Afghanistan Reflections

* The Taliban seized control of almost the entire territory of Afghanistan, including Kabul, its capitol, rapidly as U.S. forces withdrew. Some of this may have been symbolic and due to the collapse of morale it caused. But, a few thousand well disciplined and trained U.S. military personnel, mostly in training and support roles, and providing reconnaissance and close air support for Afghan National Army troops (in theory, numbering about 100,000 and greatly outnumber the Taliban forces who took greater casualties, were less well trained and were less well equipped), were also a tipping point. 

* It is beyond any reasonable doubt that the U.S. did a dismally bad job of ending the operation in Afghanistan. It failed to get its own people, other friendly foreigners, and its Afghan allies out of the country in good order. It didn't manage to deny the Taliban access to its advanced weapons and equipment. Its abrupt departure that was ill-coordinated with Afghan National Army forces was deeply disheartening to them and contributed to their utter collapse as U.S. forces left, rather than leaving them in the strongest possible position, despite months and years of advanced notice that this was in the works. The U.S. departure may have been a bipartisan political necessity, but it didn't have to end in an ugly rout.

* The very small initial force in Afghanistan in 2001 with heavy air support was extremely successful at turning the tide of an ongoing civil war then.

* The close air support wasn't terribly advanced. B-52s aren't all that different from their 1950s version. The AC-130, is a short haul cargo plane with a big artillery piece hanging out the side. The A-10 is a Vietnam era, subsonic, non-stealth aircraft. More modern armed drones and more modern fighter aircraft were involved too (even the B-1B bomber was pressed into service in close air support in what was largely a debacle), but weren't particularly pivotal. On the other hand, this was far superior to the nascent Afghan air force made up of a couple dozen or so glorified Cessna class general aviation aircraft, modified to fire missiles designed for helicopters or to drop smaller bombers.

* Despite the fact that this was predominantly a ground war, ambushes by light infantry were the main threat. There was some improved explosive devices (IEDs) in Afghanistan, but not nearly as many as in more economic developed Iraq. The Taliban had few vehicles more advanced than pickup trucks and jeeps with heavy machine guns mounted on them. The Taliban had essentially no armored vehicles. The Taliban had essentially no modern missiles. The Taliban had no air force. The Taliban's most potent weapons were suicide bombers and truck bombs. (Afghanistan is landlocked, so, of course, neither side had any naval forces, although some U.S. Navy personnel served in the conflict.) The U.S. and its allies deployed few (if any) heavy tanks to the conflict.

* The Taliban survived two decades, after having ruled most of Afghanistan for five years and coming to the brink of running the entire country. They collapsed when U.S. forces arrived in 2001 because the Taliban had allowed a terrorist group the conducted the 9-11 attacks to operate there, but retreated to Northern Pakistan and regrouped. Pakistan cooperated with the U.S. enough to allow U.S. Special Forces to assassinate Osama bin Laden there during the Obama Administration, but did not cooperate enough to allow the U.S., Afghanistan, and its allies to take their fight against the Taliban to their new base of operations.

* The U.S. won battle after battle, but the U.S. means of fighting this war was very expensive and without sufficient nation building, created dependency rather than an Afghan National Army that could stand on its own feet. The number of troops involved was never huge and the casualties per year were modest for a civil war being actively fought, for the vast majority of the U.S. military presence. But the cost of the operation approached $300 million per day, it was the longest foreign military engagement in U.S. history (the "Indian Wars" on the U.S. frontier, collectively, lasted longer), and the U.S. eventually grew tired of it, allowing the Taliban to win the war of attrition which it fought at a higher cost in lives, but a vastly lower cost in treasure. The U.S. never managed to figure out how to conduct this "small war" on a more proportionate budget.

* The Afghan government was, as a matter of constitutional law, a government in which the supreme law of the land was Islamic law. Almost everyone in Afghanistan except the foreign troops are Muslim. Yes, the Taliban are Muslim too, but they were one Sunni Islamic faction fighting are Sunni Muslims.

* The Taliban were organized and obtained the money that made them possible in significant part from Saudi Arabian elites who don't fully support the ruling monarch's foreign policies. The notion that the U.S. was the primary driving force behind the Taliban, as claimed in some memes, is false, although the U.S. did support anti-Soviet insurgents (who were Muslim, like everyone in Afghanistan is) in Afghanistan back in the Reagan administration.

* Afghanistan has been almost continuously at war since the late 1970s. The last twenty years have been characterized by an ongoing Taliban insurgency, but it was not by any means the most violent or deadly period of ongoing civil war over the last forty plus years. But you have to go all of the way back to the 1970s to find a time when the future looked bright and people were at peace in this country.

* Forty years of wars and enduring wave after wave of refugees have left Afghanistan without the human capital it really needed to return to a functioning civic society. It is the most wretched and impoverished country outside of Africa as a result of the endless war.

* The Afghan warlords whose cause the U.S. took up against the Taliban in 2001 when they were on the verge of total defeat were no angels, although they were still probably better than the Taliban.

* The U.S. and its allies were not very successful at nation building. In part, this was because they disavowed it, framing their task as a strictly military mission. In part, this was due to a lack of human capital to run a full fledge system of national, regional, and local governments in this fashion properly, even with $ 4 billion a year in foreign aid supplementing its budget. In part, this was because the Western style parliamentary governmental system put in place with an Islamic flavor chose uninspiring leaders who weren't up to the job and whose lack of experience and competence gave rise to a deeply corrupt system that reached even its military.

* The corruption was probably not entirely unrelated to high rates of cousin marriage and a heavily clan based civil society in Afghanistan, which is ill suited to an impersonal state.

* The Taliban's message of strict Islamic law, ruthlessly enforced in a manner that was also mindful of its own ability to control people by doing so, despite meager financial resources and inferior military training, won the war of ideas over the Western-style democratic republic model offered up by the U.S. and its allies. A more Western-style model may have improved the lives of many Afghans, especially women, but it didn't win over many die hard defenders and advocates at the grass roots. Afghan troops vanished in the face of serious Taliban offenses, rather than fiercely defending their truf from the insurgents.

* Delaying Taliban rule by twenty years was not meaningless. It temporarily but seriously disrupted the leading anti-Western terrorist organization and there was no subsequent major successful Islamic terrorist attacks on the U.S. again after 9-11. It changed the lives of a generation, mostly for the better. It delayed it to a time period when Islamic fundamentalism, while alive and well in various parts of the world including Afghanistan, is certainly less of a clear and present danger to the Western world than it was in 2001. Early indications are that the Taliban of 2021 has also moderated itself at least a little relative to what it was in 2001, although the Taliban's conduct effectively terrorizing smaller cities and town and rural areas in between leaves one wondering how sincere this front really is right now. The past twenty years has also dented Afghanistan's status as the biggest source in the world for illegal opium. Afghanistan has also provided the U.S. with battle hardened military veterans and advances in weapons and tactics arising from that experience, but at the cost of life shattering physical and mental disabilities for many soldiers who served there.

* Still, the reasonable expectation is that life under Taliban rule in Afghanistan will get much worse (especially for women and girls, but also economically and for the country as a whole), compared to the status quo in the short to medium term. This is so even though, Taliban hegemony might ultimately bring the absence of war necessary for progress and moderation if it persists for a long enough time spent governing to moderate this Islamist movement to the extent. A best case scenario, for example, might be similar to the Shi'ite theocracy in Iran has done so over the last four decades after the Islamic revolution there. But Saudi Arabia and other Islamic monarchies in the Persian Gulf strongly suggest that highly repressive regimes on their model can persist for a very long time.

* A key reason that a Western-style republic model lost the war of ideas was because it was a message that Afghanistan wasn't ready to receive yet. This was a country that needed a more basic democratic model than the one that it tried to adopt, and that maybe should have had a transition period of more competent, civilian, non-democratic rule to provide people with a lived example before leaving people who have mostly never known functional democratic government in times of peace to try to govern themselves. On the other hand, it isn't as if the Soviet style one party state that preceded the pre-U.S. invasion Taliban fared any better. The monarchy that preceded that, while longer lived and more peaceful, was hardly a shining model of success. The 1970s was pretty much the only time in modern history that Afghanistan was in good shape and seemingly on a track of a better future.

* Early in the conflict, the U.S. tried to use military and CIA led approaches to detaining, punishing, and interrogating people suspected of being connected with al-Qaeda. This effort was a dismal failure. It undermined the integrity of the U.S. justice system and U.S. "soft power" in favor of dubious military tribunals for Guantanamo Bay detainees who were mostly small fry when they were first detained that resulted in few actual convictions. Using civilian U.S. District Courts for terrorism prosecutions has been far more fruitful.

* The Authorization for the Use Of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress after 9-11 in 2001 with an eye primarily towards what became the war in Afghanistan has justified U.S. military action against violent Islamist organizations all over the world since then. With its original justification spent, there is some chance that the AUMF will be repealed by Congress and reduce the authority of the President to deploy U.S. military forces on these kinds of missions outside Afghanistan going forward. The other military operations have involved very modest numbers of U.S. troops with armed drones and less advanced military equipment.

* After the Vietnam War, the military tried to discourage political leaders from fighting more wars like it by restructuring its forces to be less well suited to those kinds of conflicts. Political leaders mostly ignored this fact and kept deploying the military to low intensity, counter-insurgency conflicts with a military that was intentionally not well equipped and trained to fight in this kind of conflict. This was a mistake and should not be repeated. Military leaders may prefer to plan for major international wars against "near peer" opponents, but that kind of preparation does not translate well to having force components who can prevail in asymmetric "small wars" against non-near peer opponents like the Taliban. But, the U.S. will almost inevitably be drawn into fighting conflicts like the Afghan War in the future.