Afghanistan: A long history of blunder

     "Victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan."

          John F. Kennedy, 1961, following the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion

President Biden is getting the blame. Trump handed him a mess. Trump got a mess from Obama. Obama got one from George W. Bush.

This defeat has a thousand fathers, starting with errors made by George W. Bush.

The details of a 20-year war fade into a blur, partly because of time and partly because Afghanistan was never really on the public radar. The fighting was far away, the geography unfamiliar, and an all-volunteer army meant there were no giant anti-war rallies to sharpen controversy. Leaders in both political parties, with presidents, senators and most voices on the serious Sunday morning TV shows all agreeing we needed to do something there. And so we did.

Jeffrey Laurenti, in Tunisia 

Jeffrey Lauranti has written Guest Posts here this month putting Afghanistan into perspective. This time he looks at the early years of the war, when the wheels of future disaster were put into motion. He is a college classmate who went on to study public policy at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. He directed The Century Foundation's international task force on multilateral avenues for ending Afghanistan's decades-long conflict, after serving as director of policy studies at the United Nations Association of the United States.

Guest Post by Jeffrey Lauranti

My sense is that in 2009 the "surge" was all about the generals. In Bush's second term the Taliban had reassembled their guerrilla presence in the countryside and begun adopting a tactic alien to Afghanistan that was proving devastatingly effective for the resistance in Iraq: suicide bombings. In his last months in the White House, Bush ordered a stop-gap increase in U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan -- but also left behind a story line in the national security "community" in Washington that his and General Petraeus's "surge" in Iraq had "succeeded" in "stabilizing" (ephemerally!) that shattered country. I was shocked, in January 2009, to find that all the Respectable People in Washington think-tanks were abuzz about the latest military fashion, "counterinsurgency," and busy seeking foundation and government grant money for projects demonstrating its efficacy. (I would point out that "COIN," as it was now rechristened, was being resurrected from the graveyard of Vietnam; never mind.)

As the security situation in Afghanistan continued that year to deteriorate, the generals, the holdover secretary of defense, Petraeus from his new perch as CIA director, and tellingly Hillary Clinton (stifling her own "Af-Pak" envoy and would-have-been secretary of state, Dick Holbrooke) pressed on Obama the urgency of an escalation of force levels in Afghanistan to reverse the decline. (Obama is quite direct in his memoir, *Promised Land*, about the political and media campaign orchestrated through the Pentagon to force his hand.) He agreed on a two-year surge coupled with a political opening to negotiations with the Taliban, setting an "artificial" timetable for drawing down the force levels that was adamantly not "conditions based," as national-security orthodoxy demanded. Interestingly, early in the 2012 presidential campaign, Romney attacked Obama's draw-down when the war wasn't "won" -- but with polls showing that public support for soldiering on had evaporated, by the fall debates Romney was saying his position was identical to Obama's. After reelection Obama announced jointly with the other NATO partners in 2014 an end to foreign military operations, with a "residual" force of 10,000 for training and "support" (the latter a somewhat elastic term).

Laurenti, left, in Mauritania

Having mentioned the NATO security assistance force, let me note the other fateful policy choices of the Bush regime that set the Afghanistan mission on its track to failure. Of course, the original sin was barring any negotiations with or political participation by the Taliban.

1. After the rapid collapse of the Taliban regime, there was much discussion in international circles of the need for an international security force to hold the country together in the short run which -- given most Afghans' deeply held attachments to their religious traditions -- should be largely composed of contingents from Muslim countries -- Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Egypt were volunteered as the possible core of a U.N. peacekeeping force. Team Bush made clear a U.N. peacekeeping force was not acceptable. It insisted on a "robust" NATO-led military force (NATO, of course, being firmly under U.S. control).

2. This alien security force would be highly "kinetic" (a euphemism for readily using violent force), and exempt from any meddling by the Afghan government. This exclusion of Afghan oversight of deadly force on Afghan territory would prove critical, and not only because it made a mockery of the government's claim to sovereignty over the national territory; both Karzai and U.N. mission staff would ever more insistently call for a halt to the midnight raids and dubiously "intelligence"-driven airstrikes whose high civilian casualties were fueling Taliban recruitment. Obama, in contrast, did heed these voices and sharply restricted the aggressive tactics; Trump promptly reversed Obama's restrictions and "unshackled" the military, despite the U.S. supposedly no longer doing combat operations. (This was while Trump was listening to his generals, at least at the start.)

Would I be gratuitously flogging Bush's dead horse were I to mention the dragnets that would sweep thousands of Afghans into the secretive detention facilities of the "global war on terror," with Guantanamo graduating a number of the most resolute opponents of the U.S. who have risen to leading ranks of the Taliban today?

Doubters made much at the time of the refocusing of the Bush regime's wandering eye on Iraq. That was, of course, an even more colossal blunder, one that outraged much of that same international community that had rallied to the cause in Afghanistan and outraged much of the American public as well. But even if Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld had not been seduced by their easy (initial!!) success in Afghanistan into a war of blatant aggression against Iraq, even if they had "kept their eye on the ball" in Afghanistan, the policy choices they had already made there had set the course to last week's termination date of the experiment.