By Eric Vandenbroeck and
co-workers
Currently in the
process of hastily letting go of 20-year occupation that began shortly after
Sept. 11, cost over $2 trillion, took more than 170,000 lives and ultimately
failed to defeat the Taliban. Vowing
retaliation for the recent Kabul attack in its final move, the US carried
out what it called a defensive
airstrike in Kabu, targeting a suspected ISIS-K suicide bomber who posed
an "imminent" threat to the airport, US Central Command said Sunday.
The Pentagon has said the strike resulted in secondary explosions, and those
explosions may have been what killed the civilians. Ten family members,
including children, died after the final US strike in Kabul. What can be said
about US involvement and the current situation in Afghanistan.
What can be said about US involvement in the current
situation in Afghanistan
As discussed
before China and Russia have joined the Taliban and hope to gain influence
in the new Kabul. But at least three factors remain to
be seen. The first is how much control the Taliban have over their local
commanders. The second is how far those commanders will be subject to the power
interests of local non-Taliban leaders.
The third and most difficult is relations with
neighboring countries, notably Pakistan.
The days since Kabul
fell into the hands of the Taliban have seen a steady stream of postmortems on
the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan. Some of these critiques cite
flawed policy and poor implementation. Others assert that U.S. involvement in
the country was doomed from the start, noting Afghanistan’s reputation as “the
graveyard of empires.” Still others, including U.S. President Joe Biden, go
further, arguing that all post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction
efforts, also known as nation-building, lead to quagmires that U.S. forces
should comprehensively avoid. The truth is that the United States’ failure in
Afghanistan was not preordained, but Washington severely hobbled its own
stabilization efforts early on.
Historically, the
United States has launched military interventions with the intention of
putting a stop to something, such as military aggression, genocide, nuclear
proliferation, and, in the case of Afghanistan in 2001, ongoing terrorist
operations. When the objective is achieved, as happened in Afghanistan once the
immediate threat from al Qaeda was eliminated, the intervening force reaches a
crossroads. Seeking to preempt any repeat episodes, it must choose between
occupying permanently, reinvading periodically, or committing to help build a
minimally competent successor regime, ideally allowing it to leave behind
society at peace with itself and its neighbors. The administration of U.S.
President George W. Bush, unwilling to govern Afghanistan and faced with the
threat of an al Qaeda resurgence, chose the third option but failed to grasp
the full dimensions of the challenge it was taking on.
The most strident
critics of post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction missions tend to
focus on past failures, such as Vietnam and Iraq, without mentioning past
success stories, including Germany, Japan, South Korea, and, more
recently, Bosnia and Kosovo, where U.S.-led NATO interventions successfully
ended the first armed conflicts in Europe since 1945. An important lesson
emerges from considering the success of those relatively recent U.S.
interventions alongside the failure in Afghanistan: the most critical
decision-making and planning take place in the early stages, and if they are
flawed, it will severely diminish the chances of success, no matter the time
and resources Washington is ultimately willing to spend. The U.S. mission in
Afghanistan was not doomed from the start, but the seeds of its eventual
failure were planted as early as 2002.
The aftermath of 9/11
In the aftermath of
9/11, intervention in Afghanistan took on enormous
importance for
the Bush administration, which was determined to prevent another catastrophic
attack on American soil. But the administration had no desire to garrison
Afghanistan indefinitely, so it chose to help build a successor regime to the
Taliban that could presumably govern the country on its own one day, and ensure
that it didn’t again become a safe haven for terrorists. The invasion of
Afghanistan and the ousting of the Taliban went surprisingly smoothly,
producing a quick, low-cost victory. In the flush of this initial success, the
Bush administration was led to believe that the follow-up nation-building
mission could be similarly easy.
The Bush
administration’s first mistake was a failure to fully appreciate the geographic
obstacles in the way of an Afghan reconstruction effort. Afghanistan is on the
other side of the world from the United States, and in addition to being
landlocked and inaccessible, it is surrounded by several powerful and predatory
neighbors, including Iran, Pakistan, and nearby Russia. The only way the
United States could get most of its forces and their supplies into or out of
Afghanistan was through or over Pakistan, a country that did not share American
objectives there and actively sought to subvert them.
Moreover, the
population of Afghanistan was considerably larger than that of any other
country involved in a post–World War II U.S. intervention: in 2001, Afghanistan
had almost twice as many people as wartime South Vietnam. Typically, the
troop-to-population ratio is an important determinant of the success of a
stabilization operation. Two years before the invasion of Afghanistan, in 1999,
the United States and its NATO allies had deployed 50,000 troops to stabilize
Kosovo, a country of 1.9 million. Afghanistan’s population in 2001 was 21.6
million, yet by the end of 2002, there were only around 8,000 U.S. troops in a
country that was more than ten times Kosovo’s size and had no army or police
force of its own. There simply weren’t enough U.S. boots on the ground to
secure the country the United States had captured.
One reason for the
relatively small deployment was that the Bush administration did not intend for
U.S. forces to assume peacekeeping or public security responsibilities, rather,
they focused exclusively on tracking down residual al Qaeda elements, at the
expense of the foundational security required to build a functioning state. The
Bush administration also neglected to commit the necessary financial resources
to the Afghan stabilization effort. In Bosnia, the United States and other
donors had provided economic assistance amounting to $1,600 per inhabitant per
year for the first several years after that war. The comparable figure in
Afghanistan amounted to $50 per person, a paltry sum.
No early efforts to build a national Afghan army or
police force
The Bush
administration made other critical
mistakes that limited
the possibility of a successful stabilization. There were no substantial early
efforts to build a
national Afghan army or
police force, which left security in the hands of predatory local warlords and
made confronting returning Taliban fighters more difficult. There was no single
point of leadership for the international reconstruction effort, which
consequently lacked coherence. And, perhaps most significantly, it took U.S.
officials several years to realize that although Pakistan had withdrawn its
support for the Taliban government, it hadn’t abandoned the Taliban as an
organization. After they were routed from Afghanistan, the Taliban’s leadership
and the group’s remaining members were given sanctuary in Pakistan, where they
recuperated, retrained, resupplied, and later restarted an insurgency in
Afghanistan.
Given these
miscalculations, the prospects for success in Afghanistan had diminished
significantly by early 2003. And then, of course, the Bush administration
invaded Iraq, a country as large as Afghanistan, with even more internal
conflicts and with even more hostile neighbors, and where Bush and his
officials similarly underestimated the scale of the postconflict
stabilization and reconstruction effort they would be taking on. Violent
resistance to the U.S. invasion materialized much faster in Iraq, and U.S.
forces were under severe pressure there by the time the Taliban reemerged as a
serious threat in Afghanistan. This remained the case throughout Bush’s time in
office, hamstringing the United States’ ability to stabilize Afghanistan and
allowing the Taliban to regain
footholds there.
Failure to limit the
resurgence of the Taliban and to build institutional capacity in Afghanistan
was by no means inevitable. Had the United States devoted the resources
required for a stabilization and reconstruction effort in a country of
Afghanistan’s size and location, it would have stood a better chance of leaving
the country gracefully, with a functioning state in place. But eventually,
Washington’s early unforced errors created a situation in which it faced a
choice not between winning or losing but between losing or not
losing. Washington could
hang on at a modest cost in order to keep the Taliban at bay, retain a
competent counterterrorism partner in the Afghan government, and safeguard the
political and social advances that many Afghans enjoyed, or it could leave and
acknowledge its failure to help build a lasting state, and a lasting future for
the Afghan people. Three presidents successively wrestled with the dilemma that
Bush left behind. Barack Obama and Donald Trump gestured toward ending the war
but ultimately decided not to lose on their watch. Biden finally cut the
cord and chose to lose.
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