What happened in Afghanistan?

 

Who lost Afghanistan? is the wrong question. It assumes agency, when few complex events are monocausal, and it seeks to assign blame, where responsibilities are widely shared. Better to ask, why did things turn out that way?

In his wide-ranging and detailed study of the conflict in Afghanistan during 2001-2021, The American War in Afghanistan [Oxford University Press],Carter Malkasian finds many moments of missed opportunities for peace and many questionable decisions that made things worse. A Pashto-speaking civilian working in Afghanistan who later served as a special assistant to CJCS General Dunford, Malkasian knows both American and Taliban officials as well as the territory and culture of Afghanistan.

The war brought benefits to many Afghans, but it also built resistance to outsiders that has long been a feature of Afghan history. “Afghanistan cleaved into an urban democracy and a rural Islamic order,” Malkasian writes. He mentions the impact of government incompetence and corruption and the role of Pakistan support for the Taliban, but ultimately concludes that the Taliban fighters had a greater willingness to kill and to be killed than their opponents. [He notes that one Taliban leader proudly sent his own son as a suicide bomber.]

“[T]he Taliban stood for what it meant to be Afghan.…Tainted by its alignment with the United States, the [Kabul] government had a much weaker claim to these values and thus a much harder time motivating supporters to go to the same lengths.”

Malkasian documents many consequential choices made by the Americans:

- refusing to allow any power sharing with the Taliban;

- failing to do much to build up the Afghan army and police during 2001-5 [in part of course, because of the U.S. turn to fight a war in Iraq];

- U.S. military tactics that killed many civilians and alienated others;

- overly optimistic U.S. generals that their ways would work;

- insufficient U.S. air strikes in 2014-15;

- ruptured relations with the Karzai government;

- mishandled peace talks in 2019-20 that rewarded the Taliban while leaving many crucial issues unsettled.

Maybe we need to revise the adage and conclude that defeat, not victory, has 100 fathers in this case.