Afghanistan’s War

By
Nick Wadhams
Updated on September 4, 2019, 4:55 AM GMT+8
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The longest war in American history has gone on for more than 17 years. The U.S.
and its NATO-led allies announced the official conclusion of their combat mission in
Afghanistan in 2014. But with the country remaining in violent turmoil, plans for the
exit of the coalition have been repeatedly put off. In his third year in office, U.S.
President Donald Trump has expressed an eagerness to withdraw his country’s forces,
which make up 14,000 of the 17,000 foreign troops there. His government is pursuing
a peace deal with the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalists who once ruled the country
and have reclaimed significant patches of it.
Coalition Troops in Afghanistan
Source: U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction

The Situation
American and Taliban representatives reached a draft agreement in early September
which, according to the U.S., would pave the way for a broader peace deal between
the Taliban and the Afghan government. In September, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S.
envoy in talks with the Taliban, said if “everything goes in accordance with the
agreement” the U.S. would pull out about 5,000 troops within 135 days of the
accord’s signing. In their talks, the two sides discussed a pledge by the Taliban to
prevent terrorist groups from using Afghanistan as a base and whether the Taliban
would end its refusal to negotiate directly with the Afghan government, which it
considers a puppet of the U.S. Conflict in the country has escalated since the Afghan
military officially became responsible for security in 2014. The radical group Islamic
State established a presence in the country’s east and has claimed credit for terrorist
attacks. The larger threat is the resurgent Taliban. As of January, roughly 11% of
Afghanistan’s population lived in areas under the control of the Taliban and other
insurgents, and more than a quarter were in contested regions, an assessment the U.S.
military no longer makes. The Afghan military, which receives training and
advice from the U.S. and its allies, has been hampered by insufficient air power and
heavy combat losses and desertions.
The Background
In 1989, the Soviet military pulled out of Afghanistan, after a decade-long occupation
that had made the country a front line in the Cold War. The U.S., which actively
supported the Soviets’ opponents, including radical Islamist factions, also
disengaged. Bloody chaos followed until the Taliban seized the capital Kabul from the
feuding warlords who had all but leveled it. The Taliban imposed stern theocratic rule
and gave the terrorist group al-Qaeda a base. In 2001, after the Taliban refused to
extradite al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following his group’s Sept. 11 attacks on
the U.S., the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. When bin Laden and the Taliban leadership
fled, the U.S. mission morphed into a nation-building undertaking — but with limited
military resources, as the U.S. focused on a separate war in Iraq. Eventually, more
than 50 nations joined the coalition led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In
2009, U.S. President Barack Obama ordered a “surge” in forces that reached a peak of
140,000 in 2011. Military commanders reported progress on the ground, but war
fatigue at home, especially after the killing of bin Laden in Pakistan, led Obama to
start winding down the American troop presence. Doubts that the Afghan military
could stand on its own prompted him to leave the last of them in place when he turned
the presidency over to Trump in January 2017. Within a year, Trump had deployed an
additional 3,500 U.S. troops to the country at the Pentagon’s urging. An
estimated 212,000 people have been killed in the conflict in Afghanistan and
neighboring Pakistan. The U.S. appropriated $132 billion for Afghanistan’s
reconstruction from 2002 through the end of 2018.
Will America Ever Leave Afghanistan?

Will America Ever Leave Afghanistan?

The Argument
There’s widespread agreement in the U.S. that the war against the Taliban can’t be
won militarily. The U.S. commander in charge of American and coalition forces,
General Scott Miller, said just that in an interview with NBC in late 2018. There are
divisions, however, over how fast and under what conditions the U.S. should exit the
fight. On one end are those who say it’s important to first negotiate a
political agreement that would constrain the Taliban in the event they regain power. In
 this scenario, the Taliban would pledge to never again allow a global terrorist threat
to emanate from Afghanistan and to respect the country’s current laws and
constitution, that is, refrain from reinstituting strict Islamic law. On the other end are
those who say such assurances from the Taliban would be meaningless. Some who
hold this position say the priority should be to stop pouring lives and money into
remaking Afghanistan when it isn’t working and wasn’t the original motivation for the
war. Others argue it’s too dangerous to leave Afghanistan with the Taliban as strong
as they are and the Afghan forces as weak.
The Reference Shelf
 A 2019 report by the UN Secretary-General detailed the challenges facing
Afghanistan.
 Quarterly reports by the U.S. Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction
include a section on security.
 A U.S. Congressional Research Service report on Afghanistan reviews issues for U.S.
policy.
 Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies compares U.S. challenges in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Glen Carey contributed to this article.

https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/afghanistan

The history of the Afghanistan war

8 Mar 20128 March 2012

Last updated at 00:03

GETTY IMAGES

The war in Afghanistan began back in 2001.

A group called the Taliban had controlled most of the country since 1996 but they were overthrown in November 2001 by British and
American armed forces, as well as lots of Afghan fighters from a group called the Northern Alliance.

Why was there a war?

During the time that the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, they allowed an organisation called al-Qaeda to have training camps there.
In September 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The United States believed that Osama Bin Laden - who
was the head of al-Qaeda - was the man behind these attacks.

There was a lot of international pressure on the Afghan leaders to hand over Osama Bin Laden. When the Taliban didn't do this, the United
States decided they would use their armed forces.

In October 2001, the USA began bombing Afghanistan. They targeted bin Laden's al-Qaeda fighters and also the Taliban.

In November 2001, the Northern Alliance took control of the Afghan capital Kabul. They were being helped by the US and other countries
that agreed with it, including the UK.

The Taliban were quickly driven out of the capital city, Kabul, but even today Afghanistan remains a dangerous place.

It was in 2011, ten years after the war in Afghanistan began that Osama bin Laden was eventually found by American soldiers in Pakistan,
where he was shot and killed.

British troops and forces from other countries are still in Afghanistan, trying to help the government build a stable nation.

The UK government plans to take all troops out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/15214375

We Lost the War in

Afghanistan. Get Over
It.
After 18 years of war, thousands of lives lost, and hundreds of billions of dollars
squandered, the United States accomplished precisely nothing.
BY STEPHEN M. WALT
| SEPTEMBER 11, 2019, 4:10 PM
President George W. Bush deliver remarks while flanked by Afghanistan President Hamid
Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in the Rose Garden at the White House
September 27, 2006 in Washington, DC. MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

Afghanistan has been back in the news lately, but most commentators are
missing the big picture. In recent weeks there has been a raft of articles
suggesting the United States and the Taliban were nearing a peace deal that
would enable the United States to withdraw most, if not all, of its forces there.
These rumors prompted immediate warnings from skeptics such as retired
Gen. David Petraeus, who failed to win the war on his watch but wants his
successors to keep trying, and assorted other hawks who want America’s
longest war to continue and still think victory is achievable.

Next up was U.S. President Donald Trump. Eager for another high-profile
photo-op, the narcissist-in-chief came up with a scheme to invite Taliban
leaders to Camp David and crown the peace deal there. According to some
reports, Trump eventually got persuaded to drop this ill-conceived idea, but
this latest sign of a White House in disarray may have contributed to the
decision to fire National Security Advisor John Bolton earlier this week.
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In fact, all this recent juicy hoopla is missing the big picture. We can palaver
about peace terms, residual forces, the implications for the upcoming Afghan
elections, et cetera, as long as we want, but the cold, hard reality is that the
United States lost the war in Afghanistan. All we are debating—whether in
talks with the Taliban or in op-ed pages back home—is the size and shape of
the fig leaf designed to conceal a major strategic failure, after 18 years of war,
thousands of lives lost, and hundreds of billions of dollars squandered.

To be clear, the Afghan debacle is not, strictly speaking, a military defeat. The
Taliban never vanquished the U.S. military in a large-scale clash of arms, or
caused its forces there to collapse. Instead, it is a defeat in the Clausewitzian
sense—18 years of war and “nation building” did not produce the political
aims that U.S. leaders (both Republicans and Democrats) had set for
themselves. The reason is fairly simple: Afghanistan’s fate was never going to
be determined by foreigners coming from 7,000 miles away.

As some of us have been pointing out for years, the conditions for a successful
counterinsurgency and nation-building campaign were almost entirely lacking
in Afghanistan. The country is isolated, poor, mountainous, and divided into
many different ethnonational groups. It has no tradition of democracy, a long
history of local autonomy, and a deep antipathy to foreign interference. The
central government in Kabul was and remains irredeemably corrupt. Pouring
billions of dollars of aid money into the country made that problem worse, and
its army and security forces remained ineffective despite prolonged efforts to
build them up. The Taliban had sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan and
support from Islamabad (which had its own reasons for providing such aid),
which meant it could withdraw when necessary, limit its costs, and wait it out.
Lastly, the claim that it was necessary to deny al Qaeda a “safe haven”—a
rationale invoked by both Trump and former U.S. President Barack Obama—
was increasingly dubious, especially once Osama bin Laden was dead and that
terrorist group had morphed and spread to many other countries.

The taproot of the problem, of course, is the enormous difficulty of the sort of
large-scale social engineering the United States was attempting in a country so
very, very different from it. Trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern,
Western-style democracy was an act of extraordinary hubris, and all the more
so when U.S. leaders told themselves they could do it quickly. Rejiggering
another society’s institutions and culture inevitably generates resentment and
unintended consequences, and all the more so when one is using a crude
instrument like military power and trying to do it more or less overnight.
Fighting and governing are two different activities, and the ability to blow
things up with great precision does not confer a similar capacity to shape
political realities on the ground. As former Deputy National Security Advisor
Ben Rhodes once admitted, “the [American] military can do enormous things.
It can win wars and stabilize conflicts. But the military can’t create a political
culture or build a society.” Unfortunately, that is precisely what U.S. leaders
were asking it to do.

All of this has been obvious for a long time—indeed, for more than a decade.
In 2009, for example, I wrote: “The more troops we send and the more we
interfere in Afghan affairs, the more we look like foreign occupiers and the
more resistance we will face. There is therefore little reason to expect a US
victory” (emphasis added). In 2011, I wrote the following: “The truth is that
the United States and its allies lost the war in Iraq and are going to lose the
war in Afghanistan. There: I said it. By ‘lose,’ I mean we will eventually
withdraw our military forces without having achieved our core political
objectives, and with our overall strategic position weakened.”

I take no pleasure in having seen where this one was headed, and my point is
not to say “I told you so.” Rather, the point is that it wasn’t that hard to figure
this out, and plenty of people on the inside understood this problem long
before I did. But neither former U.S. President George W. Bush, Obama, nor
even Trump was able or willing to bite the bullet, give Americans the bad
news, and change course. And perhaps the most disturbing part is that it is
easy to imagine those who criticize a U.S. withdrawal today writing the
essentially the same op-ed 10 years hence, were America foolish enough to
keep the war going for another decade.

Why didn’t the United States change course sooner? In part because it is a
wealthy and powerful country, so it is able to do dumb and expensive things
for a long time without feeling too much pain. In part because military
commanders don’t like to admit defeat, which is a laudable feature most of the
time but not in circumstances like this. In part because the country now relies
on an all-volunteer force, and the men and women who have chosen to serve
have been willing to undertake the sacrifices the country’s commitment
entailed without complaint. And in part because a long series of
commanders kept promising success, instead of telling the commander-in-
chief that they had been given an assignment that wasn’t necessary and that
they could not accomplish at a reasonable cost.

No one should be happy about this situation. But Americans might console
themselves with the sober recognition that they’ve been through events like
this before. The United States is a powerful, extremely fortunate, and
intermittently virtuous country that has done great things for its citizens and
for others on more than one occasion. But it is neither perfect nor omnipotent,
and its history also contains any number of errors and disappointments. The
War of 1812 was an ill-conceived venture that got Washington occupied and
the White House set ablaze. The sad fate of post-Civil War Reconstruction
might have taught the United States that remaking societies through military
occupation is a chancy business at best. U.S. intervention in the Russian Civil
War was a failure too, the Korean War ended in stalemate, and the war in
Vietnam, as Andrew Bacevich reminds us, was an ignominious failure as well.
Defeat in Afghanistan need not lead to defeatism; it should lead instead to
smarter decisions about where and for what purpose the country commits its
military forces.

No country should expect to win all of its wars, no matter how strong it
appears to be and how virtuous or well intended its aims. But at the very least,
a great nation should try to learn from its missteps and do what it can to avoid
them in the future. An obvious corollary: Don’t take foreign policy advice from
people who have been loudly and repeatedly wrong. In this respect, John
Bolton’s departure from the White House might be seen as a step in the right
direction.