essay about afghanistan war

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

Afghanistan War

By: History.com Editors

Published: August 20, 2021

The United States launched the war in Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The conflict lasted two decades and spanned four U.S. presidencies, becoming the longest war in American history.

By August 2021, the war began to come to a close with the Taliban regaining power two weeks before the United States was set to withdraw all troops from the region. Overall, the conflict resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and a $2 trillion price tag . Here's a look at key events from the conflict.

War on Terror Begins

Investigators determined the 9/11 attacks—in which terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes, crashing two into the World Trade Center towers in New York City , one at the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., and one in a Pennsylvania field —were orchestrated by terrorists working from Afghanistan, which was under the control of the Taliban, an extremist Islamic movement. Leading the plot that killed more than 2,700 people was Osama bin Laden , leader of the Islamic militant group al Qaeda . It was believed the Taliban, which seized power in the country in 1996 following an occupation by the Soviet Union , was harboring bin Laden, a Saudi, in Afghanistan.

In an address on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush demanded the Taliban deliver bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders to the United States, or "share in their fate." They refused.

On October 7, 2001, U.S. and British forces launched Operation Enduring Freedom , an airstrike campaign against al Qaeda and Taliban targets including Kandahar, Kabul and Jalalabad that lasted five days. Ground forces followed, and with the help of Northern Alliance forces, the United States quickly overtook Taliban strongholds, including the capital city of Kabul, by mid-November. On December 6, Kandahar fell, signaling the official end of Taliban rule in Afghanistan and causing al Qaeda, and bin Laden, to flee.

Shift to Reconstruction

During a speech on April 17, 2002, Bush called for a Marshall Plan to aid in Afghanistan’s reconstruction, with Congress appropriating more than $38 billion for humanitarian efforts and to train Afghan security forces. In June, Hamid Karzai, head of the Popalzai Durrani tribe, was chosen to lead the transitional government.

While approximately 8,000 American troops remained in Afghanistan as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) overseen by NATO, the U.S. military focus turned to Iraq in 2003, the same year U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared "major combat" operations had come to an end in Afghanistan.

A new constitution was soon enacted and Afghanistan held its first democratic elections since the onset of the war on October 9, 2004, with Karzai, who went on to serve two five-year terms, winning the vote for president. The ISAF’s focus shifted to peacekeeping and reconstruction, but with the United States fighting a war in Iraq, the Taliban regrouped and attacks escalated.

Troop Surge Under Obama

In a written statement released February 17, 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama pledged to send an extra 17,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan by summer to join 36,000 American and 32,000 NATO forces already deployed there. "This increase is necessary to stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires," he stated . American troops reached a peak of approximately 110,000 soldiers in Afghanistan in 2011.

In November 2010, NATO countries agreed to a transition of power to local Afghan security forces by the end of 2014, and, on May 2, 2011, following 10-year manhunt, U.S. Navy SEALs located and killed bin Laden in Pakistan.

Following bin Laden's death, a decade into the war and facing calls from both lawmakers and the public to end the war, Obama released a plan to withdraw 33,000 U.S. troops by summer 2012, and all troops by 2014. NATO transitioned control to Afghan forces in June 2013, and Obama announced a new timeline for troop withdrawal in 2014, which included 9,800 U.S. soldiers remaining in Afghanistan to continue training local forces.

Trump: 'We Will Fight to Win'

In 2015, the Taliban continued to increase its attacks, bombing the parliament building and airport in Kabul and carrying out multiple suicide bombings.

In his first few months of office, President Donald Trump authorized the Pentagon to make combat decisions in Afghanistan, and, on April 13, 2017, the United States dropped its most powerful non-nuclear bomb, called the " mother of all bombs ," on a remote ISIS cave complex.

In August 2017, Trump delivered a speech to American troops vowing " we will fight to win " in Afghanistan. "America's enemies must never know our plans, or believe they can wait us out," he said. "I will not say when we are going to attack, but attack we will."

The Taliban continued to escalate its terrorist attacks, and the United States entered peace talks with the group in February 2019. A deal was reached that included the U.S. and NATO allies pledging a total withdrawal within 14 months if the Taliban vowed to not harbor terrorist groups. But by September, Trump called off the talks after a Taliban attack that left a U.S. soldier and 11 others dead. “If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks, and would even kill 12 innocent people, then they probably don’t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway,” Trump tweeted .

Still, the United States and Taliban signed a peace agreement on February 29, 2020, although Taliban attacks against Afghan forces continued, as did American airstrikes. In September 2020, members of the Afghan government met with the Taliban to resume peace talks and in November Trump announced that he planned to reduce U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 2,500 by January 15, 2021.

Withdrawal of US Troops

The fourth president in power during the war, President Joe Biden , in April 2021, set the symbolic deadline of September 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as the date of full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, with the final withdrawal effort beginning in May.

Facing little resistance, in just 10 days, from August 6-15, 2021, the Taliban swiftly overtook provincial capitals, Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif and, finally, Kabul. As the Afghan government collapsed, President Ashraf Ghani fled to the UAE , the U.S. embassy was evacuated and thousands of citizens rushed to the airport in Kabul to leave the country.

By August 14, Biden had temporarily deployed about 6,000 U.S. troops to assist in evacuation efforts. Facing scrutiny for the Taliban's swift return to power, Biden stated , “I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth.”

During the war in Afghanistan, more than 3,500 allied soldiers were killed, including 2,448 American service members, with 20,000-plus Americans injured. Brown University research shows approximately 69,000 Afghan security forces were killed, along with 51,000 civilians and 51,000 militants. According to the United Nations, some 5 million Afghanis have been displaced by the war since 2012, making Afghanistan the world's third-largest displaced population .

The U.S. War in Afghanistan , Council on Foreign Relations

Costs of the Afghanistan war, in lives and dollars , Associated Press

Who Are the Taliban, and What Do They Want? , The New York Times

Operation Enduring Freedom Fast Facts , CNN

Afghanistan: Why is there a war? , BBC News

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

• Skip to content
• Skip to main menu
• Skip to more DW sites

Essay: Why the West failed to understand Afghanistan

How could the Afghan government collapse so quickly? That things were going wrong in Afghanistan had been obvious for a long time, yet the West preferred to look the other way, says Emran Feroz.

"It will probably be like last time. When they took Kabul overnight," Kabul resident Ahmad Jawed, 30, told me last Saturday. When the militant Islamist Taliban  first captured the Afghan capital 25 years ago, Jawed was a young child. But he remembers that morning well. Suddenly the fighters were there, while the members of the mujahedeen government, who had been in-fighting for years, had fled. Now, almost 20 years after NATO first occupied the country, this scenario seemed likely to repeat itself, Jawed predicted: "The last few days have made it clear that they will be here soon."

Shortly thereafter, his fears were confirmed. After the Taliban had seized all major provincial capitals in a matter of days, they marched into Kabul on Sunday. Many members of the army and police abandoned their posts even before the insurgents entered the city. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani  ,for his part, hastily fled the country with his entourage. His behavior was like that of a neo-colonial governor — that's just how he has been described in recent years, not only by the Taliban but by many Afghans who did not benefit from his corrupt state apparatus.

According to some reports, Ghani's men took bags of cash with them. Incidentally, it was Ghani who said a few years ago that he had no sympathy for Afghan refugees. They would only end up washing dishes in the West. After Ghani's flight, the Taliban captured the presidential palace and posed for pictures in front of his desk.

Why did Afghan forces fail to resist the Taliban?

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

One of the commanders said shortly afterwards during a press conference for the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera that he had been detained and tortured by the Americans for eight years in Guantanamo. A coincidence? Probably not. Instead, it was evident once more that the American "War on Terror" had radicalized scores of people in Afghanistan – and that many of them have not forgotten it to this day.

Only white US citizens allowed to board?

Events continued to unfold at a swift pace. Crowds flocked to Kabul airport, where American troops were busy evacuating their citizens. The chaos at the airport did not abate the next day. People tried to cling to the US plane as it took off and died in their last-ditch attempt to escape.

Meanwhile, US soldiers fired into the Afghan crowd. "A relative of mine was killed. He was a doctor," recounted Sangar Paykhar, a Dutch-Afghan journalist and podcaster, after the incident. The Afghan-American author and activist Nadia Hashemi claimed that Afghan-Americans were in some cases denied entry onto the plane. The reason: They were not white Americans.

The latest scenes in Kabul have underscored more plainly than ever that the Western mission in Afghanistan has failed. During his speech yesterday, US President Joe Biden , in the midst of withdrawing his military forces, did not spare a single word for all the Afghans who have been killed by the American "War on Terror" over the past two decades. Instead, his words were once again marked by a denial of reality and by ignorance. The true winners of the war are not in the White House but in Kabul.

20 years in Afghanistan – Was it worth it?

Us war equipment for the taliban.

The Taliban have never been as strong as they are now. In the last few days and weeks alone, they have captured numerous pieces of high-tech American war equipment.

Apart from Panjshir province north of Kabul, which has always been a stronghold of Taliban resistance, the extremists now once again control almost all of Afghanistan. And they have regained political clout on the international stage as well, something they have worked hard on in recent years.

Numerous analyses and forecasts concerning a Taliban takeover have had to be corrected several times in recent days. The US intelligence agency CIA was still assuming on Saturday that it would take 30 to 90 days to overpower Kabul. In the end, it all happened in 24 hours. Even prominent US analysts in Washington were at a loss for words in the face of recent events.

How was it possible?

Bill Roggio of the right-wing conservative US think tank "Foundation for the Defense of Democracies" called the Taliban's successful advance one of the "greatest intelligence failures in decades". Roggio described the Taliban's sophisticated war strategy as "brilliant." The extremists initially focused on the north of the country before taking additional cities nationwide.

There are several reasons why all this was possible. Much of what was going on in the country was suppressed and ignored for years – not only because people in the West wanted to save face but also because they still didn't know Afghanistan, even after all these years. Nearly all the districts of those provincial capitals that fell prior to Kabul had in fact been controlled by the Taliban for years.

The Taliban had put down roots there, operating and ruling in the shadows. That extremists were able to gain an early foothold in these rural regions is also due in part to the massive corruption in the capital and the numerous military operations carried out by NATO and its Afghan allies.

Victims of the West

Drone attacks and brutal nightly raids regularly caused numerous civilian casualties in Afghan villages. Many survivors shifted their support to the Taliban as a result. This was de facto also the case at the gates of Kabul. Long before the recent events, a 20- to 30-minute drive was enough to take you into Taliban territory.

Joe Biden: 'We're going to do everything in our power to get all Americans out and our allies out'

But those in charge did not want to face up to these realities. Instead, they were busy patting themselves on the back for a job well done. People spoke of their own oh-so-commendable values and focused on the supposed achievements made in Afghanistan since 2001. There was much talk of democracy, although not a single democratic transfer of power has taken place in Afghanistan in the last 20 years.

Corrupt elites

This certainly had nothing to do with those Afghans that risked their lives to go to the polls but can primarily be attributed to the corrupt elites that the US brought to power in Kabul. Men like Hamid Karzai and President Ashraf Ghani, who could not flee quickly enough, exploited the new system to their own ends and stayed in power through electoral fraud. Other important figures in Afghanistan behaved similarly, including numerous well-known warlords and drug barons who became the West's closest allies in the Hindu Kush. They were able to line their pockets with the generous foreign aid and transfer billions of dollars abroad.

At the same time, they were also among the biggest war profiteers – thanks, for example, to private security companies they themselves created to fake attacks on NATO troops. In retrospect, it is evident that lucrative contracts were signed based on the alleged terrorist threat.

No need to take responsibility

It has been clear at least since the end of 2019 that leaders in Washington and elsewhere knew all about these aberrations. Ever since the Washington Post published the "Afghanistan Papers," in which about 400 high-ranking US officials more or less admitted to their failures in Afghanistan. The details had been kept under wraps for years.

But nobody wants to talk about that today either. Instead, it is easy to get the impression that the Taliban have come out of nowhere to take Afghanistan and the West by storm. Everyone claims to have acted according to the best of their knowledge and with a clear conscience.

So, it is unfortunate, then, how things turned out. After 20 years of a misguided intervention that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and turned millions of them into refugees, driving them into poverty, the West has not only lost interest in Afghanistan, but feels no need to take responsibility for its plight.

"These people are just like that. It's not our fault," is the tenor of this cultural relativism. It is echoing particularly loudly these days.

Emran Feroz is an Austrian with Afghan roots who has been reporting for years on the situation in the Hindu Kush for German-language media such as "Die Zeit," "taz, die tageszeitung" and "WOZ," but also US media such as the "New York Times" and CNN. At the beginning of October, his analysis "The Longest War - 20 Years of the War on Terror" should have been published on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the so-called "War on Terror." Due to current events, this date was moved to August 23, 2021.

This text was originally published in German on www.qantara.de.

© Qantara.de 2021

Explore more

Related topics.

Argument: The Top Five Debriefing Questions About Afghanistan

Create an FP account to save articles to read later and in the FP mobile app.

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

World Brief

• Editors’ Picks
• Africa Brief

China Brief

• Latin America Brief

South Asia Brief

Situation report.

• Flash Points
• War in Ukraine
• Israel and Hamas
• U.S.-China competition
• Biden's foreign policy
• Trade and economics
• Artificial intelligence
• Asia & the Pacific
• Middle East & Africa

Ones and Tooze

Foreign policy live.

Winter 2024 Issue

Print Archive

FP Analytics

• In-depth Special Reports
• Issue Briefs
• Power Maps and Interactive Microsites
• FP Simulations & PeaceGames
• Graphics Database

Her Power 2024

The atlantic & pacific forum, principles of humanity under pressure, fp global health forum 2024, fp @ unga79.

By submitting your email, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and to receive email correspondence from us. You may opt out at any time.

Your guide to the most important world stories of the day

Essential analysis of the stories shaping geopolitics on the continent

The latest news, analysis, and data from the country each week

Weekly update on what’s driving U.S. national security policy

Evening roundup with our editors’ favorite stories of the day

One-stop digest of politics, economics, and culture

Weekly update on developments in India and its neighbors

A curated selection of our very best long reads

The Top Five Debriefing Questions About Afghanistan

How to make sense of washington’s longest war ever..

• United States
• Afghanistan
• Stephen M. Walt

Leaving Afghanistan

What happens to the country and its people after the forever war ends?

More on this topic

As it draws to an ignominious close, the long war in Afghanistan stands as a stunning indictment of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. The war was waged by two Republican presidents and one Democrat—George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump—and none of them managed to win or end it. The U.S. military never devised an effective strategy for prosecuting the war and never explained to their civilian overseers why their stated war aims could not be achieved. Instead, they repeatedly offered upbeat forecasts they knew were false. Had it been left to them or other representatives of the foreign-policy Blob , we’d still be toiling on with no end in sight and no prospects for improvement.

But don’t just blame the U.S. Defense Department. It was our civilian leaders who gave the military an impossible mission and refused to take responsibility for the war’s strategic direction. Congressional leaders kept authorizing funds to keep the war going without asking tough questions about the prospects for success, even as evidence that the war was not going well began to accumulate. Diplomats, development experts, and the public at large never came to terms with the fatal contradictions in the U.S. effort and refused to accept there might be limits to what U.S. power could accomplish. Those who favored disengagement have little to be proud of either, insofar as they failed to convince the relevant officials or the broader body politic to heed their advice until now.

In the face of a collective failure of this magnitude, perhaps the only benefit one can salvage is to learn the right lessons from a bitter experience. To do so requires asking the right questions and pursuing answers to them in a candid and brutally honest fashion. In that spirit, therefore, I offer my “Top Five Questions About the United States’ Afghan War.” I’ll hazard a few conjectures about each one, and I hope they all receive sustained attention in the future. If we hope to avoid similar errors down the road, a serious effort to understand why the United States failed is essential.

• Why did the United States (and NATO) imagine they could turn Afghanistan into a modern, Western-style democracy?

The United States invaded Afghanistan in response to the Sept.11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The primary goal was to capture terrorist Osama bin Laden and as many senior al Qaeda leaders as possible. Because the Taliban government refused to turn bin Laden over, toppling them became part of the mission too. Once the Taliban were ousted and melted away, however, the United States and its allies took on the quixotic task of trying to turn a poor, deeply divided, mostly illiterate, and war-torn country into a centralized, Western-style, liberal democracy. The prospects for doing so successfully could not have been bleaker, yet the United States embraced it with a sense of hubris that now seems breathtaking. Whatever noble intentions it may have had, this ambitious effort at social engineering in a country Americans barely understood was doomed to fail. Why didn’t the United States understand this from the start?

• Why did the Taliban consistently out-fight the Afghan National Security Forces?

On paper, the Afghan government’s security forces should have been stronger than their opponents. They are nominally larger and better equipped than the Taliban, and they received massive amounts of external military training, logistical support, sophisticated weaponry, and intelligence information. They were also backed up by thousands of U.S. troops, armed drones, and extensive combat air support. Yet after nearly two decades of sustained training and other forms of assistance, the Afghan forces remain poorly led, vulnerable to corruption and frequent desertions, and are sometimes the source of lethal “green-on-blue” attacks on their U.S. advisors. With rare exceptions, they have been no match for their numerically smaller and less well-armed foes. But why?

The failure of U.S. efforts to create effective Afghan security forces is a key story in the war, yet it is frequently omitted from reportage and commentary about the fighting. One can think of a number of explanations for this puzzle: 1) U.S. advisors were trying to teach the Afghans to fight like highly skilled, technology-dependent Americans, a mode of warfare which most Afghans were ill-suited for; 2) pouring vast resources into the Afghan military encouraged corruption and opportunism instead of military competence; 3) U.S. officials could not get the Afghan government to undertake meaningful reforms because their only leverage was to threaten to leave, and the Afghans knew this threat was a bluff; or 4) the Afghan security forces were unpopular due to their association with a foreign occupier (the United States) and the terminally corrupt and mostly despised government in Kabul. I don’t know which of these (or other) explanations is correct, but I would like to know why the United States’ well-armed local allies couldn’t beat their nominally weaker opponents.

• Why didn’t the United States reevaluate the true threat of terrorism?

Afghanistan was the first battleground in the so-called Global War on Terror, and preventing another 9/11 remained a key rationale from the start. As the war dragged on, U.S. leaders continued to justify it by saying they had to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a “safe haven” from which anti-U.S. terrorists could plot equally damaging attacks. This was the main reason Obama gave when he ordered a “surge” of additional U.S. troops in 2009, and Trump said much the same thing when he ordered a more limited surge in 2017. These arguments were never very convincing, however, because by then, al Qaeda had many other havens from which to operate and the Taliban were never interested in attacking the U.S. homeland directly.

More importantly, the years since 2001 have shown that al Qaeda is simply not the existential threat Americans once feared they might be. With the passage of time, the Sept. 11 attacks were more accurately seen as a rare instance when al Qaeda got extremely lucky and not the harbinger of a fearsome new wave of danger. The billions of dollars invested in homeland security made the United States a much harder target, and al Qaeda’s ability to conduct large-scale attacks turned out to be less fearsome than initially thought, especially when compared to other threats (including homegrown right-wing extremism ). Yet U.S. officials never adjusted their thinking to reflect the actual level of danger or asked themselves if the benefits of denying a potential “safe haven” in Afghanistan were worth the considerable costs .

• Could the war have been won?

Now that the war has been lost, it is impossible to know for certain whether a different approach might have succeeded. But the question should still be asked, if only to determine whether victory was always unlikely or whether there were plausible alternatives that might have had a reasonable chance of success. What if the George W. Bush administration had not taken its eye off the ball in 2003 when it chose to invade Iraq and had focused instead on finishing the job in Afghanistan? Perhaps that would have given the fledgling Afghan government, led by then-President Hamid Karzai, sufficient time to get its act together before the Taliban reemerged from their sanctuaries in Pakistan. What if U.S. officials had pushed for an Afghan governing structure that gave greater autonomy to regional governments and power centers—instead of trying to build a centralized government in Kabul—and didn’t try to transform key features of Afghan society as rapidly as possible? What if the United States had started a broad process of negotiation and regional engagement while it still held the upper hand instead of waiting until its fortunes and leverage were declining? And so forth.

My own view, for what it is worth, is trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy was always an impossible dream. Not only do “ foreign-imposed regime changes ” rarely produce democratic results (and especially not in societies with characteristics like contemporary Afghanistan), but the entire effort was rife with contradictions from the start. The more rapidly the United States tried to transform Afghan society, culture, and politics, the more local resistance it was going to face. The more it tried to minimize its own casualties by using airpower, the more accidental civilian deaths it would cause and the more unpopular the United States and its local partners would become. Having created a governmental structure that Afghanistan’s economy could not support, the billions of dollars of external aid and development assistance its state-building effort required did more to fuel corruption than to create more effective institutions or economic infrastructure. Because the war and development effort depended on transport routes through Pakistan, it was impossible to force the Pakistani government to cease its covert support for the Taliban. Even a combination of military strategists Napoleon Bonaparte, Carl von Clausewitz, George S. Patton, and Sun Tzu would have found it impossible to devise a coherent strategy in the face of these contradictions.

Moreover, the American people would only support a level of effort and a casualty rate that was sufficient to keep the war going but enough not to win it—in good part because the public recognized the stakes were not really that large. So the United States became the latest victim of the “graveyard of empires,” just as Britain had in the 19th century and the former Soviet Union had during the 1980s. What is more surprising is it convinced itself it might succeed where others had failed.

• Why did the war last so long?

One could sum up all the above questions with another question: Given all the reasons why the United States should have left long ago, why did it take so long for a president to draw the obvious conclusion and find the political will to get out? One reason is the United States’ still vast wealth and unmatched military power, which made it possible to keep going even when it no longer made much sense. A second reason is all the mechanisms the national security establishment devised to conceal the true cost of these adventures: reliance on opaque overseas contingency funds, unmanned drones, airpower, private contractors, and, of course, the All-Volunteer Force. Had the United States been fighting in Afghanistan with draftees drawn from all parts of U.S. society, it would have ended years ago. Partisan politics played a role too: Even if getting out was the smart thing to do, any president had to worry that doing so would invite a chorus of denunciations from his opponents (even when they had no idea how to win the war themselves). Add the usual deceptions and the Blob’s natural reluctance to question orthodoxies or reverse course, and you get the latest version of military analyst Daniel Ellsberg’s Vietnam-era “ stalemate machine .” Instead of ending a war they knew they couldn’t win, presidents and their advisors focused on “not losing” and on passing the buck to their successors.

To his credit, U.S. President Joe Biden chose a different course. But we, scholars, still have the responsibility of studying why his two predecessors failed to end the war, especially given that Obama and Trump clearly wanted to get out from the start. And had they done so, the results would have been no different than what we are going to see now. Understanding why it was so hard to end this war could teach future presidents two valuable lessons: It is usually easier to invade a foreign country than it is to leave it, and wars of choice should never be waged for frivolous or ill-considered reasons.

The end of U.S. involvement in the Afghan war is no cause for celebration. Conditions in Afghanistan are going to get worse, although that was likely to happen whenever the United States chose to leave. There will be a new round of blame-casting and partisan finger-pointing, which is hardly what the country needs right now. What the United States needs instead is to recognize there is plenty of blame to go around and to explore why the foreign-policy elite took on a misguided mission and pursued it much longer than was warranted.

The United States’ foreign-policy establishment did not serve the country well during this long war. It will be doubly tragic if its members are unwilling to ask the right questions about the unhappy episode, refuse to acknowledge their many errors, and try to pin the blame on those who had the good sense to withdraw. As always, failure to hold themselves accountable and learn the right lessons will only make a repeat performance more likely.

Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. Twitter:  @stephenwalt

Will the End of the U.S. War Create More Afghan Refugees?

With the Taliban insurgency expanding, the U.S. withdrawal could provoke a major humanitarian crisis.

The Moscow Attack Showed Terrorism Is Asia’s Problem Now

Increased geopolitical rivalry is allowing extremist groups to thrive—and threaten everyone.

Al Qaeda Is Back—and Thriving—in Afghanistan

The architects of 9/11 are profiting from gold and gem mines in the Taliban-led country.

Sign up for Editors' Picks

A curated selection of fp’s must-read stories..

You’re on the list! More ways to stay updated on global news:

How to Get More Aid Into Gaza

How will senegal’s new president govern, china-philippines tensions heat up, u.s. ‘outraged’ over deadly israeli strike on world central kitchen convoy in gaza, the problem isn’t just netanyahu, it’s israeli society, editors’ picks.

• 1 Is This a Revolution? Or Are People Just Very Ticked Off?
• 2 China-Philippines Tensions Heat Up
• 3 Nobody Actually Knows What Russia Does Next
• 4 How the United States Lost Niger
• 5 The Problem Isn’t Just Netanyahu, It’s Israeli Society
• 6 NATO Is Unprepared for Russia’s Arctic Threats

How Will Diomaye Faye Impact Senegal's Economy?

World central kitchen: israeli strike on gaza aid convoy prompts u.s., international condemnation, netanyahu is a scapegoat. a callous israel is the problem., more from foreign policy, is this a revolution or are people just very ticked off.

In a new book, Fareed Zakaria explores how much the times are a-changin’. At risk, he says, is the entire global system.

Egypt Is What Happens When the U.S. Gives Up on Democratization

Civil society loses—and China and Russia fill the vacuum.

Russia Is Back to the Stalinist Future

With a Soviet-style election, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has come full circle.

Why Biden Can’t Force a Truce on Israel—or Won’t

The United States has intervened in past Mideast wars, but this one is different.

Nobody Actually Knows What Russia Does Next

Ukraine is winning the war’s other front, nato is unprepared for russia’s arctic threats, the u.n. security council’s default is deadlock, how the united states lost niger.

Sign up for World Brief

FP’s flagship evening newsletter guiding you through the most important world stories of the day, written by Alexandra Sharp . Delivered weekdays.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

How America Lost Its Way in Afghanistan

By Fredrik Logevall

• Published Aug. 16, 2021 Updated Aug. 17, 2021

THE AMERICAN WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

By Carter Malkasian

The AFGHANISTAN PAPERS

A Secret History of the War

By Craig Whitlock

In the predawn hours of July 1 they departed, the few remaining U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan , the center of operations for America’s longest war. At its peak the sprawling compound — there were two runways, a 50-bed hospital, shops and restaurants, and a notorious “black jail” prison — housed tens of thousands of U.S. service members; now the last of them flew off, without fanfare and after shutting off the electricity. It marked the symbolic end of America’s 20-year military intervention in a war-ravaged land.

Left behind at the base were some 3.5 million items, carefully cataloged, including furniture and electronics, small arms and ammunition, as well as thousands of civilian vehicles and hundreds of armored trucks. The plan was for the material to be inherited by the Afghan military; most of it was, but not before looters made off with a substantial haul.

It will be up to historians of the future, writing with broad access to official documents and with the kind of detachment that only time brings, to fully explain the remarkable early-morning scene at Bagram and all that led up to it. But there’s much we can already learn — abundant material is available. When the historians get down to work, chances are they will make ample use of two penetrating new works: Carter Malkasian’s “The American War in Afghanistan” and Craig Whitlock’s “The Afghanistan Papers.”

The two volumes constitute a powerful one-two punch, covering as they do the key developments in the war and reaching broadly similar conclusions, but with differing emphases. Malkasian provides greater detail and context, while Whitlock’s United States-centric account is fast-paced and vivid, and chock-full of telling quotes. Both authors paint a picture of an American war effort that, after breathtaking early success, lost its way, never to recover.

My recommendation is to read the Malkasian first. A former civilian adviser in Afghanistan who also served as a senior aide to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Malkasian speaks Pashto and has a doctorate in history. In this, his third and most comprehensive book on Afghanistan, he provides a broad-reaching and quietly authoritative overview of U.S. involvement, from 9/11 onward. He is good on military operations, including the Battle of Marjah in 2010. No less important, he enlightens us on the Afghan part of the story — on the tribal system and its variations; on the forbidding geography, so vital in the fighting; on the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and his decision-making; on the complex and ever-shifting relationships between the government of Hamid Karzai and the warlords in the provinces.

Whitlock, a veteran Washington Post reporter, expands on a much-discussed series of articles that appeared in The Post in late 2019 and that were based on interviews and documents gathered by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) for several “Lessons Learned” reports. (Malkasian also makes copious use of these materials.) In Whitlock’s grim assessment, American military and civilian leaders in three successive administrations from George W. Bush’s to Donald J. Trump’s engaged in an “unspoken conspiracy to mask the truth” about the almost continuous setbacks on the ground in Afghanistan.

It wasn’t always that way. At the start, in early October 2001, the United States rode a wave of international support following the 9/11 attacks to launch a sustained aerial campaign against Al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban and dispatched Special Operations forces to assist a resistance organization in northern Afghanistan. The result was a rout. Within 60 days, the Taliban was driven from power, with the loss of only four U.S. troops and one C.I.A. agent. It was a stunning victory, even if Osama bin Laden and top Taliban leaders eluded capture.

Flushed with success, U.S. planners were uncertain about what to do next. They feared that Afghanistan could descend into chaos, but didn’t want to be saddled with the tasks of nation-building. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who is a key figure in both volumes, personified the indecision. Empowered by George W. Bush to oversee the mission, Rumsfeld shared the president’s inclination to view the Taliban and Al Qaeda as inseparable. Yet he also showed a subtler side. More than many of his colleagues, he worried about getting bogged down in Afghanistan, and about the potential cost of the struggle to U.S. taxpayers. He understood that American power, no matter how great in relative terms, was limited.

“Respectful of Afghanistan’s history,” Malkasian writes, Rumsfeld “was aware that U.S. troops could upset the Afghan people and trigger an uprising. He wanted to outsource to Afghan partners and be done with the place as soon as possible. In hindsight, he was prescient. Yet his actual decisions cut off opportunities to avoid the future he so feared.”

Thus Rumsfeld ignored entreaties to include the Taliban in the postwar settlement in late 2001, despite support for the notion from Karzai. Thus he sanctioned overly aggressive counterterrorism operations that alienated ordinary Afghans and in short order drove former Taliban supporters to resort again to violence. And thus he and Bush turned a blind eye to the repressive actions of Karzai’s government and its warlord allies.

Most important, Rumsfeld neglected to build up the Afghan security forces. He dismissed as “crazy” a January 2002 request from the Afghan interim government for $466 million a year to train and equip 200,000 soldiers. The Afghans scaled back their request, then scaled it back some more, until Rumsfeld agreed to a cap of 50,000 soldiers. Even then, little was accomplished, as Rumsfeld, increasingly preoccupied with the planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, insisted that training and housing costs for the recruits be minimized, and pay be kept low. By the beginning of 2004, a mere 6,000 Afghan Army troops had been trained; by 2006, when Rumsfeld stepped down, the figure had risen to 26,000, still far too few to counter the major and successful offensive the Taliban launched that year.

The offensive proved a turning point, showing in stark terms the immense challenge the Bush administration had set for itself. The United States had entered a country it didn’t understand, one that had flummoxed great powers in the past, and it had done so without a clear long-term strategy. Its client government in Kabul was beset by corruption and the lack of broad popular backing, while the Taliban was dedicated and resourceful and able to repair to sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan to rest and plan. From an early point, moreover, U.S. leaders were preoccupied with the deteriorating security situation in Iraq. Afghanistan became a sideshow. (Robert Gates, who succeeded Rumsfeld as secretary of defense in 2007, recalled that he had three priorities upon taking office: “Iraq, Iraq and Iraq.”)

Yet even as American planners acknowledged — behind closed doors — that they were losing in Afghanistan, they kept up the bullish public pronouncements. “Lies and Spin,” Whitlock titles a particularly devastating chapter, as he quotes general after general declaring to reporters that the trend lines pointed in the right direction, that the enemy was on the ropes, that victory would soon come. Never mind the plethora of intelligence assessments showing the opposite — the Taliban, far from reeling, was expanding its reach, ever more confident it would prevail in the end. Or as a Taliban commander put it to a U.S. official in 2006, sounding much like a North Vietnamese counterpart from circa 1966: “You have all the clocks but we have all the time.”

The surge of 2009 under Barack Obama should loom large in any account of the war, and so it does in these books. It involved a major but temporary escalation, which had the aim of using enormous resources to reverse the Taliban momentum within two years and then turning over security operations to the Kabul government. One wishes for more on the domestic political intricacies that shaped the policy’s contours, but both books make clear that the surge failed to bring lasting results, even though, as Malkasian puts it, “the best minds, accomplished generals and a careful president led the way.” Malkasian is sympathetic to Obama’s plight — the president, new to the office and faced with a menu of terrible choices, was boxed in by pressure from the military and from Republicans in Congress. “Bush had enjoyed freedom to maneuver for half his presidency,” he writes, while “Obama never enjoyed such freedom.”

Whitlock is less forgiving, faulting the Obama team for adopting a new counterinsurgency strategy that achieved little except to further alienate the local population; for failing to clamp down on pervasive Afghan government corruption; and for refusing — like its predecessor — to level with the American people, instead insisting on a “false narrative of progress.” Though Obama in his second term reduced sharply the scope of military operations, “The Afghanistan Papers” castigates him for failing to deliver on a promise to end the war, and for conjuring up “an illusion” that the remaining American forces would be on the sidelines, in an advisory capacity; in reality, they were still in the fight, on the ground in counterterrorism operations as well as from the air. And so they would remain under his successor, Donald Trump, who swallowed his initial inclination to get out and instead vowed to achieve the victory that had eluded Bush and Obama.

Could it have gone differently? Neither of these authors gives much reason to believe that an alternative American strategy would have brought an appreciably different result. Malkasian, the more sanguine of the two, identifies some missed opportunities to limit the bloodshed and cut back U.S. involvement, but concludes that Afghanistan was always destined to be a long and difficult slog (“something to be endured”). Whitlock, for his part, credits President Joe Biden for his April 2021 decision to pull the last U.S. forces from what the author terms an “unwinnable war.”

Indeed, one puts down these two estimable works with the strong sense that the very presence of the United States created a monumental problem for the Kabul government. Much like South Vietnam a half century before, it could never escape being tainted by its association with a foreign occupying power. Vast quantities of American aid, necessary to any hope of prevailing in the war, wiped out any hope of securing robust popular support. Or, more simply: One couldn’t win without the Americans, and one couldn’t win with them.

Could some way have been found out of the dilemma? The question loomed larger than ever as the last American aircraft rumbled down the runway at Bagram on that early July morning and flew off into the darkness.

Fredrik Logevall, a professor of history and international affairs at Harvard, is the author, most recently, of “JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956.”

THE AMERICAN WAR IN AFGHANISTAN A History By Carter Malkasian Illustrated. 576 pp. Oxford University Press. $34.95. THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS A Secret History of the War By Craig Whitlock Illustrated. 368 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.

Follow New York Times Books on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram , s ign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar . And listen to us on the Book Review podcast .

Twenty years of war: America magazine’s coverage of Afghanistan

The dramatic scenes unfolding in Kabul as Taliban forces overrun the last remaining government-held positions in Afghanistan’s capital have come as a shock to many American observers both on the ground and from afar. For those who remember the fall of Saigon in 1975, it has been a bitter repeat of history . A war that seemed eminently winnable—and justifiable—at its outset instead became a two-decade quagmire, and one that has left innocent noncombatants facing profound danger.

This is an occasion for all Americans to look back at our justifications for invading Afghanistan, our reasons for staying and our rationale for withdrawal. Where did it all go wrong? Or was the venture ill-fated from the start? Too many are dead for glib analyses to be appropriate, but a reckoning remains necessary. We at America have looked back over our coverage of Afghanistan since 2001, with some of the most pertinent accounts excerpted below.

The editors of America first weighed in on the situation in Afghanistan just a few short weeks after the United States began combat actions in that country following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 1, 2001. In the months and years that followed, the editors and other contributors weighed in with their reflections on and analyses of an increasingly fraught situation.

2001: "By their actions, the terrorists have declared war on the United States, and we certainly have the right under the just war theory to defend ourselves with military force."

A Just War? (the Editors, Oct. 8, 2001)

The United States is going to wage a war against terrorists, says President George W. Bush. Is this a just war according to the principles of the Catholic just war theory? For this issue we asked experts in the just war theory to examine this question and present their views.

Before looking at the U.S. response, it is important to make clear that the terrorists’ attacks violated almost every principle of the just war theory. First, wars can be waged only by legitimate authorities of a state. They cannot be declared by anyone who feels he has a just cause. The terrorists are not government officials. Second, the attack on the World Trade Center was directed at civilians who, according to the principle of civilian immunity, should not be targeted. And even if the Pentagon could be considered a military target, using a plane loaded with innocent civilians as a bomb is unacceptable.

By their actions, the terrorists have declared war on the United States, and we certainly have the right under the just war theory to defend ourselves with military force. But before we go too far down this path, we should ask if the use of the word war is apt. The use of the word by the president is rhetorically satisfying. It makes clear that this is a serious endeavor that will take great effort and sacrifice. But calling our response war gives the terrorists a stature that they do not deserve. It treats them like a government, when in fact they are more like organized criminals: mass murderers, not soldiers. Treating terrorists as criminals does not mean that the use of deadly force is ruled out. Police have the right to use deadly force to protect themselves and others from harm.

The rhetoric of war also makes it easier for the president to argue that we will treat nations that support terrorism in the same way that we deal with terrorists. This is easy to say, but difficult to carry out. If we discover that a foreign intelligence service gave money, arms or forged documents to Osama bin Laden, do we bomb the country? Do we bomb the offices of the intelligence service? What if the government did not know the resources were going to be used in the attack on the United States? Since the U.S. government has stated that a number of countries support terrorist groups, we could quickly be at war on many fronts.

But granting that the rhetoric of war has captured the day, it is appropriate to use the just war theory to guide us in our response. Read more...

War in Afghanistan (the Editors, Oct. 29, 2001)

The aerial attack by the United States on terrorist and Taliban targets in Afghanistan has been declared a just war by a number of Catholic leaders, including some bishops and cardinals. While we hope that the war is brought to a swift and just conclusion, such certitude, at this point, is hard to echo. There is no question that stopping terrorism is a just cause. But waging war under the just war doctrine must be the last resort, after diplomatic, economic and other means have failed. Was a month enough time to exhaust these options? This is unclear.

….Once the obvious military targets are destroyed, what do we bomb next? From the beginning, the administration has thought of this struggle primarily in military terms, but the war on terrorism cannot be won simply with bullets. The United States needs the support not only of the elites governing Muslim countries, but also of Muslim public opinion. That is why it was foolish for the administration to wait a month before accepting invitations to appear on Al Jazeera, an independent all-news satellite channel based in Qatar, which could be used to send our message to the Muslim world. This war will not be won in the mountains of Afghanistan. It will be won when Muslims are convinced that the United States acts justly. Read more...

How Goes the Coalition? (the Editors, Nov. 26, 2001)

….The Taliban retreat from Kabul will both strengthen and challenge the coalition. On the one hand, nothing strengthens a coalition like victories. On the other hand, the international coalition must now quickly find an Afghan coalition that can govern without intertribal bloodshed.

For the ultimate success of the campaign, international cooperation is indispensable, because the terrorist networks are spread across 60 nations. The coalition is not an association as formal as an alliance, but it must be held together. In an age of global interconnectedness, even a superpower cannot behave like some sheriff at high noon. If the coalition is sluggish, that’s bad luck. If the United States tries to go it alone in the campaign against terrorism, that will be more than a misfortune. It will be a perilous mistake. Read more...

2001: "In an age of global interconnectedness, even a superpower cannot behave like some sheriff at high noon."

Afghanistan Part II (the Editors, March 4, 2002)

The Bush administration has waged an effective war in Afghanistan, and, for the most part, has waged it in a just manner. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we wrote that the terrorists should be brought to justice because of their crimes and because of the danger they pose to life in this country and elsewhere. If this cannot be done peacefully, then they are legitimate targets of military action.

….While the Bush administration deserves praise, its policies have not been without defects. Many Al Qaeda and Taliban troops escaped into the mountains or Pakistan. In addition, the administration lost the moral high ground by arguing that the captives taken during the war were not covered by the Geneva conventions governing prisoners, a position it was ultimately forced to reverse. Now it is trying to convince a skeptical world that there is a difference between the Taliban soldiers and the Al Qaeda terrorists, a distinction that it could have made more successfully if it had not earlier tried to ignore the Geneva conventions. In addition, allegations that U.S. soldiers have beaten captives are alarming. The facilities holding prisoners should be immediately opened to international inspection by the Red Cross and Red Crescent.

The first casualty of war, the saying goes, is the truth. While secrecy is vital to protect military plans, post-battle secrecy breeds suspicion and prevents us from learning from our mistakes. The military would have more credibility if it acknowledged quickly and forthrightly civilian casualties and other military mistakes. To assert, for example, against all evidence that those killed at the village of Chowkar-Karez, outside Kandahar, were enemy soldiers, renders suspect all information given out by the military. Better to admit the mistake, apologize, make reparations and strive to do better.

Apologies and reparations would do much to show the Afghan people that we, unlike so many previous foreign powers, are different: we care about their welfare. Estimates of civilian casualties from the war range from 1,000 to 4,000. Justice demands that we spend at least part of our military budget to help those innocent civilians who were wounded, widowed or orphaned by U.S. weapons. We also have an obligation to retrieve and destroy unexploded ordnance, lest more innocents suffer from the war.

Rebuilding Afghanistan politically and economically will not be easy. Read more...

2002: "The Bush administration has waged an effective war in Afghanistan, and, for the most part, has waged it in a just manner."

The First Anniversary of 9/11 (the Editors, Sept. 9, 2002)

….In December, Washington was congratulating itself on defeating the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and expelling the Al Qaeda terrorists from that country—although, tragically, a significant number of noncombatant civilians were killed in the process.

But on the anniversary of 9/11, the new Afghan government remains highly unstable; the partners in the anti-terrorist coalition are growing ever more critical of U.S. leadership; the Al Qaeda leaders have not been found, much less immobilized; there is frightening talk within Congress and the administration of war with Iraq; and all the while Americans are continually assured by experts that new and more dreadful terrorist attacks are a certainty.

It is often said that 9/11 marked the beginning of a new age. It should also be said that if this age is to eliminate terrorism, it must be guided by the truth that Pope John Paul II repeated over and over in his message for the 2002 World Day of Peace: “No peace without justice; no justice without forgiveness.” Read more...

The True Costs of War (May 16, 2006)

….The campaign against international terrorism confronts a new kind of challenge. Unlike conventional wars between nation-states or the decades-long confrontation of the cold war, this campaign will not conclude with a surrender or a treaty. When the two global superpowers confronted each other in a climate of mutual assured destruction, the danger was all too real, but the competing interests of the adversaries were clear. Such clarity is not present in the campaign against international terrorism. Suicide bombers will not be defeated by missiles and tanks but by the promise of a life of opportunity with hope for future generations. While military responses to clearly defined targets must be part of our response to terrorist attacks, the fundamental and continuing conflict will be one of ideals and values. If American citizens accept the diminishment of constitutional safeguards and American values without protest, we will slowly surrender our most valuable resource in the continuing campaign against terrorism. By failing to understand our adversaries, we run the risk of becoming their mirror images. Read more...

Up or Out (Dec. 7, 2009)

Afghanistan, we are told, is the “graveyard of empires.” Visitors to the recent roving exhibit “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul” will know that description is an exaggeration. For Alexander the Great and his followers, it turns out, established colonial cities across northern and western Afghanistan. So not every foreign expedition has stumbled into disaster, like the ill-fated British and Indian troops annihilated in 1842 in the First Afghan War. Nonetheless, today Afghanistan does represent an extraordinary military and diplomatic challenge for the United States. The terrain is rugged, the climate inhospitable to invading armies. Its population consists of at least nine ethnic groups who speak more than 30 languages. Its tribal culture is, to put it kindly, highly defensive and its people skilled in irregular warfare. When the illegitimacy and corruption of the government in Kabul and the weakness of its police and military are added in, waging a counter-insurgency/counter-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan is a test of extraordinary complexity.

President Obama’s long, drawn-out deliberation on Afghan strategy is not just due to his rational temperament, as his kinder critics have suggested. It is demanded by the multiple challenges Afghanistan presents any outside power seeking to shape events in what Maryann Cusimano Love aptly called “a fictional state.” In this context, deliberation is an asset, but it cannot assure a happy outcome. Whatever the strategy, however focused the goals, war and nation-building are both chancy undertakings. The principal issue that we believe should be weighed as the nation moves ahead is the human capacity of the U.S. military to wage this war. Read more...

2006: "By failing to understand our adversaries, we run the risk of becoming their mirror images."

Hold to the Deadline (Sept. 13, 2010)

The Taliban, according to a cover story in Time on July 29, ordered the nose of 19-year-old Bibi Aisha cut off to punish her for fleeing her husband’s family, where she was being abused. Later they shot 10 aid workers and stoned to death a young couple who had eloped. If NATO leaves Afghanistan, many tell us, such atrocities will continue. But Aisha’s husband, not the Taliban, cut off her nose; and the almost 100,000 foreign troops have failed to reform brutal tribal customs during the nine years they have fought there.

Meanwhile, civilian casualties rise. The U.S. policy is to avoid killing civilians, even at risk to our troops; but recent reports of 52 people, mainly women and children, killed in the Helmand province—condemned as “morally and humanly unacceptable” by President Hamid Karzai—and another 32 a week later, demonstrate that drones and rockets fail to distinguish sufficiently between the enemy and the innocent. According to U.N. reports, in 2009 the great majority of the 2,412 civilian victims were killed by insurgents; 596 were killed by the United States, mostly by air strikes. Nevertheless, local polls show that Afghans, particularly in the villages, blame the foreigners for civilian deaths.

Each week the parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam become more vivid: the corrupt America-sponsored government; our troops bogged down in a hostile culture and terrain; our military leadership plugged into its “can do” philosophy; our domestic economy stretched to the breaking point; a public uninformed and unconvinced of the war’s necessity; and a president stuck with a premature decision to fight and determined not to become, in Richard Nixon’s words, “the first president to lose a war.”

Americans must face the fact that we cannot control the world. Given the current burdens on our military and our economic problems, we cannot remake a nation in our image. Read this...

Out of Afghanistan (Aug. 15, 2011)

Congressman Walter Jones Jr., of North Carolina, has undergone a thorough conversion. A Democrat, he became a conservative Republican; a Baptist, he became a Catholic. He supported the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; now he sends hand-written letters of condolence to the American families who have lost a son or daughter. He told George C. Wilson in The Nation (6/13) that he deals with the guilt over having voted for both wars because he was “not strong enough to vote my conscience as a man of faith.” Mr. Jones and his 13-member Out-of-Afghanistan caucus plan to push the war to the forefront in the presidential primaries. Public support for the war has fallen. Only 43 percent of Americans feel it is worth fighting, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll (6/7). A Pew survey on June 21 found that 56 percent wanted troops out as soon as possible and only 39 percent supported staying until the situation stabilized.

In June, 40 religious leaders from all faiths wrote to President Obama that it is time to bring the war in Afghanistan to an end. What began as a response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they contended, has become an open-ended war against a Taliban insurgency. Read this...

2013: "Killing civilians is not only immoral but also strategically counterproductive."

Our Sacred Dead (Oct. 23, 2013)

….As the war in Afghanistan intensified in 2008, the effort to keep count of civilian deaths increased, though many agreed the data gathered from Western media reports represented only the tip of the iceberg. The tension between the United Nations and United States increased. The coalition would claim they had killed insurgents, but the local population would tell the United Nations that the victims were farmers. A U.S. bombing in September 2008 killed 92 civilians in one village, and in May 2009 another airstrike killed 140. WikiLeaks revealed in July 2010 that the U.S. military secretly maintained files concerning 4,024 Afghan civilian war deaths between 2004 and 2009.

Killing civilians is not only immoral but also strategically counterproductive. Whether an attack using drones, or night raids on the ground, these actions lead only to new recruits for the Taliban. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal often called this “insurgent math,” and his aide said every additional civilian casualty generates 20 more insurgents, an increase in road bombs and an additional violent clash between insurgents and U.S. troops in the following six weeks.

In U.S. culture, respect for human life is narrow, sometimes to the point of indifference to the fate of innocent persons who are not military enemies, but whom we kill. We are slow to see those designated “terrorists” as our brothers and sisters. There is a need for a truly independent agency, akin to the Government Accountability Office, to record and publish the names and number of civilians killed on all sides of a conflict. The nightly news should acknowledge both American and foreign dead. Memorials and liturgies that demonstrate respect for all the victims of war would give life to the most challenging words in the Sermon on the Mount. Read more...

As a soldier I was loved for my sins. Now I must repent for them (Peter Lucier, May 17, 2019)

….The Catholic faith tells us that we are sinners loved by God. I am a sinner who is loved. I struggle with both halves. I don’t always want to admit I am a sinner. What I went over there to do felt righteous. I believed in the cause, and even if I didn’t, I believed in my brothers. I believed in America, and even if I didn’t or didn’t know what America was, I believed in the Marine Corps. I believed in violence, in purpose, in our community, our brotherhood. I wanted to receive the sacrament of confirmation in the military service. I prayed for the opportunity to kill.

I believed in the redemptive power of violence. I was young and golden and fit, on fire with the zeal of a convert. On the firing ranges at the school of infantry, in the mountains of Camp Pendleton, I fell in love with the rhythms of squad fire and maneuver—the geometries of fire, crisp left and right lateral limits, the steady drumming of an M249 machine gun zipping rounds into targets. I was born again. I felt clean and right. I slept peacefully at night, tired from an honest day’s work of training to visit violence upon the others. Some days, it is hard to admit I am a sinner.

Other days, it is hard to accept that I am loved. I have not earned it. We went out all those nights and never came back with anything to show for it. The war I fought, I didn’t win. What have I done to deserve love? I have certainly done enough to deserve contempt, to deserve condescension, to deserve belittlement, to deserve hate, even. Pick your sin: pride, anger, despair, selfishness. I am guilty. I went to war feeling entitled. To what exactly? To save. To kill. It didn’t occur to me how arrogant that was until I came home. I carried that self-centeredness into a marriage after I got home and wrecked it. The uniform I wore reminds others of service. It reminds me of all the wrongs I’ve done and continue to do. Some days it is hard to accept love.

As a Marine veteran of Afghanistan, I am a sinner who is loved—and loved in a way I am not always comfortable with. Being a veteran means being venerated here at home. Before every college basketball game I go to, we take a moment to be grateful for our nation “and those who keep it safe.” I am loved with every flyover at a football game, every Fourth of July, every Veterans Day. I feel America’s love for me and for veterans in every “Thank you for your service” and in every “Support the Troops” bumper sticker.

The oftentimes adoring American public does not talk much about my sins, but I feel them acutely. St. Augustine talked about animi dolor , “anguish of the soul.” Animi dolor is the soul’s natural response to war, to killing. I feel viscerally the stains that entering into the morally complex arena of war has left upon my soul. In the American culture, I am loved for my sins. I am loved for being a Marine who went to war.

When I returned from Afghanistan, I needed to find a way to go from being a Marine who is loved for his sins to being a believer who is a sinner but who is loved. I needed to find a way to come home. The church has always offered a path for soldiers coming home from war: the path of penance. It is a hard path, both for veterans and for the families and communities to which they are trying to return. But if we really believe in the message and truth of the cross, and if veterans are to truly become again members of the community, we are compelled to take this route. Read more...

The Afghanistan Papers make clear that America has a repentance problem (Drew Christiansen, S.J., Dec. 17, 2019)

We have been here before. In 1964 there was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution , and in 1971 came the publication of the Pentagon Papers . In 1979, David Halberstam laid the blame for the Vietnam War at the feet of “ the best and the brightest .” Not until four decades later in 2004, in the film “ The Fog of War ,” did Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, own his culpability in that conflict.

In 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney and the hawkish neo-cons of the Bush administration led the United States to war under false pretenses once again, this time in Iraq. In 2006, the Iraq Study Group , headed by James A. Baker and Lee Hamilton, issued a report listing 79 recommendations to correct and prevent the mistakes and abuses of that war.

The same year, the journalists Seymour Hersh and Mark Danner began extended coverage of the torture committed at Abu Ghraib . We later learned that the C.I.A. had filmed the “enhanced interrogations,” destroyed the tapes so they could not be turned over to investigators and continued applying these grossly immoral techniques even after they had proven ineffective at producing actionable intelligence. The new film “ The Report ” dramatizes an investigation into the torture program by the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California.

Now comes The Washington Post’s release, on Dec. 9, of the so-called Afghanistan Papers —more than 2,000 pages from the Lessons Learned Program at the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, along with other documents. They reveal that, as The Post summarizes, “Year after year, U.S. officials failed to tell the public the truth about the war in Afghanistan.” Once again there was failure at the top, by both civilian and military leaders, in the Bush and Obama administrations and right up to the present.

“The interviews make clear,” the Post reporters write, “that officials issued rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hid unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” They go on to say, “Several of those interviewed described explicit efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public and a culture of willful ignorance, where bad news and critiques were unwelcome.” Americans, it appears, have not learned the lessons of our own past failures. Rather, we seem ensnared in a tragedy of biblical dimensions from which we cannot flee.

The first lesson I draw from the Afghanistan Papers is that U.S. civic culture has lost the capacity for repentance. Read more...

What America needs to know about the Afghanistan Papers (Ryan Di Corpo, Dec. 17, 2019)

The Washington Post released previously unpublished reports and memos related to the ongoing war in Afghanistan on Dec. 9. These 428 interview transcripts and over 2,000 pages of notes , called the Afghanistan Papers, reveal a striking contrast between the private doubts and concerns of numerous ambassadors, military leaders and U.S. government officials and what they told the American public about the war.

More than 600 people sat for interviews with the Office of the Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) as part of its $11 million “ Lessons Learned ” program, which, according to The Post, “was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan.”

The documents are a sobering record of intelligence errors, strategic blunders and sustained, widespread uncertainty regarding the purpose of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan—a nearly $1 trillion endeavor . Since 2001, the war has taken the lives of 2,300 American military personnel and an estimated 43,074 Afghan civilians.

On Oct. 7, 2001, President George W. Bush announced strikes against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. He stated that the purpose of these “carefully targeted actions” was to “disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.” However, as revealed in the newly released Lessons Learned report, former Afghan war czar Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in 2015, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan— we didn’t know what we were doing .”

To help make sense of the Afghanistan Papers, America spoke by phone with Karen J. Greenberg, who has written on matters of terrorism and national security for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. A permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Ms. Greenberg is currently director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What intelligence did the U.S. lack when beginning military operations in Afghanistan? Was the war strategically misguided from the start?

Much of the criticism about the war in Afghanistan was understated, but there are many things we didn’t know. Among them was how exactly this tribal country functions, what role the warlords and others were playing vis-a-vis the United States and other countries. In other words, who to trust, what their actual goals were, how they viewed the Americans.

On Dec. 1, 2009, at West Point, President Obama announced a surge of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and his plan to end U.S. involvement by July 2011. At the time, was it possible for U.S. forces to complete a successful transfer of power to Afghan troops?

Why was the drawdown so hard? In part because there was such opposition to it by officials who wondered, “If we draw down in Afghanistan, then what will happen?” Will Al Qaeda be on the rise again? Will other Islamist terrorist groups will be able to take root? For the most part, Obama’s decision was to draw down, but among many military experts and national security figures, that was a problem. It takes time.

The question was, “How are they going to do it?” Read more...

2020: "An emboldened and patient Taliban appears content to simply wait out the Americans."

As tensions rise with Iran, Afghanistan becomes the longest war in U.S. history (Kevin Clarke, Feb. 5, 2020)

The Afghanistan papers offer a litany of intelligence errors, strategic blunders and expressions of sustained, widespread uncertainty regarding the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. During his interview for Lessons Learned, former Afghan war czar Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in 2015, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan— we didn’t know what we were doing ”—a fitting summary of the sentiment expressed by scores of other combat officers, diplomats and Pentagon strategists who participated in the policy postmortem. According to The Post, those documents reveal “there was no consensus on the war’s objectives, let alone how to end the conflict.”

The same day The Post released its grim exposé, The New York Times published a summary of a report from Brown University’s Cost of War project. According to those researchers, the United States has spent $2.15 trillion so far in efforts to contain the Taliban, Al Qaeda and now ISIS militants and to stabilize Afghanistan’s government and civil society.

During that time, the war has cost the lives of 2,351 American military personnel and an estimated 43,000 Afghan civilians . Yet more than 18 years after U.S. and NATO troops first arrived to begin the longest war in U.S. history, the stable, democratic Afghanistan the United States struggled to establish remains acutely vulnerable to collapse, and an emboldened and patient Taliban appears content to simply wait out the Americans. Read more...

What we owe U.S. veterans who fought in Afghanistan (Matt Malone, S.J., Feb. 18, 2020)

On Feb. 8, 2020, Sgt. First Class Javier Gutierrez, of San Antonio, Tex., and Sgt. First Class Antonio Rodriguez, of Las Cruces, N.M., became the latest U.S. soldiers to die in Afghanistan. They were both 28 years old. Six other American personnel were wounded in the attack, which reportedly came as they were waiting for a helicopter transport in Nangarhar Province. Since the start of the war in 2001, more than 2,300 U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan and more than 20,000 have been wounded.

The war has been far costlier, of course, for Afghan civilians. According to Amnesty International , “in the first nine months of 2019 alone, more than 2,400 children were killed or injured in Afghanistan, making it the deadliest conflict in the world for children.”

You would think that these sobering statistics would keep the war at the forefront of our national consciousness. Instead, most of us hardly think about it. Philip Klay, a former U.S. Marine, described in these pages in 2018 how our mass indifference affected him when he came home from the war in Iraq: “To walk through a city like New York upon return from war, then, felt like witnessing a moral crime.... I was frustrated, coming home, that the American people did not embrace my vision of war.” Mr. Klay went on to explain how his “vision” of the war changed, but I think one could forgive any veteran for feeling what he felt. Read more…

Most popular

Your source for jobs, books, retreats, and much more.

The latest from america