Who is responsible for the American defeat in Afghanistan?

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ANALYSIS / OPINION:

Under the order of President Joe Bidens, all American troops in Afghanistan will be withdrawn by the end of the month, except for the hundred who guard our embassy in Kabul. Coalition troops are withdrawing on the same schedule. The Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan is progressing rapidly, sometimes against resistance from the Afghan security forces.

The point is, we were defeated there almost exactly the same way we were defeated in Vietnam. Politicians and experts are already trying to attribute our defeat to a disadvantaged person or group.

History will soon discover that there is much to blame for our defeat in the Twenty Year War in Afghanistan. Presidents, vice-presidents, cabinet members and White House advisers, as well as the generals who led the war, all need to share it.

Victory is an accumulation of decisions, just like defeat. It is not difficult to identify the people and organizations who made the bad decisions that have accumulated over twenty years to understand the reasons for our defeat. Before doing this, it is necessary to define what constituted our defeat. Then we can identify those responsible for making and executing the decisions that lead to it.

President George W. Bush established the initial mission to overthrow the Taliban government, punish al-Qaida, bring Osama bin Laden to justice, and then bring peace and democracy to Afghanistan.

We quickly overthrew the Taliban government, but they were never truly defeated and never severed their ties with al-Qaida. It took ten years to kill Bin Laden, but peace never returned to Afghanistan. Our attempt to establish democracy failed as it inevitably would.

Mr. Bush’s nation-building strategy, as I have written since 2003, was fundamentally flawed. Islam prohibits the separation of religion and state and therefore does not allow democracy. It was easy for the Taliban to convince the Afghan people that we were the enemy, trying to steal their religion. By failing to defeat Islamist ideology, we could not win in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Mr. Bush’s strategy and the actions of his successors have not stopped China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran from supporting the Taliban, which they have had for years with funds and weapons.

The war in Afghanistan, named Operation Enduring Freedom, began on October 7, 2001, when the Army’s first special forces unit entered Afghanistan. In November 2001, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as he wrote in his memoir, told Mr. Bush: way to Afghanistan. We should not be making a career in transforming Afghanistan. Mr. Bush decided against this advice.

Mr. Bush’s nation-building strategy is the main reason we lost in Afghanistan and Iraq. In his memoir, then-vice president Richard Cheney makes no mention of advising against nation building, so he must share the blame. The same is true of then Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose reign of Pottery Barn, if you break it, you bought it, convinced Mr. Bush to undertake the building of the nation.

Presidents Obama and Trump must also share the responsibility, as must President Biden who, as Mr. Obama’s vice president, stood with him on strategy. Mr. Obama intentionally abandoned ideological warfare and supported the nation-building strategy after the fact. Mr. Trump never saw the need for ideological warfare and continued nation-building for lack of a better idea. Its 2020 peace deal with the Taliban assumed, rather than demanded, the Taliban to engage in serious peace negotiations and sever ties with al-Qaida. He never did either.

Much of the blame must fall on the generals and admirals who convinced themselves that the nation-building and COIN counterinsurgency strategy, which fit right in with it, was successful in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Generals such as David Petraeus, the author of the COIN Strategy, and others whose names have become household words – George Casey, Stanley McChrystal and many others have failed to understand why nation building couldn’t pass or simply drank the COIN Kool-Aid. Even after it became evident that nation building was failing, they continued to support it.

Generals in command in Afghanistan, in particular, were mistaken in believing that twenty years of American training ensured that Afghan soldiers would fight rather than desert the government in Kabul after the departure of American troops and the coalition. This illusion allowed the Taliban to continue to reconquer Afghanistan.

President Biden sent B-52s and AC-130 gunships to target Taliban on August 7 to cover our retreat. There is no evidence that the airstrikes even slowed the Taliban’s advance. Mr. Biden should have left enough air power, special forces and intelligence assets in Afghanistan to prevent the creation of terrorist havens from which attacks could be launched against us or our allies. Had he done so, the Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan would have been rendered almost insignificant.

The Taliban will soon seize Kabul and reestablish their emirate in Afghanistan. Whatever rights Afghan men and women have under the US-backed government in Kabul, they will evaporate overnight.

There are many lessons to be learned from our defeat in Afghanistan, but that is for another day. We must first ask ourselves whether America is, at this point in history, politically capable of winning any war.

Jed Babbin, Assistant Under Secretary of Defense in the administration of George HW Bush, is the author of In the Words of Our Enemies.

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