As a young boy in the spring of 1975, I remember watching US Navy personnel pushing helicopters over the side of ships in the South China Sea.
I was confused.
Why would the Navy throw away perfectly good military equipment? It seemed like such a waste. I looked to my father for guidance as we watched TV together, but he didn’t answer. He just stared at the images with a look intense sadness and anger.
My father’s demeanor nearly half a century ago has been much in my mind as I watched the Taliban march back into Kabul, topple the government, and take over the country. I watched as the medieval savages who had given safe haven to bin Laden and Al Qaeda as they planned and executed 9-11, who had been overthrown from power in only five weeks by US Special Forces on horseback working with local militias, retook Afghanistan’s capital almost twenty years since they had been driven from power.
How? How was this result possible?
Over 20 years, 800,000 American service personnel were rotated through Afghanistan. The US cumulatively spent $2.3 trillion on the country, including $837 billion in warfighting alone. 2,352 Americans paid the ultimate price in Afghanistan, while another 20,000 will carry the wounds of its battles the rest of their lives. 51 nations, including many of our closest NATO allies, joined us in war, internationalizing the effort. 1,100 of their troops died fighting the Taliban. In addition, 66,000 Afghan military and police personnel died in the fight over 20 years. $145 billion was invested in Afghan reconstruction, including infrastructure, the national military, governance, and counter narcotics operations.
As the US signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, intelligence reports circulating in the government estimated that 52,000 Taliban fighters had been killed over 20 years, a not insignificant number of casualties. Further, with massive US investment the Afghan military had was now national army/police force of 352,000, fitted out with the vert best equipment. On paper, the Afghan army was larger than the ground forces of our NATO allies, including Great Britain, Germany, Spain, and Poland, among others.
Yet, in only 10 days, a freshly recruited, well armed, and well organized band of 80,000 Taliban fighters swept the country as the Afghan army collapsed and the government fled. It was one of the most stunning reversals in modern history, and at the center of the humiliation was the United States.
The “what-might-have-beens” are seductive here.
The 9-11 Commission identified nine opportunities for the US to kill Osama bin Laden during the Clinton administration. Either through perceived legal constraints, lack of nerve, poor communication, or bad timing, the efforts failed. Had the US attacked and killed bin Laden and his lieutenants, even as late as November 2000, all history from 9-11 forward could have been radically different.
Later, after 9-11, as the US military moved against terrorists in Afghanistan, if only US commanders been more willing to take casualties and less willing to trust the Pakistanis to close the border to Al Qaeda, US forces might have gotten bin Laden at Tora Bora, before he fled to Pakistan in December 2001. Had US forces killed or captured Bin Laden, only 90 days after 9-11, the US attitude toward Afghanistan would have been fundamentally different.
But those events didn’t happen. We are left instead to consider the last 20 years and assess the consequences of our actions.
Ownership: the collapse of Afghanistan has fueled an even more robust partisanship, with both political parties assigning blame. The painful truth is that the Afghanistan war is an American failure. Four American presidents, two from each party, have had the opportunity to shape policy, and each bears responsibility for what is happening today.
2001-2008: The Bush administration launched the war in Afghanistan and at the beginning, it was spectacularly successful. American forces landed in October 2001 and the Taliban had been overthrown in November; Al Qaeda was on the run. What is not commonly remembered is that the US did that with only 2,500 troops on the ground.
Despite robust US assistance in setting up a civilian Afghan government after the Taliban had been toppled, US troop strength did not increase appreciably, despite an deteriorating security situation. A year after the defeat of the last Taliban strong hold in December 2001, the US had only 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.
By then, however, US attention had turned to Iraq, where the US quickly assembled an army that ultimately number 170,000. It was only in the aftermath of the collapse of Saddam and the birth of the Iraqi insurgency that the tangible threat from a re-organized Taliban was realized. At the end of 2008, US force levels in Afghanistan had surged to 38,000. While the insurgency in Iraq had been brought under control by the end of the Bush administration, the security situation in Afghanistan remained uncertain.
2009-2016: In the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Obama had promised to end the “bad” war in Iraq, and to finish the “good” war in Afghanistan. True to his word, Obama did surge troops into Afghanistan. But in announcing the troop surge at West Point in December 2009, Obama also simultaneously announced when the troops would be withdrawn – July 2011. For all the power that the US was about to bring to Afghanistan, all the Taliban needed to do was wait it out.
In August 2010, US troop strength reached 100,000; the largest of the war. But almost immediately, the force began to shrink. In June 2011, Obama announced that the mission of the surge had been accomplished, and that US forces would be withdrawn and security duties handed over to the Afghans in 2014.
On December 28, 2014, Obama declared and end to combat operation in Afghanistan. At that point, only 16,000 of the 100,000 troops remained. When Obama left office in 2009, 10,000 troops would be left.
2017-2020: President Trump entered office with a pledge to end America’s “forever wars.” However, in 2017, as part of a new Afghanistan strategy, Trump increased US troop levels in Afghanistan to roughly 15,000 by November of that year.
In June of 2018, the Trump administration began direct negotiations with the Taliban, in Doha, Qatar. The final agreement was signed in February 2020. It’s terms surrendered US interests in Afghanistan.
Under the terms of the agreement all US and NATO forces had to be out of Afghanistan within 14 months. 5,000 Taliban prisoners would be released in the same time period. In order to achieve this result, all the Taliban had to do was promise not to make Afghanistan a safe haven for terrorists, abide by a cease fire, and agree to talks regarding reconciliation with the Afghan government.
The agreement was a fig leaf for the US to get out quickly and without strings. There was no enforcement provision in the agreement to hold the Taliban to their word. And the Afghan government wasn’t even at the table. An agreement between the Afghan government and the Taliban for a reconciliation government as a prerequisite for withdrawal wasn’t even discussed. There were ultimately never was any negotiations between the Afghan government an the Taliban. The ceasefire was ultimately applied only to US and NATO forces, while the Taliban regularly attacked Afghan positions.
As per the terms of the agreement, US force levels dropped from 13,500 to 8,600 in May 2020, and to 2,500 in November 2020.
2021: The rapid redeployment of US forces out of Afghanistan was one of the very few areas of agreement between the Trump administration and the incoming Biden administration. Biden has opposed the 2010 Obama troop surge and was determined to end the Afghan war. In April, Biden announced that the US would abide by the Trump agreement and complete the US US withdrawal by September 11th, which was then shortened the time to August 31st.
After nearly 20 years of war, and with the Vietnam precedent always in the background, the US effectively did no planning for a large scale evacuation of US citizens and Afghan nationals who had assisted the US. Despite warnings from the US Embassy and from US military personnel on the ground, the US placed its trust in the Afghan army and government, convinced that a Taliban victory was at best, months away. The result, that continues to play out on TV screens daily, is an additional scar on our national honor.
The most popular conventional wisdom of the last few years, and in particular, the last few weeks, has been that there is no military solution to Afghanistan. But that’s simply not true as the US never committed the resources to seriously fight and beat the Taliban. These weren’t Viet Cong. Had the US sealed the border with Pakistan and attacked the Taliban in their strongholds, a result not dissimilar to what happened to ISIS could have been won.
But that would have meant a serious commitment in ground troops. Probably 150,000 over a prolonged period of time. Bush could have done that in 2002, with popular support. That was frittered away on Iraq. Obama could have done it even in 2010, but there was no stomach in his party or in the nation to sustain the kind of casualties that would have been necessary to beat the Taliban and their Pakistani enablers.
If you’re not going to fight to win, then leave. And that is what Obama, Trump, and Biden agreed to. But no American president want’s to lose a war on their watch, and so the can was kicked down the road. Even as the colossal disaster of the evacuation has occurred on Biden’s watch, he gets a measure of credit for his willingness to end Afghanistan on his watch.
Still we are left with the question. So much blood and treasure, but to what purpose? We are an immensely powerful country. We have the power to change the fate of nations. But no amount of money or lives lost makes up for a fundamental lack judgement and reason, and the skillful use of military power for narrow, achievable goals. Afghanistan proves yet again that limited wars are easy to start but more difficult to end. That mission creep infects early victory, and that public support is rarely enduring. That stalemate is suffocating and brings out the worst in both our military and civilian bureaucracies, attempting to quantify the unsustainable.
If we didn’t learn from Vietnam nearly half a century ago, we can only hope that Afghanistan is a lesson that if we are going to fight, we fight all the way, to win, or we don’t fight at all.