The Afghan disaster: Will America ever learn?

The furor over the release of the summary of an investigation into the 2021 evacuation from Kabul airport was fully justified. The evacuation was a disaster. But while President Biden is bearing the brunt of the blame, he shares responsibility for the Afghan debacle with three other presidents: George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

Reciting the history does not mean the U.S. will learn from it. Aside from the brief Desert Storm campaign, which was not a full-fledged war, the last U.S. military victory was World War II. When George W. Bush initially unleashed the CIA and U.S. Special Forces and Marines into Afghanistan in late 2001, the mission was to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Trapped in Tora Bora on the Pakistan border, bin Laden escaped in large part because of the commanders’ ineptness in sending forces into mountain combat at high altitudes for which they were not prepared.

The mission then shifted to nation building. Afghanistan was to have a Western-style democratic government with elections. And its army, having successfully defeated invaders dating back to Alexander the Great, would become modeled along Western lines. Was it a surprise that this failed?

Barack Obama commissioned the Afghan-Pakistan study as an effort to resolve the war. The first flaw was the title of the study. It was backwards. Pakistan was the strategic center of gravity, not Afghanistan. Without understanding the real priority, any conclusions risked having fatal flaws.

That led to the request by the then commander, General Stanley McChrystal, for surging an additional 45,000-75,000 troops, causing the national security advisor, retired Marine General James Jones, to raise questions. The troop number was greatly reduced, and that too would fail.

Donald Trump entered office vowing to end the war. In secret negotiations with the Taliban in which the elected Ashraf Ghani government was excluded, a deal was reached in February 2020. The U.S. and its coalition partners would completely withdraw by a date certain in 2021.  

Sanctions would be lifted against the Taliban, and the Afghan government would release some prisoners. The Taliban would cease attacks on coalition forces. Interestingly, the agreement was not signed by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, perhaps because he harbored political ambitions and did not want to be tainted if the agreement went wrong. Instead, Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who had served as ambassador to Afghanistan, was the U.S. signatory.

Joe Biden entered office promising to end the Afghan war. Despite the urging of his key military advisers and a number of NATO allies to leave a residual force behind retaining the Bagram Air Base to support the Afghans, Biden felt compelled to honor the Trump agreement with the Taliban. An August 2021 date was set for the final evacuation.  

The assumption was that the Afghan security forces had sufficient training and capability to prevent a complete Taliban takeover for an extended period. But that assumption was based on the presence of thousands of civilian contractors responsible for the maintenance of the equipment and weapons as well as the vital command and control networks. Obliged to leave, with the departure of the contractors, the Afghan military was not capable of supporting itself and collapsed with stunning suddenness.

Without functioning security forces, the Afghan government soon fled, returning the Taliban to power and the country to medieval rule. Many observers likened the Kabul Airport disaster with the image of the last U.S. helicopter lifting off the former U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975.

Critics of Biden argue he could have changed the agreement with the Taliban. And Biden bears a large measure of responsibility for the final retreat. But the Afghan tragedy was the responsibility of three other presidents when blame and culpability are finally assessed.

The crucial lesson that America refuses to learn is that when force is to be used, it must be done with enough knowledge and understanding of the circumstances to enable it to succeed. We did not learn that after the Vietnam War or before attacking Iraq in 2003 over weapons it did not possess. And we risk making a similar mistake with China, provoking a crisis for the wrong reasons.

Herein is the conundrum and cause for alarm. If Joe Biden, with 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president, could not get Afghanistan right, in the future, who will or can deal with the next real foreign policy crisis? Americans must seriously answer this question.

Harlan Ullman is senior adviser at the Atlantic Council and the prime author of “shock and awe.” His latest  book is “The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD: How Massive Attacks of Disruption Became the Looming Existential Danger to a Divided Nation and the World at Large.” Follow him on Twitter @harlankullman.