March/April 2020	 77
CARTER MALKASIAN is the author of War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on
the Afghan Frontier. From 2015 to 2019, he was Senior Adviser to U.S. General Joseph
Dunford, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
How the Good War
Went Bad
America’s Slow-Motion Failure
in Afghanistan
Carter Malkasian
T
he United States has been fighting a war in Afghanistan for over
18 years. More than 2,300 U.S. military personnel have lost their
lives there; more than 20,000 others have been wounded. At least
half a million Afghans—government forces, Taliban fighters, and civilians—have
been killed or wounded. Washington has spent close to $1 trillion
on the war. Although the al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is dead
and no major attack on the U.S. homeland has been carried out by a terrorist
group based in Afghanistan since 9/11, the United States has been
unable to end the violence or hand off the war to the Afghan authorities,
and the Afghan government cannot survivewithout U.S. military backing.
At the end of 2019, The Washington Post published a series titled
“The Afghanistan Papers,” a collection of U.S. government documents
that included notes of interviews conducted by the special inspector
general for Afghanistan reconstruction. In those interviews, numerous
U.S. officials conceded that they had long seen the war as unwinnable.
Polls have found that a majority of Americans now view the war
as a failure. Every U.S. president since 2001 has sought to reach a
point in Afghanistan when the violence would be sufficiently low or
the Afghan government strong enough to allow U.S. military forces to
withdraw without significantly increasing the risk of a resurgent terrorist
threat.That day has not come. In that sense, whatever the future
brings, for 18 years the United States has been unable to prevail.
Carter Malkasian
78	 foreign affairs
The obstacles to success in Afghanistan were daunting: widespread
corruption, intense grievances, Pakistani meddling, and deep-rooted
resistance to foreign occupation. Yet there were also fleeting opportunities
to find peace, or at least a more sustainable, less costly, and less
violent stalemate. American leaders failed to grasp those chances,
thanks to unjustified overconfidence following U.S. military victories
and thanks to their fear of being held responsible if terrorists based in
Afghanistan once again attacked the United States. Above all, officials
in Washington clung too long to their preconceived notions of how
the war would play out and neglected opportunities and options that
did not fit their biases. Winning in Afghanistan was always going to
be difficult. Avoidable errors made it impossible.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF A LONG WAR
On October 7, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush launched an invasion
of Afghanistan in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks. In the months
that followed, U.S. and allied forces and their partners in the Northern
Alliance, an Afghan faction, chased out al Qaeda and upended the
Taliban regime. Bin Laden fled to Pakistan; the leader of the Taliban,
Mullah Omar, went to the mountains. Taliban commanders and fighters
returned to their homes or escaped to safe havens in Pakistan.
Skillful diplomatic efforts spearheaded by a U.S. special envoy, Zalmay
Khalilzad, established a process that created a new Afghan government
led by the conciliatory Hamid Karzai.
For the next four years, Afghanistan was deceptively peaceful. The
U.S. military deaths during that time represent just a tenth of the
total that have occurred during the war. Bush maintained a light U.S.
military footprint in the country (around 8,000 troops in 2002, increasing
to about 20,000 by the end of 2005) aimed at completing the
defeat of al Qaeda and the Taliban and helping set up a new democracy
that could prevent terrorists from coming back. The idea was to
withdraw eventually, but there was no clear plan for how to make that
happen, other than killing or capturing al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.
Still, political progress encouraged optimism. In January 2004, an Afghan
loya jirga, or grand council, approved a new constitution. Presidential
and then parliamentary elections followed. All the while,
Karzai strove to bring the country’s many factions together.
But in Pakistan, the Taliban were rebuilding. In early 2003, Mullah
Omar, still in hiding, sent a voice recording to his subordinates
How the Good War Went Bad
	 March/April 2020	 79
calling on them to reorganize the movement and prepare for a major
offensive within a few years. Key Taliban figures founded a leadership
council known as the Quetta Shura, after the Pakistani city
where they assembled. Training and recruitment moved forward.
Cadres infiltrated back into Afghanistan. In Washington, however,
the narrative of success continued to hold sway, and Pakistan was
still seen as a valuable partner.
Violence increased slowly; then, in February 2006, the Taliban
pounced. Thousands of insurgents overran entire districts and surrounded
provincial capitals. The Quetta Shura built what amounted
to a rival regime. Over the course of the next three years, the Taliban
captured most of the country’s south and much of its east. U.S.
forces and their nato allies were sucked into heavy fighting. By the
end of 2008, U.S. troop levels had risen to over 30,000 without
stemming the tide. Yet the overall strategy did not change. Bush
remained determined to defeat the Taliban and win what he deemed
“a victory for the forces of liberty.”
President Barack Obama came into office in January 2009 promising
to turn around what many of his advisers and supporters saw as
“the good war” in Afghanistan (as opposed to “the bad war” in Iraq,
JIMYOUNG/REUTERS
What, us worry? Karzai and Rumsfeld in Washington, D.C., September 2006
Carter Malkasian
80	 foreign affairs
which they mostly saw as a lost cause). After a protracted debate, he
opted to send reinforcements to Afghanistan: 21,000 troops in March
and then, more reluctantly, another 30,000 or so in December, putting
the total number of U.S. troops in the country at close to 100,000.
Wary of overinvesting, he limited the goals of this “surge”—modeled on
the one that had turned around the U.S.
war in Iraq a few years earlier—to removing
the terrorist threat to the American
homeland. Gone was Bush’s intent
to defeat the Taliban no matter what,
even though the group could not be
trusted to stop terrorists from using Afghanistan
as a refuge. Instead, the United States would deny al Qaeda a
safe haven, reverse theTaliban’s momentum, and strengthen the Afghan
government and its security forces. The plan was to begin a drawdown
of the surge forces in mid-2011 and eventually hand off full responsibility
for the country’s security to the Afghan government.
Over the next three years, the surge stabilized the most important
cities and districts, vitalized the Afghan army and police, and rallied
support for the government. The threat from al Qaeda fell after the
2011 death of bin Laden at the hands of U.S. special operations forces
in Pakistan. Yet the costs of the surge outweighed the gains. Between
2009 and 2012, more than 1,500 U.S. military personnel were killed
and over 15,000 were wounded—more American casualties than during
the entire rest of the 18-year war. At the height of the surge, the
United States was spending approximately $110 billion per year in
Afghanistan, roughly 50 percent more than annual U.S. federal spending
on education. Obama came to see the war effort as unsustainable.
In a series of announcements between 2010 and 2014, he laid out a
schedule to draw down U.S. military forces to zero (excluding a
small embassy presence) by the end of 2016.
By 2013, more than 350,000 Afghan soldiers and police had been
trained, armed, and deployed. Their performance was mixed, marred
by corruption and by “insider attacks” carried out on American and
allied advisers. Many units depended on U.S. advisers and air support
to defeat the Taliban in battle.
By 2015, just 9,800 U.S. troops were left in Afghanistan. As the
withdrawal continued, they focused on counterterrorism and on advising
and training the Afghans. That fall, the Taliban mounted a
The Taliban exemplified an
idea—resistance to
occupation—that runs deep
in Afghan culture.
	 March/April 2020	 81
Carter Malkasian
82	 foreign affairs
series of well-planned offensives that became one of the most decisive
events of the war. In the province of Kunduz, 500 Taliban fighters
routed some 3,000 Afghan soldiers and police and captured a provincial
capital for the first time. In Helmand Province, around 1,800 Taliban
fighters defeated some 4,500 Afghan soldiers and police and recaptured
almost all the ground the group had lost in the surge. “They
ran!” cried an angry Omar Jan, the most talented Afghan frontline
commander in Helmand, when I spoke to him in early 2016. “Two
thousand men. They had everything they needed—numbers, arms,
ammunition—and they gave up!” Only last-minute reinforcements
from U.S. and Afghan special operations forces saved the provinces.
In battle after battle, numerically superior and well-supplied soldiers
and police in intact defensive positions made a collective decision
to throw in the towel rather than go another round against theTaliban.
Those who did stay to fight often paid dearly for their courage: some
14,000 Afghan soldiers and police were killed in 2015 and 2016. By
2016, the Afghan government, now headed by Ashraf Ghani, was
weaker than ever before. The Taliban held more ground than at any
time since 2001. In July of that year, Obama suspended the drawdown.
When President DonaldTrump took office in January 2017, the war
raged on. He initially approved an increase of U.S. forces in Afghanistan
to roughly 14,000. Trump disliked the war, however, and, looking
for an exit, started negotiations with the Taliban in 2018. Those
negotiations have yet to bear fruit, and the level of violence and
Afghan casualties rates in 2019 were on par with those of recent years.
THE INSPIRATION GAP
Why did things go wrong? One crucial factor is that the Afghan government
and its warlord allies were corrupt and treated Afghans
poorly, fomenting grievances and inspiring an insurgency. They stole
land, distributed government jobs as patronage, and often tricked
U.S. special operations forces into targeting their political rivals. This
mistreatment pushed certain tribes into the Taliban’s arms, providing
the movement with fighters, a support network, and territory from
which to attack. The experience of Raees Baghrani, a respected Alizai
tribal leader, is typical. In 2005, after a Karzai-backed warlord disarmed
him and stole some of his land and that of his tribesmen, Baghrani
surrendered the rest of his territory in Helmand to the Taliban. Many
others like him felt forced into similar choices.
How the Good War Went Bad
	 March/April 2020	 83
Washington could have done more to address the corruption and
the grievances that Afghans felt under the new regime and the U.S.
occupation, such as pushing Karzai to remove the worst-offending
officials from their positions, making all forms of U.S. assistance
contingent on reforms, and reducing special operations raids and
the mistaken targeting of innocent Afghans. That said, the complexity
of addressing corruption and grievances should not be underestimated.
No comprehensive solution existed that could have denied
the Taliban a support base.
Another major factor in the U.S. failure was Pakistan’s influence.
Pakistan’s strategy in Afghanistan has always been shaped in large
part by the Indian-Pakistani rivalry. In 2001, Pakistani President
Pervez Musharraf officially cut off support for the Taliban at the
behest of the Bush administration. But he soon feared that India
was gaining influence in Afghanistan. In 2004, he reopened assistance
to the Taliban, as he later admitted to The Guardian in 2015,
because Karzai, he alleged, had “helped India stab Pakistan in the
back” by allowing anti-Pakistan Tajiks to play a large role in his government
and by fostering good relations with India. The Pakistani
military funded the Taliban, granted them a safe haven, ran training
camps, and advised them on war planning. The critical mass of recruits
for the 2006 offensive came from Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
A long succession of U.S. leaders tried to change Pakistani
policy, all to no avail: it is unlikely that there was anything Washington
could have done to convince Pakistan’s leaders to take steps that
would have risked their influence in Afghanistan.
Underneath these factors, something more fundamental was at
play. The Taliban exemplified an idea—an idea that runs deep in
Afghan culture, that inspired their fighters, that made them powerful
in battle, and that, in the eyes of many Afghans, defines an individual’s
worth. In simple terms, that idea is resistance to occupation.
The very presence of Americans in Afghanistan was an assault on
what it meant to be Afghan. It inspired Afghans to defend their
honor, their religion, and their homeland. The importance of this cultural
factor has been confirmed and reconfirmed by multiple surveys
of Taliban fighters since 2007 conducted by a range of researchers.
The Afghan government, tainted by its alignment with foreign
occupiers, could not inspire the same devotion. In 2015, a survey of
1,657 police officers in 11 provinces conducted by the Afghan Institute
Carter Malkasian
84	 foreign affairs
for Strategic Studies found that only 11 percent of respondents had
joined the force specifically to fight the Taliban; most of them had
joined to serve their country or to earn a salary, motivations that did
not necessarily warrant fighting, much less dying. Many interviewees
agreed with the claim that police “rank and file are not convinced
that they are fighting for a just cause.” There can be little doubt that
a far larger percentage of Taliban fighters had joined the group specifically
to confront the United States and the Afghans who were
cooperating with the Americans.
This asymmetry in commitment explains why, at so many decisive
moments, Afghan security forces retreated without putting up much
of a fight despite their numerical superiority and their having at least
an equal amount of ammunition and supplies. As a Taliban religious
scholar from Kandahar told me in January 2019, “The Taliban fight for
belief, for jannat [heaven] and ghazi [killing infidels]. . . .The army and
police fight for money. . . . The Taliban are willing to lose their heads
to fight. . . . How can the army and police compete with the Taliban?”
The Taliban had an edge in inspiration. Many Afghans were willing to
kill and be killed on behalf of theTaliban.That made all the difference.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
These powerful factors have kept the United States and the Afghan
government from prevailing. But failure was not inevitable. The best
opportunities to succeed appeared early on, between 2001 and 2005.
The Taliban were in disarray. Popular support for the new Afghan
government was relatively high, as was patience with the foreign presence.
Unfortunately, U.S. decisions during that time foreclosed paths
that might have avoided the years of war that followed.
The first mistake was the Bush administration’s decision to exclude
the Taliban from the postinvasion political settlement. Senior Taliban
leaders tried to negotiate a peace deal with Karzai in December 2001.
They were willing to lay down their arms and recognize Karzai as the
country’s legitimate leader. But U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld shot down the deal—in a press conference, no less. After
that, between 2002 and 2004, Taliban leaders continued to reach out
to Karzai to ask to be allowed to participate in the political process.
Karzai brought up these overtures to U.S. officials only to have the
Bush administration respond by banning negotiations with any top
Taliban figures. In the end, the new government was established
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Carter Malkasian
86	 foreign affairs
without the Taliban getting a seat at the table. Whether or not the
entire group would have compromised, enough senior leaders were
interested that future violence could have been lessened.
After pushing the Taliban back to war, Bush and his team then
moved far too slowly in building up the Afghan security forces. After
the initial invasion, a year passed before Washington committed to
building and funding a small national army of 70,000. Recruitment
and training then proceeded haltingly. By 2006, only 26,000 Afghan
army soldiers had been trained. So when the Taliban struck back that
year, there was little to stop them. In his memoir, Bush concedes the
error. “In an attempt to keep the Afghan government from taking on
an unsustainable expense,” he writes, “we had kept the army too small.”
The Bush administration thus missed the two best opportunities
to find peace. An inclusive settlement could have won over key Taliban
leaders, and capable armed forces could have held off the holdouts.
Overconfidence prevented the Bush team from seeing this.
The administration presumed that the Taliban had been defeated.
Barely two years after the Taliban regime fell, U.S. Central Command
labeled the group a “spent force.” Rumsfeld announced at a
news conference in early 2003: “We clearly have moved from major
combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction
activities. . . . The bulk of the country today is permissive;
it’s secure.” In other words, “Mission accomplished.”
The ease of the initial invasion in 2001 distorted Washington’s
perceptions. The administration disregarded arguments by Karzai,
Khalilzad, U.S. Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry (then the senior
U.S. general in Afghanistan), Ronald Neumann (at the time the
U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan), and others that the insurgents
were staging a comeback. Believing they had already won the war in
Afghanistan, Bush and his team turned their attention to Iraq. And
although the fiasco in Iraq was not a cause of the failure in Afghanistan,
it compounded the errors in U.S. strategy by diverting the
scarce time and attention of key decision-makers.
“I DO NOT NEED ADVISERS”
After 2006, the odds of a better outcome narrowed. The reemergence
of the Taliban catalyzed further resistance to the occupation.
U.S. airstrikes and night raids heightened a sense of oppression
among Afghans and triggered in many an obligation to resist. After
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	 March/April 2020	 87
the Taliban offensive that year, it is hard to see how any strategy
could have resulted in victory for the United States and the Afghan
government. Nevertheless, a few points stand out when Washington
might have cleared a way to a less bad outcome.
The surge was one of them. In retrospect, the United States would
have been better off if it had never surged at all. If his campaign
promises obligated some number of reinforcements, Obama still
might have deployed fewer troops
than he did—perhaps just the initial
tranche of 21,000. But General Stanley
McChrystal, the top U.S. commander
in Afghanistan, and General
David Petraeus, the commander of U.S.
Central Command, did not present the president with that kind of
option: all their proposals involved further increases in the number of
U.S. military personnel deployed to Afghanistan. Both generals believed
that escalation was warranted owing to the threat posed by the
possible reestablishment of Afghanistan as a safe haven for terrorists.
Both had witnessed how a counterinsurgency strategy and unswerving
resolve had turned things around in Iraq, and both thought the
same could be done in Afghanistan. Their case that something had to
be done and their overconfidence in counterinsurgency crowded out
the practical alternative of forgoing further reinforcements. Had
Obama done less, U.S. casualties and expenses would likely have been
far lower and still the conditions would have changed little.
It is worth noting that the much-criticized 18-month deadline
that Obama attached to the surge, although unnecessary, was not itself
a major missed opportunity. There is scant evidence to support
the charge that if Obama had given no timeline, the Taliban would
have been more exhausted by the surge and would have given up or
negotiated a settlement.
But Obama did err when it came to placing restrictions on U.S.
forces. Prior to 2014, U.S. airstrikes had been used when necessary to
strike enemy targets, and commanders took steps to avoid civilian
casualties. That year, however, as part of the drawdown process, it was
decided that U.S. airstrikes in support of the Afghan army and police
would be employed only “in extremis”—when a strategic location or
major Afghan formation was in danger of imminent annihilation. The
idea was to disentangle U.S. forces from combat and, to a lesser extent,
The intention to get out of
Afghanistan met reality
and blinked.
Carter Malkasian
88	 foreign affairs
to reduce civilian casualties. As a result of the change, there was a
pronounced reduction in the number of U.S. strikes, even as the Taliban
gained strength. Into 2016, U.S. forces carried out an average of
80 airstrikes per month, less than a quarter of the monthly average for
2012. Meanwhile, over 500 airstrikes per month were being conducted
in Iraq and Syria against a comparable adversary. “If America just
helps with airstrikes and . . . supplies, we can win,” pleaded Omar Jan,
the frontline commander in Helmand, in 2016. “My weapons are
worn from shooting. My ammunition stocks are low. I do not need
advisers. I just need someone to call when things are really bad.” The
decision to use airstrikes only in extremis virtually ensured defeat.
Obama had purchased too little insurance on his withdrawal policy.
When the unexpected happened, he was unprepared.
Bush had enjoyed the freedom to maneuver in Afghanistan for half
his presidency and had still passed up significant opportunities. Facing
far greater constraints, Obama had to play the cards he had been
dealt. The Afghan government had been formed, violence had returned,
and a spirit of resistance had arisen in the Afghan people.
Obama’s errors derived less from a willful refusal to take advantage of
clear opportunities than from oversights and miscalculations made
under pressure. They nevertheless had major consequences.
FEAR OF TERROR
Given the high costs and slim benefits of the war, why hasn’t the
United States simply left Afghanistan? The answer is the combination
of terrorism and U.S. electoral politics. In the post-9/11 world,
U.S. presidents have had to choose between spending resources in
places of very low geostrategic value and accepting some unknown
risk of a terrorist attack, worried that voters will never forgive them
or their party if they underestimate the threat. Nowhere has that
dynamic been more evident than in Afghanistan.
In the early years after the 9/11 attacks, the political atmosphere
in the United States was charged with fears of another assault.
Throughout 2002, various Gallup polls showed that a majority of
Americans believed that another attack on the United States was
likely. That is one reason why Bush, after having overseen the initial
defeat of al Qaeda and the Taliban, never considered simply declaring
victory and bringing the troops home. He has said that an option
of “attack, destroy the Taliban, destroy al Qaeda as best we could,
How the Good War Went Bad
	 March/April 2020	 89
and leave” was never appealing because “that would have created a
vacuum [in] which . . . radicalism could become even stronger.”
The terrorist threat receded during the first half of Obama’s presidency,
yet he, too, could not ignore it, and its persistence took the
prospect of a full withdrawal from Afghanistan off the table in the
run-up to the surge. According to the available evidence, at no point
during the debate over the surge did any high-level Obama administration
official advocate such a move. One concern was that withdrawing
completely would have opened up the administration to
intense criticism, possibly disrupting Obama’s domestic agenda,
which was focused on reviving the U.S. economy after the financial
crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recession.
Only after the surge and the death of bin Laden did a “zero option”
become conceivable. Days after bin Laden was captured and killed, in
May 2011, a Gallup poll showed that 59 percent of Americans believed
the U.S. mission in Afghanistan had been accomplished. “It is time to
focus on nation building here at home,” Obama announced in his June
2011 address on the drawdown. Even so, concerns about the ability of the
Afghan government to contain the residual terrorist threat defeated proposals,
backed by some members of the administration, to fully withdraw
more quickly.Then, in 2014, the rise of the Islamic State (or isis) in Iraq
and Syria and a subsequent string of high-profile terrorist attacks in Europe
and the United States made even the original, modest drawdown
schedule less strategically and politically feasible. After the setbacks of
2015, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that if the drawdown
went forward on schedule, security could deteriorate to the point where
terrorist groups could once again establish safe havens in Afghanistan.
Confronted with that finding, Obama essentially accepted the advice of
his top generals to keep U.S. forces there, provide greater air support to
the Afghan army and police, and continue counterterrorism operations
in the country. The intention to get out had met reality and blinked.
So far, a similar fate has befallen Trump, the U.S. president with
the least patience for the mission in Afghanistan. With Trump agitating
for an exit, substantive talks between the Taliban and the
United States commenced in 2018. An earlier effort between 2010
and 2013 had failed because the conditions were not ripe: the White
House was occupied with other issues, negotiating teams were not
in place, and Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader, was in seclusion—
and then died in 2013. By 2019, those obstacles no longer stood in
Carter Malkasian
90	 foreign affairs
the way, and Trump was uniquely determined to leave. The result
was the closest the United States has come to ending the war.
Khalilzad, once again serving as a special envoy, made quick progress
by offering a timeline for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces
in return for the Taliban engaging in negotiations with the Afghan
government, reducing violence as the two sides worked toward a comprehensive
cease-fire, and not aiding al Qaeda or other terrorist
groups. Over the course of nine rounds of talks, the two sides developed
a draft agreement. The Taliban representatives in the talks and
the group’s senior leaders refused to meet all of Khalilzad’s conditions.
But the initial agreement was a real opportunity for Trump to get the
United States out of Afghanistan and still have a chance at peace.
It fell apart. Although Trump toyed with the idea of holding a dramatic
summit to announce a deal at Camp David in September 2019,
he was torn between his campaign promise to end “endless wars” and
the possibility of a resurgent terrorist threat, which could harm him
politically. During an interview with Fox News in August, he was distinctly
noncommittal about fully withdrawing. “We’re going down to
8,600 [troops], and then we’ll make a determination from there,” he
said, adding that a “high intelligence presence” would stay in the country.
So when the Taliban drastically escalated their attacks in the runup
to a possible announcement, killing one American soldier and
wounding many more,Trump concluded that he was getting a bad deal
and called off the negotiations, blasting the Taliban as untrustworthy.
Trump, like Obama before him, would not risk a withdrawal that might
someday make him vulnerable to the charge of willingly unlocking the
terrorist threat. And so yet another chance to end the war slipped away.
The notion that the United States should have just left Afghanistan
presumes that a U.S. president was free to pull the plug as he
pleased. In reality, getting out was nearly as difficult as prevailing. It
was one thing to boldly promise that the United States would leave
in the near future. It was quite another to peer over the edge when
the moment arrived, see the uncertainties, weigh the political fallout
of a terrorist attack, and still take the leap.
EXPECT THE BAD, PREPARE FOR THE WORST
The United States failed in Afghanistan largely because of intractable
grievances, Pakistan’s meddling, and an intense Afghan commitment
to resisting occupiers, and it stayed largely because of unrelenting
How the Good War Went Bad
	 March/April 2020	 91
terrorist threats and their effect on U.S. electoral politics. There
were few chances to prevail and few chances to get out.
In this situation, a better outcome demanded an especially wellmanaged
strategy. Perhaps the most important lesson is the value of forethought:
considering a variety of outcomes rather than focusing on the
preferred one. U.S. presidents and generals repeatedly sawtheir plans fall
short when what they expected to happen did not: for Bush, when the
Taliban turned out not to be defeated; for McChrystal and Petraeus,when
the surge proved unsustainable; for Obama, when the terrorist threat returned;
for Trump, when the political costs of leaving proved steeper
than he had assumed. If U.S. leaders had thought more about the different
ways that things could play out, the United States and Afghanistan
might have experienced a less costly, lessviolentwar, or even found peace.
This lack of forethought is not disconnected from the revelation in
The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” that U.S. leaders misled
the American people. A single-minded focus on preferred outcomes
had the unhealthy side effect of sidelining inconvenient evidence. In
most cases, determined U.S. leaders did this inadvertently, or because
they truly believed things were going well. At times, however,
evidence of failure was purposefully swept under the rug.
Afghanistan’s past may not be its future. Just because the war has
been difficult to end does not mean it will go on indefinitely. Last
November, Trump reopened talks with the Taliban. A chance exists
that Khalilzad will conjure a political settlement. If not, Trump may
decide to get out anyway. Trump has committed to reducing force
levels to roughly the same number that Obama had in place at the
end of his term. Further reductions could be pending. Great-power
competition is the rising concern in Washington. With the death last
year of isis’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the shadow of 9/11 might
at last recede, and the specter of terrorism might lose some of its
influence on U.S. politics. At the same time, the roiling U.S. confrontation
with Iran is a wild card that could alter the nature of the
Afghan war, including by re-entrenching the American presence.
But none of that can change the past 18 years. Afghanistan will
still be the United States’ longest war. Americans can best learn its
lessons by studying the missed opportunities that kept the United
States from making progress. Ultimately, the war should be understood
neither as an avoidable folly nor as an inevitable tragedy but
rather as an unresolved dilemma.∂