Dan Snow's History Hit - What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

History is vital for contextualising current events but as Professor Paul Miller argues in today's episode of the podcast it cannot tell us all we need to know about the present especially in the case of Afghanistan. Professor Miller has dedicated much of his working life to Afghanistan. He is an Afghan veteran, he worked for the CIA as an intelligence analyst and served on the National Security Committee for both President Bush and President Obama. He is currently Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He brings Dan up to speed on events in Afghanistan, why the country fell to the Taliban so quickly, why historical comparisons are not always as useful as they first seem and how a very different outcome might have been achieved.

Hi everybody, welcome, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're having a little focus on Afghanistan this week for obvious reasons. Yesterday we had the one and only William Dalrymple, a man who's written about Afghanistan for years, a man who's met many of the big players on all sides of this conflict and who has an unparalleled knowledge of failed invasions of Afghanistan in the past. So we move on to an expert whose entire working life really is revolved around Afghanistan. He went as a young soldier to Afghanistan, the US Army. He then joined the CIA. He worked in the White House, the National Security Committee, under both Presidents Bush and Obama, dealing primarily

with Afghanistan. And he's now a professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. He has written, researched and thought about Afghanistan ever since. He's been a really interesting voice that I've been following the last few months and articles he's written and social media posts that he's been sharing. Both of these two, William Dalrymple and Professor Miller, have got different takes on it, both of which are fantastically well-argued, well-researched, and well-thought-out,

which leaves me, folks, leaves me in a quandary. I don't know what to think. I've got no answers. Luckily, I'm on this podcast asking the questions. If you want to hear more of those podcasts, you can do so without the ads. If you want to hear more of those podcasts, you can do so without the ads. If you start to become a subscriber to History Hit, you just go to historyhit.tv, historyhit.tv.

You get a month for free if you subscribe today. And there you get all of these podcasts without the ads. Over a thousand podcasts now with all our sibling podcasts. But you also get hundreds of hours of history documentaries, like Netflix for history. You go on there, you have documentaries from the Stone Age to the Digital Age. It's all on there. At the moment, everyone is watching the famous UK survival expert, Ray Mears, talking through the history of the Iron Age transition, the agricultural revolution of the Bronze and Iron Ages. Fascinating

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As you're watching these events play out this weekend, what's your response just personally? What is your emotional response? Yeah, thanks for the question. It's been really hard for me and I know for other veterans of the war in Afghanistan. I've been in touch with some friends and former colleagues. It's gut-wrenching. Honestly, it feels like a betrayal of everything we fought and served for. It feels like an abandonment of our allies that we served alongside of.

And it feels like a cheapening of our time, our effort, our sacrifice. The friends that I know who didn't come back from Afghanistan, what was it worth? Why did they make that ultimate sacrifice? So that's how it feels right now. And it's not a fun feeling. It's not a good feeling at all. I do want to acknowledge that as hard as it is for us watching it on TV, it's infinitely worse for the people who are living through it on the ground. And so I don't want to make light of what they're experiencing,

despite how hard it is for us back here. Can you please tell us a little bit about where your journey began? Where were you in 2001, for example? I was training in the United States Army. I had actually just recently joined the Army about 18 months prior to 9-11. I was still in training to be an intelligence analyst at Fort Huachuca, Arizona on 9-11. And the time zone difference, we got a notice that something was happening in New York when we were still in class that morning. And then they abruptly canceled class, marched us back to the barracks, and we watched the rest unfold on TV. Did you have a sense that you were going to be called into this fray and

this would be something that would cast a shadow over your coming career? Did you have that sense instantly? I think we did. I think all of us who watched that while we were wearing the uniform, we knew that we were going to be part of the response and we were eager to. That's what we're joining the army for, right? It's to be there to defend our country, defend our interests and our values and be on the front lines. So I graduated from that training a month later and I got the phone call three days after that. And so I was on active duty with the United States Army for the following year and spent the summer of 2002 in Afghanistan in Bagram.

I thought I got there late because March of 02 was kind of the last big conventional military operation of that early phase. And I arrived shortly after that and I thought, oh, great, I missed it. But now all these years later, I realized I was there at the very beginning of what turned out to be a very long conflict. So I was there in 02 with the army. And I was an army reservist. So when I ended my tour in Afghanistan, I was actually demobilized and had to go look for a job. And I ended up working for the CIA as an intelligence analyst covering Afghanistan and Pakistan for the next several years. So I continued to essentially do the same job, just wearing a different set of clothing, a different letterhead on the paycheck. And then after doing that for a number of years,

the CIA seconded me over to the White House where I served as the director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council staff. And I was there for the tail end of the Bush administration and the beginning of the Obama administration. Because I wasn't a political appointee, I had the rather unique privilege to work for both presidents, worked right through the transition when most of the personnel were rotating out. At what stage in that journey did history become important to you? On September 12th, 2001, I went onto Amazon. I just typed in Afghanistan and I bought the first three books that came up because I knew right away I needed to learn something about the history of this place that was going to be part of my life and my work. I had a sense immediately that even if I wasn't going to be there myself, which I

ended up I was, but I thought even if I wasn't going to be there myself, I needed to know this place because my work was going to intersect with it somehow. I think it was Ahmed Rashid's book on the Taliban. And it was, I want to say Tanner, the book on Afghanistan's military history. And then Martin Ewan's book, Afghanistan, a short history were those first three books I bought. This was essential to know something of the context of the antecedent narrative. You can't be a good analyst on anything unless you know some history. And I took that with me and my work as an intelligence analyst. And then at the CIA, some of the, I think, best work I did at the agency was bringing that historical perspective to bear on the current problems. A lot of people act as if history started in 2001.

And that's, of course, not true. To understand the political dynamics in Kabul in 2007, you had to know something about where these players came from, which means their histories, usually in 1970s, 1980s, as Afghanistan was beginning its slow collapse and then its dramatic collapse when the Soviets invaded. And so that kind of historical perspective was absolutely essential to understanding what was going on. And I fear too many of our policymakers simply never cultivated that historical perspective. It's interesting about your work, Paul, I'm struck by is lots of people read a bit of

history about Afghanistan and they like to say things like, well, it's the graveyard of empires, no one's ever conquered Afghanistan, there's always going to be a disaster. Your study of that history and your presence in that country, your work in that country did not lead you to that same conclusion. Right. I was curious about this phrase, graveyard of empires, and I did some research on it. And the term has been around for a long time, but usually it was applied to other places in the world. It was applied to the Balkans. It was applied to Poland. It was applied to Mesopotamia, Egypt. And the first time that I found that it was ever applied to Afghanistan was actually October of 2001, right after the intervention

started in a famous foreign affairs piece by Milton Bearden called Afghanistan Graveyard of Empires. I emailed Milt and I said, where'd you get this headline? He said, I made it up. He said he wasn't following a previous tradition of using that phrase and applying it to Afghanistan. And today we all act as if Afghanistan has always been known as a graveyard of empires. This is not true, right? We made it up as a journalistic trope, as a convenient way of capturing something that we wanted to believe about Afghanistan. If you read Thomas Barfield's book, Afghanistan, A Short History, or Afghanistan, A Political and Cultural History, I think is the title, which is probably the best book in English language about Afghanistan prior to 2001. Barfield makes the point that Afghanistan actually

has been conquered many times. Empires marched across it. They conquered it. Afghanistan's reputation comes from this tiny mountainous border area that usually wasn't conquered, not because it's an invincible readout, but because it was too inconvenient and too expensive to conquer. If you're a conqueror in the early modern era, climbing up mountains to kill insurgents is just not worth your time. And so the empires, they conquered Afghanistan, they conquered the cities,

conquered the roads, they controlled the trade and the foreign policy. They just didn't bother with the mountainous areas. So that's where Afghanistan's reputation comes from. And I think it's silly for us to take those historical anecdotes as relevant for what we've gone through the past 20 years. The stories, for example, of the British retreat from Kabul in 1841 and the retreat to the Khyber Pass. People love to bring that up as an example of how the Afghans are legendary warriors and xenophobic and hate foreigners. And it's totally irrelevant to what's going on in Afghanistan because the United States, the coalition, didn't do what the British Expeditionary Force did in 1839 and 40. There was no sort of retreat to the Khyber Pass. We don't retreat people by land anymore. And by the way, the retreat in 1841 wasn't by a bunch of disciplined redcoats. It was mostly the British Indian Army, mostly made up of Indian

soldiers and their camp followers, women and children. And that's why it turned into a debacle and a mess, right? You have a bunch of civilians tramping through the snow, and of course that's going to turn into a disaster, but we just don't do that kind of thing anymore. So that's a small example of how these historical anecdotes are actually the wrong way to use history for policymaking. It's a cheap, easy, and shallow way of appealing to history as a talking point, as a debater's little punchline, as a snarky aside, not as a way of cultivating historical mindedness. What's the history that you think is more relevant? What is the history that you learned, you studied, and that you would, I guess, try and share with your political and military masters?

There's a couple of points I'd pull out. One is that for most of the 20th century, Afghanistan was a pretty normal country. When I say normal, it was a pretty normal post-colonial poor modernizing society. People have this way of treating Afghanistan as if it's like this sort of freakishly bizarre, unique thing. And it did become later pretty unique, but I would want to emphasize first, normal country, very poor, had a monarch that tried to modernize and copy the Western model as many developing nations did in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. And it was kind of successful. Afghanistan in the 1960s actually had a democratic constitution.

They held elections. Their economy was growing kind of slowly. There was no drug trade. There was no insurgency. Pretty normal country, right? So that's the first thing I'd say is we can think of it in similar categories as many other countries mid- 20th century. Then it suffered some exogenous shocks that were pretty unique in the world. There was a coup, which is not a huge deal, but then the Soviet Union invaded

in 1979 and sent the country to hell in a way that I can't find a parallel for it in many other countries or many other incidents. Afghanistan suffered a higher casualty rate in the Soviet-Afghan war than most European countries did in World War I. The degree of violence, displacement, death, and injury is near genocidal. What Afghanistan went through in the 1980s, I can't find a good parallel to it almost anywhere in the world. The Soviet Union comprehensively destroyed a nation. I need to emphasize that history so that when we're talking about today and essentially our failure and reconstruction stabilization, what we failed at doing was we failed to undo the damage that the Soviets did. And I think maybe people don't quite grasp the lingering effects of the Soviet war and how

they destroyed a country. How do you put that back together? The Soviets destroyed it. Then the Taliban took over and neglected it. And instead of building roads, they tyrannized women, right? So that's 30 years right there. And so how do you begin to undo the effects of all of those years of destruction, misery, and tyranny? That's a tough challenge. And that's the immediate context to the coalition, the international intervention in 2001 is first the Soviet destruction, then the Taliban neglect and tyranny. I'd want to emphasize that extent, the degree of destruction is pretty unique. And undoing that damage only gets us up to zero, from which we can then start to build up. It's a tall order. up. It's a tall order. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We've got Paul Miller on the podcast, talking Afghanistan. More after this.

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a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Were there things that you saw through your career or looking back now, we can Monday quarterback this, no problem at all. Like I don't mind. One of the things that you guys, we all should have done differently. What was achievable in Afghanistan? So I would highlight four specific decisions that U.S. policymakers made that should have been made differently that would have resulted in a different situation today. I'm not going to say it would have turned Afghanistan into Belgium or Switzerland, but we certainly could have avoided the catastrophe of this past week. The first decision was President Bush's decision to adopt a light footprint. And by the way, the United Nations as well.

They looked at Afghanistan, which was at the time the most failed state in the world. And they actually said, let's do as little as possible. Let's go whack some terrorists. Let's hold a few elections. And that's kind of it, right? There was no effort to maintain law and order throughout the country. And so most of Afghanistan continued to be ungoverned for about five or six years after the initial intervention. President Karzai was the mayor of Kabul. Warlords ruled the countryside. There was a lot of corruption. There continued to be privation and state failure, which is the exact context the Taliban needed to come back and launch an insurgency. I think the light footprint that President Bush adopted enabled the return of the Taliban around 2005 or 2006. So that's decision

number one. A larger intervention earlier on to provide greater security and more reconstruction assistance could have prevented the insurgency from breaking out. The second mistake was President Obama's decision to announce the withdrawal of U.S. troops, even as he was sending more in. President Obama got a lot of things right. There was a surge of troops. He pledged more reconstruction assistance. He didn't actually follow up on that. And so there was the beginnings, I think, of a defensible strategy there. And he undercut all of it by announcing the withdrawal of US troops and essentially the wind down of the international project. That really undermined

whatever good we were trying to accomplish in those years. For my money, I actually think President Obama came close to winning the war. If you take Obama's strategy and subtract the withdrawal deadline, we might have actually had a more satisfactory conclusion to the war around 2012, 2013, when the Taliban were actually interested in meaningful peace negotiations. So his decision to announce that withdrawal was strategic error number two. Number three was President Trump's peace deal. When he sat down in 2019, 2020 to negotiate the Taliban, signed a piece of paper that obligated the United States to withdraw and really made almost no demands or concessions on the Taliban, nothing enforceable. And so the Taliban understood all they had to do was wait out the clock, which is exactly what they've done. And so the fourth decision is President Biden's

decision to actually honor and abide by that agreement, even though the Taliban weren't. Taliban were not abiding by that agreement. We would have been fully within our rights to throw out the agreement and start from scratch. But Biden chose to pull the plug anyway. So there's four decisions. We had made those decisions. Otherwise, it'd be a very different world today.

As we watch the pictures at the moment of the airport, people keep saying, this is a Saigon moment. This is a Saigon moment. This is a Saigon moment. Another misuse of history, which we should cover off because you've written so fluently about it. Can you just, as you've put in your own words, can you shoot that enormous slow-moving fish in that tiny barrel that says this is somehow identical to what happened in Saigon in mid-1970s? So I spent most of the last 20 years saying Afghanistan is not Vietnam, and these are very different wars. And you can highlight the differences in lots of ways, just vastly different scales. Vietnam was a much larger war. It was a much more unilateral war.

It was part of the Cold War. The enemy in Vietnam had superpower sponsorship and support. It was partly a conventional war. Let's not forget that the Viet Cong essentially was defeated and it was the North Vietnamese army that took Saigon, not the insurgents. The weapon systems involved were different. The tactics involved were different. I could go on and on about how different these wars were. It's clear to me that President Biden thinks of Afghanistan through the lens of Vietnam. He made, I think, three separate references to Vietnam in his speech yesterday. And that's not the first time. You can find other references to Vietnam in his thinking over the years. It's hard not to see the parallel here at the end.

It's almost as if President Biden has manufactured the similarity through how he chose to end the war by pulling the plug on support for an indigenous security force that we trained. Just like in Vietnam, we had trained the ARVN. And then at the end, we pulled our air support and decided to stop giving them any training or funding, which caused their collapse, right? That's pretty similar to what happened here in 2021 with the Afghan army. And then with their collapse, we had to beat a pretty hasty retreat that looked bad on the cameras and dealt a psychological blow to the United States and our allies around the world, just like in Vietnam. So there's a parallel there that is very uncomfortable for all of us. We all know that Saigon was one of the

lowest moments in American diplomacy in history. And I fear that these images coming out of Kabul will take their place alongside Saigon. That's not to say that the wars were similar because they weren't. It's not to say that we should learn the same kind of lessons or anything like that. I'm saying the psychological impact of these images is going to be very similar to the fall of Saigon, to our lasting regret. I've been thinking a lot about superpower, hegemonic power reverses, you know, the British Empire. You mentioned the graveyard of empires.

I was thinking as you said that, it's because Britain had a habit of staggering around the world, taking absolute shooing in various places, be it Mesopotamia, be it South Asia, North and South Africa. And yet what eventually leads to the fall of dissolution of the British Empire is the strategic plate tectonic shifts of the rise of competing powers economically and militarily. And in the same way that Vietnam was followed by 40 years of unparalleled American hyper-powerdom. People think superpower isn't even the word to describe the reach that you guys had those generations following Vietnam.

Do regional reverses, obviously it's too soon to tell with Afghanistan, but do regional reverses kind of matter in this way? Or it is what matters, the changing economic and military balance in East Asia, for example. the changing economic and military balance in East Asia, for example? I don't know how important Afghanistan will be in the story of the erosion of the liberal international order and American leadership. The rise of China is more important, right? Let's just say that right off the bat. Afghanistan doesn't have to be the most important thing for us to care about it. Each individual straw on the camel's back might not be individually important, but you never want to risk putting one more on the camel's back because one of them is going to be the straw that breaks the

camel's back. And when you put that one on the camel's back that breaks it, every other straw on the camel's back also bears responsibility because the one that breaks the camel's back wouldn't have broken the camel's back without all the other ones also being there. Does that make sense? I hope I'm not being too convoluted there. Every single action that you take, that we take to erode the liberal order is going to be responsible for its eventual collapse. So the fall of Kabul, it's a bad thing. Probably not the worst thing that could happen in the world, but when you stack the fall of Kabul up with the COVID-19 pandemic, with the rise of China, with Russia's pattern of aggression and behavior over the past 15 years, its invasion of Georgia, its invasion of Ukraine, its re-imposition of

autocracy on itself and Belarus as well. When you stack that up against everything that China's done in its neighborhood, you start to see a picture of how the world has gone over 20 years that is deeply, deeply disturbed. We just observed the anniversary of the end of World War II. The 75th anniversary was last year. So I guess we're on the 76th now. And when you look at the interwar years, the trend lines in the 20s and 30s, again, no individual incident caused World War II,

not Germany retaking the Ruhr, not the Spanish Civil War, not the annexation of Czechoslovakia. None of these things caused World War II. Once World War II starts, you look backwards and you can see in hindsight, oh, I understand the narrative. I understand how all these things fed on each other, leading the world to that cataclysm. Okay, so what I observe now is I look back on the last 20 or really 30 years, and I see a narrative emerging of how these individual events feed on each other and lead in a very troubling direction. And each individual event is survivable. Added together, I'm scared to death. I'm scared to death of what's happening and what's coming in the next 10, 20, 30 years. I don't know. I'm not trying to be a Cassandra. I'm not trying to be a Chicken Little. I'm not trying to be a prophet. I'm just saying,

I think the state of international politics today is more volatile than at any point since 1939. And with a big dose of technological transformation and climate change thrown in there as well. Right. I forgot to mention, right? So there's some new stuff to worry about as well. What is the case for American liberal intervention, if that's even an expression? So Western liberal interventionism, which we all got pretty excited about in 2001, you know, it attracted a very broad coalition from previously kind of slightly isolationist US Republicans to very liberal people. I remember Michael Ignatieff, the kind of liberal writer and thinker and politician in Canada, all on the same kind of team for a while. That era now seems to be over,

a mixture of cynicism, a mixture of isolationism, a mixture of anti-colonialism, if you like, you know, resurgent left in the West that finds any kind of intervention acceptable. What is the case for it today? Yeah. The era, I think, starts not in 2001, but it starts in really 1991, right? It's the post-Cold War optimism that democracy is breaking out all over the world and we can facilitate it and bring it along. The United States, the United Nations, and NATO and other organizations undertook these sorts of interventions all over the world, dozens of them, from the 1990s on forward. And Afghanistan and Iraq ended up being kind of the bigger ones. They have a bad reputation, but many of them were successful. The United Nations managed to mediate rather peaceful

transitions in places like Mozambique and Namibia and Nicaragua. And the United Kingdom had a remarkable intervention in Sierra Leone that really helped end a civil war there and bring in some peace to that country. And people don't know that history. People don't know that the international community was actually getting better at these interventions. And by getting better at them, we were helping other countries end wars and experience a chapter of peace and stability when, in many cases, people had not had that in their entire lifetimes. They just lived in conditions of endless war. So that interventionism had some positive effects. Iraq killed it. And it was Iraq that killed it because when we bungled Iraq, the next big humanitarian catastrophe that happened

was Syria. The non-intervention in Syria was to me one of the most remarkable events in post-Cold War history. Because if you take the collapse of Syria and you put that into the 1990s, we absolutely would have intervened. We, whether it's the United States, the United Nations, NATO, whoever else, would have intervened. And so the fact that the world community chose not to do anything about Syria told me, okay, I think we're coming to the end of this era of humanitarian intervention by whatever label you want to give it. And then the way Afghanistan has now ended, I think will reinforce that trend. Unfortunately, it breaks my heart because the people who are going to suffer the most are going to be the people of North Korea or Nigeria or whatever the next state is that collapses and needs help. And the world community says, no,

thanks. We're not doing that anymore. In fact, you know, people who suffered, it was the Libyans. 2011, NATO goes in and overthrows the Libyan government and then walks away and does nothing and doesn't build anything in its place. And now Libya is a failed state, terrorist playground run by warlords. That's an example of what's going to happen around the world when we do not assume responsibility for responding to these humanitarian crises

and failures of governance around the world. We're going to get more Libyas. Happy thought. Well, thank you, Paul Miller. What's your most recent book people can follow your thinking in a more long form way? My most recent book is called Just War and Ordered Liberty by Cambridge University Press. And it's a reflection on just war and how it ought to be aligned with these ideas of order and liberty, peace and justice. I also have another book coming out probably next year

on Christian nationalism. It's more of a look inward about features going on inside the United States and the troubling things that I think we saw under the Trump administration. So those are my two most recent works. And you can also follow me on Twitter at PaulDMiller2. Thanks so much, Paul. Thank you very much for coming on and talking about this.

Thank you, Dan. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. Thanks so much, Paul. Thank you very much for coming on and talking about this. Thank you, Dan. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake. Appreciate your loyalty. Sticking through to the end. If you fancied doing us a favor here at history here i would be incredibly grateful if you would go and wherever you get these pods give a little rating five stars or it's equivalent a review would be great please head over there and do that it really does make a huge difference it's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account so please head over there do do that. Really, really appreciate it.