Playing the blame game: why the military is not the architect of foreign policy success

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After Army General Austin Scott Miller stepped down as commander of US forces in Afghanistan, the Naugahyde in his office chair had barely cooled when criticism began to pour in. Afghan Army Commander General Sami Sadat said he felt abandoned by the US The New Republic quickly focused on the military leadership so important over the past 20 years in Afghanistan: Blame the Generals accused the military leaders of our country of a long campaign of lies and deception which ultimately ended with our withdrawal. Invoking the ghosts of Vietnam, the article claimed that the current generation of wartime commanders had also failed to accomplish the mission defined by the White House and Congress.

If it was that easy.

Enough blame to go around

Do these generals share some of the blame? Without a doubt. But in a war that has cost the United States nearly $ 2 trillion and nearly 2,500 dead, there is a lot of blame to be turned, especially when it comes to Afghanistan. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the military expedition to Central Asia was a rapid and remarkable success. But the objectives were limited: to overthrow the Taliban and uproot al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization responsible for the attacks. In December 2001, with the total withdrawal of the Taliban and an interim government in place in Kabul, these objectives were largely achieved, even though Osama bin Laden had fled to Pakistan.

Then two things changed all that. On April 17, 2002, President George W. Bush announced his intention to launch a reconstruction effort in Afghanistan, invoking the Marshall Plan in a speech at the Virginia Military Academy. Then, on May 1, 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared the major fight over (an announcement that coincided with President Bush’s declaration of mission accomplished to end the fighting in the Iraq War), relegating Afghanistan to an operation of economy of force. In the eyes of policymakers, Kabul was on the back burner.

The rest, as they say, is history. The Taliban were shot, but not out. Violence in the country escalated and what became a revolving door of strategies quickly became the norm on C-SPAN. Like a clip straight out of the War Machine movie, every two years a four-star general marched up Capitol Hill with a new strategy for Afghanistan, a new plan to achieve elusive reconstruction goals and vague policies. and often disconnected supposedly designed to advance these goals. The strategies themselves weren’t necessarily bad, but the political theater around them was insignificant.

Military strategy

So why blame the generals? As US Army War College professor Steven Metz wrote in a 2019 World Politics Review article, America’s strategic problems are not purely or even primarily the fault of the military. If there is a strategy failure, its roots run deep in how the United States has approached the conflict. Metz further notes that the generals, as well as specialists in the defense and security industry, share some responsibility for the misreading of Afghanistan and the enormity of their task. It has never been the military’s responsibility, Metz writes, to be the architect of ultimate victory or to change the conditions that fuel extremism.

That responsibility rested somewhere on the Capitol Mall between Congress and the White House. In an article for Military Strategy magazine, It Is Our Fault, Kevin Benson reminded readers that military strategy is derived from political guidance. Yet, even as NATO’s military strategy struggled to stabilize the Afghan countryside and provide the expertise needed to help a fledgling government lay the foundation it needed to be self-sufficient one day, politicians and policymakers backed down. vestige of responsibility, never once asking generals the most important questions. How long will it take? How much will it cost? Is it even possible in our lifetime?

Defining success in Afghanistan

The Marshall Plan was as big a strategy as a grand strategy can be, but we never really got there with Afghanistan. And to be fair, generals with the kind of capable attitude that characterizes leaders of their stature were reluctant to point out the near impossibility of their mission or the blatant lack of any real grand strategy. Oval Office meetings and Senate hearings were little more than pantomime, as the various actors danced around the elephants in the room and avoided uncomfortable and difficult questions.

If there was any lies and deception involved, it was denying the obvious: as defined, success in Afghanistan would require a multigenerational commitment of blood, treasure, and public will. Which, after 20 years of struggle without a modern Marshall Plan, were all in limited supply. So, yeah, go ahead and blame the generals. Blame the decision makers. Blame the politicians. There’s a lot of blame for everyone.

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