A few thoughts from someone who spent the last eight years of his career in the military teaching about this stuff.
1. This was a classic example of "mission creep." Our objective was to disrupt Al-Queda and kill bin Laden. We did so. Then, for whatever reason, we decided that Afghans wanted a country in the image of the United States. So, rather than focusing on why we went there in the first place, we allowed ourselves to be sucked into a nation building task.
2. We have the hubris to think that everyone around the planet is just dying for a society that resembles ours. No they do not. Start with the fact that the U.S. is radically individualistic whereas nearly every other society on the planet is far more collectivist. We try to instill our individualist values onto a collectivist society and that never, ever works. Moreover, it is not sufficient to merely install the legal mechanisms of a liberal democracy. Such an effort is doomed to fail if you do not also have the cultural prejudices and social structures that also support a liberal democracy.
3. Afghans have never thought of themselves as Afghans first. Their primary loyalty is to family and tribe and only very secondarily to Afghanistan itself. Additionally, many of them have another loyalty to Islam and view the U.S. and its allies as infidels to be expelled.
4. They are a patient society. They know the U.S. won't be there forever. So, they can just wait us out. Keep hostilities at a low enough level that we don't get really pissed off but keep them at a high enough level that the American public tires of the cost. This is not a new thing. It's not as if the American rebels actually defeated the British empire. We just kept fighting until the British got tired of fighting.
5. The trillions of dollars we sank into Afghanistan, ironically, undermined the legitimacy of the government. Rather than use the money we spent to improve their communities, officials at all levels used it to enrich themselves and their families. After all, that's their primary loyalty. So, Afghanis who weren't recipients of that largesse viewed the entire government as corrupt and illegitimate and they weren't wrong.
6. The Taliban fight for a cause. You may think their cause is wrong, you may even think of it as evil. No matter. That cause motivates them to fight. Afghan soldiers, OTOH, were typically simply joining the Afghan army to make some money. The desertion rates were astonishingly high. Soldiers would enlist just long enough to make whatever money they needed from the enlistment and then they'd desert.
7. As in Vietnam, Americas military leaders either deliberately misled the American public about the capabilities of Afghan forces or, maybe worse, had zero situational awareness as to actual conditions on the ground. The interesting thing is that I heard from more than one person who was there that Afghanistan was a total cluster****, the Afghan forces were a joke, and the government would collapse the second we left.
8. We badly, badly misjudged the speed with which the Afghan government would fall. There are many reasons for this failure but it was colossal nonetheless.
9. Last, and most importantly, American military and civilian leaders need to spend years dissecting what went wrong and writing detailed critiques so that we don't make this mistake again. Well, at least for a while. In a generation or so, we'll forget all about this and **** it up again. It's what we do.
1. This was a classic example of "mission creep." Our objective was to disrupt Al-Queda and kill bin Laden. We did so. Then, for whatever reason, we decided that Afghans wanted a country in the image of the United States. So, rather than focusing on why we went there in the first place, we allowed ourselves to be sucked into a nation building task.
2. We have the hubris to think that everyone around the planet is just dying for a society that resembles ours. No they do not. Start with the fact that the U.S. is radically individualistic whereas nearly every other society on the planet is far more collectivist. We try to instill our individualist values onto a collectivist society and that never, ever works. Moreover, it is not sufficient to merely install the legal mechanisms of a liberal democracy. Such an effort is doomed to fail if you do not also have the cultural prejudices and social structures that also support a liberal democracy.
3. Afghans have never thought of themselves as Afghans first. Their primary loyalty is to family and tribe and only very secondarily to Afghanistan itself. Additionally, many of them have another loyalty to Islam and view the U.S. and its allies as infidels to be expelled.
4. They are a patient society. They know the U.S. won't be there forever. So, they can just wait us out. Keep hostilities at a low enough level that we don't get really pissed off but keep them at a high enough level that the American public tires of the cost. This is not a new thing. It's not as if the American rebels actually defeated the British empire. We just kept fighting until the British got tired of fighting.
5. The trillions of dollars we sank into Afghanistan, ironically, undermined the legitimacy of the government. Rather than use the money we spent to improve their communities, officials at all levels used it to enrich themselves and their families. After all, that's their primary loyalty. So, Afghanis who weren't recipients of that largesse viewed the entire government as corrupt and illegitimate and they weren't wrong.
6. The Taliban fight for a cause. You may think their cause is wrong, you may even think of it as evil. No matter. That cause motivates them to fight. Afghan soldiers, OTOH, were typically simply joining the Afghan army to make some money. The desertion rates were astonishingly high. Soldiers would enlist just long enough to make whatever money they needed from the enlistment and then they'd desert.
7. As in Vietnam, Americas military leaders either deliberately misled the American public about the capabilities of Afghan forces or, maybe worse, had zero situational awareness as to actual conditions on the ground. The interesting thing is that I heard from more than one person who was there that Afghanistan was a total cluster****, the Afghan forces were a joke, and the government would collapse the second we left.
8. We badly, badly misjudged the speed with which the Afghan government would fall. There are many reasons for this failure but it was colossal nonetheless.
9. Last, and most importantly, American military and civilian leaders need to spend years dissecting what went wrong and writing detailed critiques so that we don't make this mistake again. Well, at least for a while. In a generation or so, we'll forget all about this and **** it up again. It's what we do.
