Part One: Doing too Much Loses Wars — Like Afghanistan
By: Mason Nsi
Tags: War, Afghanistan, Military, Conflict, Featured Analysis

By Mike Nelson and Jennifer Cafarella, NSI Visiting Fellows

Measuring America’s loss in Afghanistan is surprisingly hard for a war we’ve spent twenty years waging. The toll in lives is clear and deeply painful, but the defeat itself is hard to quantify. Is it a failure to prevent al Qaeda from reconstituting? A failure to build a democracy? A failure to modernize Afghan society? All or none of these? In Afghanistan, America waged war without a clear and shared purpose. As a result, it is hard to reach a common view of what we forfeit by withdrawing. Our lack of consensus makes coming to terms with our experience even more difficult. It also risks failure to learn lessons for which we’ve paid an extremely high price and which we’ll need in the years to come.

Americans are right to be outraged at the failures of America’s leadership to achieve success in Afghanistan. More accountability earlier in the war might have enabled a better outcome. As Americans try to move on, we must ensure that such failures do not recur. To do so, we must resist the false but tempting conclusion that success in Afghanistan was impossible. It wasn’t. Winning begins with clear and realistic goals. The Taliban had them, and is likely to succeed. America lacked them, and two nations paid the price.

After September 11th, the war America launched in Afghanistan was undoubtedly justified. The U.S. decision to go to war against the Taliban, who governed Afghanistan and sheltered al Qaeda, was neither rash nor arbitrary. President Bush issued clear demands to avert war: “Close terrorist training camps; hand over leaders of the al Qaeda network; and return all foreign nationals… unjustly detained in [Afghanistan].” The Taliban refused to comply due to a religious promise of fealty to al Qaeda that remains strong today.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan began with a stunning success in 2001. U.S. Task Force Dagger, comprised of Special Forces and CIA elements supported by airpower, partnered with a loose coalition of Afghans known as the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban and begin forming a new government within three months. It was an unparalleled success. Unfortunately, Osama Bin Laden slipped away, thwarting America’s second objective to deliver justice to those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. But the opportunity for victory in regards to America’s primary mission to deny Afghanistan as a safe haven for terrorists would elude the United States far longer than Bin Laden would evade U.S. forces.

The opportunity America squandered in 2002 was perhaps the greatest failure of the war. In a mistake we would repeat elsewhere, the United States had no clear vision for how to shape a new Afghan state. Aid and development projects surged forward and became ends themselves. Metrics such as number of schools opened began to stand in for measures of progress toward specified goals — a telltale sign of absent strategy. The United States would never recover from this period of strategic ambiguity. Later, arguments against withdrawal that focused on protecting Afghan girls fell flat with the public. Americans had gone to war in self-defense. Nearly twenty years later, the war seemed unrecognizable — and was, no matter the righteousness of some U.S. efforts.

The Taliban never lost sight of its political goal: to govern Afghanistan. It continued this effort from exile in Pakistan and in rural villages across Afghanistan where Taliban forces had regrouped and as the U.S., its allies, and the Afghan government dithered over bureaucratic organization in Kabul. The Taliban’s semi-functioning local governance remained brutal, but the unfamiliar and increasingly corrupt regime in Kabul drove alienation among the populace that disadvantaged the government. The Taliban used its influence to launch a vicious insurgency during the 2006 fighting season that reclaimed the war’s momentum by 2008.

America’s halfhearted response to the Taliban’s counter-offensive was the second major step towards defeat. Already distracted by other threats and domestic pressure, President Obama reluctantly authorized a surge of U.S. forces but imposed a time limit that rendered the military pressure essentially useless. The Taliban waited it out. The successful raid against Osama Bin Laden in May 2011 further weakened U.S. resolve as the troop surge wound down. The difficult and costly mess of Afghanistan seemed less vital to many after Bin Laden’s death. Attention wavered.

Nonetheless, the United States continued to wage a largely directionless war for another decade. We continued to try to purge corruption and implement civil and social changes based on Western norms. U.S. efforts to modernize the Afghan military required an Afghan military annual budget that exceeded Afghanistan’s entire GDP, virtually ensuring it would be unsustainable.

Our early failures in Afghanistan set the United States, our allies, and Afghanistan itself on a path toward strategic defeat. While the outcome seems clear in retrospect, the reality as the war unfolded confronted U.S. leaders with uncertain conditions and difficult decisions. Good leadership required more than a better strategy. It required a form of accountability U.S. leaders have begun to avoid: an ongoing conversation between the public and policy makers.

To continue reading, part two of this series can be found here.

Jennifer Cafarella is the inaugural National Security Fellow at the Institute for the Study of War and an NSI Visiting Fellow.

Michael D. Nelson is an Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel and currently serves as Professor of Military Science and Chair of the Military Science Department at George Mason University.

Previously, he served as the Deputy Director of the Commander’s Action Group at United States Central Command for General Joseph Votel. In this capacity he served as a direct adviser to the CENTCOM Commander and was responsible for coordinating all strategic communication between the CENTCOM Commander and political and military leaders throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.