You don’t get to lose a war and expect the result to look
like you’ve won it.
That is the terrible truth that the collapse of the Afghan
government has proved but that some in Washington continue to refuse to accept.
The United States failed to achieve the objective to which it devoted most of
its 20 years of war and $2.3
trillion in expenditures: to build a Western-style Afghan state that
could sustain itself and prevent a Taliban takeover. In the face of a poor but
tenacious insurgency, the U.S.-backed Afghan army folded within weeks in
historical fashion, not for lack of training, supplies, or numbers but because
it had no will to fight — something two decades of American efforts could not
instill.
After the Vietnam War, Americans undertook a painful
national reckoning, and for decades after Saigon fell, U.S. leaders avoided
large and prolonged military interventions. But to judge from the reactions in
some quarters to recent events, we face the troubling possibility that this
time no reckoning is forthcoming. Instead of accepting and learning from loss,
some foreign policy leaders prefer to perpetuate the very myths that inspired
the tragedy in the first place, beginning with the proposition that the United
States should and could transform Afghanistan, if only it tried long and hard
enough.
In the past week, as one provincial capital after another
surrendered to the Taliban, prominent voices advanced a dangerous form of
denial: We can still fix it, through still more war. On Aug. 13, Brookings
Institution President John Allen, a retired Marine general, called on
President Biden to reverse his decision to withdraw ground troops and intervene
to prevent the Taliban from entering Kabul. If the Taliban crossed that red
line, he proposed “a concerted military response against Taliban forces and
leadership across Afghanistan.” The neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol tweeted his
support of Allen’s plan. “Is it too late to salvage Afghanistan?” he asked. “ …
The Iraq surge worked. Could an analogous effort in Afghanistan?”
The answer is no, because we tried it. In the
Obama surge, U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan rose to 100,000 in
2010 and 2011, double the
total of May 2009. As The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan
Papers” project revealed, military brass subsequently exaggerated the
potency of the Afghan soldiers they were training. (“Afghan security forces are
increasing in number and quality every day,” Allen wrote in
2012.) U.S. civilian leaders made rosy assessments in public even as they
privately doubted that America could win. Obama, souring on the war, lowered
troop levels below 10,000 by the end of his presidency, but he failed
to fulfill his hope for a full withdrawal. The war was given so long to work
that advocates of a new surge hope Americans have forgotten the last one.
Now, having all along refused to confront the paradox of
trying to build an independent Afghan state that was utterly dependent on
foreign support, proponents of continuing the war are blaming others,
especially Biden, as decisive evidence of their fiasco unfolds before the
world. Within days of their latest and possibly last call for a new surge,
there was no more Afghan government for which another generation of Americans
could fight.
Biden
pulled troops out of Afghanistan. He didn’t end the ‘forever war.’
The war’s dark conclusion has occasioned a second form of
denial. This version holds that even though it’s too late to fix Afghanistan
now, the war had been on track before the Trump administration prepared to
withdraw and the Biden administration followed through.
“What makes the Afghanistan situation so frustrating is that
the US & its allies had reached something of an equilibrium at a low
sustainable cost,” Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign
Relations, opined on
Aug. 13. “It wasn’t peace or military victory, but it was infinitely preferable
to the strategic & human catastrophe that is unfolding.” Retired Army Gen.
Barry McCaffrey added,
as another sign of the mission’s success and stability, that the U.S. military
has suffered no personnel killed in action in more than a year.
Only a small cadre in Washington could make a two-decade war
sound like bloodless equilibrium. True, U.S. service members have not been
killed in action recently — but that is only because the Taliban shrewdly
decided not to target them in exchange for the U.S. agreement to withdraw. For
Afghans, the war has been unceasingly brutal, with the Taliban on
the offensive for years. An estimated 3,378
members of Afghan government forces and 1,468 civilians died in 2020. All
parties understood that the Taliban was gearing up for a further offensive this
summer in which it was poised to win more territory and kill more Afghans.
The president therefore never had the luxury to choose a
small, casualty-free troop presence. Biden’s choice was to escalate a failing
war, to counteract the Taliban’s offensive, or bring U.S. troops home. Had he
done the former, he would have sent Americans to die indefinitely, only to help
the Afghan government lose more slowly. Such an option should be unacceptable
for any president. As Biden explained in a speech Monday:
“How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me
send to fight Afghans — Afghanistan’s civil war, when Afghan troops will not?”
The war has effectively been lost for years. By claiming
otherwise, hawks are stoking unwarranted resentment at Biden and other civilian
leaders for accepting defeat.
Or almost accepting defeat. While making
the right decision to withdraw, the Biden administration has indulged in a bit
of retconning to defend itself and burnish the war’s outcome. “In terms of what
we set out to do in Afghanistan, we’ve done it,” Secretary of State Antony
Blinken said Sunday.
He is correct, to a point: The United States long ago accomplished its initial
objectives after Sept. 11, 2001, of weakening al-Qaeda and punishing its
Taliban sponsor. Yet the United States had larger ambitions, or else it would
have withdrawn after its initial successes. America lost the longer war to
determine who would govern Afghanistan. And it is important to say so.
Only by accepting defeat can the country mourn the precious
lives lost and resources squandered, including the Afghan women and girls
betrayed by promises of a Taliban-free future that no one could keep. Only by
accepting defeat can U.S. leaders level with the American public, which
strongly supports
withdrawal, and begin to repair decades of mistrust. This was a grievous
defeat for which responsibility must be assigned, not evaded.
America
was finally using Biden’s Afghanistan strategy. Then he pulled the plug.
A vacuum of meaning will be filled by the least responsible
among us, whose ranks are growing amid the country’s political dysfunction.
Recall that even in the less polarized era after Vietnam, not everyone accepted
defeat. A myth circulated
that pusillanimous leaders had forced American soldiers to fight with “one hand
tied behind their backs.” This myth, promoted by unsuccessful generals
like William
Westmoreland, led some observers to conclude that the real problem with
U.S. warmaking lay with the public and politicians for supporting too little of
it. To neoconservatives,
the “Vietnam syndrome” needed to be kicked. After Sept. 11, 2001, they found
their opportunity to demonstrate that
American power could remake Afghanistan and Iraq and redeem the world.
By failing to learn, by choosing
to forget, the country moves from one unwinnable war to the next. To accept
defeat, however, would put America on a different course, at a time when it can
ill afford to repeat destructive mistakes.
Stephen Wertheim was a student of mine at Montgomery
Blair High School and is one of many of my former students who made my career
as a teacher a pure joy. Today he is senior fellow in the American Statecraft
Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of
“Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.”
This op/ed piece originally posted in the Washington
Post, August 18, 2021
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