My position at the time was that the US should minimize its enemies. AQ was the enemy. The Afghan war was justified by their refusal to give up bin Laden. When we were 'brokering' a new government in Afghanistan, we defined the Taliban broadly as our enemy. There appeared at the time plenty of Taliban-adjacent forces who would have cooperated. I saw no reason for US to exclude them. Maybe all of this would have blown up with Taliban back in power more quickly but it seems Matt's proposed position was really doomed to blow up in a big way.
This is fine as far as it goes, but the notion that you're just going to permanently destroy an ideology and coalition that has substantial purchase among many rural and religious Afghans seems a big stretch, especially since Pakistan cares more about who governs Afghanistan than we do.
Honestly this is all the folly of nation building. We should have just focused on getting the people who did 9/11 and doing whatever damage we could to Al Qaeda.
Honestly, the Lord has spoken, and she needs a full pardon. I mean isn't there some old timey common law rule that if they try and hang you and the rope breaks and you survive that you're free?
My perspective on Afghanistan is heavily influenced by two things:
1) My father's stories of being a draftee infantryman in Vietnam. His summary "we had enough air support to have a hot meal every day, and they had tuna cans full of stolen C-4; and they were winning."
2) T. E. Lawrence's classic article on guerilla warfare from the 1929 Britannica. Guerilla fighters need a place to retreat (Pakistan), but if they have the ability to attack when and where they want it takes a huge force to hold against them long-term.
Thank you for posting this. I was a kid when the Afghanistan War began. I was against the Iraq War and always tried to lump Afghanistan in with the obvious "bad idea" that Iraq was. So many people, very appropriately, sat me down to explain all the many reason that going into Afghanistan was a good idea and had international support. They were right. And so it has brought me a lot of anguish to see so many people forget why we went in, how much we did accomplish, and how much support we had.
I am sorry that we abandoned the people of Afghanistan.
“When a country is being subverted it is not being outfought; it is being out-administered” - Bernard Fall
At the Modern War Institute, we recently had a conference for the five year anniversary of the war to capture its lessons. Matt’s argument lines up will Paul Miller’s in “Choosing Defeat.” There is another argument, which Carter Malkasian makes in “America’s War in Afghanistan” that troop levels and commitments could not have overcome the character of Afghanistan society. They are both great books, but I do not think they explain the casual mechanism of the defeat.
Often what these debates miss is not how we lost, but how did the Taliban win? How did it adapt and create a political apparatus that out-administered the countryside, eliminated corruption, and mobilized the population against the state? It did exactly what the communist in Vietnam did. It embedded itself with the rural population and created a grassroots movement that was tied to them. It was forced to.
On the other hand, the Afghanistan government was overly-centralized and disconnected from the rural population. Just as in Vietnam, provincial and district governors were appointed by the president. There was no meaningful political feedback at the local level. The government never created an administrative system that mobilized the rural population against the Taliban. Because it could rely on foreign aid, it was never forced to.
My view is somewhat different. I think we should have left once the Taliban was initially toppled. We had sent our message and looked extremely stong and capable. Maybe the Taliban never regains power? Or maybe they do but with some sense that they'd like to avoid provoking us again. We would have left on our own terms. Not defeated. Today, I imagine they don't fear anything more than some missile strikes if they supported another 9/11. We could have continued our hunt for bin Laden either way.
Yeah, it's basically like the "bell curve meme" with the two tails being "Bush screwed it up back at the begining" and middle guy from the media/nat-sec world/foreign policy blob shouting "Nooooo, it's because Biden failed to implement a right sized surge to disengage while re-engaging!" with tears of rage in his eyes.
That pussyfooting alliance with Pakistan didn't help things. If I recall correctly, the borderlands in Pakistan were a source of the Taliban's military strength and we didn't do much damage there.
We also went in to Afghanistan, like most other muddling Mideast wars, with limited vision on what we were trying to accomplish (even the successful Kuwaiti invasion had Colin Powell et al flummoxed as to what to do once the Iraqis had been driven out). We appear to be doing the same with Iran.
Pakistan is a large nuclear state and an India-Pakistan War would be substantially worse than anything involving Afghanistan. So we had to tread lightly and still do.
That may be true but treading lightly is why nothing gets accomplished. If we have a 'war-lite' strategy then we're just wasting people and money. If Pakistan and India are dumb enough to launch nukes then let them (though I find that very unlikely).
Here’s the big question here Matt is leaving out. If the US military had gotten Bin Laden in Tora Bora, what happens? Given what we know in follow reporting supposedly Dick Cheney was itching to go to Iraq practically the day after 9/11. So if we get Bin Laden, the rationale for the Iraq war pivots much more to “we won the first battle, but we have not yet won the war”. In this scenario where Bin Laden’s death likely leads to even fewer troops on the ground as way more of the American public and politicians basically say Afghanistan was “mission accomplished”.
Ok so let’s say the Bush Administration wasn’t filled with neocons and other regular proto Hesgeth* types and there wasn’t actually a plan from the beginning to invade Iraq. If we get Bin Laden at a later date say a year later (if troops weren’t being pulled into Iraq think this a very live possibility for reasons Matt lays out). Again, what are the chances of their being the political will to keep huge number of troops around in Afghanistan in order to secure a post Taliban future?
I bring this all up just to note that looking back 25 years later, the limited goal of trying to destroy Al Queda was clearly achievable, but I think you’re giving short shrift to the idea that keeping in mind political realities, a project to secure Afghanistan’s future long term was doomed to fail.
* it’s really instructive to me that so many “never Trumpers” were part of the foreign policy stool of the Reagan coalition. Sort of indicative to me that there was a small cadre of conservatives who were foreign policy hawks for deep seated ideological reasons. But Hesgeth’s “I never actually emotionally matured past being 14 years old” schtick it’s like a fun house mirror expose to me that a so so much of conservative support for hawkish foreign policy is just dumb “manly man” BS.
I think this is the "real" answer. There never was a popular appetite for the nation building commitment and the historical scenarios where such a thing arguably 'worked' involve too many totally different variables and contingencies.
The answer was to use all of our might to find and kill bin Laden then leave with a warning stapled to the door of every Afghan power broker that if they ever allowed something like that to develop on their soil again we'd come back and kill them too.
In hindsight, I question whether anything would have produced a good government in Afghanistan. Even if we’d flooded the whole country with troops right after the war, clearly there are a lot of people in that country who support the Taliban and unless the Northern Alliance produced some Napoleon type leader, it’s just hard to see how what ended up happening wasn’t the outcome regardless.
If the Bush Admin had made Afghanistan its #1 priority, then there's a lot of moves that should have followed. For example, this would have necessitated a reapproachment with Iran, who sponsored the Northern Alliance before we took it on. Indeed, a greater troop presence would have been necessary to create the space to take our time building a government there that could work. As it was, we were forced to move quickly so we could at least get some more boots out there on the ground, which made for a government that was rather problematic.
Instead though Afghanistan just ended up being a stepping stone to the next thing rather than a long-term commitment. Even when we left Iraq, we didn't really recommit to Afghanistan, we just ended up satisfied with the situation and left it in stasis so we could wash our hands of it, which is what Trump I did with it.
Perhaps the "Afghanistan as stepping stone" thing was in part because while al-Qaeda did of course use Afghanistan as a training ground, they were still seen more as a creation of the Arab world: the 19 direct perpetrators of 9/11 were 15 Saudis, 2 Emiratis, an Egyptian and a Lebanese.
Also, early in the war, Iran was providing us with intelligence, which Cheney then shut down when he found out about it. A complete lack of ability to set real priorities.
>If the United States had done an Iraq-scale troop deployment at the time, the insurgency never would have gained strength.<
So, if our nation building invasion had only been mounted on a much larger scale (vastly more expensive, far more dead Americans?) it would have resulted in a permanent defeat of the Taliban, at least provided said invasion had triggered desirable cooperation on the part of Pakistan? Hmm...
(All the while a Communist dictatorship on the other side of the Pacific from us was rapidly narrowing the gap between their capabilities and ours; they were happy to see our attentions diverted.)
I'm skeptical.
The particular form of government that obtains in a landlocked, medieval central Asian nation is not a vital interest of the United States of America. It may be *an* interest, sure. Just like we'd prefer to see Turkmenistan and Haiti well-governed. But an interest worthy of a massive and ruinously expensive invasion and rebuilding project in a country that has successfully resisted every empire that laid a glove on it for centuries? That's a reach.
For the record I completely concur with Matt our initial military response was warranted. The Taliban was an accomplice in the worst attack on the US homeland since Lee invaded Pennsylvania, and it deserved a biblically violent thrashing.
But our invasion, while maximally punitive, should also have been brief. I vehemently disagree with Matt on this one.
Yes, precisely. I’m sure a better short-term outcome in Afghanistan could have been achieved. But the question always when you invade a foreign country that you need to be able to answer is: how are you going to withdraw again? And I can’t see a scenario where America withdraws and Afghanistan remains well-governed (let alone a democracy).
1. I dont think I’ve ever heard anyone argue that Bush *didn’t* lose Afghanistan through his insane decision to invade Iraq.
2. What was the “bad policy choice” Matt is referring to here? The Obama surge?
“It was fashionable at one point to argue that the Bush administration’s passion for invading Iraq had fatally undermined the good war in Afghanistan. And while that view later became unfashionable because it inspired a bad policy choice of its own…”
I agree that is Matt’s thesis, and I agree with it. I just wondered what was the unnamed “bad policy choice” *that was inspired by* the argument that Bush lost Afghanistan by focusing too much on Iraq.
Too lazy right now to find charts indicating how much both failed campaigns have added to our overall debt. Although not the central thesis of today’s take, it lends credence to why our perpetual presence in the Middle East continues to be a loser.
My position at the time was that the US should minimize its enemies. AQ was the enemy. The Afghan war was justified by their refusal to give up bin Laden. When we were 'brokering' a new government in Afghanistan, we defined the Taliban broadly as our enemy. There appeared at the time plenty of Taliban-adjacent forces who would have cooperated. I saw no reason for US to exclude them. Maybe all of this would have blown up with Taliban back in power more quickly but it seems Matt's proposed position was really doomed to blow up in a big way.
> the British-drawn border that separates the Pashto-speaking parts of Afghanistan from the Pashto-speaking parts of Pakistan
Oh let's not be all nitpicky about one slightly sub optimal border. Focus on all their other spectacularly well drawn borders.
This is fine as far as it goes, but the notion that you're just going to permanently destroy an ideology and coalition that has substantial purchase among many rural and religious Afghans seems a big stretch, especially since Pakistan cares more about who governs Afghanistan than we do.
Honestly this is all the folly of nation building. We should have just focused on getting the people who did 9/11 and doing whatever damage we could to Al Qaeda.
What-the-actual-fuck!?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-was-mess-tennessee-fails-execute-inmate-2-lethal-injections-rcna600863
Honestly, the Lord has spoken, and she needs a full pardon. I mean isn't there some old timey common law rule that if they try and hang you and the rope breaks and you survive that you're free?
My perspective on Afghanistan is heavily influenced by two things:
1) My father's stories of being a draftee infantryman in Vietnam. His summary "we had enough air support to have a hot meal every day, and they had tuna cans full of stolen C-4; and they were winning."
2) T. E. Lawrence's classic article on guerilla warfare from the 1929 Britannica. Guerilla fighters need a place to retreat (Pakistan), but if they have the ability to attack when and where they want it takes a huge force to hold against them long-term.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/T-E-Lawrence-on-guerrilla-warfare-1984900
Thank you for posting this. I was a kid when the Afghanistan War began. I was against the Iraq War and always tried to lump Afghanistan in with the obvious "bad idea" that Iraq was. So many people, very appropriately, sat me down to explain all the many reason that going into Afghanistan was a good idea and had international support. They were right. And so it has brought me a lot of anguish to see so many people forget why we went in, how much we did accomplish, and how much support we had.
I am sorry that we abandoned the people of Afghanistan.
“When a country is being subverted it is not being outfought; it is being out-administered” - Bernard Fall
At the Modern War Institute, we recently had a conference for the five year anniversary of the war to capture its lessons. Matt’s argument lines up will Paul Miller’s in “Choosing Defeat.” There is another argument, which Carter Malkasian makes in “America’s War in Afghanistan” that troop levels and commitments could not have overcome the character of Afghanistan society. They are both great books, but I do not think they explain the casual mechanism of the defeat.
Often what these debates miss is not how we lost, but how did the Taliban win? How did it adapt and create a political apparatus that out-administered the countryside, eliminated corruption, and mobilized the population against the state? It did exactly what the communist in Vietnam did. It embedded itself with the rural population and created a grassroots movement that was tied to them. It was forced to.
On the other hand, the Afghanistan government was overly-centralized and disconnected from the rural population. Just as in Vietnam, provincial and district governors were appointed by the president. There was no meaningful political feedback at the local level. The government never created an administrative system that mobilized the rural population against the Taliban. Because it could rely on foreign aid, it was never forced to.
Troop levels and Pakistan were supporting factors, but they were not the critical influencer on the Taliban victory. For more on the lessons of Afghanistan, I recommend reading my article, “All Power is Local” in Military Review: https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/January-February-2023/Rose/
My view is somewhat different. I think we should have left once the Taliban was initially toppled. We had sent our message and looked extremely stong and capable. Maybe the Taliban never regains power? Or maybe they do but with some sense that they'd like to avoid provoking us again. We would have left on our own terms. Not defeated. Today, I imagine they don't fear anything more than some missile strikes if they supported another 9/11. We could have continued our hunt for bin Laden either way.
Yeah, it's basically like the "bell curve meme" with the two tails being "Bush screwed it up back at the begining" and middle guy from the media/nat-sec world/foreign policy blob shouting "Nooooo, it's because Biden failed to implement a right sized surge to disengage while re-engaging!" with tears of rage in his eyes.
That pussyfooting alliance with Pakistan didn't help things. If I recall correctly, the borderlands in Pakistan were a source of the Taliban's military strength and we didn't do much damage there.
We also went in to Afghanistan, like most other muddling Mideast wars, with limited vision on what we were trying to accomplish (even the successful Kuwaiti invasion had Colin Powell et al flummoxed as to what to do once the Iraqis had been driven out). We appear to be doing the same with Iran.
Pakistan is a large nuclear state and an India-Pakistan War would be substantially worse than anything involving Afghanistan. So we had to tread lightly and still do.
That may be true but treading lightly is why nothing gets accomplished. If we have a 'war-lite' strategy then we're just wasting people and money. If Pakistan and India are dumb enough to launch nukes then let them (though I find that very unlikely).
Here’s the big question here Matt is leaving out. If the US military had gotten Bin Laden in Tora Bora, what happens? Given what we know in follow reporting supposedly Dick Cheney was itching to go to Iraq practically the day after 9/11. So if we get Bin Laden, the rationale for the Iraq war pivots much more to “we won the first battle, but we have not yet won the war”. In this scenario where Bin Laden’s death likely leads to even fewer troops on the ground as way more of the American public and politicians basically say Afghanistan was “mission accomplished”.
Ok so let’s say the Bush Administration wasn’t filled with neocons and other regular proto Hesgeth* types and there wasn’t actually a plan from the beginning to invade Iraq. If we get Bin Laden at a later date say a year later (if troops weren’t being pulled into Iraq think this a very live possibility for reasons Matt lays out). Again, what are the chances of their being the political will to keep huge number of troops around in Afghanistan in order to secure a post Taliban future?
I bring this all up just to note that looking back 25 years later, the limited goal of trying to destroy Al Queda was clearly achievable, but I think you’re giving short shrift to the idea that keeping in mind political realities, a project to secure Afghanistan’s future long term was doomed to fail.
* it’s really instructive to me that so many “never Trumpers” were part of the foreign policy stool of the Reagan coalition. Sort of indicative to me that there was a small cadre of conservatives who were foreign policy hawks for deep seated ideological reasons. But Hesgeth’s “I never actually emotionally matured past being 14 years old” schtick it’s like a fun house mirror expose to me that a so so much of conservative support for hawkish foreign policy is just dumb “manly man” BS.
I think this is the "real" answer. There never was a popular appetite for the nation building commitment and the historical scenarios where such a thing arguably 'worked' involve too many totally different variables and contingencies.
The answer was to use all of our might to find and kill bin Laden then leave with a warning stapled to the door of every Afghan power broker that if they ever allowed something like that to develop on their soil again we'd come back and kill them too.
In hindsight, I question whether anything would have produced a good government in Afghanistan. Even if we’d flooded the whole country with troops right after the war, clearly there are a lot of people in that country who support the Taliban and unless the Northern Alliance produced some Napoleon type leader, it’s just hard to see how what ended up happening wasn’t the outcome regardless.
If the Bush Admin had made Afghanistan its #1 priority, then there's a lot of moves that should have followed. For example, this would have necessitated a reapproachment with Iran, who sponsored the Northern Alliance before we took it on. Indeed, a greater troop presence would have been necessary to create the space to take our time building a government there that could work. As it was, we were forced to move quickly so we could at least get some more boots out there on the ground, which made for a government that was rather problematic.
Instead though Afghanistan just ended up being a stepping stone to the next thing rather than a long-term commitment. Even when we left Iraq, we didn't really recommit to Afghanistan, we just ended up satisfied with the situation and left it in stasis so we could wash our hands of it, which is what Trump I did with it.
Perhaps the "Afghanistan as stepping stone" thing was in part because while al-Qaeda did of course use Afghanistan as a training ground, they were still seen more as a creation of the Arab world: the 19 direct perpetrators of 9/11 were 15 Saudis, 2 Emiratis, an Egyptian and a Lebanese.
Also, early in the war, Iran was providing us with intelligence, which Cheney then shut down when he found out about it. A complete lack of ability to set real priorities.
>If the United States had done an Iraq-scale troop deployment at the time, the insurgency never would have gained strength.<
So, if our nation building invasion had only been mounted on a much larger scale (vastly more expensive, far more dead Americans?) it would have resulted in a permanent defeat of the Taliban, at least provided said invasion had triggered desirable cooperation on the part of Pakistan? Hmm...
(All the while a Communist dictatorship on the other side of the Pacific from us was rapidly narrowing the gap between their capabilities and ours; they were happy to see our attentions diverted.)
I'm skeptical.
The particular form of government that obtains in a landlocked, medieval central Asian nation is not a vital interest of the United States of America. It may be *an* interest, sure. Just like we'd prefer to see Turkmenistan and Haiti well-governed. But an interest worthy of a massive and ruinously expensive invasion and rebuilding project in a country that has successfully resisted every empire that laid a glove on it for centuries? That's a reach.
For the record I completely concur with Matt our initial military response was warranted. The Taliban was an accomplice in the worst attack on the US homeland since Lee invaded Pennsylvania, and it deserved a biblically violent thrashing.
But our invasion, while maximally punitive, should also have been brief. I vehemently disagree with Matt on this one.
Yes, precisely. I’m sure a better short-term outcome in Afghanistan could have been achieved. But the question always when you invade a foreign country that you need to be able to answer is: how are you going to withdraw again? And I can’t see a scenario where America withdraws and Afghanistan remains well-governed (let alone a democracy).
1. I dont think I’ve ever heard anyone argue that Bush *didn’t* lose Afghanistan through his insane decision to invade Iraq.
2. What was the “bad policy choice” Matt is referring to here? The Obama surge?
“It was fashionable at one point to argue that the Bush administration’s passion for invading Iraq had fatally undermined the good war in Afghanistan. And while that view later became unfashionable because it inspired a bad policy choice of its own…”
I think Matt's thesis is that Obama surge should have been the bush Surge -Iraq. The Obama surge was already too late.
I agree that is Matt’s thesis, and I agree with it. I just wondered what was the unnamed “bad policy choice” *that was inspired by* the argument that Bush lost Afghanistan by focusing too much on Iraq.
Too lazy right now to find charts indicating how much both failed campaigns have added to our overall debt. Although not the central thesis of today’s take, it lends credence to why our perpetual presence in the Middle East continues to be a loser.
Bush started with an essentially balanced budget and left with $6 trillion in debt. I've heard figures from $1.5 to $6 trillion for his dubious wars.
Didn't Bush II contribute to the US national debt more through tax cuts than through spending: military or otherwise?
For sure (and why did Obama continue them for so long?). But the wars were significant too.