Maybe that war in Afghanistan was a bad idea.

It seemed so straightforward to Americans.   Go to war to clean up Afghanistan.

Maybe not.

Afghan War:  2001 to 2017.  Troop surge under consideration.

There it is, south of Uzbekistan.

Americans have point of view about Afghanistan, built around our profound ignorance and lack of concern about anything in that part of the world.

Here is a map of Afghanistan.  Who cares?  Who could have found it, had it not been labeled?  Americans do not know that the actual name of the country is "The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan." Surprise!  It isn't a foreign version of the USA, with an uneasy tradition of separation of church and state.  They put Islam right in their name. Apparently they want to do things differently there.

Americans saw our obligation to invade Afghanistan as pretty simple and clear cut.  The government in Afghanistan either assisted, or at least turned a blind eye, to the presence of people in their country who plotted the 9-11 attacks on the US.   That forced the US to make a decision:  we could define it as a criminal act, a one-off event, and work with the government there to identify wrongdoers.  It risked being perceived as "weak" and it would have assumed good will and cooperation from the Afghan government, but it would have been based on the observation from history that the cost in blowback and unintended consequences were greater than any benefit.  Alternatively, we could consider it an act of war, showing that America would not tolerate the harboring of anti-American terrorists, telling the world that America reacts vigorously to past and future threats.

The politics were completely on the side of going to war.  We needed to send a message as clear as the one we send with nuclear bombs.  We consider ourselves not to be at risk from nuclear bombs from a rational state actor because Mutually Assured Destruction makes a nuclear attack suicide.  The thinking went that America needed to show that terror attacks invite a similar response.

Washington Post: May 19, 2017

Asymmetric war is real war.  "Little" attacks have big consequences.  The technological and economic changes in the seventy years since the end of World War Two have made great military and economic powers uniquely sensitive to asymmetric war.  Modern economies need to be efficient.  The economies are a complicated web of world trade, transportation, communication, electrical grids, internet, GPS, mobile capital, labor, education, and knowledge.  They are efficient but fragile.  

America intervened because we thought we needed to.   No credible voices were raised to argue that America should have left Afghanistan alone, worked with them to locate surviving plotters and dealt with it as a criminal activity of a few bad actors, leaving the government in place.

Maybe we should have.

One reader of this blog, Carlo Cristofori, makes the point that America lost something very important when we invaded Afghanistan--our moral authority.   America took upon itself the right to determine the legitimate government of the Afghani people.  It was an impossible task.  No government put in place by Americans would be considered legitimate.  Its origin story would have been corrupted from the beginning, so even a government that might have been successful had it arisen from the people, would be doomed.

Cristofori: an Afghani view

Cristofori says that in continuing our doomed effort the US  did damage far beyond any response the world would have considered legitimate.  Tens of thousands of Afghanis have been killed, leaving hundreds of thousands of people ripe for revenge.  Thousands of Americans have died.  The result is becoming not simply a failed mission; it is worse than failure.  We are doing damage to our reputation and long term interests.  We are creating enemies and we have lost our moral authority.  

The Islamic world sees with their own eyes (amplified, of course, by news reports from hostile sources, including social media and word of mouth) that America considered the deaths of foreign people, especially foreign Muslims, of little consequence, just the collateral damage of war.  People in the Middle East would see this and draw conclusions.  The more America won, the more America would lose.

Story in The Guardian

I know of no American voices raising this idea.  Cristofori is an Italian national, a graduate of Harvard in my class of 1971, and a man who has worked closely with the Afghan people and government for forty years.  He is not anti-American; his father was imprisoned at Dachau and was rescued by American troops in 1945.  American media looks at the wars in the Middle East through American eyes, but there are other eyes in the world, eyes that matter to Americans.  Cristofori says that America has made a grave mistake, betraying our own values of self-determination, and creating generations of ill will in the Middle East.

I do not consider this "defeatism" or anti-American in the least.  Everyone understands that sometimes the tools one has to solve a problem are simply not the right ones.  Money is a handy tool, but it does not buy youth.  Shouting at a child having a tantrum does not help.  Usually, doing more of the wrong thing makes things worse, not better.  Having nuclear bombs makes us strong in some ways, but it does not create good government in Afghanistan.  

At a critical point in American history American politicians, media, and the public looked at the Middle East from American eyes only, and did not see the big picture nor the implications of what we planned.