By Gil Barndollar and Jason Dempsey
A T-shirt that was popular with veterans for much of America’s nearly 20-year war in Afghanistan showed a helicopter in flight with the caption we were winning when i left. U.S. generals seem to be the only ones who didn’t get the joke. On the first anniversary of our botched withdrawal, the military leaders most responsible for America’s disastrous outcome in Afghanistan have continued to loudly insist that the war was winnable when they were in charge, and that responsibility for the debacle must lie with someone else.
Retired Generals Frank McKenzie and Joseph Votel, the last two commanders of U.S. Central Command, which includes Afghanistan, recently made the case that America should have stayed indefinitely, arguing that the pullout was a mistake and that America could have defended its interests—and kept the Taliban at bay—with a small residual force of a few thousand soldiers. And in The Atlantic, the retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus, who commanded the war in Afghanistan after presiding over the surge that helped bring temporary stability to Iraq, wrote that more than a decade ago “we had finally established the right big ideas and overarching strategy.” But the problem, he maintained, was that America did not have the stomach for a “sustained, generational commitment.”
A sustained, generational commitment? The United States spent more than $2 trillion in Afghanistan and sacrificed the lives of 2,461 servicepeople over those two decades. And in that time, the top brass mostly got their way. President Barack Obama caved to his generals, agreeing to a substantial troop surge in a war he was trying to end. President Donald Trump did the same on a smaller scale, entering office on a promise to end the war but eventually agreeing to a “mini-surge” and deferring a full withdrawal to his successor.
The outcome of America’s commitment was an Afghan government and military that couldn’t hold out long enough even for U.S. forces to leave with a semblance of dignity. The “right big ideas” deployed by a generation of generals proved to be empty slogans: “government in a box,” “money as a weapons system,” “ink spots.” All of these were tactical approaches or overly simplistic frameworks that ignored the nuances of Afghan politics and the reality of attempting to modernize a fractured country that was mired in corruption and a continuing civil war.
This piece was originally published in The Atlantic on September 2, 2022. Read more HERE.