Introduction
In 2010, President Barack Obama told an interviewer:
It is very easy to imagine a situation in which, in the absence
of a clear strategy, we ended up staying in Afghanistan for another
five years, another eight years, another 10 years. And we would do
it not with clear intentions but rather just out of an inertia. Or
an unwillingness to ask tough questions.1
In the subsequent decade, the war in Afghanistan has been
notable principally for the inertia Obama was concerned about. NATO
allies have gradually faded away as the long war has become ever
longer, leaving the United States to determine the end of the
conflict on its own.
America, too, could leave or pull back. In previous conflicts,
when the strategic rationale had gone stale or when the costs
exceeded the expected benefits, the United States withdrew its
forces from active hostilities, as it did in Somalia in 1993 and in
Lebanon in 1983. And although the Vietnam War went on far too long,
the United States withdrew from that stalemate in 1973. In each of
these cases, withdrawal was the wise choice. But the United States
seems to think it owns the war in Afghanistan. Consequently, the
“tough questions” that are either ignored or answered
with knee-jerk, unexamined responses include: Why are we still
there, and should we still be there?
In the words of Lord Salisbury: “Nothing is more fatal to
a wise strategy than clinging to the carcasses of dead
policies.”2 This paper first sets out a group
of propositions relating to some of the kinds of tough questions
Obama suggested should be asked. In the process, it assesses why
the United States has continued for so long to pursue its dead
policies in Afghanistan. With these considerations in mind, it then
lays out a plausible negotiation strategy for ending the war and
for withdrawing American troops. The strategy is based in part on
the experience with the U.S. war in Vietnam.
10 Policy Propositions
In the quest for Obama’s clear strategy, we offer 10
propositions to scrutinize the justifications for the war and to
clarify the stakes.
1. The United States Can’t Win against the Taliban at a
Remotely Acceptable Cost
The proposition that the United States can’t win in
Afghanistan has long been appreciated, even at official levels. Six
months before President Trump announced in August 2017 that he
would send additional troops to Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson,
then commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, testified before the
Senate Armed Services Committee that “the current security
situation in Afghanistan [is] a stalemate.”3
Five months later, Laurel Miller, who was acting special
representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan until June 2017, said
in an interview, “I don’t think there is any serious
analyst of the situation in Afghanistan who believes that the war
is winnable.”4 A year after that, Lisa Curtis,
deputy assistant to the president and senior director for South and
Central Asia at the National Security Council, told an audience at
the U.S. Institute of Peace that “no one believes that there
is a military solution to this conflict.”5
The Trump administration’s policy response of increasing
troop levels in Afghanistan and leaving the strategy essentially
unchanged fits a pattern going back to the George W. Bush
administration. In his January 2008 State of the Union address,
President Bush announced a troop surge in Afghanistan, sending an
additional 3,200 marines, along with tens of billions of additional
taxpayer dollars, to “fight the terrorists and train the
Afghan Army and police.”6
Progress proved elusive, however, and later that year a classified
National Intelligence Estimate assessed the situation in
Afghanistan to be “bleak,” noting that “the
Afghan government has failed to consistently deliver services in
rural areas,” that the Taliban and other insurgent groups
were beginning to fill the void, and that “the Taliban have
effectively manipulated the grievances of disgruntled,
disenfranchised tribes.” It further maintained that even if
the Afghan army and police could be trained into an effective force
of several hundred thousand, that improbable development would
still be “insufficient if Pakistan remains a safe haven for
insurgents.”7
In 2009, the Obama administration produced yet another
comprehensive internal review of the war that, according to
Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes,
concluded the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan
“couldn’t succeed.”8 By
2010, briefers were pointing out to top generals that no
counterinsurgency on record had succeeded when the insurgents had
access to a deep cross-border sanctuary. They did add, however,
that one could hope the situation in Afghanistan would prove to be
an exception.9
But Obama had campaigned on recommitting to the war in
Afghanistan. Citing the need to “keep the pressure on al
Qaeda” and for “a military strategy that will break the
Taliban’s momentum and increase Afghanistan’s
capacity,” he increased troops by nearly
70,000,10 reaching a total of about
100,000 by 2011. In 2016, Obama warned that “the security
situation in Afghanistan remains precarious” while
acknowledging that the “Taliban remains a threat” and
had even “gained ground in some cases.”11
He then passed the buck to Trump, leaving roughly 8,400 American
troops in Afghanistan without a clear mission or a resolution to
the conflict.
A 2019 report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction proves a continuation on a theme going back to the
earliest years of the war. Despite 18 years of trying to quell the
Taliban insurgency and to build an independent and competent Afghan
government, army, and police force, “Afghanistan remains one
of the world’s poorest and most dangerous countries,”
with the security forces still “not able to protect the
population from insurgents in large parts of the
country.”12
History demonstrates that indigenous armed groups tend to be
more committed to their country than foreign military occupiers.
Afghans in particular have a long history of resisting intruders,
ousting the British twice in the 19th century and once in the 20th
century and pushing out the Soviets at the end of the 1980s.
Afghanistan’s landlocked geography, mountainous terrain, and
porous borders complicate attempts at military domination from the
outside while giving an advantage to guerilla insurgents.
Military occupations fail far more often than they succeed even
when active armed resistance is absent.13
Foreign-imposed regime change succeeds only in the rarest
circumstances and often only in the short term; over the long term,
it is more likely to lay the groundwork for future civil war than
to stabilize or democratize, particularly so in an underdeveloped
tribal society such as Afghanistan.14
Graeme Smith, a Canadian journalist who was stationed in
Afghanistan, suggests that the counterinsurgency theory applied
there has been, to put it mildly, “flawed.” The
essential notion was that American soldiers, not knowing either the
culture or the language and on a one-year tour of duty,
“could walk into the world’s most conservative
villages, make friends, hunt their enemies, and build a better
society.” But “none of that,” he concludes,
“proved successful.”15
Instead, the Taliban was finding that the notion of attacking
foreign invaders regularly rallied tribesmen to their
cause.16
Even in the early years, the war scarcely went smoothly, and
things got much worse.17 In the wake of the successful
2001 U.S. invasion, an international coalition and anti-Taliban
Afghan groups established a new government, many Afghans returned
to their tortured country, and many countries sent aid and
assistance. The coalition managed to provide a fair amount of
security, particularly in the capital, Kabul, but much of the
country continued to be run by, or plagued by, entrepreneurial
warlords who were following traditional modes of conduct.
The Bush administration worked closely with bands of warlords
and strongmen that opposed the Taliban but were notorious among the
Afghan people as violent and corrupt thugs. With continued U.S.
backing after the fall of the Taliban, this group eventually came
to populate the new Afghan government. It should be little wonder,
then, that the Kabul regime fell short of the functioning
democratic state envisioned. Washington also erroneously conflated
the Taliban and al Qaeda while refusing, sometimes over the wishes
of its clients in Kabul, to allow moderate or defected members of
the Taliban to join the government.18
Forced by the invasion into exile in Pakistan, the Taliban
gradually regrouped, and by 2006 it had reignited a civil war in
Afghanistan. The group soon controlled substantial areas in the
south that were mostly inhabited by ethnic Pashtuns. Its operators
were essentially free to come and go from base areas in the Pashtun
section of neighboring Pakistan. The long, remote international
border simply can’t be closed.19
Moreover, Pakistan was inevitably drawn into the fight. The United
States has provided Pakistan with more than $34 billion in economic
and security assistance since 2002.20
However, most Pakistanis—74 percent in 2012—view the
United States as an enemy.21
Over the years, corruption has increased in Afghanistan. In one
index on corruption, the country ranked 172 on a list of 180
countries.22 The current vice president,
Abdul Rashid Dostum, has been “accused, along with nine of
his top security officials and bodyguards, of kidnapping, torturing
and raping a political rival, Ahmad Ishchi, who was then in his
early 60s.” Although seven of Dostum’s bodyguards have
been sentenced to years in prison for the crime, Dostum and his top
aides have escaped prosecution.23 A
government study in 2012 estimated that of the almost $100 billion
in reconstruction aid that had been doled out by then, 85 percent
had been siphoned off (including by American contractors) before it
could reach its intended recipients.24
In 2010, “Afghan soldiers died of starvation at the National
Military Hospital because pervasive bribery left the facility
stripped of supplies.”25
There also have been major training failures. After seven years
of buildup, some 200,000 Afghans were under arms, but only one
battalion of 1,000 was deemed capable of carrying out operations
independently.26 And by 2016, top American
commanders were noting that, after a decade and a half of training
by the United States at enormous cost, the Afghan army was still
not ready, in part because it still lacked effective leaders. To
set things right, they said, would require the United States to
keep working at it for, variously, several more years, decades, or
generations.27
The Taliban now holds more territory than at any point since
2001, and the regime in Kabul ranks as one of the worst in the
world on corruption and respect for human rights.28
The Department of Defense estimated Afghanistan’s security
funding requirement to be about $6.5 billion for fiscal year 2019,
of which the Afghan government pledged to cover only $500 million.
According to Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), ranking member of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, the Afghan security forces “would
disintegrate” without U.S. economic and military
backing.29
As it’s gained and held land, particularly in the south of
the country, the Taliban has set about trying to prove, with
considerable success, that it can govern with more effectiveness
and less corruption than the U.S.-supported entity in
Kabul.30
It is common to see the cause or initial impetus of the
Afghanistan fiasco in the early decision of the Bush administration
to divert the focus of policy from Afghanistan to Iraq. But, as
analysts Michael Mandelbaum and Steve Coll suggest, the notion of
successfully using social engineering in Afghanistan was flawed
from the start.31 In particular, it seems likely
that the Taliban revival would have happened and proceeded apace
whether Americans were there in greater numbers or not: the
development was essentially unstoppable.
In Vietnam, the United States had not been able to break the
will of the communists even though it delivered horrific punishment
that, by any reasonable historical standard, should have
overwhelmed enemy resistance.32
In contrast, in Afghanistan, the Taliban only needs to maintain a
comparatively low level of violence. They can hit and run, retire
to Pakistan for refreshment, and then come back to inflict more
damage. If they can’t be cut off, they can likely continue
the effort forever, or until the hated foreign invader gets
sufficiently tired of the contest and goes away—whichever
comes first. As in Vietnam, the key issue is one of patience and
will. The Taliban has nowhere else to go; the Americans do.
The American military failure in Afghanistan is hardly unique.
Indeed, for all the very considerable expense, the military has won
no wars since World War II—especially if victory is defined
as achieving an objective at an acceptable cost—except
against enemy forces that essentially didn’t exist. The
American military triumphed in comic opera wars over tiny forces in
Grenada and over scarcely organized thuggish ones in Panama and
Kosovo. And the Iraqis hardly presented much of a challenge in the
1991 Persian Gulf War. More recently, there has been a successful
war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) insurgent
group, an opponent that proved to be spectacularly
self-destructive.33 However, the principal American
contribution has been in air support; others have done the heavy
lifting. There are also a few wars in which it could probably be
said that the United States was ahead at the end of the first,
second, or third quarter—Korea, Vietnam, Somalia,
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. But the outcomes of these—as
seen in Afghanistan in full measure—were certainly less than
stellar: exhausted stalemate, effective defeat, hasty withdrawal,
and extended misery.
2. The U.S. Military Must Provide Honest Assessments of the
War
The war has persisted despite the telltale signs of mission
failure in part because of the culture in the Department of Defense
and how it interacts with politics at the national level. In their
public portrayal of the war, military leaders have rather
persistently depicted a rosier picture than the facts
warranted.34 In 2014, Gen. John Campbell told
National Public Radio that the good news of progress in Afghanistan
“sometimes [doesn’t] make the media,” that
“the Afghan security forces [are] really stepping up their
game,” and that he was “excited about the future
here.”35 Such optimistic pronouncements
from the military are common: it was in 2013 that Gen. Joseph
Dunford talked about “the inevitability of our
success.” In 2011, David Petraeus said that American forces
had “reversed the momentum of the Taliban.” In 2010,
Gen. Stanley McChrystal predicted that “success is still
achievable.”36 In 2008, Gen. David McKiernan
insisted that “we are not losing in
Afghanistan.”37
Overly optimistic portrayals are partly a result of
institutional habits and a view about civil-military relations that
calls for focusing on tactical and operational facts on the ground
while leaving broader strategic and political assessments of the
war to elected leaders. Some military leaders publicly
misrepresented the course of the war to avoid the hit to troop
morale they expected would result from more honest and critical
presentations.38 Others felt strongly that
negotiations with the Taliban should only occur from a
“position of strength,” which they believed was always
just around the corner.39
But sometimes the deception was more flagrant: media reports
revealed in 2011 that commanders tasked with briefing congressional
delegations in Afghanistan deliberately misled members of Congress
about the progress of the war.40
After his second deployment to Afghanistan, Army Lt. Col. Daniel
L. Davis (now retired) spoke out publicly against this kind of
distortion. He wrote two reports, one classified and one
unclassified, and briefed members of Congress on his
conclusions.41 “Senior ranking U.S.
military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating
with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions
on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become
unrecognizable,” he wrote, adding that “if the public
had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic
gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and
what is actually true behind the scenes.”42
Elected officials are often deferential to military leaders and
national security advisers. This is partly due to the superior
subject area expertise of military and national security
professionals, but it is also because going against such advice can
be politically costly.
When Obama entered office in 2009, the senior military
leadership strongly favored a troop surge in Afghanistan. According
to Vali Nasr, at the time a senior adviser on Afghanistan and
Pakistan at the Department of State, the White House was
“ever afraid that the young Democratic President would be
seen as ‘soft’” if he went against the
military’s recommendations.43
Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, says that
the administration’s Afghanistan policy review was
“shaped by leaks from the military designed to box Obama into
sending more troops into Afghanistan.”44
One member of Obama’s National Security Council, a colonel
who was also an Iraq war veteran, told the president that, if he
were to “defy [his] military chain,” the top brass may
resign in protest.45 “No Democratic president
can go against military advice, especially if he asked for
it,” advised Leon Panetta, then CIA director.46
Obama’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates, described the
troop surge recommendations as “the classic Henry Kissinger
model … You have three options, two of which are ridiculous, so
you accept the one in the middle.”47
Obama expressed frustration at this. In the end, advisers presented
him with four options, two of which were indistinguishable.
“So what’s my option?” Obama asked. “You
have essentially given me one option.”48
He complained to journalist Bob Woodward that the military was
“really cooking the thing in the direction that they wanted .
. . They are not going to give me a choice.”49
Trump faced similar pressure to recommit to the war in
Afghanistan. The advice Trump received from his military and
national security advisers was overwhelmingly supportive of
continuing the mission—and of adding another 4,000 troops.
According to Woodward’s account, Trump did push back at
first, exploding:
You guys have created this situation. It’s been a
disaster. You’re the architects of this mess in Afghanistan.
You created these problems. You’re smart guys, but I have to
tell you, you’re part of the problem. And you haven’t
been able to fix it, and you’re making it worse.
Moreover, he added, “I want to get out, and you’re
telling me the answer is to get deeper in.”50
But in the end, Trump succumbed to the military request.
The U.S. military has a strong parochial interest in avoiding
the perception that the war in Afghanistan has been lost and
therefore in ensuring it receives additional resources to continue
fighting in it. But the problem extends beyond the Department of
Defense. The professional foreign policy class in Washington,
concentrated in the various national security agencies of the
executive branch, is subject to a powerful bias in favor of action
over inaction and troop surges over withdrawal.51
As a result, the advice presidents receive from this expert
community tends to reflect these biases. But that expert consensus
seems to exist only in the White House’s Situation Room and
is frequently at odds with official assessments of the war, with
the views of many specialists in academia, and with the perspective
of the general public.52
3. A Taliban Victory Would Not Present a Serious Terrorism
Threat to the United States
By far the most common justification for remaining in
Afghanistan is the safe-haven myth: the fear that if the Taliban
take over the country, they would let al Qaeda reestablish a
presence there, leaving the terrorist organization to once again
plot attacks on the United States. That is, it is effectively
contended that although 9/11 was substantially plotted in Hamburg,
Germany, just about the only reason further attacks haven’t
taken place is because al Qaeda needs a bigger territorial base of
operations and that that base must be in Afghanistan.53
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who worked on Afghanistan policy
under Obama as special envoy to South Asia, explained in 2009 that
“the fundamental difference between Afghanistan and Vietnam
is 9/11. The Vietcong and the North Vietnamese never posed a threat
to the United States homeland. The [perpetrators] of 9/11 who were
in that area still do and are still planning. That is why
we’re in the region with troops.” If the Taliban
returned to control in Afghanistan, Holbrooke maintained that
“without any shadow of a doubt, al Qaeda would move back into
Afghanistan, set up a larger presence, recruit more people and
pursue its objectives against the United States even more
aggressively.” That, he insisted, is “the only
justification for what we’re doing.”54
Virtually all promoters of the war stress this notion. Obama
applied it in 2009.55 And, in 2017, Petraeus, a
retired general who had commanded American forces in Afghanistan,
ardently contended in an article written with the Brookings
Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon, that:
America’s leaders should not lose sight of why the U.S.
went to, and has stayed in, Afghanistan: It is in our national
interest to ensure that country is not once again a sanctuary for
transnational extremists, as it was when the 9/11 attacks were
planned there. We have been accomplishing that mission since the
intervention began in October 2001. Although al-Qaeda in
Afghanistan and Pakistan is diminished, it could rebound if given
the opportunity. Islamic State could expand its newfound Afghan
foothold as well.56
Trump reflected that thinking when he authorized an increase of
troops to Afghanistan in 2017. His “original instinct,”
he noted, was “to pull out,” but, as noted earlier, he
had been persuaded by the military (whose record on predicting
events in Afghanistan has been rather miserable) to believe that
“the consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and
unacceptable.” Noting that “the worst terrorist attack
in our history, was planned and directed from Afghanistan because
that country was ruled by a government that gave comfort and
shelter to terrorists,” Trump was sure that “a hasty
withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists … would
instantly fill, just as happened before September
11th.”57 On one occasion when Trump
expressed skepticism about the need to deploy additional forces,
his then secretary of defense, James Mattis, reportedly told him,
“Unfortunately, sir, you have no choice,” adding that
it was imperative in order “to prevent a bomb from going off
in Times Square.”58
When Trump was subsequently asked, “Can you explain why 17
years later we’re still there?” he replied:
“We’re there because virtually every expert that I have
and speak to say [sic] if we don’t go there, they’re
going to be fighting over here. And I’ve heard it over and
over again.”59
This key justification for staying in Afghanistan—indeed,
the only one, according to Holbrooke—has gone almost
entirely unexamined. It fails in several ways.60
First, it is unlikely that a triumphal Taliban would invite al
Qaeda back because its relationship with the terrorist group has
been strained from the start. In 1996, Osama bin Laden, an exile
from Saudi Arabia and Sudan, showed up in Afghanistan with his
entourage. As Lawrence Wright makes clear in his prizewinning book
The Looming Tower, the relationship between the Taliban
and al Qaeda was often very uncomfortable. Although quite willing
to extend hospitality to their well-heeled visitor, the Taliban
insisted on guarantees that bin Laden refrain from issuing
incendiary messages and from engaging in terrorist activities while
in the country. Bin Laden repeatedly agreed but also frequently
broke his pledge.61
At times, the Taliban had their troublesome “guest”
under house arrest, and veteran correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave
said he was “stunned by the hostility” that Mullah
Mohammad Omar, the top Taliban leader, expressed for bin Laden
during an interview.62 A senior Taliban official
recalls that bin Laden was “a pain in the
backside.”63 As Vahid Brown, of the Combating
Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New
York, puts it, relations were “deeply contentious, and
threatened by mutual distrust and divergent
ambitions.”64 Meanwhile, Riyadh tried for
years to get the Saudi renegade extradited, and it appears to have
been close to success in 1998. However, the deal fell through after
the Americans bombed Afghanistan in response to two al Qaeda
attacks on a pair of U.S. embassies in Africa in August
1998.65
Bin Laden’s 9/11 ploy not only shattered the agreement but
also brought armed destruction on his hosts.66
The last thing the Taliban would want, should it take over
Afghanistan, is an active terrorist group continually drawing fire
from the outside. As Richard Barrett, the United Nation’s
former Taliban and al Qaeda monitor, put it in 2009, if the Taliban
regain power, “they don’t want al Qaeda hanging
around.”67 Moreover, unlike al Qaeda, the
Taliban has a very localized perspective. They have never been
interested in conducting international terrorism. They are
primarily concerned with governing Afghanistan as they see fit free
from outside interference.
The main Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are quick to point out
that they are running their own war, and it seems clear that al
Qaeda plays only a limited role in their efforts. “No foreign
fighter can serve as a Taliban commander,” insisted one
Taliban leader in 2007.68
And, in 2010, the American commander of U.S. detention centers in
Afghanistan said that fewer than 6 percent of his prisoners came
from outside the country and that most were from Pakistan:
“This is a very local fight,” he
observed.69 The then CIA chief Panetta
estimated in 2010 that there were “maybe 60 to 100, maybe
less” al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan.70
An extensive 2008 study of the Taliban operation in Afghanistan
included al Qaeda as part of the coalition but mentioned it only
very occasionally when discussing the details of the
insurgency.71 And there have long been reports
that the main Taliban leaders are very hostile to the foreign
militants and have explicitly distanced themselves from al
Qaeda.72 As for the Islamic State’s
branch in Afghanistan, the Taliban has actively fought them on the
battlefield almost uninterruptedly for years, making a
Taliban-sponsored safe haven for that group unlikely.73
Second, it is not at all clear that al Qaeda would even want to
return to ravaged, impoverished, insecure, and factionalized
Afghanistan even if it were invited. It would have to uproot itself
from Pakistan, where it has been operating for more than a decade,
and reestablish itself in new, unfamiliar territory. It’s
difficult to see how an Afghan haven would be safer than the one al
Qaeda occupies now. In fact, Douglas Saunders of Canada’s
Globe and Mail reports that most allied commanders in
Afghanistan whom he had talked with think it “very
unlikely” that al Qaeda would establish a base there even if
the Taliban were to take over.74
Third, if al Qaeda were to return, the United States would still
be able to bomb and raid in response to a clear and present threat
to U.S. security. Indeed, it might well be in a better position to
do so in Afghanistan than in Pakistan. American efforts to go after
al Qaeda in Pakistan are hampered by concerns about the
sensitivities of the Pakistanis and by the fact that Pakistan can
retaliate by cutting off or cramping logistics lines. The
constraints on taking potential future military action in an
Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban are much less formidable.
Also, American planners and forces would know the turf better, as
they have been occupying the country for nearly two decades. Thus,
al Qaeda would be unlikely to find much sanctuary in
Afghanistan.
And fourth, the safe-haven argument is based on the ill-founded
assumption that the presence of al Qaeda leaders in
Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in the lead-up to 9/11 was essential
for the success of the attacks. In fact, it seems to have had
little, if any, operational utility. Al Qaeda operatives planned
and coordinated the 9/11 attacks not just in Afghanistan but also
in Germany, Malaysia, and the United States. Technological
innovation and increasingly widespread access to the internet has
only made instant communication across borders, oceans, and time
zones easier in the ensuing years. A territorial haven in remote,
landlocked Afghanistan wouldn’t be much help to jihadists
plotting to attack the West. Terrorist groups seek
inconspicuousness, to have no return address against which their
enemies can retaliate.75
The notion that terrorists need a lot of space and privacy to
hatch plots of substantial magnitude in the West has been
repeatedly undermined by such tragic terrorist episodes in Madrid
in 2004, London in 2005, Paris in 2015, and Brussels and Istanbul
in 2016. None of the attackers in those incidents operated from a
safe haven, nor were their plans coordinated by a group within a
safe haven. Al Qaeda Central has not really done all that much
since it got horribly lucky on 9/11, and the patent inadequacies
and incompetence of the group would scarcely be erased by uprooting
itself and moving to new foreign turf.76
Its problems do not stem from failing to have enough territory in
which to operate or plan.
4. Defeat in Afghanistan Would Not Necessarily Destabilize the
Region
Some commentators argue a U.S. withdrawal would result in
regional destabilization. One justification for continuing the war,
in particular, is that a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan would
somehow destabilize Pakistan, perhaps leading to terrorists or
other militants seizing its atomic arsenal.
Actually, though, Pakistan has essentially been harboring the
Taliban and generally enjoys good relations with it—and did
before 9/11.77 Therefore, a Taliban takeover
that brought stability—in the sense of freedom from civil
war—to Afghanistan might just as well serve to help stabilize
Pakistan.
Other regional players, including Iran, India, China, and
Russia, would likely adjust their policies toward Afghanistan
following a U.S. withdrawal, in some cases in ways that could
benefit American interests. Moscow has recently cultivated a
diplomatic relationship with the Taliban, and this seems calculated
to irritate Washington, to expedite negotiations predicated on U.S.
withdrawal, and perhaps to hedge against more radical jihadist
groups at loggerheads with the Taliban.78
China worries that Islamic militant groups in Afghanistan could
pose problems in its restive eastern province of Xinjiang, and it
also plans to incorporate Afghanistan into its Belt and Road
Initiative, meaning there is a strong preference for a functioning,
stable Afghan government. Beijing has proven perfectly capable of
managing its alliance with Pakistan while cooperating with Moscow
on security issues in the broader Central Asian region.
A recent report published by the Canadian Security Intelligence
Service contends that “most of Afghanistan’s neighbours
want to prevent the US from maintaining a long-term military
foothold in their backyard” and that there is “some
level of regional agreement about the need to prevent the spread of
instability” with multiple countries “seeking to
facilitate peace negotiations, in part to curb the escalating
violence on their doorstep and secure a stake in an eventual
political settlement.”79
This suggests a confluence of interests among many regional powers
and the United States—an opportunity policymakers in
Washington should seize upon.
Whatever happens following a U.S. withdrawal, the regional
players are likely to increase their investment of energy and
resources in Afghanistan in ways that address their somewhat
overlapping (albeit occasionally conflicting) interests. In short,
Afghanistan would become someone else’s
problem.80 If that problem were to worsen
over time or cause substantial instability beyond
Afghanistan’s borders, the country’s neighbors would
surely suffer the consequences, and they would deal with them long
before the United States must. Widespread regional destabilization
is a rather low-probability consequence of withdrawal.
5. Efforts to Reduce Opium Production Are Unnecessarily
Complicating and Futile
The heroin trade accounts for an estimated 60 percent of Taliban
revenue, roughly $200 million annually.81
Up to 85 percent of the world’s opium is produced in
Afghanistan, and drug traffickers cooperate with the Taliban,
providing the group with weapons and cash in exchange for
protection of trade routes. In addition to fueling the insurgency,
Afghanistan’s opium exports contribute to a slew of problems
around the world, such as empowering international drug gangs and
increasing rates of addiction.82
The Kabul government is the other major beneficiary of the opium
trade, and many corrupt Afghan officials have become quite wealthy
by helping administer it. “In the district of Garmsir, poppy
cultivation not only is tolerated, but is a source of money that
the local government depends on,” the New York Times
reported in 2016. “Officials have imposed a tax on farmers
practically identical to the one the Taliban use in places they
control.”83
It is widely accepted that the insurgency cannot be defeated so
long as the drug trade persists. The United States has spent years
and more than $8 billion trying to quash this critical source of
sustenance for the insurgency, with tactics including prohibition,
crop eradication, and bombing buildings suspected of being heroin
laboratories. However, the effort has failed. Opium production
increased by a staggering 87 percent from 2016 to 2017, to 9,000
metric tons—“the most in Afghan history,”
according to the Brookings Institution’s Vanda
Felbab-Brown.84 In 2014, the special inspector
for Afghanistan concluded that “by every conceivable metric,
we’ve failed. Production and cultivation are up, interdiction
and eradication are down, financial support to the insurgency is
up, and addiction and abuse are at unprecedented levels in
Afghanistan.”85
The Taliban relies on the heroin trade out of need, not out of
preference or indifference. In a condition of peace, however, they
would no longer feel that need. Indeed, in 2000, after about four
years of being in power, the Taliban famously imposed an outright
ban on all opium cultivation, which reduced the harvest by 94
percent.86 The results of that effort are
instructive: because farmers in other countries responded to the
continued demand, the street price of heroin both in Europe and the
United States did not change.
Outside the context of the counterinsurgency campaign, the drug
trade out of Afghanistan does not pose a direct threat to the
United States. Trying to eradicate or control opium production
throughout the war has been a failure, and seeking to do so
following withdrawal would simply continue an exercise in
futility.87
6. Efforts to Ensure Women’s Rights Are Unlikely to
Work
Thanks in part to deliberate efforts of the United States over
the course of the war, Afghan women are better off than they were
under Taliban rule. Women at least nominally have the right to vote
and to equal treatment; they hold prestigious positions in
education and law; they work in healthcare and as private-sector
entrepreneurs. Women in Afghanistan hold 63 out of 320
parliamentary seats.88
Najia Nasim and Megan Corrado, executive director and director
of advocacy at the nonprofit advocacy group Women for Afghan Women,
criticized Trump’s “concession-filled diplomacy”
as dismissive of the rights of Afghan women, who will suffer
repression when the U.S. military is no longer there to support the
Kabul government and to thwart the Taliban.89
Mariam Safi, director of the Organization for Policy Research and
Development Studies in Kabul, and Muqaddesa Yourish, a commissioner
on Afghanistan’s Independent Administrative Reform and Civil
Service Commission, similarly warned that withdrawal “will
jeopardize for Afghans the future of hard-won gains such as
constitutional rights, freedoms of citizens and democratic
institutions.”90
However, while Afghanistan has progressed on many normative
metrics over the course of the nearly two-decade nation-building
effort, those gains are quite limited. According to the United
Nations, Afghanistan ranks 153rd out of 160 countries for gender
equality.91 In a 2017 index, Afghanistan
tied with Syria for the worst place in the world to be a
woman.92 As the Canadian intelligence
study notes, while “there was no freedom for women in Taliban
Afghanistan,” that was also the case “at the end of
2018—after nearly 18 years of international
engagement.” The study stresses that “the reality is
that Afghanistan was and is a deeply conservative culture governed
largely by ancient traditions that are also reflected in their
interpretation of Islam and its edicts.”93
Any retreat on women’s rights following a U.S. withdrawal
would be heart-rending and tragic. However, advancement, perhaps
halting, is more likely to take place in a condition of peace than
of war. And if the post-9/11 experience has demonstrated anything,
it’s that wars to remake foreign societies into liberal
democracies are generally ineffective. In any case, the suggestion
that women’s rights are a vital objective in the U.S. mission
in Afghanistan is hard to square with the countless other places
where human rights and democracy are absent or substantially
circumscribed. It is not clear why respect for human rights is
vital to American interests in Afghanistan but not in Saudi Arabia,
for example.
7. Costs Already Borne in Afghanistan Do Not Justify Additional
Investments
Proponents of continuing the mission also maintain that the
United States must fight the war until it achieves a clear victory
because anything less would derogate the steep costs in blood and
money that America has already devoted to the mission. In other
words, it is argued, sunk costs necessitate continued
investment.
Trump exhibited this kind of thinking when he announced his
troop surge: “Our nation must seek an honorable and enduring
outcome worthy of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made,
especially the sacrifices of lives.”94
Similarly, in critiquing Obama’s gradual drawdown of troops
from Afghanistan in 2015, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) emphasized sunk
costs: “All of us want the war in Afghanistan to be over, but
after 14 years of hard-fought gains, the decisions we make now will
determine whether our progress will endure and our sacrifices will
not have been in vain.”95That same year, former general
Petraeus and Michael O’Hanlon implored Obama to
“protect our investment in Afghanistan,” noting that
“the investment to date” has been “well over
2,000 American lives and nearly $1 trillion in
expense.”96
Particularly in limited counterinsurgency wars, decisionmakers
are often more sensitive to potential future losses than equivalent
gains. This can produce a greater willingness to take uncertain
gambles to avoid total defeat. Loss aversion, as it is called,
often manifests in the form of the sunk cost fallacy, in which
actors seek to make good on spent resources by redoubling their
commitment to ensure that the costs were not expended in vain.
Successive last-ditch efforts across three administrations to flood
Afghanistan with more troops and resources in the hope that greater
effort would enable America to eke out a “win” are
consistent with the presence of this fallacy. Unfortunately, this
cognitive bias poses as a serious strategic argument as it pushes
people to double down and become entrapped into additional net
losses.
A decision about where and whether to devote resources should be
based on whether the investment will add future value, not on sunk
costs. Rational policymakers should be quick to abandon expensive
ventures that lack a decent chance of yielding better returns. They
should also give greater weight to opportunity costs and thus be
more open to exploring alternatives.
8. Policymakers Should Not Be Overly Concerned about
“Salient Failures”
“Failure salience,” according to political
scientists Dominic D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney, refers to the
“tendency to remember and learn more from perceived negative
outcomes than from perceived positive
outcomes.”97 The Obama administration’s
withdrawal from Iraq at the end of 2011 and the subsequent rise of
ISIS became a salient failure frequently cited to discourage
withdrawing from Afghanistan. In 2017, Trump was persuaded to stay
the course as a result. “As we know, in 2011, America hastily
and mistakenly withdrew from Iraq,” Trump said in his speech
announcing the troop surge in Afghanistan. “The vacuum we
created by leaving too soon gave safe haven for ISIS to spread, to
grow, recruit, and launch attacks. We cannot repeat in Afghanistan
the mistake our leaders made in Iraq.”98
A more incisive lesson to draw from the rise of ISIS is that
prolonged military occupations tend to generate violent resistance
movements. ISIS is an outgrowth of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which
emerged from the Sunni insurgency that rose up to fight occupying
U.S. forces. Its leadership consists of veteran AQI insurgents and
former Baathists in the Saddam Hussein regime. It never could have
filled the vacuum left by the United States’ withdrawal
without the initial spark provided by the invasion. Moreover, any
“vacuum” was created far more by staggeringly inept
policies of Iraqi politicians and by the unwillingness of the Iraqi
army (trained by the United States for $20 billion) to
fight.99
Given the state of both U.S. and Iraqi politics, America’s
withdrawal was inevitable, and the end of 2011 was as auspicious a
time as any to do it. But, negative experiences have a profound
impact on the psyche. Drawing a causal connection between the
American withdrawal and the emergence of a rapacious terrorist army
prone to spectacular atrocities and harboring vast territorial
ambitions may serve as a compelling argument for some against
withdrawal from Afghanistan, but it is an argument based on a
misunderstanding of a separate case with entirely different actors,
dynamics, and context.
9. Concerns about Humiliation and about Preserving American
Credibility in the Event of a Withdrawal Are Misguided
Fear of a loss of credibility or standing has been another major
impediment to withdrawal. As Richard Haas, president of the Council
on Foreign Relations, put it earlier this year, an abrupt exit
“would cast further doubt on America’s willingness to
sustain a leading role in the world.”100
The real cost of withdrawing from Afghanistan, according to Edward
Luce, a columnist for the Financial Times, “is to
the US’s global standing.”101
Bing West, military historian and a former Reagan official,
contends that it would be “a disaster for the prestige,
influence, and self-image of America if Kabul fell in a manner
similar to Saigon in 1975.”102
Even negotiating with the Taliban to eventually bring American
troops home, former U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker claims, is
tantamount to “negotiating the terms of our
surrender.”103
These concerns are essentially baseless. To begin with, states
tend to assess the credibility of other states’ security
commitments based on perceived national interests in discrete
situations rather than on extrapolations of policies in different
regions and contexts.104 NATO countries will not
interpret a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as a signal that
Washington is ready to relinquish its security commitment to Europe
any more than they did when the U.S. abandoned Vietnam. As for
“America’s willingness to sustain a leading role in the
world,” polling data strongly suggests that fighting a lost
war for almost 20 years is doing more to sap the public’s
enthusiasm for overseas ventures than a timely withdrawal ever
could.105 The same goes for so-called
standing. The unending quagmire has arguably tarnished
America’s international reputation, but it is not clear that
this has negatively impacted national security sufficiently to
justify a continued occupation amid a simmering civil war at a cost
of tens of billions of dollars per year.
The worry Crocker expresses, that negotiating an end to the U.S.
war in Afghanistan without a clear victory would be tantamount to a
humiliating surrender, is common throughout history. Though the
public defense of the Vietnam War emphasized liberating South
Vietnam and preventing falling dominos of communist states, by 1965
the then assistant secretary of defense for international security
affairs, John McNaughton, had concluded that the initial security
reasons that had gotten America into Vietnam had become
“largely academic” and that the U.S. objective in
Vietnam was now to “avoid humiliation.”106
The tragic parallel to today’s war in Afghanistan is hard to
miss.
Concerns about credibility, prestige, and reputation can often
drive states to adopt more aggressive and militarized approaches to
foreign affairs.107 However, there is little
evidence that a perceived loss of prestige from overseas failures
such as Vietnam and Afghanistan has a tangible impact on the
nation’s security, except to the extent that it incentivizes
political leaders to persist in costly ventures. The University of
Washington’s Jonathan Mercer calls prestige an
“illusion” that has “neither strategic nor
intrinsic value.”108
Nor does the United States need to continue the mission because
of fears about domestic political blowback. The American public
accepted the capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese in 1975 with
remarkable equanimity in part because of the popularity of U.S.
withdrawal and a rather sanguine view of the threat a Vietcong
victory posed to their lives and livelihood.109
Similarly, when the United States abruptly withdrew from Lebanon in
1983, and from Somalia in 1993, there seemed to be no lasting hit
to America’s influence or self-image. Nor did that happen
when armed intervention in Libya in 2011 led to a calamitous civil
war. All four debacles generated little political problem for the
people who had presided over them.
10. The Most Compelling, and Perhaps Only, Reason to Stay in
Afghanistan Is to Avoid a Humanitarian Catastrophe
The strongest argument for continuing the forever war in
Afghanistan is primarily humanitarian: as after the fall of the
communist regime, the country could descend into another
catastrophic civil war. A low-intensity conflict followed the
Soviet withdrawal in 1989, but after Soviet aid to its clients in
Kabul dried up in December 1991, the regime collapsed, insurgents
stormed the capital, and Afghanistan descended into a brutal
conflict that eventually brought the Taliban to power in 1996.
Combatants, disciplined when confronting the Soviet invaders,
disintegrated into dozens of squabbling and corrupt warlord and
bandit gangs, plundering the population they had once defended.
According to Ahmed Rashid, they “abused the population at
will, kidnapping young girls and boys for their sexual pleasure,
robbing merchants in the bazaars and fighting and brawling in the
streets.” They “seized homes and farms, threw out their
occupants and handed them over to their supporters,” and they
“sold off everything to Pakistani traders to make money,
stripping down telephone wires and poles, cutting trees, selling
off factories, machinery and even road rollers to scrap
merchants.”110
A similar fate could befall Afghanistan following U.S.
withdrawal. Of particular concern is that in recent years, a branch
of ISIS called Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) has established a
modest presence in Afghanistan. However, it has suffered repeated
tactical failures, as both the Taliban and the United States have
actively battled the group and disrupted its operations. IS-K has
little to no support from the local population and has been further
weakened by the rollback and defeat of the Islamic State’s
“caliphate” in Iraq and Syria.111
Suggestions that the group would rise and ultimately pose a grave
threat to the United States following a withdrawal of U.S. forces
are dubious.
Other sources of fracturing following a withdrawal of American
troops are certainly imaginable, but it should be remembered that
even without Soviet troops, the regime the USSR set up in Kabul
managed to survive for years as long as financial assistance was
provided. Moreover, the risk of internal instability must be
weighed against the costs and risks inherent in an indefinite war
that seems to cause at least as many national security problems as
it allegedly staves off.
In addition, the humanitarian argument for continuing the
occupation in Afghanistan confuses the security mission with the
expansive ambitions adopted after the invasion. Although the Bush
administration was well known for a neoconservative orientation
that emphasized democracy promotion through regime-change wars, it
began (or sold) the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on national
security grounds and mostly adopted the normative missions about
democracy and the rule of law later.112
Leaders engaging in limited wars without decisive victories
sometimes respond to that ambiguity by expanding their objectives.
As Betty Glad and Philipp Rosenberg explain, “Once a
belligerent has invested significant nonrecoverable resources in
its attempt to win its original goal, the nature of its goals is
apt to change.”113
And although the humanitarian situation could deteriorate
following a U.S. withdrawal, it is by no means adequate under
current American occupation. At present, an estimated 2 million
children in Afghanistan suffer from acute malnutrition. The
Taliban, as insurgents against the U.S. occupation, exact a very
heavy humanitarian toll on the country and frequently kill and
abuse the civilian population. And yet, 2019 marked the first year
since the United Nations began documenting civilian casualties that
U.S. and Afghan government forces killed more Afghan civilians than
the Taliban and other insurgent groups.114
Ending the war through a negotiated settlement, therefore,
offers a better safeguard against a humanitarian catastrophe than
simply continuing the occupation. But it is not a risk-free
solution.
Negotiating a Political Settlement and Withdrawing U.S.
Forces
Over the years, there have been sporadic efforts to find a
negotiated solution to the war in Afghanistan.115
In his 2017 speech announcing an increase of a few thousand
American troops to the war in Afghanistan, Trump laid out what he
said was a plan for victory. But he then defined
“victory” as something more akin to stalemate:
preventing the Taliban from taking over and then perhaps
negotiating.116
And in fact, the Trump administration has been quietly pursuing
direct talks with the Taliban, with promising, if halting, results
so far. The times may be propitious. The Taliban has set up what
seems to be a strong negotiating team led by Mullah Abdul Ghani
Baradar, who has been described as skilled and
pragmatic.117 He had sought a peace deal a
decade ago but was arrested by the security establishment in
Pakistan, which at the time opposed negotiations.118
The fact that he and others have now been released, due in part to
pressure by the American negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, is taken to
be a sign that Pakistan is now in favor of negotiations, and the
fact that he has been appointed their lead negotiator suggests that
the Taliban is as well.119
Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, lessons for a deal might be
applied from the January 1973 agreement between the United States
and the Communist Vietnamese that ended U.S. involvement. The
Taliban, while open to talks, wants only to negotiate with the
United States, not with what they call the “slave”
regime in Kabul.120 That is a condition similar to
the one in Vietnam in which the United States pushed ahead with the
1973 agreement largely without substantial participation by the
South Vietnamese regime. But as Khalilzad seems to have already
accepted, for talks to move forward the United States must accept
this condition and negotiate alone, at least at the start.
The Vietnam agreement contained several elements that might be
applied to the present, essentially stalemated, situation in
Afghanistan. In this, Afghan forces are incapable of being able to
seize, hold, and then coherently govern areas controlled by the
Taliban while Taliban members recognize that a takeover of
government strongholds, in particular the heavily populated capital
area of Kabul, is likely to be extremely difficult.121
These elements would be built around establishing an initial
cease-fire. Thus, for a time there would be a rather formal
partition between Taliban-held areas and Kabul-held areas.
Partition has been the effective condition for some
time—indeed, it is how the country has traditionally been
organized. There would be competition of governance in the two
areas, but the war, a decades-long disaster for all involved, would
be ended or at least substantially tempered.
Over time, the main Afghan forces might develop a degree of
cooperation and coordination. A great deal has changed since the
American invasion, and a wired-in generation has developed,
particularly in Kabul. And at least some in the Taliban realize
that a full return to the Islamic Emirate that existed there before
the invasion is no longer possible.122
According to the Canadian report, Taliban interlocutors
“rarely if ever” still insist on “a settlement
that restores an emirate form of government.” The leadership
is “increasingly willing to state that they can accept some
form of elected republic—often noting, paradoxically, that
the main problem with elections now is the corrupt and chaotic way
in which the Afghan government has administered
them.”123 In fact, even if the Taliban
were to fully take over, some of the gains of the long American
occupation might well be retained. The Taliban have indicated, for
example, that they would agree to permit women’s education,
which they previously denied.124
A withdrawal of American military forces from the country, as in
Vietnam, would also have to be a primary part of any negotiated
deal; although, as in Vietnam, the United States could continue to
supply the current regime using civilians and perhaps contractors
to facilitate the process. There could also be an exchange of
prisoners, including some Taliban members still held in
Guantanamo.125
In addition, the United States might require a pledge from the
Taliban that it will not allow its territory to be used by
international terror groups. They reportedly have been willing to
guarantee that they would not provide a safe haven for
international terrorism, including al Qaeda, and over the years, as
noted earlier, they have generally maintained that their concerns
are local, not international.126
Some in the Taliban have been more resistant to the U.S. demand
that they explicitly repudiate al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is scarcely a
threat anymore, and the American demand for a wholesale
denunciation seems to be something required simply for domestic
purposes. Washington could therefore drop this condition—it
is essentially meaningless.
With an American military withdrawal, the Taliban would lose its
chief recruiting and motivating device, and under a cease-fire,
Afghans could set about trying to work out their own future. An
agreement with the Taliban would not necessarily bring the end of
all fighting because there are spinoff and independent insurgent
elements throughout the country as well as independent areas
controlled by warlords—though it is at least conceivable that
some of these could be brought into the agreement. As noted, the
Taliban for years has been fighting against ISIS militants in
Afghanistan as well as against other fringe offshoots. That said,
95 percent of violent incidents in Afghanistan involve fighting
between pro-Kabul forces and the Taliban, which suggests these
other militant groups “are a negligible factor on the
battlefield.”127 With an agreement, the Taliban
would likely continue to oppose these groups to the degree
necessary, and they might even be willing to accept assistance from
the United States (and/or regional powers) to do so.
Such a settlement might prove to be temporary. That is what
happened in Vietnam when, after an interval of two years,
communists launched an offensive and the U.S.-supplied South
Vietnam military and government folded in 55 days as the United
States wrung its hands from afar and then promptly, and with
remarkably little obvious regret, moved on to other concerns.
Later, the United States and the communist regime in now-unified
Vietnam reconciled, commiserating with each other over their mutual
concern about China.
However, the nightmare scenario is not a Taliban takeover or a
further splintering of the country, but a descent into widespread
and murderous civil war. There are no guarantees, but working
against this outcome is the bone-deep exhaustion of the Afghan
population with civil war, as seen in the overwhelming popularity
of a short cease-fire between Taliban and government forces in June
2018 in which people in all areas and walks of life implored
combatants on all sides to stop the fighting.128
The Afghan people have endured 40 years of war and are desperate
for relief.129
The fact is that to satisfy the pressing U.S. interest to end
the war in Afghanistan, policymakers will have to make difficult
and politically sensitive concessions. But if the nightmare
scenario can be avoided, none of those accommodations exceed the
costs of waging a perpetual, stalemated conflict in the country.
The national security threats emanating from Afghanistan have been
considerably exaggerated, and even the worst-case scenarios present
only limited, manageable hazards to American interests that are not
effectively mitigated by continuing the war or by stubbornly
adhering to maximalist, and fanciful, definitions of victory.
Conclusion
The United States cannot win the war in Afghanistan on the terms
stipulated by the three presidents who have waged it, at least not
at an acceptable cost. Pretending that the Taliban can be defeated
and that a constitutionally bounded, democratic, and competent
Kabul-based government can be left in its place is unrealistic. A
Taliban victory might occur after an American military withdrawal,
but this does not present a serious security concern to the United
States. Particularly, the threat of a terrorist safe haven is
minimal and based mostly on the myth that territorial harbors
provide great utility in conducting transnational terrorist
attacks. Moreover, fears of regional disintegration and
destabilization are misplaced, as are concerns about a loss of
credibility: there is good reason to expect stability to emerge
following a negotiated withdrawal, and the war itself seems to
inflict greater damage to America’s image than defeat likely
would. Narrower elements of the mission, including quelling the
opium trade and securing a lasting human rights regime, have
substantially proven to be futile over almost two decades of effort
and are not objectives that the U.S. military, a tool for
protecting the country from threats overseas, is well suited to
addressing.
A negotiated settlement, with a formal cease-fire and a U.S.
military withdrawal at the center of it, is the most reasonable and
promising way of overcoming inertia and of avoiding the most
undesirable outcomes.
Notes
1. Bob Woodward,
Obama’s Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010),
p. 376.
2. Quoted in Paul Kennedy,
“A Time to Appease,” National Interest, June
28, 2010, https://nationalinterest.org/article/a-time-to-appease-3539.
3. Gen. John W. Nicholson,
Statement for the Record on the Situation in Afghanistan before the
Senate Committee on Armed Services, 115th Cong., 1st sess.,
February 9, 2017, p. 2, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Nicholson_02-09-17.pdf.
4. Susan B. Glasser,
“Laurel Miller: The Full Transcript,” Politico
Magazine, July 24, 2017, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/24/laurel-miller-the-full-transcript-215410.
5. Lisa Curtis, “The
Long Search for Peace in Afghanistan: Top-Down and Bottom-Up
Efforts,” opening remarks at the U.S. Institute of Peace
panel discussion, Washington, June 7, 2018, https://www.usip.org/events/long-search-peace-afghanistan.
6. George W. Bush,
“President Bush Delivers State of the Union Address,”
speech, Washington, January 28, 2008, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/01/20080128-13.html.
7. Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A.
and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan
(New York: Penguin Press, 2018), p. 336.
8. Ben Rhodes, The
World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (New York:
Random House, 2018), p. 75.
9. Coll, Directorate
S, p. 488.
10. Barack Obama,
“The New Way Forward—The President’s
Address,” speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point,
NY, December 1, 2009.
11. Barack Obama,
“Statement by the President on Afghanistan,” speech at
the White House, Washington, July 6, 2016, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/07/06/statement-president-afghanistan.
12. Special Inspector
General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, 2019 High-Risk
List, 2019, p. 8.
13. David Edelstein,
Occupational Hazards: Success and Failure in Military
Occupation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
14. Alexander B. Downes
and Lindsey A. O’Rourke, “You Can’t Always Get
What You Want: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Seldom Improves
Interstate Relations,” International Security 41,
no. 2 (Fall 2016): 43-89; Goran Peic and Dan Reiter,
“Foreign-Imposed Regime Change, State Power and Civil War
Onset, 1920-2004,” British Journal of Political
Science 41, no. 3 (July 2011): 453-57; and Alexander B. Downes
and Jonathan Monten, “Forced to Be Free?: Why Foreign-Imposed
Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,”
International Security 37, no. 4 (Spring 2013):
90-131.
15. Graeme Smith, The
Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (Berkeley:
Counterpoint, 2015), p. xvi.
16. Jack Fairweather,
The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in
Afghanistan (New York: Basic Books, 2014), p. 246.
17. Coll, Directorate
S.
18. Coll, Directorate
S, pp. 140-41.
19. Coll, Directorate
S, p. 103.
20. Direct Overt U.S.
Aid Appropriations for and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan, FY
2002-FY 2018 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service,
2017).
21. Pakistani Public
Opinion Ever More Critical of U.S.: 74% Call America an Enemy
(Washington: Pew Research Center, 2012).
22.
“Afghanistan,” Transparency International, https://www.transparency.org/country/AFG.
23. Rod Nordland and Najim
Rahim, “Afghan Vice President Survives Attack on
Convoy,” New York Times, March 31, 2019.
24. Fairweather, The
Good War, pp. 237-38.
25. Coll, Directorate
S, p. 496; for a somewhat wider discussion, see pp.
494-96.
26. Fairweather, The
Good War, p. 305.
27. Greg Jaffe and Missy
Ryan, “The U.S. Was Supposed to Leave Afghanistan by 2017.
Now It Might Take Decades,” Washington Post, January
26, 2016.
28. Kara Fox,
“Taliban Control of Afghanistan on the Rise, US Inspector
Says,” CNN, November 8, 2018.
29. Sen. Jack Reed,
Testimony in Review of the Defense Authorization Request for Fiscal
Year 2020 and the Future Years Defense Program before the Senate
Committee on Armed Services, 116th Cong., 1st sess., February 5,
2019, p. 20, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/19-04_2-05-19.pdf.
30. Ashley Jackson,
“The Taliban’s Fight for Hearts and Minds,”
Foreign Policy (September/October 2018): 43-49; Ashley J.
Tellis and Jeff Eggers, U.S. Policy in Afghanistan: Changing
Strategies, Preserving Gains (Washington: Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, 2017), p. 6.
31. Michael Mandelbaum,
Mission Failure: America and the World in the
Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016),
pp. 168-69; Coll, Directorate S, p. 664.
32. John Mueller,
“The Search for the ‘Breaking Point’ in Vietnam:
The Statistics of a Deadly Quarrel,” International
Studies Quarterly 24, no. 4 (December 1980): 497-519. Recent
research suggests the bombing campaign did have some effect in some
cases. However, this was not enough to cause communist forces to
pull back. Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An
International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
33. On the Gulf War, see
John Mueller, “The Perfect Enemy: Assessing the Gulf
War,” Security Studies 5, no. 1 (1995): 77-117. On
ISIS, see John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart,
“Misoverestimating ISIS: Comparisons with Al-Qaeda,”
Perspectives on Terrorism 10, no. 4 (2016): 32-41. The
remarkable capacity of ISIS to self-destruct is one reason that
lessons from that conflict are unlikely to be applicable to the war
in Afghanistan. The Taliban does not share that crucial proclivity.
See John Mueller, “Redefining Winning in Afghanistan,”
National Interest, September 5, 2017.
34. Bernard Brodie’s
observation about World War I seems to apply as well to the
Afghanistan situation. He argues that “the first casualty is
not so much ‘truth’ as simple reason” and
“to attempt to express reason is, under the circumstances, to
risk the label of ‘defeatist,’ the penalties for which
are always unpleasant and sometimes extreme. The military
commanders who in adversity can feel and exude optimism are the
ones who inspire confidence.” War and Politics (New
York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 26.
35. Steve Inskeep and Greg
Myre, “Afghanistan’s Way Forward: A Talk with Gen. John
Campbell, Decoded,” NPR’s Morning Edition, November 11,
2014.
36. These quotes were
compiled by Patricia Gossman, “Commentary: What U.S. Generals
Get Wrong about Afghanistan,” Reuters, April 12,
2018.
37. John F. Burns,
“General Says He’s Hopeful about Taliban War,”
New York Times, October 12, 2008.
38. This is according to
an off-the-record conversation between one of the authors and a
senior Pentagon official.
39. Barnett R. Rubin,
“Negotiations Are the Best Way to End the War in
Afghanistan,” Foreign Affairs, March 1, 2019.
40. Michael Hastings,
“Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S.
Senators,” Rolling Stone, February 24, 2011.
41. Scott Shane, “In
Afghan War, Officer Becomes a Whistle-Blower,” New York
Times, February 5, 2012; Daniel L. Davis, “Truth, Lies
and Afghanistan: How Military Leaders Have Let Us Down,”
Armed Forces Journal, February 1, 2012.
42. Michael Hastings,
“The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You
to Read,” Rolling Stone, February 10, 2012.
43. Vali Nasr, The
Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (New
York: Anchor Books, 2014), p. 36.
44. Rhodes, The World
as It Is, p. 74.
45. Woodward,
Obama’s Wars, pp. 319-20.
46. Woodward,
Obama’s Wars, p. 247.
47. Woodward,
Obama’s Wars, p. 103.
48. Woodward,
Obama’s Wars, p. 278.
49. Woodward,
Obama’s Wars, p. 280.
50. There was dissent as
well from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had been on the
Senate Armed Services Committee for years and had repeatedly heard
that the United States was six to 18 months from turning
Afghanistan around—time and time again, the same thing,
always wrong. Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), pp. 255-56.
51. See Emma Ashford,
“Trump’s Syria Strikes Show What’s Wrong with
U.S. Foreign Policy,” op-ed, New York Times, April
13, 2018.
52. On the biases in the
foreign policy community more generally, see Stephen M. Walt,
The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy
Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 2018), pp. 91-136.
53. It is worth keeping in
mind that the 9/11 attack has proven to be a severe outlier.
Neither before nor after that event, in war zones or outside them,
has any terrorist attack inflicted even one-tenth as much total
damage. See John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, Chasing Ghosts:
The Policing of Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press,
2016), pp. 117-21.
54. Matthew Kaminski,
“Holbrooke of South Asia: America’s Regional Envoy Says
Pakistan’s Tribal Areas Are the Problem,” Wall
Street Journal, April 11, 2009.
55. Fairweather, The
Good War, p. 246.
56. David Petraeus and
Michael O’Hanlon, “Getting an Edge in the Long Afghan
Struggle,” Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2017.
57. “Full Text:
Trump’s Speech on Afghanistan,” Politico,
August 21, 2017, https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/21/trump-afghanistan-speech-text-241882.
58. Greg Jaffe and Missy
Ryan, “Trump’s Favorite General: Can Mattis Check an
Impulsive President and Still Retain His Trust?,”
Washington Post, February 7, 2018.
59. Aaron Blake,
“President Trump’s Full Washington Post Interview
Transcript, Annotated,” Washington Post, November
27, 2018.
60. See also Paul Pillar,
“Who’s Afraid of a Terrorist Haven?,”
Washington Post, September 16, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/15/AR2009091502977.html;
John Mueller, “The ‘Safe Haven’ Myth,”
The Nation, October 21, 2009; Martha Crenshaw,
“Assessing the Al-Qa`ida Threat to the United States,”
CTC Sentinel 3, no. 1 (2010): 6-9; Micah Zenko and Amelia
Mae Wolf, “The Myth of the Terrorist Safe Haven,”
Foreign Policy, January 26, 2015.
61. Lawrence Wright,
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New
York: Knopf, 2006), pp. 230-31, 287-88; Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda:
The True Story of Radical Islam (London: I.B. Taurus, 2003),
pp. 150, 164-65; Vahid Brown, “The Façade of Allegiance: Bin
Ladin’s Dubious Pledge to Mullah Omar,” CTC
Sentinel 3, no. 1 (January 2010): 1-6.
62. Scott Atran,
“Turning the Taliban against Al Qaeda,” New York
Times, October 26, 2010.
63. Nic Robertson,
“Afghan Taliban Spokesman: We Will Win the War,” CNN,
May 5, 2009.
64. Brown, “The
Façade of Allegiance,” pp. 1-6.
65. Jason Burke,
Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror (New York: I. B.
Tauris, 2003), pp. 167-68.
66. See also Crenshaw,
“Assessing the Al-Qa`ida Threat,” p. 7.
67. Scott Shane, “A
Dogged Taliban Chief Rebounds, Vexing U.S.,” New York
Times, October 10, 2009.
68. Brian Glyn Williams,
“Return of the Arabs: Al-Qa`ida’s Current Military Role
in the Afghan Insurgency,” CTC Sentinel 1, no. 3
(February 2008): 22-25.
69. Craig Whitlock,
“Facing Afghan Mistrust, al-Qaeda Fighters Take Limited Role
in Insurgency,” Washington Post, August 23,
2010.
70. Daniel W. Drezner,
“Why I’m Glad I’m Not a Counter-Terrorism
Expert,” Foreign Policy, June 28, 2010.
71. Seth G. Jones,
“The Rise of Afghanistan’s Insurgency: State Failure
and Jihad,” International Security 32, no. 4 (Spring
2008): 7-40.
72. Brown, “The
Façade of Allegiance,” p. 2.
73. Afghanistan: The
Precarious Struggle for Stability (Ottawa: Canadian Security
Intelligence Service, May 2019), p. 28. This report summarizes the
views emerging from a January 2019 meeting of six experts from
Canada, the United States, and Europe.
74. “To the
Point,” Public Radio International, May 14, 2009.
75. See Zenko and Wolf,
“The Myth of the Terrorist Safe Haven.”
76. On al Qaeda’s
inadequacies, see Fawaz A. Gerges, The Rise and Fall of
Al-Qaeda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Mueller
and Stewart, “Misoverestimating ISIS”; Mueller and
Stewart, Chasing Ghosts, chap. 4. Al Qaeda’s
remarkably limited record since 2001 suggests that Glenn Carle was
right when he said in 2008: “The organization … has only
a handful of individuals capable of planning, organizing and
leading a terrorist operation … its capabilities are far
inferior to its desires… . We must not take fright at the
specter our leaders have exaggerated. In fact, we must see
jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed and miserable opponents
that they are.” Glenn L. Carle, “Overstating Our
Fears,” op-ed, Washington Post, July 13, 2008.
Terrorism specialist Marc Sageman characterizes the threat
terrorists present in the United States as “rather
negligible.” Marc Sageman, Misunderstanding
Terrorism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2017), p. 170; see also Marc Sageman, Turning to Political
Violence: The Emergence of Terrorism (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), p. 373.
77. Coll, Directorate
S.
78. Precarious
Struggle for Stability, p. 49.
79. Precarious
Struggle for Stability, p. 47.
80. This analysis comes
from Barry Posen, “It’s Time to Make Afghanistan
Someone Else’s Problem,” The Atlantic, August
18, 2017.
81. Justin Rowlatt,
“How the US Military’s Opium War in Afghanistan Was
Lost,” BBC News, April 25, 2019.
82. Mujib Mashal,
“Afghan Taliban Awash in Heroin Cash, a Troubling Turn for
War,” New York Times, October 29, 2017.
83. Azam Ahmed,
“Tasked with Combating Opium, Afghan Officials Profit from
It,” New York Times, February 15, 2016.
84. Vanda Felbab-Brown,
“Afghanistan’s Opium Production Is through the
Roof—Why Washington Shouldn’t Overreact,”
Brookings Institution, November 21, 2017.
85. Alfred W. McCoy,
“How the Heroin Trade Explains the US-UK Failure in
Afghanistan,” The Guardian, January 9, 2018.
86. McCoy, “US-UK
Failure in Afghanistan.” See also Barnett R. Rubin,
Afghanistan from the Cold War through the War on Terror
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 401; Coll,
Directorate S, p. 60.
87. On this issue more
generally, see Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall,
“Four Decades and Counting: The Continued Failure of
the War on Drugs,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no.
811, April 12, 2017.
88. Special Inspector
General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, 2019 High-Risk
List, pp. 41-42.
89. Najia Nasim and Megan
Corrado, “Don’t Sacrifice Afghan Women’s Freedoms
for a Flawed Peace Deal,” op-ed, The Hill, February
16, 2019.
90. Mariam Safi and
Muqaddesa Yourish, “What Is Wrong with Afghanistan’s
Peace Process,” op-ed, New York Times, February 20,
2019.
91. United Nations
Development Programme, Human Development Indices and
Indicators: 2018 Statistical Update.
92. Jeni Klugman,
“This Chart Shows the Best and Worst Countries for Women in
the World Today,” Washington Post, November 7,
2017.
93. Precarious
Struggle for Stability, p. 65.
94. “Trump’s
Speech on Afghanistan.”
95. Kristina Wong,
“McCain: Obama Should Have Halted Afghan Withdrawal,”
The Hill, October 15, 2015.
96. David Petraeus and
Michael O’Hanlon, “The U.S. Needs to Keep Troops in
Afghanistan,” Washington Post, July 7, 2015.
97. Dominic D. P. Johnson
and Dominic Tierney, “Bad World: The Negativity Bias in
International Politics,” International Security 43,
no. 3 (Winter 2018/19): 112.
98. “Trump’s
Speech on Afghanistan.”
99. Joel D. Rayburn and
Frank K. Sobchak, eds., The U.S. Army in the Iraq
War—Volume 2: Surge and Withdrawal 2007-2011 (Carlisle,
PA: U.S. Army War College Press, 2019), pp. 569-611.
100. Richard N. Haass,
“Agonizing over Afghanistan,” Project Syndicate,
January 14, 2019.
101. Edward Luce,
“Donald Trump Is Pulling a Vietnam in Afghanistan,”
Financial Times, April 4, 2019.
102. Bing West,
“Afghanistan Options: Leave, Increase, Stand Pat, or Cut
Back?,” Strategika, February 26, 2018, https://www.hoover.org/research/afghanistan-options-leave-increase-stand-pat-or-cut-back.
103. Ryan Crocker,
“I Was Ambassador to Afghanistan. This Deal Is a
Surrender,” Washington Post, January 29, 2019.
104. Daryl G. Press,
Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military
Threats (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). Also see
Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Robert Jervis and
Jack Snyder, eds., Dominoes and Bandwagons: Strategic Beliefs
and Great Power Competition in the Eurasian Rimland (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991).
105. Dina Smeltz,
Foreign Policy in the New Millennium: Results of the 2012
Chicago Council Survey of American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign
Policy (Chicago: Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 2012).
106. Cited in Mercer,
Reputation and International Politics, p. 39.
107. See Richard Ned
Lebow, Why Nations Fight (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
108. Jonathan Mercer,
“The Illusion of International Prestige,”
International Security 41, no. 4 (Spring 2017): 135.
109. For an extended
discussion, see John Mueller, “Reflections on the Vietnam
Protest Movement and on the Curious Calm at the War’s
End,” in Peter Braestrup, ed., Vietnam as History
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), pp.
151-57.
110. Ahmed Rashid,
Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central
Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), chaps.
1-2.
111. Precarious
Struggle for Stability, pp. 25-31.
112. John Mueller, War
and Ideas: Selected Essays (London: Routledge, 2011), chap. 7;
Chaim Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure of the
Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War,”
International Security 29, no. 1, (Summer 2004): 5-48.
113. Betty Glad and
Philipp Rosenberg, “Bargaining Under Fire: Limit Setting and
Maintenance during the Korean War,” in Psychological
Dimensions of War, ed. Betty Glad (Newbury Park, CA: Sage
Publications, 1990), p. 195.
114. David Zucchino,
“U.S. and Afghan Forces Killed More Civilians Than Taliban
Did, Report Finds,” New York Times, April 24,
2019.
115. For example, see
Coll, Directorate S, chap. 31.
116. “Trump’s
Speech on Afghanistan.”
117. Shane, “Dogged
Taliban Chief Rebounds.”
118. Shashank Bengali,
Sultan Faizy, and Aoun Sahi, “What Might Peace with the
Taliban in Afghanistan Look Like?,” Los Angeles
Times, January 29, 2019, p. A3.
119. Precarious
Struggle for Stability, p. 69; Bengali, Faizy, and Sahl,
“What Might Peace,” p. A3.
120. Borham Osman,
“The U.S. Needs to Talk to the Taliban in Afghanistan,”
New York Times, March 19, 2018; Tellis and Eggers,
U.S. Policy in Afghanistan, p. 16; Precarious Struggle
for Stability, p. 68.
121. Osman, “U.S.
Needs to Talk to the Taliban.”
122. Osman, “U.S.
Needs to Talk to the Taliban.”
123. Precarious
Struggle for Stability, p. 19.
124. Frud Bezhan,
“Afghan Taliban Open to Women’s Rights—But Only
on Its Terms,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, February 6,
2019.
125. Coll, Directorate
S, p. 572.
126. Rod Nordland and
Mujib Mashal, “U.S. and Taliban Make Headway in Talks for
Withdrawal from Afghanistan,” New York Times,
January 24, 2019.
127. Precarious
Struggle for Stability, p. 48.
128. Precarious
Struggle for Stability, p. 21; Najim Rahim and Mujib Mashal,
“As Afghan Cease-Fire Ends, Temporary Friends Hug, Then
Return to War,” New York Times, June 17, 2018.
129. Erik Goepner,
“War
State, Trauma State: Why Afghanistan Remains Stuck in
Conflict,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 844, June
19, 2018.
Citation: Glaser, John, and John Mueller.
“Overcoming Inertia: Why It’s Time to End the War in
Afghanistan.” Policy Analysis no. 878, Cato Institute,
Washington, DC, August 13, 2019. https://doi.org/10.36009/PA.878.
