On The Mistakes We (I) Made

Where It All Went Wrong

Howdy,

Another episode of Shoulder to Shoulder dropped. If you love the troops—and you better love the troops!—please go check it out.

Let’s talk about Afghanistan (shocker, I know). Someday, inshallah, I won’t feel the burning desire to write about this every other day. But, alas, it was one of America’s longest wars, and although we’re doing our best to forget it ever happened — 1984, eat your heart out—it did happen.

I’ve been speaking to quite a few Afghan war veterans about the war. Many of them are totally ignorant of the war. This might surprise everyone: just because you fought in a war doesn’t mean you’re an expert in that war. For example, an A-10 pilot can tell you some great stories of providing close air support (CAS) to troops on the ground and is an expert on aspects of the Afghan war but not the history of the war. Most of the troops who fought in it only knew their small piece of the battlefield.

While I’m as full of shit as everyone else, I’ve spent the last 20 years reading deeply about Afghanistan. I’ve studied both main languages and know the country reasonably well. I’m not the expert on America’s Afghan War, but I can hold my own. I’m not, however, an expert on Afghanistan. I can recommend some books on Afghan history, but anything before the Saur Revolution gets hazy.

Ok, enough throat-clearing. Here are the top 5 mistakes we made.

1. An ahistorical government. The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) was built to fail. It was an ahistorical concoction created at the Bonn Conference in 2001. Instead of establishing regional centers of power, like Herat City, Lashkar Gah, Kandahar City, Jalalabad, and Mazar-e Sharif, it put all the power in Kabul. Tragically, it could never hold. Much like the United States, people in Kandahar don’t give two shits about Kabul. It might as well be on the moon. The longest-lasting Afghan regimes—and this is a problem with the current Taliban government, too—gave real power and authority to the hinterlands. While each province (like a state) had a provincial governor and provincial council (state representatives), these bodies had no real power. The President appointed all the provincial governors (mistake), and while the provincial councils were elected, they had no control. All of the province’s budgets were provided to them by Kabul. Moreover, Kabul appointed all of Afghanistan’s district governments, too. Imagine DC appointing county commissioners. Do you think that would work here? Nope. But we tried it there—awful decision. The Bonn Conference was an absolute disaster.

2. The Afghan National Army was built in our image. The ANA gets a bad rap, but that’s mainly because we did such a lousy job building it. I won’t even get started on the Afghan Police — big problems. First, the ANA didn’t get started until 2005-2006. I won’t bore you with all the details, but the majority of the early parts of the ANA were simply remnants of the “Northern Alliance.” It was overwhelmingly Tajik, specifically from Jamiat e-Islami. This was a huge problem when they went on operations in predominantly Pashtun areas. While not a perfect analogy, it is like only white police officers being employed to police a black neighborhood in the United States—times about 1,000. Further, by building it in our image, we created an ANA that was addicted to the Western way of war: ubiquitous intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), and CAS and joint fires on demand. While the Afghan Air Force (AAF) was quite good, they could never match the USAF. Further, the ANA should’ve been like the National Guard. Each province or region should’ve had soldiers from that area fighting in those regions. There was an understandable fear that this would lead to grift, but that happened anyway. Instead, soldiers from Jowzjan were sent to fight in Helmand province. Bruh, Uzbeks shouldn’t be fighting down there for numerous reasons, but the most important being that it led to soldiers simply leaving and returning home. The amount of churn inside the ANA helped destroy it.

3. Corruption was the cancer that killed the patients. You have to hand it to the Afghans; they are the kings of corruption. I sat through an hour-long briefing once on all the corruption schemes cooked up by the Afghans, and I came away quite impressed. Donald Trump, eat your heart out. They would run circles around him. The US and the international community flooded the country with money, creating an avalanche of problems. By the time we realized it in 2012, it was too late to do anything about it. We tried to pressure President Karzai to do something, but he was on the take, especially his now-deceased brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai. Corruption also destroyed the ANA. It hollowed them out. It also helped create a predatory government in some parts of the country that was no better than the Taliban.

4. We Never Understood Our Enemy. We spend billions annually on our intelligence community. While the IC is great at stealing signals, tracking bad guys, and killing people, we suck at understanding our foes. This is primarily because we believe only classified information will reveal the truth! Horsepoop. The Taliban kept telling us who they were, but we refused to listen to them. At first, however, we missed a golden opportunity to reconcile with them. In the early months after the Taliban fell, many of them were ready to make peace with Karzai and the US. But we refused to listen and went hunting for them (more on that below). We could’ve probably reconciled at least half of them initially, though who knows if they would’ve stayed reconciled. After the war started, we had no idea who we were fighting. Sure, we understood the Taliban’s organizational structure—at least some did—but we didn’t understand what they wanted. Instead, we believed that they wanted peace. But that ship sailed around 2006. They whispered sweet nothings in our ear, and we thought that if we tried hard, they would make nice-nice with our allies. Instead, they waited us out and drove in for the win. We kept saying there was no military solution to the war, but the Taliban begged to differ.

5. Too many troops. I didn’t always think that Obama’s surge was a mistake, though I hated that he announced our withdrawal date during the same speech he announced a surge in troops. Regardless, I’m convinced a smaller footprint would’ve been better for the country. That doesn’t mean it should’ve been tiny the entire time. There were moments when the Taliban needed to get the snot kicked out of them. Nevertheless, keeping around 5,000 US troops in Afghanistan, mostly SOF, airpower, and intel folks, would’ve been more sustainable. More importantly, flooding the zone with young 18-20 year olds in rural Afghanistan wasn’t the best idea. I love troops, but they shouldn’t be interacting with rural Afghans; the cultures are too different. We also chased ghosts into valleys we had no business in (see the movie, Restrepo). For example, I spent a year in Ghorak, Kandahar. While I loved my time there (because I’m a weirdo), extending the reach of the Afghan government into an area that has never had government officials was a mistake. Often, we chased ghosts into valleys, creating more harm than good. A smaller footprint wouldn’t have been a panacea, but it would’ve been manageable.

I’ll continue chipping away at this list over the coming months. I’ll probably write something a bit more comprehensive for the third anniversary of the Taliban’s victory over the United States and NATO.

Until Next Time.