Once again, Clausewitz has been vindicated. He wrote that the first, most fundamental task of a statesman contemplating war is to decide what kind of war it will be; that is, to frame a definition of victory. For war is an instrument of policy, and the policy objective is the definition of victory.
What, though, was the US policy objective in Afghanistan? What, where, was the point at which the soldiers could look around and say, “Mission accomplished”? Nobody knew, not really, and so on the US side the war was a succession of expedients. The Taliban, however, knew exactly what its objective was and how to achieve it: by a strategy of what might be called psychological attrition. The enemy thought he could exhaust the patience and commitment of the US, and since the US didn’t really know what it was doing, the enemy was successful.
Really very informative. Vivek Kelkar’s article reminded me of an essay written by Adam Garfinkle in the American Interest over a decade ago. Obama was President at the time and Adam suggested that it would be difficult to solve the problems of Afghanistan and Iran simultaneously. Given resource constraints and limited amounts of public enthusiasm for foreign policy adventurism, Adam thought it might be an either/or situation. The essay is well worth a read,
Of course, here we are a decade later and the situation with Iran and Afghanistan are both getting worse.
It’s just one more example of the bumbling incompetence of bipartisan American foreign policy “experts.” They never get anything right. Like the keystone cops they stumble from disaster to disaster.
Say what you want about Trump, but at least he recognized that the clowns leading American foreign policy since at least the end of the Cold War, were weakening the United States not strengthening it.
What exactly is to be gained now by sending in the B52 bombers? It’s little more than a feckless act that makes the United States look even more pathetic than it already does.
Trump was right when he said during his campaign against Hillary Clinton that our country “never wins anymore.” Can anyone really deny that? Isn’t it time to acknowledge that both the foreign policy Mandarins and military leaders (all globalists by the way) who have been designing and implementing policy for decades have done a horrendous job?
The Biden foreign policy team, the Obama foreign policy team and the Bush (the second) foreign policy team all had one thing in common. They were populated by morons who never seem to get anything right.
Does anyone remember when Trump ordered the attack that killed Qasem Soleimani? He was widely (and often vitriolically) criticized for it by both the Democratic and Republican foreign policy establishments.
Yet more was gained by killing this one man than the United States accomplished in the long years we spent wasting our time and resources in Afghanistan.
How many American soldiers came home from Afghanistan without arms and legs because of the stupidity if not venality of our bipartisan cabal of experts?
I would just like to second these criticisms of our political and military leadership—who repeated, almost literally, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the mistakes that led to America’s defeat in Vietnam. These mistakes were (1) the failure to identify and strike at the enemy’s center of gravity and (2) the failure to align military strategy with overall policy.
Vietnam was a relatively straightforward case: The policy was clear enough but the strategy was defective. Trendy theories of “counterinsurgency” distracted attention from the main enemy, North Vietnam. The insurgency in the South would have collapsed in short order without support from the North. But instead of striking at that center of gravity the US conducted a futile counterinsurgency campaign.
Afghanistan was more complicated in that the overall policy was never clear, and so naturally the military campaign became aimless. No one seems to have asked the obvious questions that would have served to clarify matters.
Thomas, I think David P. Goldman (of the newspaper, Asia Times) has correctly identified the pathology at the center of American foreign policy in the post Cold War era.
He says,
“America’s political leaders believed that the Biblical injunction to “proclaim liberty throughout the land” required we “export democracy throughout the world.” In that vein, we dissipated our moral and financial resources on failed foreign adventures and neglected our own circumstances at home, confusing asset bubbles with national wealth. The end of the Cold War left America in a stronger relative position than any power since Rome, yet now we are at severe risk of becoming second rate.”
Goldman is a severe critic of the liberal internationalist and neoconservative leaders (the spawn of Woodrow Wilson) who have guided American foreign policy for decades. He accuses them of squandering American resources in the search of unicorns.
He describes this much more cogently than I can in a recent essay at law liberty.org. In the event you are interested, you can find the essay here,
On the policy side of the equation, I think that it was’t simply a question of nation building. In 2001 there were good reasons for making war on that country. Its government was the sponsor and protector of the terrorist group that perpetrated 9/11–clearly a casus belli. Wiping out the terrorist infrastructure and punishing the Taliban were perfectly reasonable objectives. So, indeed, was the overthrow of the Taliban and its replacement by a less atrocious government—perhaps not a democracy but at least something milder than a totalitarian/fundamentalist tyranny. And the sine qua non of such a policy was *the destruction of the Taliban*.
America’s failure in Afghanistan flowed from the failure to pursue and achieve victory on the battlefield. It really is that simple.
The problem is that to destroy the Taliban you really had to destroy the Pakistan ISI and Pakistan's nuclear weapons protecting it. The George W Bush administration was unwilling to take out the former and people like our own Claire Berlinski find it very destabilizing to try to take out another countries nuclear weapons in a first strike.
That’s a decent enough psychological explanation, if rather general. But even if it's true, that doesn’t explain the failure of our political and military leadership to think strategically.
Leet’s accept for the sake of argument that the policy goal in Afghanistan was to foster a democratic government. Well, the related military strategy, if such it can be called, in no way furthered the policy. The great impediment was the Taliban, and the military strategy should have zeroed in on the Taliban. Instead our soldiers were put to work on nation-building projects. (I except from this criticism the antiterrorist operations carried out by the armed forces which were appropriate and valuable.)
You cannot beat an enemy like the Taliban with half-measures. The only thing that would have worked was an all-out offensive campaign, applying relentless pressure, maintaining the initiative, with the stated objective of destroying the enemy. And it won’t do to argue that the war was “unwinnable.” Given sufficient military power, any war is winnable if you’re prepared to do what’s necessary to achieve victory. Whether the victory is worth the price is a question for policymakers. If it’s not, then why fight at all?
So, given your background in the military and my ignorance on the topic, let me ask you a question I’ve always wondered about.
In most wars throughout history, the military paid scant attention to avoiding civilian casualties. In the American Civil War and the two World Wars of the 20th Century, enormous numbers of civilians were killed, maimed or displaced. The same was true in the Thirty Years War in Europe.
Since the end of World War II, the western powers have been highly attuned to avoiding civilian casualties.
What I wonder is whether there is a relationship between the desire to avoid harming civilians and the fact that total victory doesn’t seem to be achievable any more.
Could we have won the Second World War if we were as attentive to avoiding civilian casualties then as we are now? Does our sensitivity to civilian casualties preclude, for example, our ability to destroy the Taliban?
During the recent Civil War in Syria, the Russians, who weren’t squeamish about civilian carnage, managed to win the War on behalf of Assad in a few short months. Something I suspect we could never have accomplished for the other side under rules of engagement that seem to be prevalent in the American military.
Given our humanitarian concern for innocent Afghans, was destroying the Taliban really possible?
To defeat an enemy, don’t you need to destroy his will to fight? If so, doesn’t that mean destroying not only him and his comrades but also his tribe, town or even his family?
If it does indeed mean that, and if we no longer have the inclination to engage in that type of warfare, does that mean that we will never again have the prospect for victory in war?
Any insight you have on this question would be greatly appreciated.
In World War II, civilian casualties caused by American forces were mostly the result of the strategic bombing offensives against Germany and Japan—admittedly a controversial policy but one not relevant to 2001-2021 Afghanistan.
Somewhat more relevant was the Allies' air offensive directed against the French transportation net in preparation for the Normandy invasion. It had the valid objective of isolating the Normandy battlefield by destroying the rail net, bridges, etc. on which the German Army depended to supply and reinforce its troops in the invasion area. No less a personage than Winston Churchill expressed misgivings about this in view of the anticipated civilian casualties—though he had to admit that the Transportation Plan, as it was called, was essential to the success of Overlord. In the event French civilian casualties, though painful, were far lower than forecast. And of course, the Battle of Normandy itself caused civilian casualties and significant damage, e.g. the near-total destruction of the city of Caen.
It seems to me unlikely that civilian casualties on such a scale would have occurred if the US had pressed a major effort to destroy the Taliban. We are not, after all, contemplating such battles as Kursk or the Falaise pocket. Overall, the number of troops involved would have been much lower, with small-unit actions predominating and little if any urban combat. In addition, precision-guided munitions produce good effects on target with significantly less risk of collateral damage.
Realistically, there's absolutely no way of avoiding all civilian casualties in war, especially when fighting a barbaric enemy like the Taliban. But to entertain armchair scruples about civilian casualties is to concede the victory to those who have no scruples at all. That's pretty much what's happening in Afghanistan now—and I feel safe in predicting that the people who were so swift to decry civilian casualties in the past will avert their eyes from the coming slaughter. That's precisely what the antiwar Left did after the victory of the North in Vietnam and as we know, history repeats itself.
In fact to go to back to Adam Garfinkle's point the obvious enemy of my enemy strategy to use against the Taliban is to have the Iranian mullah's fight it on our behalf but of course this is anathema to the likes of WigWam and Trump.
This assumes a fact not in evidence: that the Iranian regime’s policy toward Iran aligns—or could be made to align—with US policy. It may well be that the Iranian mullahs might like to see the Taliban disappear. But no regime considered acceptable by those thugs would be much an improvement from the US point of view.
A policy of wishful thinking is no policy at all. The US must either define its desired outcome in Afghanistan and determine what’s necessary to secure that outcome, or admit defeat and wash its hands of that unfortunate country.
Once again, Clausewitz has been vindicated. He wrote that the first, most fundamental task of a statesman contemplating war is to decide what kind of war it will be; that is, to frame a definition of victory. For war is an instrument of policy, and the policy objective is the definition of victory.
What, though, was the US policy objective in Afghanistan? What, where, was the point at which the soldiers could look around and say, “Mission accomplished”? Nobody knew, not really, and so on the US side the war was a succession of expedients. The Taliban, however, knew exactly what its objective was and how to achieve it: by a strategy of what might be called psychological attrition. The enemy thought he could exhaust the patience and commitment of the US, and since the US didn’t really know what it was doing, the enemy was successful.
Really very informative. Vivek Kelkar’s article reminded me of an essay written by Adam Garfinkle in the American Interest over a decade ago. Obama was President at the time and Adam suggested that it would be difficult to solve the problems of Afghanistan and Iran simultaneously. Given resource constraints and limited amounts of public enthusiasm for foreign policy adventurism, Adam thought it might be an either/or situation. The essay is well worth a read,
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2010/03/01/spring-note-disconnected/
Of course, here we are a decade later and the situation with Iran and Afghanistan are both getting worse.
It’s just one more example of the bumbling incompetence of bipartisan American foreign policy “experts.” They never get anything right. Like the keystone cops they stumble from disaster to disaster.
Say what you want about Trump, but at least he recognized that the clowns leading American foreign policy since at least the end of the Cold War, were weakening the United States not strengthening it.
What exactly is to be gained now by sending in the B52 bombers? It’s little more than a feckless act that makes the United States look even more pathetic than it already does.
Trump was right when he said during his campaign against Hillary Clinton that our country “never wins anymore.” Can anyone really deny that? Isn’t it time to acknowledge that both the foreign policy Mandarins and military leaders (all globalists by the way) who have been designing and implementing policy for decades have done a horrendous job?
The Biden foreign policy team, the Obama foreign policy team and the Bush (the second) foreign policy team all had one thing in common. They were populated by morons who never seem to get anything right.
Does anyone remember when Trump ordered the attack that killed Qasem Soleimani? He was widely (and often vitriolically) criticized for it by both the Democratic and Republican foreign policy establishments.
Yet more was gained by killing this one man than the United States accomplished in the long years we spent wasting our time and resources in Afghanistan.
How many American soldiers came home from Afghanistan without arms and legs because of the stupidity if not venality of our bipartisan cabal of experts?
I would just like to second these criticisms of our political and military leadership—who repeated, almost literally, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the mistakes that led to America’s defeat in Vietnam. These mistakes were (1) the failure to identify and strike at the enemy’s center of gravity and (2) the failure to align military strategy with overall policy.
Vietnam was a relatively straightforward case: The policy was clear enough but the strategy was defective. Trendy theories of “counterinsurgency” distracted attention from the main enemy, North Vietnam. The insurgency in the South would have collapsed in short order without support from the North. But instead of striking at that center of gravity the US conducted a futile counterinsurgency campaign.
Afghanistan was more complicated in that the overall policy was never clear, and so naturally the military campaign became aimless. No one seems to have asked the obvious questions that would have served to clarify matters.
Thomas, I think David P. Goldman (of the newspaper, Asia Times) has correctly identified the pathology at the center of American foreign policy in the post Cold War era.
He says,
“America’s political leaders believed that the Biblical injunction to “proclaim liberty throughout the land” required we “export democracy throughout the world.” In that vein, we dissipated our moral and financial resources on failed foreign adventures and neglected our own circumstances at home, confusing asset bubbles with national wealth. The end of the Cold War left America in a stronger relative position than any power since Rome, yet now we are at severe risk of becoming second rate.”
Goldman is a severe critic of the liberal internationalist and neoconservative leaders (the spawn of Woodrow Wilson) who have guided American foreign policy for decades. He accuses them of squandering American resources in the search of unicorns.
He describes this much more cogently than I can in a recent essay at law liberty.org. In the event you are interested, you can find the essay here,
https://lawliberty.org/an-almost-blessing-and-an-almost-curse-for-an-almost-chosen-nation/
On the policy side of the equation, I think that it was’t simply a question of nation building. In 2001 there were good reasons for making war on that country. Its government was the sponsor and protector of the terrorist group that perpetrated 9/11–clearly a casus belli. Wiping out the terrorist infrastructure and punishing the Taliban were perfectly reasonable objectives. So, indeed, was the overthrow of the Taliban and its replacement by a less atrocious government—perhaps not a democracy but at least something milder than a totalitarian/fundamentalist tyranny. And the sine qua non of such a policy was *the destruction of the Taliban*.
America’s failure in Afghanistan flowed from the failure to pursue and achieve victory on the battlefield. It really is that simple.
The problem is that to destroy the Taliban you really had to destroy the Pakistan ISI and Pakistan's nuclear weapons protecting it. The George W Bush administration was unwilling to take out the former and people like our own Claire Berlinski find it very destabilizing to try to take out another countries nuclear weapons in a first strike.
That’s a decent enough psychological explanation, if rather general. But even if it's true, that doesn’t explain the failure of our political and military leadership to think strategically.
Leet’s accept for the sake of argument that the policy goal in Afghanistan was to foster a democratic government. Well, the related military strategy, if such it can be called, in no way furthered the policy. The great impediment was the Taliban, and the military strategy should have zeroed in on the Taliban. Instead our soldiers were put to work on nation-building projects. (I except from this criticism the antiterrorist operations carried out by the armed forces which were appropriate and valuable.)
You cannot beat an enemy like the Taliban with half-measures. The only thing that would have worked was an all-out offensive campaign, applying relentless pressure, maintaining the initiative, with the stated objective of destroying the enemy. And it won’t do to argue that the war was “unwinnable.” Given sufficient military power, any war is winnable if you’re prepared to do what’s necessary to achieve victory. Whether the victory is worth the price is a question for policymakers. If it’s not, then why fight at all?
So, given your background in the military and my ignorance on the topic, let me ask you a question I’ve always wondered about.
In most wars throughout history, the military paid scant attention to avoiding civilian casualties. In the American Civil War and the two World Wars of the 20th Century, enormous numbers of civilians were killed, maimed or displaced. The same was true in the Thirty Years War in Europe.
Since the end of World War II, the western powers have been highly attuned to avoiding civilian casualties.
What I wonder is whether there is a relationship between the desire to avoid harming civilians and the fact that total victory doesn’t seem to be achievable any more.
Could we have won the Second World War if we were as attentive to avoiding civilian casualties then as we are now? Does our sensitivity to civilian casualties preclude, for example, our ability to destroy the Taliban?
During the recent Civil War in Syria, the Russians, who weren’t squeamish about civilian carnage, managed to win the War on behalf of Assad in a few short months. Something I suspect we could never have accomplished for the other side under rules of engagement that seem to be prevalent in the American military.
Given our humanitarian concern for innocent Afghans, was destroying the Taliban really possible?
To defeat an enemy, don’t you need to destroy his will to fight? If so, doesn’t that mean destroying not only him and his comrades but also his tribe, town or even his family?
If it does indeed mean that, and if we no longer have the inclination to engage in that type of warfare, does that mean that we will never again have the prospect for victory in war?
Any insight you have on this question would be greatly appreciated.
In World War II, civilian casualties caused by American forces were mostly the result of the strategic bombing offensives against Germany and Japan—admittedly a controversial policy but one not relevant to 2001-2021 Afghanistan.
Somewhat more relevant was the Allies' air offensive directed against the French transportation net in preparation for the Normandy invasion. It had the valid objective of isolating the Normandy battlefield by destroying the rail net, bridges, etc. on which the German Army depended to supply and reinforce its troops in the invasion area. No less a personage than Winston Churchill expressed misgivings about this in view of the anticipated civilian casualties—though he had to admit that the Transportation Plan, as it was called, was essential to the success of Overlord. In the event French civilian casualties, though painful, were far lower than forecast. And of course, the Battle of Normandy itself caused civilian casualties and significant damage, e.g. the near-total destruction of the city of Caen.
It seems to me unlikely that civilian casualties on such a scale would have occurred if the US had pressed a major effort to destroy the Taliban. We are not, after all, contemplating such battles as Kursk or the Falaise pocket. Overall, the number of troops involved would have been much lower, with small-unit actions predominating and little if any urban combat. In addition, precision-guided munitions produce good effects on target with significantly less risk of collateral damage.
Realistically, there's absolutely no way of avoiding all civilian casualties in war, especially when fighting a barbaric enemy like the Taliban. But to entertain armchair scruples about civilian casualties is to concede the victory to those who have no scruples at all. That's pretty much what's happening in Afghanistan now—and I feel safe in predicting that the people who were so swift to decry civilian casualties in the past will avert their eyes from the coming slaughter. That's precisely what the antiwar Left did after the victory of the North in Vietnam and as we know, history repeats itself.
Thanks, Thomas. This is very informative.
Except what is your or Trump's definition of winning against Iran and what was gained by killing Qasem Soleimani?
In fact to go to back to Adam Garfinkle's point the obvious enemy of my enemy strategy to use against the Taliban is to have the Iranian mullah's fight it on our behalf but of course this is anathema to the likes of WigWam and Trump.
This assumes a fact not in evidence: that the Iranian regime’s policy toward Iran aligns—or could be made to align—with US policy. It may well be that the Iranian mullahs might like to see the Taliban disappear. But no regime considered acceptable by those thugs would be much an improvement from the US point of view.
A policy of wishful thinking is no policy at all. The US must either define its desired outcome in Afghanistan and determine what’s necessary to secure that outcome, or admit defeat and wash its hands of that unfortunate country.