How We Won the War in Afghanistan
By: Brandon Scott
Tags: Conflict, War, Afghanistan, America

Courtesy of DOD/Regional Command East

The second World War ruined our concept of conflict. It led us to believe that conflicts are wars and wars are two sides fighting, with a singular monolithic outcome — one side wins. Then everyone comes home. There is a parade. A sailor kisses a woman. Boom. War Won.

But this is a myth of epic proportions. Conflicts are not war, though wars are a part of conflicts. Although a war is typically made up of many battles, the battle is not the war, and the war is not the conflict. Conflicts go on for decades and centuries and evolve, devolve, merge, morph, fizzle-out, flare up, expand, and shrink geographically, go from hot to warm to cold, and develop into hybrid forms.

The most famous US war that is said to be lost — Vietnam — was actually won. It just took 40 years. Vietnam is a free market country for all intents and purposes; and allies with the US with an extensive population exchange. All the wars that we viewed as won, were never won in the sense of this black and white model that we subscribe to, from World War II. Not even World War II was won in the sense of its own model.

It was not clean cut. There was a small resistance afterwards. There are still neo-NAZIs in Germany, and we still have troops in Germany. Germany still battles us on various fronts politically, economically, and socially. Yet no one says we lost the war against Germany.

Conflict has a four-dimensional spectrum that is never ending. This spectrum is partnered in a dance with Peace: two bi-polar points that are constantly in a fluid dance together like one of those geo-spatial screen savers on your Compaq computer in 1998.

The Korean War was never won. The “Cold War” was never won. The First Gulf War was only “won” in the sense that Iraqi troops were pushed out of Kuwait. But the First Gulf War was only a battle within a larger conflict. The second Gulf War, or the War in Iraq, consists of about four or more wars that all fall under the same conflict.

When you speak to Iraqis, they make a distinction between the Invasion in 2003, the Sectarian War and the counter-ISIS war. Why Americans insist on viewing the “War in Iraq” as a singular monolithic war is sadly due to their lack of attention, detail and narrow-minded World War Two syndrome.

For those that argue the Afghan War was lost, they fail to understand the concept of conflict. The war in Afghanistan was never lost, because it never began. It has continued in some fashion for centuries. The actors just rotated through, changing names and claims. The Taliban may lay claim to political power currently and maintain some level of monopoly of violence — but that is not universal. They maintain this status because we let them.

Make no mistake about it: there was never a moment in time, that the US could not have removed the Taliban off the map. However, our moral obligations hindered that, due to the massive amount of civilian casualties it would have cost. So no, the Taliban and their cohorts at no point “beat” the American military and our NATO allies.

It may be argued that we failed at training the Afghan army. The same could be said of the Iraqi Army in 2014 in the face of ISIL, yet that does not hold true today. Moreover, we did not fail at training the Afghan people. What the Taliban face, assuming they maintain “power,” is the same challenge every “government” or “occupier” in Afghanistan has always faced. The difference is: this aint your parents’ Afghanistan.

For twenty years, we have vaccinated the Afghan population with concepts of freedom, education, work, opportunities, English language, liberal thoughts, internet. All the while, the Taliban showed their true colors, by killing innocent people as a matter of policy and without remorse. The Afghans know the Taliban. They do not like them. They may not all be the greatest fans of the US or NATO in their country, but they, more than 80% definitively prefer a non-Taliban-run nation.

In the end, we won the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. We inoculated them in a way that in a 21st century makes it impossible for the Taliban to operate without, at the very minimum, making extreme concessions. This is not to say there will be no blood spilled, but good luck to the Taliban ever surpassing the reach of governance that GIRoA did which was with the backing of the entire world. The Taliban may have the watches, but freedom has the time.

The Taliban as we knew them pre-August 31st, 2021, will never succeed. Like in Vietnam, the will of the people to have access to equality, justice, information, quality of life, connectivity, travel, education, and business, is and always will be greater than the violence-forced power of “Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and backward-ass, cave-dwelling, fundamentalist assholes everywhere.” America always wins their wars, because America is not a country, it is an idea, and you cannot kill an idea.