Afghanistan Was the "Good" War. But It Was Probably Always Going to End Badly
There's a reason it's called the "Graveyard of Empires"
War is never good. The world would be better off without it. If a nation or people does have to go to war, the best we can hope for is that, in retrospect, they went to war for good reason, something that can justify all the death and destruction and suffering and sacrifice.
Afghanistan was the “good” war. We had a legitimate reason to be there. Al Qaeda, who had attacked us on 9/11 by turning commercial airliners into missiles that killed nearly 3,000 people, was hiding out in Afghanistan, where that country’s Taliban rulers had granted them safe haven. We invaded Afghanistan and stayed there to bring those who attacked us to justice and to make sure the country did not again become a launching pad for terrorism.
At first, the prospect of war in Afghanistan was daunting. Afghanistan was a landlocked country surrounded by nations that were not traditional American allies. It was not clear how we would get in, nor what we would do if we needed to get out. Its terrain is rugged and imposing. Although Afghanistan was among the world’s least developed countries (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld complained prior to the invasion that the country lacked targets to bomb) it had developed a reputation as the Graveyard of Empires: The British did not fare well there in the 1800s, and the Soviet Union found itself humiliated (and soon non-existent) after a decade-long war in the 1980s.
Consequently, the speed of America’s success in Afghanistan came as both relief and a heady rush of confidence. The United States overthrew the Taliban quickly in 2001 and may have come close to killing bin Laden in Tora Bora in December. In less time than it took to play-out the NFL regular season, we had deposed a government on the other side of the world and scattered our enemies into the mountains. Our state-of-the-art weaponry had turned what many feared would be a slog into a rout. There was a brief moment near the end of 2001 when it seemed possible we would have this whole War on Terror business wrapped up by Christmas. We couldn’t withdraw, though, as there was still work to do: We needed to get a new Afghan government—one less friendly to al Qaeda and more western in its orientation—up and running since bin Laden was still in a cave somewhere out there in the Safed Koh.
But then the whispers coming from Washington about another invasion of a different country became more than rumors. The build-up to this war would last for over a year. This war would be a full-scale operation. This war would have targets.
By contrast, Iraq was the “bad” war. It was a war of choice started under false premises, although it would take years for a majority of the American population to figure that out. We overthrew Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial government quickly, but soon it turned into a debacle. Civil war broke out, then al Qaeda showed up, and news of atrocities committed by Americans discredited the operation. Thousands of Americans died, tens of thousands were wounded, and at least one hundred thousand—if not hundreds of thousands—of Iraqis lost their lives.
As the United States’ involvement in Iraq squandered the national unity that had emerged after 9/11, the war in Afghanistan became something of a forgotten war. Iraq consumed more manpower (an average of about 140,000 troops in 2006 compared to 20,000 that year in Afghanistan), more resources ($96 billion in Iraq in 2006 compared to $19 billion that year in Afghanistan), and more attention (the media at times had to remind Americans the nation was engaged in a war in Afghanistan, which seemed like an afterthought to the Bush administration.) Yet as public opinion soured on the war in Iraq (by 2006, disapproval of the conflict hovered in the high 50% range) Americans remained supportive of the war effort in Afghanistan (in 2006, Americans approved of the war by a 3-to-1 margin.) When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he ran against the war in Iraq but for the war in Afghanistan. That was the war “we have to win,” and Americans agreed.
The situation in Afghanistan had grown more dire, however, by the time Obama took office. As early as 2006, military advisors began to privately warn American officials that the Taliban, secretly aided by Pakistan, had regained strength in the country and now threatened an insurgency. The Afghan government led by Hamid Karzai had become a kleptocracy, and the Afghan people had no confidence in it. More Americans died in combat in Afghanistan in 2008—100—than any year prior.
Modeled on a troop “surge” in Iraq in 2007 that many analysts claimed reduced the level of violence in Iraq, Obama ordered a surge of troops in Afghanistan in 2009 that would raise the number of military personnel in the country in 2010 to over 100,000. For the first time since 2003, the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan exceeded the number of soldiers in Iraq, where Obama was overseeing a withdrawal. The surge in Afghanistan was intended to buy time to strengthen the fighting capability of the Afghan army, weaken the Taliban, and undertake a series of public works projects designed to win the favor of local Afghans. It was a last-ditch effort, though: Obama had little faith in nation-building, and the surge would be followed by a drawdown that would eventually see all combat troops withdrawn from Afghanistan.
And then, finally, in May 2011, a military operation launched from Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan into neighboring Pakistan resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. He was the man the American military came to Afghanistan to capture or kill nearly a decade earlier, and while al Qaeda was not just going to collapse without bin Laden’s leadership, his passing seemed to suggest the organization had been seriously degraded. It also removed the most high-profile premise for the American presence in Afghanistan.
But as much as Obama didn’t want his successor to inherit a war in Afghanistan, he was never able to complete a withdrawal despite falsely telling the American people in 2014 (when a majority of Americans now believed the war in Afghanistan had not been worth fighting) that the combat mission in the country had ended. The Taliban was now a persistent threat, and the Afghan military relied on American military expertise and air support to keep them in check. In Iraq, ISIS had suddenly taken advantage of the absence of American troops and captured much of the northwestern portion of the country in 2014, leading Obama to re-intervene militarily. Fearing a similar situation should the United States pull-out, Obama left office in 2017 with about 8,000 troops in Afghanistan.
Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 by blasting the political establishment that had entangled the United States for years in misbegotten wars in the Middle East. As president, he essentially allowed the Pentagon—which remained determined to bolster the Afghan government, cripple the Taliban, and root out terrorists—to set personnel levels in Afghanistan. By 2018, the number of American troops there had risen to 15,000. At the same time, the Trump administration began negotiations with the Taliban on the terms for an American withdrawal.
Trump’s outreach to the Taliban revealed a reality American officials were loathe to acknowledge: That absent American military might, the Taliban were the preeminent fighting force in Afghanistan, and that outside Kabul, the Taliban had greater support amongst the people than the government. The Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani had already initiated peace talks with the Taliban in 2018. Trump got his deal—absent the involvement of the Afghan government—in early 2020. The United States agreed to end economic sanctions against the Taliban in August of that year and fully withdraw all combat troops by the spring of 2021. The Taliban stepped up its attacks on the Afghan military in the summer of 2020. The writing was on the wall: The United States was out and the Taliban was coming in.
The man who advised President Obama in 2009 that Afghanistan was bound to descend into chaos no matter how long the United States maintained a presence in-country became president in 2021, inheriting about 2,000 soldiers from President Trump. Joe Biden—the main voice against escalating the war in Afghanistan during Obama’s presidency—delayed Trump’s planned withdrawal by a few months but had all American combat troops out by July. What Biden got wrong was the speed by which the Afghan military and government would crumble. That led to the heartbreaking scenes we have watched over the past few days as Afghans who had worked alongside the United States as it waged war against the Taliban flocked to Kabul’s airport in a desperate bid to flee the country. Thousands of American allies are in danger of being left behind due to a bureaucracy moving too slowly to process their requests to leave.
A lot of Americans may be wondering this week when it all went wrong in Afghanistan. Many blame Biden for presiding over an embarrassing and humiliating exit, while the Biden administration deflects responsibility to Trump for setting the process in motion. Biden’s failure to get more of those seeking refuge from the Taliban out of the country shouldn’t be downplayed; we may end up abandoning a lot of people who deserve better by us, including some American citizens. But assessing the success or failure of the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan through the events of the past few days is kind of like getting all hot and bothered over someone incorrectly spelling the last word of a really long run-on sentence. The truth is, American involvement in Afghanistan was always going to be a mess. Instead of asking when it all went wrong in Afghanistan, we should be asking if we ever really expected it to go right.
In retrospect, there were three critical moments in the history of America’s involvement in Afghanistan that, had we acted differently, may have lent themselves to a different ending. The first came in December 2001 when we failed to catch Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. Maybe that was never in the cards, but had we destroyed al Qaeda’s leadership in that moment, perhaps we wouldn’t have felt the need to establish a more permanent military presence in the country. The second came just a few months later when the Bush administration shifted its operational focus in the War on Terror to Iraq, which relegated what should have been that war’s central mission—the pursuit of al Qaeda and bin Laden—to the back burner. Had the Bush administration remained laser-focused on finding bin Laden and his aides, it is possible we could have ended our mission in Afghanistan much earlier and before we became overly invested in nation-building. Finally, after SEAL Team Six killed bin Laden in May 2011, Obama could have declared the American mission in Afghanistan over and ordered a rapid draw down of forces. The Afghan government probably still would have fallen to the Taliban, but at least the United States’ withdrawal would have been tied to the fulfillment of a key mission goal.
What those three moments have in common is that they were all inflection points in our effort to combat al Qaeda. Capturing or killing bin Laden, degrading al Qaeda’s operational capacity: That’s why we were in Afghanistan. Breaking al Qaeda in Tora Bora had the potential to provide the US with an off-ramp out of Afghanistan before we had established much of a presence there. Erroneously shifting our focus to Iraq kept us in Afghanistan for the long haul. It also made it that much more difficult to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan once bin Laden was dead, although Obama should have gotten us out regardless instead of extending our stay for what turned out to be another ten years.
But let’s also be clear here: There was no guarantee we were going to catch bin Laden and crush al Qaeda by the end of 2001, just as there was no guarantee we would have accomplished the same if, instead of invading Iraq, we would have focused exclusively and intensively in the 00s on our efforts in Afghanistan to bring those who attacked us on 9/11 to justice. Afghanistan by no means promised an easy deliverance on those objectives. That was the very real risk of invading Afghanistan in 2001: That the pursuit of bin Laden and al Qaeda would become a costly, long-term project. You and I both understood those stakes even if we didn’t openly admit them, as did the United States’ leadership. Still, an overwhelming majority of American citizens supported the prospect of war.
The longer we stayed in Afghanistan, the more likely we would end up needing to sponsor a government there (we were the ones who deposed the old one, after all) and persuade the people to tolerate our presence. We built schools and roads, brought modern amenities to the cities. Attempting to build a modern democracy proved preferable to installing an abusive puppet dictator or dividing the country up among regional warlords, but Afghanistan was never fertile ground for a western-style democracy or western cultural values. The longer we stayed, the more likely an insurgency would arise as well, one disinterested in power-sharing and liberal democratic values. To defend the government that allowed us to pursue our anti-terror operations, we would have to fight that insurgency. That was always the gamble, though: Invade Afghanistan to hunt down bin Laden and al Qaeda, and run the risk of getting bogged down in a messy civil conflict that would find us playing the role of despised foreign invaders.
That’s how we ended up invested in the fight against the Taliban and in nation-building even though we had entered Afghanistan in 2001 in pursuit of al Qaeda. It didn’t have to happen that way—again, just imagine if we had caught bin Laden in Tora Bora and then cut bait—but it wasn’t hard to imagine the mission turning into a quagmire, and there were probably pretty decent odds that it would. Maybe we didn’t reckon with that possibility enough in 2001. Or maybe we did, but didn’t want to fathom the endgame with smoke still rising from the ruins of the World Trade Center.
For those who are now insisting we should never have withdrawn from Afghanistan, I would just say that we’ve been pursuing your strategy of “staying” for years now but it hasn’t gotten us much of anywhere. If anything, the Taliban has been gaining strength recently, and our continued presence in Afghanistan was only likely to draw us into a new conflict with them, which is not the reason we were in Afghanistan to begin with.
I would also say, however, that it’s disingenuous of the critics of American involvement in Afghanistan to claim it is another example of the United States’ failed attempt at empire or that it stands as another irredeemable folly like Vietnam or Iraq. Arguments about how the United States’ reckless foreign policy led to 9/11 aside, the reasons for invading Afghanistan in 2001 and maintaining a presence there while we searched for bin Laden and al Qaeda are defensible. That’s not to say the war was always managed well—we certainly made many mistakes, some more avoidable than others, some more serious than others—but that’s why we can say Afghanistan was the “good” war. The American people just never came to terms with the likelihood that, absent an early miracle, it was all probably going to end badly.
Thanks for reading.
Further reading: “We Lost the War in Afghanistan Long Ago” by Fareed Zakaria (Washington Post); “Biden Could Still be Proved Right in Afghanistan” by Thomas Friedman (New York Times); “America’s Longest War Winds Down” by Andrew Bacevich
Photo credit: NBC News; Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction; Gallup
Exit music: “Sugar Baby” by Bob Dylan (2001, Love and Theft, live in Boston)