The Afghanistan occupation could be understood as a classic dramatic tragedy with The United States in the lead. Sometimes nations like individuals are left without good choices and must follow their fated destiny. Should Antigone follow her duty and bury her brother Polynices at the risk of incurring Creon’s wrath or should she save her own skin and live with the guilt of leaving her brother’s body to rot on the outskirts of Thebes? Should Hamlet take revenge against his uncle for the murder of his father or should he ignore his father’s ghost? You can add to these characters’ dilemmas those faced by The United States of America after the horrifying terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Should we invade a country we can’t successfully occupy given who we are or should we hope that a slow international process will deliver Osama Bin Laden into our custody before he can attack again?
Once the Taliban refused to hand over Bin Laden, it was the duty of the President of The United States, any President of The United States, to have security forces track down the mastermind of the most tragic day in our history. This, of course, entailed confronting both Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters who would seek to stop our soldiers. I am all in on criticizing the dereliction of duty on the part of Bush administration officials in their refusal to invest human and material resources in capturing the cornered Bin Laden at Tora Bora. Yet, once we had pushed the Taliban leadership out of power in Afghanistan, and killed thousands of its soldiers in the process, we had no choice but to stay a while.
Were we supposed to immediately withdraw from Afghanistan once we had captured or killed Bin Laden in late 2001, or once his trail had grown cold? In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, it would have been impossible for any president to allow that. Never mind the daunting dissatisfaction of seeing the Taliban come back to power in say 2002 or 2004 when the wounds of 2001 were still fresh. One would expect that with their own humiliation still warm, the Taliban would not only have gone back to giving comfort to foreign jihadists, but would have also actively engaged in retaliatory plots against The United States and it allies.
Those who argue The United States could have done something short of invading Afghanistan and occupying the country for an extended time period after 9/11 are not making a serious argument. They are writing speculative fiction. Their analysis looks at a different political system and at a different culture than that of our nation. The choice to not go into Afghanistan was never real. The choice to leave immediately was never real. To theorize about these possibilities is to imagine an alternate United States only existent in the imagination of pundits.
As Craig Whitlock shows in The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, our realistic options for transforming the country from a war-torn land of feuding tribes to a cohesive, functional nation ranged between bad and worse. The book
is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who played a direct part in the war.
These interviews were conducted mainly by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction under the Lessons Learned project, the oral-history project of the Bush presidency at the University of Virginia, the nonprofit Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training, and the Army’s Operational Leadership Experience project between 2005 and 2015. The book also benefits from unearthing many of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s short memos to his Pentagon staff, known as snowflakes, and other government documents on a war that spanned four administrations. What it all reveals is that throughout two decades we were conflicted about our mission in Afghanistan, in denial about what it would take to complete it, and ignorant about the land we were hoping to nation-build.
Whitlock, like so many Americans, still believes that things were clear when we first invaded Afghanistan and then somehow, somewhere went astray. Our mission was
to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks.
Putting aside that clarity of mission does not guarantee success, to accomplish this mission entailed doing exactly what we did: defeating al-Qaeda, removing their host, the Taliban, from power, and making sure that it did not return… for a while, at least. To have this mission succeed permanently would have taken a longer, more direct, and larger occupation.
Whitlock insists that
when the Pentagon launched the first airstrikes against Afghanistan on October 7, no one expected that the bombing would continue unabated for twenty years.
Perhaps no one in the halls of power in Washington expected that. However, when one has a functional knowledge of history, optimistic statements from Bush and Obama administration officials about standing up the government before our troops can leave Afghanistan strike one as farcical. We are talking about a land that was never a cohesive nation and that had been war-torn since the 1980s.
At no point during the past twenty years should there have been talk about an Afghan government. If we had been serious about creating a stable Afghanistan, we would have employed a much larger occupation force that would have necessitated a draft, we would have ruled for far more than two decades through a direct occupation government, where US officials were mandated to serve and not asked to volunteer as they actually were, and we would have spent enough treasure to make the trillion the occupation cost look like pocket change. The American people would have experienced decades of tax hikes instead of the cuts we got during the Bush and Trump years.
I am not claiming that this is what should have been done. There is no guarantee that an actual colonial occupation of Afghanistan would have succeeded in creating a democratic, stable nation by 2101 or thereafter. I am claiming that the only chance we had for an honorable withdrawal from Afghanistan depended on at least a century of committed occupation. Now, I too am imagining a different country than the only United States of America I have known. I am imagining a different political system, and a different culture than we have had throughout my half-century of life. When you call a twenty-year war, “a forever war,” you clearly should not be in the business of occupying nations that need to be re-built.
Sure, there were things we could have done better in the past twenty years. Rotating troops and diplomats in periods of six to twelve months constituted strategic malpractice. As soon as an American started to get to know the land and the culture of Afghanistan, they were replaced by more ignorant newcomers. This policy ensured that very few US military commanders and diplomatic officials knew what they were doing. So the occupation piled folly upon folly. By 2016, for example, ideas to fight corruption and the drug trade in Afghanistan were being recycled.
Because the war had dragged on for so long, the new staffers didn’t realize those tactics had been tried before, to no avail.
There was no institutional history within the occupation bureaucracy because there was a dearth of experience amongst individual American occupiers.
And of course invading Iraq in the midst of it all was the height hubris and idiocy. While incurring international condemnation, the invasion of Iraq drained American military, diplomatic, and financial resources away from Afghanistan. In the words of Lt. General David Barno, head of Combined Forces Command in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, when The United States was mired in Iraq,
[t]he Army was unhelpful to be generous […] They clearly had Iraq on their minds, but there was no interest whatsoever in providing us with anything but the absolute minimum level of support.
What needed to be the main event, the occupation and transformation of the land that harbored the mastermind of 9/11 became a sideshow through the pigheaded choice of invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein from power.
The many flabbergasting errors and fumbles encapsulate the tragedy of The United States in Afghanistan. This country had a situation thrust upon it after 9/11 that it seemed to have been asking for since WWII. After multiple wars, police actions, and occupations around the globe, from Korea to The Dominican Republic, from Panama to Iraq I, this country finally got the justification to invade, colonize and remake another land. And we found ourselves wantonly incapable.