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ARGUMENT

The United States Keeps Doing What

It Can’t
The main lesson from the failed intervention in Afghanistan is about the dangers of self-
delusion. Will anyone learn it?

By James Traub
AUGUST 20, 2021, 1:40 PM

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U.S. Army soldiers use an M-88 recovery vehicle to demolish Hesco barriers as troops prepare for the withdrawal from Forward Operating Base Pasab in Kandahar province,
Afghanistan, on June 2, 2014. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

We only learn through suffering. Americans have experienced a spasm

of shame as they have witnessed the whirlwind collapse of Afghanistan in the aftermath
of American military withdrawal. Right now, we are obsessed with the question of
whether U.S. President Joe Biden could have mitigated the suffering of the Afghan
people at the hands of the Taliban if he had withdrawn those troops more slowly or
differently. That’s an important matter. But the more fundamental question is: What
should we learn from the failure of an enterprise into which the United States has poured
so much life, money, and time?

We need to first recognize a point about lessons. Any lesson drawn from political failure
will itself be political, which is to say that it will be used in the service of some other
argument. Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell applied the alleged
lessons of the Vietnam War—don’t intervene without a clear plan to win, without a clear
exit, without clear public support—to oppose a radically different proposed intervention
in the Balkans in 1993. Powell used his ownership of those lessons, as the senior military
figure in the administration of President Bill Clinton, to prevent a use of force he
considered unnecessary. We should be sorry that he succeeded.

Afghanistan is, of course, the prime example of the

forever war that it has now become almost obligatory to Leaving Afghanistan
deplore. America’s utter inability to fashion a decent, What happens to the country and its
effective Afghan state after 20 years will be taken by people after the forever war ends?
many on the left as proof that the United States only
MORE ON THIS TOPIC
makes things worse wherever it exercises its blundering
dominion, and by realists on the right to demonstrate
the folly of pursuing good in failed states. But we need to ask exactly what it is that failed
in Afghanistan and whether that failure is particular to “the graveyard of empires,” as
some have dubbed Afghanistan, where all great imperial designs have come to grief, or
whether that failure can be attributed to a generalizable principle.

Here I recommend the recently published American War in Afghanistan, a sweeping

history of the 20-year encounter between Americans and Afghans by Carter Malkasian, a
Pashto-speaking former Defense and State Department official with long experience in
Afghanistan. Malkasian is drawn to two conflicting, but not irreconcilable, themes:
American officials made a series of colossal errors that continually frustrated their own
goals, and the Taliban probably would have returned to power even if the foreigners had
gotten things right. Perhaps both are true.

The list of missed opportunities is long. The administration of George W. Bush refused to
include the Taliban in the November 2001 talks to forge a new government in
Afghanistan; Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to pay for an army big
enough and effective enough to stand up to the Taliban resurgence in 2005; President
Barack Obama authorized a counterinsurgency strategy in 2009 that failed on its own
terms while greatly increasing the tempo of killing; an impatient President Donald
Trump cut a lousy deal with the Taliban in 2020. Malkasian perhaps dwells too little on
yet another epic failure: the corrupting effect of the mighty American spigot of dollars.

READ MORE

A Non-Interventionist Region Reacts to Afghanistan

The factors that led to the country’s collapse find many parallels in Latin America.

LATIN AMERICA BRIEF | CATHERINE OSBORN

Malkasian states in closing that American officials should have had the “forethought” to
recognize when preconceptions about their own capacities, those of their host
government, or of their adversary proved illusory. Yes, they should. But one can hardly
think of a more piercing lesson from Vietnam, where Americans overestimated the
staying power of the Saigon regime and underestimated the resilience of the Viet Cong.
American optimism—or imperial hubris—appears to be quite literally bulletproof. It may
not be in Americans’ nature to know better, for most lack the patience as well as the
stomach for imperial adventures. Only the rare American abroad will attain the fine-
grained knowledge required to distinguish the good warlord from the bad.

Malkasian argues that while wiser policy could have led to an earlier exit and much less
bloodshed, it probably could not have led to victory. This is so in part because the Afghan
government commanded little or no loyalty from its own people, and the Afghan army
was hopelessly fragmented and poorly commanded, as we have now seen all too vividly.
But Malkasian also shows that the Taliban persisted despite the American onslaught
because they were extraordinarily resilient, patient, and resourceful, and far more
willing than their adversaries to die and kill. The real key to the war is that despite their
brutality the Taliban drew on a deep well of popular support because “they fought for
Islam and resistance to occupation, values enshrined in Afghan identity.”

Other experts have deprecated this claim of religious identification. But it still may be
true that the outcome was foretold from the start, and thus that it was a war best not
fought. If we go back and ask what we would have done if we knew then what we know
now, the answer may be that Bush would have pushed Mullah Mohammad Omar, the
Taliban’s leader, harder than he did to turn over Osama bin Laden, and thus avoid a war
altogether—even though this would have left the nation under the Taliban’s medieval
despotism. Second best would have been giving the Taliban a place in the government of
then-President Hamid Karzai. Third best would have been forgoing counterinsurgency
for a more limited counterterrorism policy in 2009. Instead, as Malkasian mordantly puts
it, “We resuscitated a state of civil war so that we could sleep a little better at night.”

U.S. soldiers return to Camp Phoenix from a patrol near the town of Musa Qala in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan on April 11,
2011. PETER PARKS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The lesson of Afghanistan is thus not that the United States is uniquely maladroit, much
less malevolent. Rather, it is that the United States keeps insisting that it must do that
which it cannot do. Because Americans say that they must do it, they persuade
themselves that they can do it, whether it is rolling back communism in Southeast Asia
or conquering sectarian hatred in Iraq or installing good government in Afghanistan.
Forethought, to use Malkasian’s term, should mean recognizing that the United States
does not, in fact, have to do that which cannot be done. It can bend circumstances to its
advantage, but it cannot remake the circumstances themselves.

And so, yes, no more forever wars. In its long wars, where the exit strategy requires
leaving behind a legitimate and self-sustaining government, the United States only
protracts its own suffering and, far more, that of the host people. But what else? Will
American policymakers draw from Afghanistan the lesson that they should stick to great-
power competition, a game they have been playing for much of the last century, and stop
meddling in weak, troublesome countries, a preoccupation of the post-Cold War era?

That’s a pipe dream. The world is not a chessboard with China or Russia playing black
and Washington and its allies playing white; rogue players like the Taliban keep
intruding. Maybe tomorrow’s threat will come not from Islamist extremists but from
state-backed hackers vowing to bring America’s infrastructure to a grinding halt, or from
a despot who gets hold of biological weapons. What if, God forbid, the United States had
to invade Iran? Bush really had no choice but to invade Afghanistan once Mullah Omar
refused to turn over bin Laden. The question for the future is what the United States
should do once it succeeds in eliminating such a threat.

Afghanistan mostly provides us with negative answers to that question. But there are
alternative paths. The United Nations is one such path, as the former Afghanistan
diplomat James Dobbins argued in America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to
Iraq. There are diplomatic off-ramps that can make an intervention self-limiting.
Perhaps we should even consider the bitter wisdom of Jacqueline Hazelton, a scholar at
the Naval War College who recently wrotethat counterinsurgencies succeed not by
installing legitimate government but by co-opting rival elites, abusing human rights, and
imposing tight military control on civilian populations.

You can understand why many Britons were happy to hand off the imperial burden to the
United States after World War II. An increasing number of Americans feel the same sense
of exhaustion. But only China is waiting in the wings. The United States will have to keep
blundering—and trying to benefit from painful lessons—for the foreseeable future.

James Traub is a columnist at Foreign Policy, nonresident fellow at New York

University’s Center on International Cooperation, and author of the book What
Was Liberalism? The Past, Present and Promise of A Noble Idea.

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