And yes, we lost it.
A few short points.
1. Conducting a war when a punitive expedition will do.
A friend of mine has this better put than I do, but the fact of the matter is that we never needed to take over Afghanistan in the first place. We shouldn't have.
Our invasion of the country was done in reaction to the Al Qaeda attack upon the Twin Towers in New York City. We needed to react to that. And Afghanistan was where Al Qaeda had taken refuge. That meant something had to be hit there.
But that something should have been proportional, something that's now been forgotten. The terrorist attack was just that, a criminal terrorist attack. But we treated it effectively as an act for war by two foreign nations, Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with it, which we'll address in a moment.
A proportional response would have been a heavy series of raids. . . a punitive expedition, aimed at Al Qaeda and its infrastructure in Afghanistan.
Examples of this abound. Ronald Reagan's administration carried one out against Libya while he was in office, which was directed at Gaddafi himself. That event turned out to be hugely successful. The most famous US one was the one against Pancho Villa in 1916-17, which had mixed results, but after that threats to the border did diminish. The US has carried them out additionally against Fiji and local forces in Korea, way back in the sailing ship days, which you rarely hear about.
Arguably, the US reaction to the taking of the Mayaguez ship by Cambodia following the Vietnam War provides the best recent example in addition to Libya. That was a criminal act, and President Ford sent the Marines to take the ship back and destroyed the Cambodian navy in the process.
A heavy raid, designed to wipe out Al Qaeda, which in the end took years to wipe out as it was, would have been a better, proportional, response. It would have left the Taliban in power, but they're back in power as it is.
Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but that's actually what I expected at the time. Not an invasion.
Before moving on, I'd further note that treating the perpetrators of the terror attack as criminals, rather than soldiers, would have been a better philosophical and legal move as well. Treating them as soldiers, as we did, means that at some point here all of them remaining in captivity will have to be released really. You don't keep Prisoners Of War forever.
2. If you invade, you don't ignore Clausewitz.
Having determined to invade, we did it incompetently with a minimal amount of force.
That never made any sense at all, but that was the way Donald Rumsfeld saw it. He thought that we'd advanced so far technologically that a mere handful of US troops could invade and control the country.
He was wrong.
The application of US technology to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were amazing. But it hasn't carried the day in Afghanistan. It did in the conventional war in Iraq. The problem with our campaign in Afghanistan, other than it being unjustified and probably an illegal act under the US Constitution, is that we subordinated the war in Afghanistan to our war in Iraq. I don’t think the war in Iraq was necessary, and the fact that it became the main show meant that our early efforts in Afghanistan were with smaller unconventional forces. By the time we got around to a large commitment the war was on and the initial shock over. That caused it to drag on. Had we gone in big right off the bat things may well have turned out differently, long term. By and large we did so well against the Taliban that even having a small force there, before we began to withdraw it, was enough to keep the country from collapsing.
What ever the war in Iraq was about, it wasn't about the Twin Towers and was an unnecessary manpower suck that went on for years.
In someways, I think we just liked invading Iraq better than Afghanistan. The early part of it was like the Six Day War on steroids. Of course, that lead us into a protracted guerilla war as well, but at least so far our efforts there, unnecessary though they were, seem to have worked.
A full scale invasion of Afghanistan, if we were going to invade it, may also have worked. Massively overrunning the country would have caught the Taliban off guard and potentially destroyed it. Putting it on the back burner to take on a different war didn't serve that aim.
It also committed it to a long stay and nation building.
3. The long stay
The US, and indeed maybe any democracy, has a limited staying
power. At least in our case, we get tired of things after a few years and
are ready to leave, even if we regret leaving later.
Supposedly having an “exit plan” was a lesson learned from Vietnam, but if so we really didn’t exhibit it when we went into Afghanistan. I’m not saying that going in was the wrong thing to do (although I do think we didn’t do it well when we did it), but we didn’t seem to have a clear exit plan.
The reason seems to be that the George Bush II administration was a "neo conservative" one, not a conservative one.
Neo cons have their merits, but they are far from being conservatives. Actually growing out of the Trotskyite wing of the Communist Party, but with a latter-day loss of faith in Communism and a restoration of faith in something greater than that, Neo Cons believed in their hearts that everyone was just like Americans and that all you had to do was get the bad guys and democracy would bloom. That's naive, but it reflects their original views as Communists, as well as a sort of perpetual American naïveté on these issues.
The Bush Administration really believed that we could invade Afghanistan, take the Taliban out of power, and a modern democracy would just pop up. That was never going to happen rapidly.
Building a nation is a messy process and most countries have gone about it badly. There are European countries that were still enduring military coups as late as the 1970s, for example Greece. If Greece, which experimented with democracy really early, was still trying to make it work out that late, we can’t expect Afghanistan to pick it up in two decades. Russia, which of course some would debate as not really being European, hasn't managed to pull it off yet, even though it looked like it was going to after Communism fell, and It's had some sort of supposedly deliberative body since 1905. Some countries in the region still hover on backsliding, with Turkey being a prime example.
Indeed, while Afghanistan is a Central Asian nation, not a Middle Eastern one, no Middle Eastern nation has managed to pull off becoming democratic save for Israel, Turkey, and so far Iraq. Even the countries that have some sort of deliberative body aren't really democratic. There are historical reasons for this, but before a person goes too far in attributing it to anything, we should keep in mind that Portugal and Spain only became democracies in the 1970s, and they certainly have long histories of western political culture.
Probably what we need also need to keep in mind is the example of countries like South Korea. South Korea is a functioning democracy but as late as the 80s the military still basically ran the country. It took nearly 40 years from WWII for the country to get the hang of it. During that interval, the country was ruled by some folks that really weren’t super admirable.
And that presents an uncomfortable truth. To really cause a nation to cross over this bridge, its political culture, and even its culture, needs to be reformed, and it won't be reformed very easily from the inside.
The Philippines, when we took it from Spain in 1898, was a country rife with internal political and cultural divisions, but which also wanted freedom. We fought a war there against that goal that we declared over, when it really wasn't, in 1902. "Civilizing them with a Krag" actually took a really long time, and it wasn't until 1946 when the country imperfectly became independent. In other words, we ran it for about 50 years.
South Korea provides a different example. We didn't run it, but we supported it, as a dictatorship, for about the same length of time.
And there's a real lesson there. To build democracy, in real terms, sometimes you have to back the non-democratic.
Spain became democratic, ironically, because of Franco. Nobody wants to admit it, but it's true. Spanish democracy had collapsed in the mid 1930s and the country was going to be Communists, Anarchist, or Authoritarian. Franco won, and he wasn't a democrat, but in later years he facilitated the transfer back to a civil government which was sustainable. Salazar achieved the something, without even meaning to, in Portugal.
People like to call Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires", and it sort of is. But not for the reason people imagine. It's just hopelessly backwards and to really address its situation you have to try to advance it 2,000 years. Unfortunately, you can't do that overnight, and you really can't do it with the culture that's in place. We would have been better off turning the country over to a strong man who was at least our strong man.
There might be a lesson from Vietnam there too. We got irritated with Diem as he wasn't a Democrat. He wasn't. But he was the last guy who ran the South competently. The country might have become a democracy eventually, but it would have taken a long time. It still might, as at least it isn't hopelessly backwards like Afghanistan.
If we didn't have the stomach for that, and it appears we never did, we should have just done a raid.
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