20 years of failed policy."
I’m surprised that Matt didn’t mention the botched search for bin Laden that resulted from Bush’s dipshit war in Iraq. If we had invested properly in Afghanistan at the start, gotten bin Laden right away and then either done a decent job nation building or declared victory and left it would have been so much better than what we actually did.
I think we can definitely connect this to the failed pattern of "attempting regime change by bombing campaign" that we see illustrated so clearly in Iran right now.
I also think routine counter-terrorism bombing with civilian casualties is just incompatible with a rule-of-law institution-building mission. This country is supposed to have fair courts with due process, clear guidance for behavior, and a pan-ethnic national vision. Meanwhile, on scant evidence, often just following rumors and tribal grievances, bombs are dropping on large swaths of the country hoping to get more bad guys than good guys. This is just not how you act when its your own country that you are responsible for making it functional in the aftermath. This is the "mowing-the-lawn" approach to counter-terrorism, which is at best always a temporary suppression tactic that is accomplished at great cost.
Japan and Germany had hundreds of thousands of troops deployed. There are thousands still in each country today. Serbia we didn't try to overthrow the government. We just strategically bombed to prevent a potential genocide in Kosovo. Panama I'm less informed by but the 1990 Noriega operation I believe was fairly quick and was just to get him out.
No, those are not examples of "mowing the lawn", those are example of "nation-building".
A contemporary comparison between "De-Nazification" and "De-Baathification". Switching to Iraq here only because this is where the GWB admin made the analogy most explicit:
In reality, there was both a more organized process for De-Nazification and a greater attempt to leave German institutions intact. This is not just hindsight bias, but something remarked upon by people who knew the history better.
Yeah but we have no idea why our policies work in some places and fail tragically in others. There are undoubtedly many more reasons for success and failure than suggested here.
As Matt says, prioritizing forces for Iraq undermined our options in Afghanistan. The way to an acceptable ending in Afghanistan* was clear: devote resources at Tora Bora to capturing/killing OBL instead of letting him slip through our fingers and don't embark on the Iraq idiocy.
It was not just that we sent our forces to Iraq; in addition, it monopolized attention and energy, and all elements of government and the national security community pivoted away from Afghanistan and devoted all their time and energy to planning/arguing about Iraq.
* However, I don't know what an acceptable ending in Afghanistan would have been. Presidential system or one more to Matt's liking notwithstanding, I find it doubtful that such a tribal, poor society would ever develop a stable system to our liking.
The other thing that was defining about Afghanistan relative to Iraq was that we had a set of plausibly-achievable coherent military objectives. “Depose an unrated dictator and somehow establish governance infrastructure and institutions, but with humvees” is categorically distinct from “find and annihilate the group sponsoring, supporting, and operationalizing the systemic targeting and killing of Americans”.
Three more GWB blunders soon afte 9/11 that are worth noting:
1. Right after 9/11 Pakistan asked for tariff relief on clothing exports to the US (a major industry in Pakistan). Bush didn't agree because of pressure from clothing manufacturers in the South--at a time when he could have gotten just about anything he asked for.
2. At the same time we were working with China and Iran on anti-terror initiatives; Iran certainly had every reason to want Al-Qaeda to be eliminated. But then Bush (thanks David Frum) listed Iraq, Iran, and N Korea as the "axis of evil" in the State of the Union.
3. Bush also refused to consider one Afghan proposal for a new government--bring back the monarchy from exile. This might well have worked better in such a traditionalist society.
How stupid, stubborn, and "from the gut" GWB was has faded from memory, not least because of how much he has been excelled since then.
> How stupid, stubborn, and "from the gut" GWB was has faded from memory, not least because of how much he has been excelled since then.
He was one of the worst presidents in American history. He bears partial responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents abroad. But it’s not just that. Even if you don’t care about that, the damage that he did to the United States – both domestically and with respect to its position in the world – is enormous.
Few trends in American life are more disturbing than the liberal whitewashing of his reputation. Many liberals I know who would never vote Republican nevertheless are tempted to think of him as just a folksy old guy. They have no extent of the gravity of his errors or the evil that his regime did.
First off, thank you for your service. Second, it's always great when people with on-the-ground experience comment. If you care to share, I'm curious if you have one or two experiences that exemplify why you feel the war was not winnable?
One interaction that stuck with me was with an educated, English-speaking ANA officer from Kabul who told me, essentially, that our mistake was not simplyaa wiping out the Pashtuns. Then there was the provincial-government corruption—sometimes so blatant that you’d find yourself thinking, “At least the Taliban offer consistency and a functioning justice system.”
The broader realization was that we were trying to build a centralized national state in a place where local, tribal, and family loyalties were often far stronger than loyalty to Kabul. And we were fighting people for whom war was an intergenerational tradition. Given the resources they had, they were remarkably capable tactical fighters and have been for decades now. “You (NATO) have the watches we (Taliban) have the time” was the saying.
By 2013 my conclusion was that those two facts were fatal to the project: the political structure we were trying to impose was too weak to hold, and the people resisting it were too decentralized, durable, and good at fighting to be decisively defeated. I don’t think an earlier or larger surge changes that.
This is precisely why the Taliban arises in the first place. The fragmented warlords vying for power after the Soviet withdrawal were massively corrupt and hated. The Talibs were seen as clean nosed scholars who could be trusted not to take bribes. Unfortunately they could also be trusted to not take a lot of other things, democracy, women rights, fair courts, etc. But this wasn't known or at least was considered a better alternative to the rampant infighting of the warlords
One other moment that really crystallized it for me: Marine snipers had an HVT in a position where they could take the shot, but were denied permission. The decision was made to use a Hellfire instead—and the missile missed. I remember thinking: what exactly are we doing here? We had created a system so risk-averse, bureaucratic, and technologically elaborate that it could actually make us less effective at the basic task we were there to accomplish. That incident became a kind of shorthand in my mind for the absurdity of the whole war.
The irony is that Iraq ended up a fairly stable democracy. I don’t think we should have invaded, but at least we got what we wanted, eventually.
What do you think of the argument that the US shouldn’t have tried for regime change in Afghanistan at all, and that Bush should’ve just gone for Bin Laden? After all, it was partly for the sake of regime change that Bin Laden got away.
At the Battle of Tora Bora, the CIA requested 1,000 army rangers to cut off Bin Laden’s escape, but Bush feared that US boots on the ground would undermine the Northern Alliance’s perceived legitimacy at a crucial early stage of the new regime.
The fundamental problem with Afghanistan was that we weren't willing to commit to remaining there for an indefinite amount of time and running the country until they were ready to do it themselves. At the same time we weren't willing to shoot lower and allow a Taliban light government to run the country while we were there. Basically, we weren't willing to make the hard choice of either admitting we were going to act as benevolent long term colonialists (yes the excuse is often used...but plenty of empires like the Romans did good relative to the alternative) or that we were party to a state that was violating human rights or not democratic.
We were shooting for a modern, democratic egalitarian state. That doesn't happen overnight, you need people to build their lives around it, for people to change what they think is appropriate for their female children and choose to stay in the country. Without such a commitment the incentivizes were never going to be for Afghanistan to develop a truly robust civil society and administration since anyone making long term plans about their life and career knew that there was a very good chance that the Taliban would eventually regain power and not only would their investment be nullified they might be punished if they did too much to fight for human rights and to create a modern egalitarian state.
It doesn’t add a ton to the overall picture here but the book The Hardest Place- the American Military adrift in the Pech Valley really leaves you gobsmacked at various aspects of this war. Separately but related I think everyone should watch Restrepo and read Sebastian Jungers accompanying book. If people can check their priors I honestly think it’s good for all Americans who live through 9/11 and the wars thereafter.
You gotta love the guy who thought Trump's kidnapping of Maduro went pretty well accusing the Taliban of having "terrible values." If that's not sufficient, then asserting that we could have emerged victorious over indigenous armies reveals a hegemonic hubris, not to mention a degree of ignorance, that should have even Yglesias loyalists scratching their deluded heads.
My overall opinion is that Iraq guaranteed our loss in Afghanistan but whether Afghanistan could be won depends highly on the definition of victory.
Which brings me to my main complaint about American military usage in modern times: unclear war aims! If our only goals were the Taliban's surrender and for us to be allowed to go after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, I think these were imminently achievable goals. It's not obvious to me that those were the goals of the Bush administration, since they wouldn't accept surrender from the Taliban initially.
I think since Korea that our war aims were not to conquer or convert, but to cripple our opponents. If our goal since Korea was to make our enemies as economically and socially as dysfunctional as possible, we have done very well. If that was our goal we were victorious.
But that's not the kinda "aims" that would sell. So it's not put that way.
Freedom sells. Defence sells. Liberation sells. But are they believable?
Proposals to subject tens of millions of people, most of them just civilians, to long term desperation and dysfunction doesn't sell, even if it is a fairly cheap way to reduce the ability of people targeted to be a threat compared to traditional wars and winning traditional victories.
It is not the mandate of the US to make Afghanistan a better place. We fail. They care more than we do. We should focus less on what's good or bad for Afghanistan and far more on why we screw up so very much.
Starting with Vietnam our hope to make a number of places better fails miserably. We have no understanding of why our efforts in Germany, Japan, South Korea or Chile basically worked and why we have failed so miserably elsewhere. We have no theory of the case just failure.
Further, we have far too often enabled presidents to reach for our weapons of war and then we wind up with dreadful domestic politics, an ever more imperial presidency, the loss of lives and the exhaustion of the Treasury.
"And it’s driven me crazy for years that the media gave so much more scrutiny to the implementation details of the Biden administration’s withdrawal of forces at a point when the war was already unwinnable and had no public support than it gave to the prior 20 years of failed policy."
Thank You
I’m surprised that Matt didn’t mention the botched search for bin Laden that resulted from Bush’s dipshit war in Iraq. If we had invested properly in Afghanistan at the start, gotten bin Laden right away and then either done a decent job nation building or declared victory and left it would have been so much better than what we actually did.
I think we can definitely connect this to the failed pattern of "attempting regime change by bombing campaign" that we see illustrated so clearly in Iran right now.
I also think routine counter-terrorism bombing with civilian casualties is just incompatible with a rule-of-law institution-building mission. This country is supposed to have fair courts with due process, clear guidance for behavior, and a pan-ethnic national vision. Meanwhile, on scant evidence, often just following rumors and tribal grievances, bombs are dropping on large swaths of the country hoping to get more bad guys than good guys. This is just not how you act when its your own country that you are responsible for making it functional in the aftermath. This is the "mowing-the-lawn" approach to counter-terrorism, which is at best always a temporary suppression tactic that is accomplished at great cost.
But it worked well in Japan, Germany, Serbia, Panama etc
Japan and Germany had hundreds of thousands of troops deployed. There are thousands still in each country today. Serbia we didn't try to overthrow the government. We just strategically bombed to prevent a potential genocide in Kosovo. Panama I'm less informed by but the 1990 Noriega operation I believe was fairly quick and was just to get him out.
No, those are not examples of "mowing the lawn", those are example of "nation-building".
A contemporary comparison between "De-Nazification" and "De-Baathification". Switching to Iraq here only because this is where the GWB admin made the analogy most explicit:
https://warontherocks.com/too-soft-americas-failure-to-learn-from-germany-to-iraq/
In reality, there was both a more organized process for De-Nazification and a greater attempt to leave German institutions intact. This is not just hindsight bias, but something remarked upon by people who knew the history better.
Yeah but we have no idea why our policies work in some places and fail tragically in others. There are undoubtedly many more reasons for success and failure than suggested here.
As Matt says, prioritizing forces for Iraq undermined our options in Afghanistan. The way to an acceptable ending in Afghanistan* was clear: devote resources at Tora Bora to capturing/killing OBL instead of letting him slip through our fingers and don't embark on the Iraq idiocy.
It was not just that we sent our forces to Iraq; in addition, it monopolized attention and energy, and all elements of government and the national security community pivoted away from Afghanistan and devoted all their time and energy to planning/arguing about Iraq.
* However, I don't know what an acceptable ending in Afghanistan would have been. Presidential system or one more to Matt's liking notwithstanding, I find it doubtful that such a tribal, poor society would ever develop a stable system to our liking.
The other thing that was defining about Afghanistan relative to Iraq was that we had a set of plausibly-achievable coherent military objectives. “Depose an unrated dictator and somehow establish governance infrastructure and institutions, but with humvees” is categorically distinct from “find and annihilate the group sponsoring, supporting, and operationalizing the systemic targeting and killing of Americans”.
What’s the alternate history of Iraq if we took this path? Sadaam stays in power and one of his sons takes over?
Not trying to imply anything about this being better/worse on net, just genuinely interested in the Yglesias alt-history.
Three more GWB blunders soon afte 9/11 that are worth noting:
1. Right after 9/11 Pakistan asked for tariff relief on clothing exports to the US (a major industry in Pakistan). Bush didn't agree because of pressure from clothing manufacturers in the South--at a time when he could have gotten just about anything he asked for.
2. At the same time we were working with China and Iran on anti-terror initiatives; Iran certainly had every reason to want Al-Qaeda to be eliminated. But then Bush (thanks David Frum) listed Iraq, Iran, and N Korea as the "axis of evil" in the State of the Union.
3. Bush also refused to consider one Afghan proposal for a new government--bring back the monarchy from exile. This might well have worked better in such a traditionalist society.
How stupid, stubborn, and "from the gut" GWB was has faded from memory, not least because of how much he has been excelled since then.
> How stupid, stubborn, and "from the gut" GWB was has faded from memory, not least because of how much he has been excelled since then.
He was one of the worst presidents in American history. He bears partial responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents abroad. But it’s not just that. Even if you don’t care about that, the damage that he did to the United States – both domestically and with respect to its position in the world – is enormous.
Few trends in American life are more disturbing than the liberal whitewashing of his reputation. Many liberals I know who would never vote Republican nevertheless are tempted to think of him as just a folksy old guy. They have no extent of the gravity of his errors or the evil that his regime did.
The monarchy idea is really interesting. Do you feel like a lot of people were talking about that at the time?
My takeaway after my second tour in Afghanistan in 2013 was the war was not winnable and wouldn’t have been even if we had “surged” in 2002.
First off, thank you for your service. Second, it's always great when people with on-the-ground experience comment. If you care to share, I'm curious if you have one or two experiences that exemplify why you feel the war was not winnable?
One interaction that stuck with me was with an educated, English-speaking ANA officer from Kabul who told me, essentially, that our mistake was not simplyaa wiping out the Pashtuns. Then there was the provincial-government corruption—sometimes so blatant that you’d find yourself thinking, “At least the Taliban offer consistency and a functioning justice system.”
The broader realization was that we were trying to build a centralized national state in a place where local, tribal, and family loyalties were often far stronger than loyalty to Kabul. And we were fighting people for whom war was an intergenerational tradition. Given the resources they had, they were remarkably capable tactical fighters and have been for decades now. “You (NATO) have the watches we (Taliban) have the time” was the saying.
By 2013 my conclusion was that those two facts were fatal to the project: the political structure we were trying to impose was too weak to hold, and the people resisting it were too decentralized, durable, and good at fighting to be decisively defeated. I don’t think an earlier or larger surge changes that.
This is precisely why the Taliban arises in the first place. The fragmented warlords vying for power after the Soviet withdrawal were massively corrupt and hated. The Talibs were seen as clean nosed scholars who could be trusted not to take bribes. Unfortunately they could also be trusted to not take a lot of other things, democracy, women rights, fair courts, etc. But this wasn't known or at least was considered a better alternative to the rampant infighting of the warlords
One other moment that really crystallized it for me: Marine snipers had an HVT in a position where they could take the shot, but were denied permission. The decision was made to use a Hellfire instead—and the missile missed. I remember thinking: what exactly are we doing here? We had created a system so risk-averse, bureaucratic, and technologically elaborate that it could actually make us less effective at the basic task we were there to accomplish. That incident became a kind of shorthand in my mind for the absurdity of the whole war.
This piece is excellent and covers a lot of ground missing from many of the 25th anniversary commemorations I’ve been seeing.