Peter Konchak ’21, Law & Public Policy Scholar
August 30, 2021 marked the end of nearly two decades of continuous U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. A little more than two weeks after Taliban militants seized the Afghan capital, Kabul, following a rapid offensive and the wholesale collapse of the Afghan security forces, the last U.S. military forces in Afghanistan completed their ignominious withdrawal from that country. As a consequence, to the extent that the war in Afghanistan constituted a protracted armed conflict between the United States and the Taliban, that war is over. Insofar as it was a war fought over whether the Afghan government or the Taliban would control Afghanistan in our absence, it is a war we have lost. Why did we fail in that endeavor?
The proximate causes are clear enough. For the past twenty years, the United States carried out a major counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, pursuant to the twin objectives of constructing an Afghan government aligned with U.S. interests and defending that regime against the Taliban. However, the United States failed to comprehensively neutralize the military capabilities of the Taliban or build a government capable of governing Afghanistan without substantial foreign military support. Over time, the costs of the U.S. counterinsurgency effort became a drain on U.S. resources, prompting the United States to disengage from that conflict. And as the United States extricated itself from the hostilities, the Afghan security forces—bereft of the U.S. logistical, intelligence, and operational assistance on which they had come to rely—proved unable or unwilling to resist the Taliban.
Those were the immediate reasons for the U.S. failure in Afghanistan. But what were the ultimate factors that resulted in those proximate causes of defeat?
Raison d’Etat: The Policy Rationale for War in Afghanistan
In his seminal study of military strategy, Carl von Clausewitz observed that the inherent nature of war is defined by a perennial duality. War is distinct from all other human activity because it necessarily involves the large-scale use of force or threats of force by organized political entities. Yet, Clausewitz instructs that war remains connected to the entirety of human endeavor because it is also inherently a social phenomenon—war is the continuation of policy by forcible means. The implication of that duality is that war involves the application of force not myopically in a vacuum, but rather in pursuit of specific policy objectives. An effective strategy for prosecuting an armed conflict must therefore rationally relate the use of force to the political goals sought by the proponent. The United States lost the war in Afghanistan when it failed to achieve that task.
It is well known that the initial reason for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was borne out of the events of 9/11. In response to those attacks, the United States launched a global military and intelligence campaign to dismantle al Qaeda as an effective terrorist network capable of conducting mass-casualty terror attacks on U.S. territory or against core U.S. interests. In late 2001, al Qaeda was primarily based in Afghanistan, where it had been afforded safe haven by the Taliban since the latter group had seized power there in 1996. As a result, when the Taliban refused to turn over al Qaeda leaders to the United States for purposes of prosecution, the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies initiated armed hostilities against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Critically, amid those circumstances, going to war with the Taliban was a rational strategy. Given al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s protection of that group, the United States had to initiate armed hostilities against the Taliban in order to achieve its objectives vis-à-vis al Qaeda. At the very least, Taliban control of the territory on which al Qaeda bases were located, coupled with the substantial ground forces and limited air defense networks possessed by the Taliban, required the United States to neutralize critical Taliban military capabilities in order to achieve the freedom of action necessary to strike al Qaeda targets with impunity.
Moreover, the tight linkages between the Taliban and al Qaeda as of 2001 made the complete overthrow of the Taliban regime a legitimate military objective. The 9/11 attacks had been made possible by the fact that al Qaeda possessed a cohesive base of operations from which it could plan and execute complex terror attacks directed against distant geographies. The existence of that base was in turn made possible by Taliban control of Afghanistan. Therefore, eliminating the military capability of the Taliban—and thus that group’s capacity to control Afghan territory—permitted the United States to eject al Qaeda from its primary base of operations. In so doing, the 2001 U.S. invasion decisively disrupted core al Qaeda operations against foreign targets and displaced the group to less permissive geographies, such as Pakistan and Yemen.
As a result of the foregoing analysis, it is evident that U.S. military strategy vis-à-vis Afghanistan in late 2001 rationally corresponded to the achievement of U.S. national security objectives—the neutralization of al Qaeda as a cohesive terrorist organization capable of launching coordinated, mass-casualty attacks on the U.S. homeland or otherwise against key U.S. interests.
Things Fall Apart
Almost as soon as that objective had been achieved, however, U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan became woefully disjointed from the imperatives of U.S. national security policy. This was the result of three key events. First, in late 2001, having suffered a catastrophic military defeat at the hands of U.S. forces, the Taliban attempted to surrender to the United States. Under the terms of that surrender, Taliban militants—including its leader, Mullah Omar—would have been afforded amnesty in exchange for an end to the fighting and the Taliban’s acceptance of a marginal role in a reconstituted Afghan government. While the interim Afghan government was receptive to that offer, the United States summarily rejected it.
Second, following its initial military victory in Afghanistan, the United States proceeded to establish a democratic government in Afghanistan that was designed as one of the most centralized forms of national administration in the world. This occurred despite the fact that Afghanistan is a multiethnic and primarily tribal society with few traditions of nationhood or statehood as understood in western political theory. Third and finally, pursuant to that effort, the United States did not withdraw from Afghanistan following its decisive victory over the Taliban. Instead, it proceeded—both, as it seems, as a matter of bureaucratic inertia as much as determined policy—to effectuate a prolonged occupation of a country historically disposed towards fierce independence from foreign influence. Ostensibly, U.S. forces were to be withdrawn from Afghanistan after hunting down remaining terrorist elements. But with no clear exit strategy and a feeble approach to stabilization efforts, the United States would gradually be drawn in to a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign.
That was the road taken, so to speak. But why, specifically, were those elements of U.S. strategy disconsonant from U.S. national security policy objectives?
The answer is that they bore no reasonable relation to the conditions that had originally impelled the United States to go to war in Afghanistan, or those that emerged after initial U.S. objectives in that country had been achieved.
Ends and Means
As discussed above, the original motivation for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was to target al Qaeda’s primary base of operations. Removing the Taliban from power was, as explained, arguably a necessary condition precedent for achieving that central objective. But the United States never had a compelling national interest in carrying out a prolonged occupation of Afghanistan pursuant to constructing a democratic, centralized Afghan government and effectuating the complete destruction of the Taliban.
Following the 2001 invasion, at minimum the United States needed to ensure that Afghanistan would not subsequently reemerge as a comprehensive safe haven for al Qaeda. Based on the paradigm case of pre-9/11 Afghanistan under the Taliban, a comprehensive terrorist safe haven can most accurately be defined by the confluence of three features. First, a state—or a non-state actor possessing substantial territory—permits a terrorist organization to operate from areas under its control. Second, that state or non-state group possesses the intent and the ability to protect that terrorist organization from external military threats by employing its military capabilities in a manner that impedes or denies the ability of an external actor to project force against that terror group. Third, as a consequence those factors, that terrorist organization is afforded the freedom to operate with the degree of security and cohesion necessary to plan and execute complex terror attacks against distant geographies.
Applying this framework to Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion, preventing al Qaeda from reacquiring a comprehensive safe haven in that country required the United States to achieve one of the following objectives. Either it had to ensure that any entity in control of Afghanistan would not allow al Qaeda to operate from its territory, or it had to make certain that any entity that did permit al Qaeda to operate within its jurisdiction would not possess the capacity to substantially interfere with U.S. military operations. Critically, the United States could have achieved the first objective without constructing a democratic, centralized Afghan state closely aligned with the United States.
Perhaps more importantly, the United States could have prevented Afghanistan from reemerging as a comprehensive al Qaeda safe haven even if it did not ensure that any cohesive Afghan government emerged from its intervention. Currently, in places such as Yemen and Libya, the lack of a viable central government permits al Qaeda affiliates to operate in ungoverned spaces. The lack of effective governmental control affords terrorists partial or potential safe haven in those geographies. However, those activities are perpetually vulnerable to U.S. counterterrorism efforts. U.S. intelligence and military capabilities can operate in those spaces with relative impunity, permitting the United States to execute over-the-horizon airstrikes or special forces raids against terrorists when necessary. As a result, militant groups located in ungoverned spaces have largely been forced to focus their efforts on local campaigns rather than transnational terror plots.
The corollary to that point is that there is no reason why Washington needed to create a centralized, democratic Afghan government. Certainly, the promotion of democracy on the international plane is an important and worthwhile effort. Similarly, it is almost necessarily true that the greater consolidation of state authority in the undeveloped world is conductive to greater international peace and security. However, those phenomena—the spread of democracy and the development of legitimate, sovereign states—have always been tenuous processes that have been most successfully supported by the United States through continuous engagement with societies already predisposed towards achieving those objectives. And Afghanistan’s historic decentralization and political conservatism made it a poor candidate for such engagement in the first place. Therefore, attempting to achieve those objectives in Afghanistan, in order to ensure that that country would not reemerge as a comprehensive safe haven for al Qaeda, was not the optimal response to the problem of attempting to achieve geopolitical stability in that country.
Similarly, there was no legitimate U.S. interest in effectuating the complete destruction of the Taliban after that group had already been defeated by and had offered to surrender to the United States. Discussing the central failings of the Versailles Peace Treaty that ended the First World War, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once wrote, “In dealing with the defeated enemy, the victors designing a peace settlement must navigate the transition from the intransigence vital to victory to the conciliation needed to achieve a lasting peace. A punitive peace…saddles the victors…with the task of holding down a country determined to undermine the settlement.” Replace the word “country” with the term “violent non-state actor,” and Kissinger could have been describing U.S. dealings with the Taliban in late 2001. By refusing to accept any result less than the utter destruction of the Taliban, the United States failed to translate its military victory over that group into the creation of a post-war state of affairs compatible with its interests.
As Kissinger suggests, if the victor seeks the complete subjugation of the vanquished enemy, it must repress that adversary for a prolonged period if it is to prevail. In Afghanistan, that meant suppressing the Taliban via a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign after that group had reconstituted itself by 2006. Winning that campaign was possible; insurgencies are not impossible to defeat, and indeed most insurgencies fail. The problem is that efficacious counterinsurgency strategies often require a prolonged, patient, and perceptive commitment of resources on the part of the counterinsurgent. But for the United States in Afghanistan, incurring those costs was never clearly worth the benefit of ending a renewed Taliban insurgency.
The Road(s) Not Taken
The United States was committed to extricating itself from Afghanistan for over half the time it was fighting in that country. Despite recognizing that its strategy in Afghanistan had failed as early as 2008, the United States spent over a decade continuing to pursue variations in that general course of action. That strategy was pursued notwithstanding the existence of at least several possible alternatives that were more rationally related to U.S. policy interests. Might the United States, for example, have utilized its overwhelming leverage over the Afghan government in order to compel Kabul to adopt a new, more decentralized governmental structure more in line with its historical political traditions? Or might the United States have incentivized regional powers with a stake in Afghanistan, such as Pakistan, to help stabilize the security situation in Afghanistan by permitting them to exercise greater influence in that country?
Whatever the answer to those questions and others like them, such options were never systematically pursued by the United States. And that was the final failure of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Its result was that, in the end, such a myopic course of action had turned the question of future U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, for the public and policymakers alike, into a simple binary choice—stay indefinitely or leave completely. The decision to leave then merely made the failure official. The United States has now officially lost because the war is now officially over. But decades-long wars are not lost in a month, or a day, or a year. They are lost because the strategy of the defeated power fails over the course of a prolonged period. And U.S. strategy in Afghanistan failed long before the last American plane departed from Kabul International Airport.