Editor’s note: This article was originally published at Grumpy Combat Veteran + Friends.
August 15, 2021, was the day Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, and the US lost the war. Or was it?
After following the war for over two decades, it’s become clear that Afghanistan wasn’t lost in a day. Or 11 days, as General Mark A. Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others have wrongly claimed. Our failure in Afghanistan was the culmination of many fateful decisions and missteps that played out over many days.
Some will say that Afghanistan was lost on February 29, 2020, when President Donald Trump inked the disastrous Doha Agreement, which excluded the Afghan government from negotiations and set the US withdrawal in motion. Others may argue it was April 15, 2021, when President Joe Biden announced the withdrawal.
Perhaps it was August 31, 2021, when the last American soldier left the country. Or was it September 7, 2021? That’s when the Taliban beat the National Resistance Front, the last vestige of organized opposition. The National Resistance Front’s defeat in its once-impregnable mountainous stronghold in Panjshir cemented the Taliban’s military and political dominance over the war-torn country.
Go ahead and pick a date; it doesn’t really matter, as we all know the outcome. Three years to the day after the Taliban marched into Kabul and then-President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, the terror group maintains a firm grip on Afghanistan.
Any current national resistance to the Taliban remains nascent. The Islamic State’s Khorasan Province, the only real military threat to the Taliban, is limited to occasional terror attacks, ambushes, and assassinations. The international community now tolerates the Taliban and looks the other way as it shelters and supports Al Qaeda and allied terror groups.
America’s failure in Afghanistan cannot be laid at the feet of one president. Four administrations shoulder the blame to some degree or another.
President Bush’s mistakes laid the foundation for a weak and corrupt government, as well as Al Qaeda’s survival. The inability and unwillingness of the Bush administration to bring every American asset to bear at the Battle of Tora Bora led to the escape of Osama bin Laden and his cadre into Pakistan, where, with their Taliban allies, they plotted the Afghan insurgency. The Bush administration also refused to meaningfully hold Pakistan’s feet to the fire for its support of terror groups, and the Taliban’s safe haven in that country was its lifeblood. And the establishment of a centralized Afghan government and military did not prove up to the task of overcoming the challenges of basic governance and security.
Whatever the failures of the Bush administration, many of these errors were fixable. But that wasn’t to be. The following three presidential administrations didn’t seek to correct course in Afghanistan; they sought a way to leave what was ironically called both “the good war” and “America’s longest war.”
President Obama referred to Afghanistan as “the good war” but simultaneously sought an exit and took shortcuts to get there. His Afghan “surge” was perhaps one of the most cynical displays of foreign policy since Nixon’s “peace with honor” and Kissinger’s “decent interval” face-saving approaches in Vietnam (that is, until Trump’s Doha agreement and Biden’s withdrawal). It was clear to me that the surge would fail. It was under-resourced, limited to specific regions, time-limited, and unaccompanied by any effort to address Taliban safe havens in Pakistan and Iran.
Why was this a cynical ‘strategy?’ More American soldiers died in the three years of the surge than in the other 17 years of combat in Afghanistan combined. Many others had their limbs blown off or were otherwise maimed while attempting to implement counterinsurgency doctrine with insufficient resources. And all of it for a strategy that was clearly doomed to fail.
After the surge and the transition of primary security to the Afghan defense forces, the Obama administration opened talks with the Taliban and allowed it to establish a political office in Doha, Qatar. While the Obama administration, to its credit, ultimately walked away from the talks as the Taliban refused to budge on any American demands, these negotiations set the stage for the Trump administration to reengage.
After Trump took office, there was a glimmer of hope for Afghanistan. The Trump administration stepped up military operations to roll back gradual Taliban gains while cutting off aid to our ‘frenemy’ Pakistan.
But within a year, Trump abandoned this strategy and reinitiated talks with the Taliban. The Doha Agreement—with its 3.3 pages of text that are far shorter than car loans I’ve signed—sidelined and delegitimized the Afghan government while caving to all of the Taliban’s demands. However, while Trump threatened to withdraw from Afghanistan and set a tentative deadline of May 2021, he did not do it before his term ended.
President Biden would not be deterred. Despite the previous administration’s deadline not being bound by a treaty and the Taliban not complying with other aspects of the Doha Agreement, Biden was determined to leave Afghanistan, come hell or high water—and he gave us both. Less than three months after taking office, Biden announced the withdrawal. To rub salt in the wounds of every American, he originally set the date for September 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of Al Qaeda’s attack on America that it launched from Afghanistan as the terror group sheltered with the Taliban.
President Biden was seemingly unconcerned about how the withdrawal would impact the government and people of Afghanistan. He yanked the troops out quickly, with little thought on how this would affect the Taliban’s advance. Administration officials told us with a straight face that the Afghan government had two years before the Taliban could meaningfully threaten the Afghan government—a ‘decent interval.’ I predicted the Afghan government would be lucky to make it to the end of the summer. One prediction was wrong, and one was right.
The costs of our epic failure in Afghanistan are still being felt to this day. American power eroded before the eyes of the international community. We abandoned an ally who, while imperfect, fought the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups and died in the tens if not hundreds of thousands doing so.
Afghans now live under the terrifying yoke of the Taliban, which enforces its harsh version of Sharia (Islamic law) just as it did in the 1990s. Al Qaeda now runs training camps in at least 12 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces and is arguably far more secure in Afghanistan today than it was pre-911. The moral injury to American soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors, and civilians who sacrificed years of their lives—and many, their lives, limbs, and mental well-being—is incalculable.
Three years after the fall of Afghanistan, American politicians, policymakers, generals, and our so-called foreign policy experts can’t even admit we lost the war. It’s an uncomfortable truth, as they would have to own many fateful days where their decisions contributed to the collapse of Afghanistan.
