The U.S. In Afghanistan - Snatching Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory

Michael Scheuer highlighted that immediately following the attacks of 9/11, Sir John Keegan offered the United States some advice grounded in history when he warned that, 

"Efforts to occupy and rule [Afghanistan] usually ended in disaster. But straightforward punitive expeditions...were successful on more than one occasion. It should be remembered that, in 1878, the British did indeed succeed in bringing the Afghans to heel [with a punitive expedition]. Lord Roberts' march from 'Kabul to Khandahar' was one of Victoria's celebrated wars. The Russians, moreover, foolishly did not try to punish rogue Afghans, as Roberts did, but to rule the country. Since Afghanistan is ungovernable, the failure of their [1979-92] effort was predictable...America should not seek to change the regime, but simply find and kill terrorists. It should do so without pity." 

The U.S. did exactly this, embarking on a punitive expedition, targeting Bin Laden, his Al Qaeda associates and the Taliban regime which provided him sanctuary. These goals had largely been accomplished within three months post- 9/11.  CIA operatives and Special Forces teams supported by U.S. air power linked up with Afghan warlords to conduct a very successful unconventional warfare campaign against the Taliban regime. As Yaniv Barzilai has noted, by December 7, 2001 anti-Taliban forces were in control of every major city in Afghanistan.  The Taliban had surrendered its traditional stronghold of Kandahar and had been pushed into Pakistan.   Those members of Al-Qaeda who had not been killed or captured, or had not fled Afghanistan before the attacks, were cornered in Tora Bora along with Bin Laden himself.  At this critical moment in the campaign, the U.S. had, within striking distance, precisely the tools needed to finish off Bin Laden and the remaining members of Al Qaeda.  Barzilai writes, 

For weeks, Gary Berntsen, the top CIA officer in Afghanistan, pleaded for eight hundred Army Rangers to seal the six-by-six square mile sierra of Tora Bora. Then-colonel John Mulholland, the commander of the Special Forces A-teams in Afghanistan, was “concerned about the inadequacy of the force to the mission at hand.” General James Mattis, who commanded twelve hundred Marines at Camp Rhino near Kandahar, asked to reposition his forces to seal the border at Tora Bora. And, more than one thousand troops from the Tenth Mountain Division lay ready at Bagram Air Base near Kabul and Kharshi Khanabad in Uzbekistan.

Instead of turning the displacement into destruction, GEN Tommy Franks refused requests to put more U.S. troops on the ground and allowed the “battle for the existence of Al-Qaeda to be waged by ninety-three Western commandos and a contingent of generally untrustworthy Afghan rebels without any reliable force to seal the escape routes."  During this time Bin Laden, along with the core of Al Qaeda, was able to slip across the border into Pakistan undetected.  The U.S. would not know his exact location again for 12 years.  Decisive victory in Afghanistan was lost in that moment.

Despite this, victory, albeit a less satisfying one, was still within the nation’s grasp.  The U.S. had accomplished many of its goals by having displaced the regime that supported Al-Qaeda, forcing the organization out of Afghanistan and severely damaging it. The U.S. could have simply left Afghanistan to the opposition forces that defeated the Taliban and returned home, demonstrating to its enemies that terror sponsors will be removed from power.  It could then have continued to pursue Bin Laden in Pakistan through more smaller, less costly and maintainable clandestine actions until his final elimination.  Though not decisive, this would have classified as a victory.  It certainly would have been in keeping with the advice of  Lord Roberts, the very British General of whom Sir John Keegan spoke in his advice to the U.S.:

     It may not be very flattering to our amour propre...but I feel sure that I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us he less they will dislike us. Should Russia in future years attempt to conquer Afghanistan, or invade India through it, we should have a better chance of attaching the Afghans to our interests if we avoid all interference with them in the meantime.

Instead, however, the U.S. policy in Afghanistan shifted to one that has never been one of its strengths - nation-building, and its consequent condition of long-term occupation.  As Alicia Wittmeyer has noted,

The West was trying to do something it couldn't do, and it was trying to do something it didn't need to do. Its basic assumptions were wrong. Afghanistan did not pose an existential threat to international security; the problem was not that it was a "failed state." The truth is that the West always lacked the knowledge, power, or legitimacy to fundamentally transform Afghanistan. But policymakers were too afraid, too hypnotized by fashionable theories, too isolated from Afghan reality, and too laden with guilt to notice that the more ambitious Afghanistan mission was impossible and unnecessary.

In a 2008 interview, COL Gian Gentile asked a question about U.S. policy that has deep implications:  

With regard to Afghanistan the president's political objectives are to disable, disrupt, dismantle al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, to prevent it from using Afghanistan and Pakistan as a base to attack the United States. Then why, as a matter of strategy, do we have to embrace such a maximalist approach of nation-building to achieve those rather limited objectives?

Presumably it was to prevent the kind of instability it was thought might create another opportunity for terrorist safe-haven.  But this approach ignored a critical reality: that the desired outcome was not possible given the political conditions in the United States and on the conditions on ground in Afghanistan as they existed then.  


The shift from punishing the Taliban and targeting our enemies to nation building resulted in an enemy response: insurgency.  Thus the mission became counterinsurgency.  A new doctrine was codified to help win the war and its framework imposed on a situation for which it was ill-suited.  

Twelve years later, at a cost of almost $1.5 trillion, more than 6,700 dead, and over 50,000 wounded.  Bin Laden is dead but Al Qaeda remains intact and has an undeniably larger global footprint.  U.S. power, and its ability to to deter, has been irrevocably tarnished.  Meanwhile, observers, and even the U.S. government, have noted that Afghanistan is still no less likely, and possibly more likely, to devolve into the same instability feared a decade prior.  This is, in any view, a defeat rather than victory, and a costly one at that.  It is precisely when U.S. policymakers decided to alter the U.S. role in Afghanistan from punitive action to nation-building, whether in ignorance or denial of the conditions that would preclude the desired outcome, that they sealed the nation’s defeat.   

This is a vital lesson for future interventions.