Irregular Warfare Podcast - Another Forgotten War: America’s Experience in Afghanistan

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

This episode contemplates lessons learned from America’s twenty years of war in Afghanistan. To do so, we're joined by Dr. Carter Malkasian, author of The American War in Afghanistan: A History, and James Cunningham, a senior analyst with SIGAR—the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The discuss whether, in the year following the US withdrawal, the United States and its allies have sufficiently reflected on lessons learned from the war. They then describe various reasons why the intervention in Afghanistan failed, based on their extensive research and on-the-ground experience—to include multiple lessons from SIGAR reporting and Dr. Malkasian’s argument that the Taliban won because it fought for values close to what it means to be Afghan, including religion and resistance to occupation. Our guests conclude with policy implications we can draw from twenty years of strategy that ultimately resulted in failure. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Thank you for listening to Episode 61 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm Shauna Sinnott, the Executive Director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, and I'm joined here by Gordon Richmond, the Deputy Director for the IWI Fellows Program. We are about to start today's conversation with James Cunningham from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and Dr. Carter Malkajian. But before we begin, we have a quick announcement. The Irregular Warfare Initiative is seeking applicants for our 2023 fellows cohort. We're looking for diversity of position in the field, ranging from practitioners at the

tactical to the policy levels, and both senior and emergent scholars. Fellows expand their professional networks through engagement with senior members of the IW community and collaboration with one another. We amplify fellows' research and writing through social media with assistance from our collaborators at the Modern War Institute at West Point and Princeton University's Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. Check out IWI on Twitter or LinkedIn for the application link. We are accepting applications until October 31st and expect to release the selection for the 2023 cohort in December. We look forward to seeing your applications and continuing to build the irregular warfare professional community. Thanks again for

listening. And now to start this episode marking one year since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. We always talked about the strategic partnership, that we are going to stay in Afghanistan forever, that we have certain interests in Afghanistan. But every administration from President Bush all the way to President Biden always had one eye on the exit. But as Carter has kind of mentioned in his book, you know, security conditions and the Afghans have a say in it. And they created an environment in which we decided we needed to stay longer, and it drew out our presence more. In talking about all those different reasons as to why we lost, you should have observed that none of them are easy to solve. None of these things have some easy solution. You

can't get rid of Pakistan as a safe haven. Fixing corruption takes a whole lot of time. Dealing with the feelings of nationalism, the motivation to resist occupation, that's not an easy thing to fix either. So they're all really tough to fix. And so that should give people pause. Welcome to episode 61 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Vanoff, and my co-host today is Kyle Atwell. Today's episode explores the lessons learned from America's 20-year war in Afghanistan. Our guests begin by discussing whether, in the year following withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States and its allies have sufficiently reflected on lessons learned from the war.

They then discuss various reasons the intervention in Afghanistan failed, based on their extensive research and on-the-ground experience. To include multiple lessons from SIGAR reporting and Carter's argument that the Taliban won because it fought for values close to what it means to be Afghan. To include Islam and resistance to occupation. Our guests conclude with policy implications we can draw from the 20 year war in Afghanistan. James Cunningham is a senior analyst in the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR. He has spent more than 17 years focused on Afghanistan and played a leading role in researching and writing SIGAR's forthcoming report, Deconstructing and Assessing Why America Failed to Achieve Its

Objectives There. Dr. Carter Malkasian is a historian with extensive experience working in conflict zones, to include two years in Afghanistan as a State Department political officer. He also served as Special Assistant for Strategy to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and is the author of multiple books to include the award-winning history called The American War in Afghanistan, which underpins today's conversation. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners

to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here is our conversation with Carter Malkasian and James Cunningham. Carter, James, thank you for being on the Irregular Warfare podcast. Jeff, Kyle, thanks for having us here today. Really appreciate the invitation. And it's great to hang out with James. We haven't seen each other face to face in a while since COVID and all that, but we did some great work together in the Pentagon back when things weren't going well in Afghanistan. Although, well, maybe that doesn't help differentiate the times very well. Carter, it's always a pleasure to see you. Looking forward to this conversation again.

Thank you all for hosting us today. I'm looking forward to talking about our 20 years of experience in Afghanistan. We are at the one-year anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and we are recording on Friday, August 26th, the one-year anniversary of the bombing at the Kabul airport, which killed 13 U.S. service members and as many as 170 Afghans. Last fall, Afghanistan received a lot of attention in the media, but it seems that world events such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine and tensions with China have taken priority for Americans. Some have argued there is a deliberate forgetting of Afghanistan, similar to what happened after Vietnam. You have both contributed significantly to the public discourse to identify what went wrong there. Do you feel the United States has reflected adequately on what happened in Afghanistan? Jeff, that's a great question. And the first thing I think I'd say is that Afghanistan

was forgotten while the war was being fought. There's only certain times in the course of the war where it was on front headlines, on newspaper front lines, on the surge, the initial 2001 intervention, and of course, the disastrous end of the war. So it's not surprising at all now that it's not being talked about and it's not being dealt with. The Ukraine helps us understand that to a certain extent. That is an important issue that naturally draws attention. A confrontation with a nuclear power can hardly be called a safe thing. And I think James can probably second this, that there is a feeling in Washington, certainly, and even outside of Washington, I'm outside of Washington right now, that we shouldn't

be talking about Afghanistan. We have other things to worry about for the United States. So there is a certain pressure not to deal with it. Maybe that pressure is okay, but it is the state of things. Yeah, absolutely. To kind of second what Carter had mentioned, right after the collapse of the Afghan government and security forces, we were requested by Congress to look into what happened. And the initial reactions from Washington and all the agencies was, we don't have the time to look at it. We don't have the resources to look at it. And again, we will do our own

evaluations in the coming years. And so what we've noticed over the past year or so, as we've been doing our work, is that the administration, the Department of Defense, Department of State, and other organizations have just been resistant to this type of independent examination of learning what happened in Afghanistan and making those modifications and reforms necessary for places like Ukraine or other operations in the future. And I second Carter. I think he's correct in the fact that we have forgotten about Afghanistan way before we left. It was only those specific events that really got that attention inside the media and back home. But outside of that, Afghanistan was on cruise control for a number of years,

despite the amount of money and personnel that we were putting there. And only until now, with the collapse right in front of us, are we actually trying to do some reflective examination of what happened. But unfortunately, right now with Ukraine, I think attention is elsewhere. And I really think learning from our experience in Afghanistan is something that we are not taking full attention of right now. So to be clear, Congress was asking for lessons learned, but you're having trouble with some of the executive branches because they're busy looking at other projects. Did I get that right? And have you seen kind of continued interest from Congress or is that also starting to wane as we move into other national security priorities? Great question.

So, again, it's more of the fact of they don't have the time. So a lot of personnel that were assigned to the Afghan desks at State Department and Department of Defense have moved on relatively quickly. So it's only one or two people in a desk that used to be 10 or 12. So really having the staff to be able to respond to it has not been there. So really having the staff to be able to respond to it has not been there. But to put things in perspective, we put forth a request for information to the agencies to learn from documentary evidence what happened. And we submitted that back in November. And only now, in August of 2022, just under a year later, are we starting to get one or two documents in for our request. So there's just this resistance to really taking a look at those things.

Now, within the Congress and the Hill, there definitely is some interest, but it is waning slightly. I think their interest is showing the fact that Cigar is still receiving its funding. But again, we get a lot of questions on, have we learned from Afghanistan in Ukraine? So it always kind of has that Ukraine hook. But again, there is some interest still within Congress of trying to understand exactly what happened. Yeah, the executive agencies shorthanded got it. And I think that they should let you guys in, you have the clearances, just to go through the files that exist there. And maybe you're hanging around their office for three weeks, which they may or may not like, but that's going to get the work done a whole lot quicker than having some poor action office or trying to dig for files for you. Absolutely. And I think it really comes down to some knowledge management issues, Carter. And the fact that we asked CENTCOM

two years ago if we could look through historical files. And I think they said the files would be ready for us to look in 2030. So again, 10, 15 years after the fact. And so that really doesn't provide us that immediate retroactive look that we tried to do. But we were hopeful that the agencies would be retroactive in trying to look at this issue. But again, we just have not been experiencing that. And it's unfortunate that we're only in the lessons identified and not lessons learned stage. James, can you talk a little bit about what CIGAR's mission is? And what about CIGAR is unique in the federal government? Absolutely. So CIGAR is the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. We were created by Congress to do independent oversight of all reconstruction

dollars spent in Afghanistan. Reconstruction is a wide writ. Everything from developing an Afghan government institution to building schools, building infrastructure, to reconstructing an entire security force, it's police, it's military, it's air force. So again, the writ is very large, but it's any U.S. government agency that spends money, reconstruction dollars in Afghanistan. So again, anybody who's there, Department of Commerce, Department of State, Department of Defense, the Special Inspector General has oversight over all of that funding. So we're not siloed in any one agency like most Inspector Generals who are focused on that agency. And again, we're appointed by Congress, and our actual inspector general is appointed by the president. And so our inspector general,

Mr. Sopko, is actually appointed by President Obama. And again, we provide that independent oversight of all of these various programs and actions in Afghanistan. And that's what makes us unique, is the fact that we have such a large purview and able to examine in depth into one specific country and have that focus in that area. So this is really about monitoring and accountability. Is that correct? Absolutely. So again, our job is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of U.S. spending and operations and reconstruction. And as the Inspector General often says, in baseball, we're kind of calling balls and strikes. We're the umpire. We're not doing policy,

we're not doing strategy, but we're trying to improve our efficiency and effectiveness in how we do reconstruction in places like Afghanistan and prior to that with the Special Inspector General in Iraq. Carter, your book is The American War in Afghanistan, A History. What motivated you to write this book? Well, besides being a historian and wanting to expend too much time sitting in front of a computer and typing things out. I read William Dalrymple's book, Return of a King, which is about the first Anglo-Afghan war. And that was in 2013. I read that when I was going out to Afghanistan to help General Dunford. I'd already spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and I'd already written my previous book. My previous book was just about one district. And in my attempt to grow and to think more and to think broader,

I thought, what's the next thing I could do? I thought, well, maybe I could try to write a book about the whole war. And it was 2013. I thought, well, the war is probably going to be over in a year or so. So if I start writing now, it'll all be good. Nearly 10 years later, eight years later, the war is ending and the book is finally done after lots of extensions and lots of other things that I've been doing that I didn't have time to focus on it. And then it got completed. And so I guess as a historian, I like the idea of trying to write a complete history of a conflict so we can take all the strands together and try to understand where things went, why we lost, what opportunities were missed, and why we didn't get out earlier. That's the down and dirty. Yeah, I think it's funny considering that we identified that the United States was on

cruise control in Afghanistan, but you decided to invest in writing a book on it nonetheless, so it shows your dedication to the subject. So your book is important, and it doesn't just provide a history, but it provides, I believe, an assessment of what some of the biggest challenges were for the United States in Afghanistan. Could you summarize your main argument of what the challenge was that led to our ultimate failure there? Well, so I think it's important, without going too long, to say there were a set of challenges. Or like in academic speak, I might say there were a set of necessary conditions that prevented the United States from succeeding. There isn't one condition that's there. And so some of the conditions are like really well known.

The government didn't rule well. The government often mistreated its people. And we can associate to that to a certain degree with the amount of corruption that was occurring. So that's one factor. Another one that's known really well is Pakistan. When the Taliban could have refuge in Pakistan, whether or not the government wanted it to, that's a significant obstruction to success. Much more difficult for us to target and go after them because of Pakistan. There's a few other points that are known kind of the academic community, but maybe a little bit less in other places. And the one that I pull out there is that the way the government worked and the tribes worked that were aligned with the government

was very fractured. Different groups wanted to do what they wanted to do and often wouldn't coordinate well. And this would extend into the Afghan police and army. And so when they're confronted with the Taliban, they were often divided and wouldn't come together. Whereas the Taliban tended to be more cohesive. Now, this can be a debatable point, but it's become less debatable since last year. So those are some of the broad conditions that are there. But what I've tried to talk about is a separate condition that I felt was being missed and needed to be highlighted. And it's not original that I brought it up, but I felt it was not being observed enough during the later years of Afghanistan. And that's that the Taliban forces could be more motivated, more aggressive, more willing to take risks, more willing to be killed than the Afghan forces and the government forces because they were fighting occupation.

because they were fighting occupation, because they felt there was an occupier here that was from a different religion, and they could represent themselves as being the interpreters of Islam for Afghanistan, being from the villages and such. And that allowed them to motivate people better. And one way to say it is what it meant to be Afghan was better represented by the Taliban than by the government forces who were tied to us. And you meant to be Afghan was better represented by the Taliban than by the government forces who were tied to us. And you want to be careful talking about identity because identity is very complex, very disputed. But I think it's less controversial to say that people were motivated by the fact there was an outsider from a different religion in their country. To me, that's not a very controversial thing to say. I think Carter is spot on. I think we do not look at the Taliban enough. I think over the course of

20 years, the Taliban's cohesion, the Taliban's strength, the Taliban's reflection of being Afghan was often undervalued. A lot of times it was intent versus capability was often the discussion. And, you know, the Taliban may have the intent, but they don't have the capability. And I think they pretty much have shown they had both intent and capability. I think we also, a lot of times would say there were not Afghans, that the Afghans were the ones that we were working with and that these guys were outsiders. And we try to have those stigmas stick, but we were projecting them as an outsider and they weren't sticking. I think Carter's absolutely right that the Taliban did represent that part of society. I also think, you know, martyrdom and what they fought for, for a religious cause, really mattered too. We were told by many of the educated Afghans in the

Afghan National Defense Security Forces that what it meant to be a martyr, like why were you not staying on the front lines in those final days and doing this concept of martyrdom that's ingrained into the religion. And they said martyrdom's something aspirational, but when you have money and education, you can leave the country and not actually engage in martyrdom. And so that's for those that don't have that opportunity, which a lot of them were potentially Taliban. So the fact that there was such a difference in some of that implementation of things like martyrdom really stuck out as far as the Taliban's ability to be cohesive. I mean, the Taliban's senior leader, his son was a martyr. I mean, they believed in this cause.

We did not see Ghani or Saleh or Bismillah Khan or any of the Afghan leaders putting their sons on the front line to fight. But you saw very much this in the Taliban. So I think Carter bringing this to the fold as a well-respected scholar, I think is very important. And I think throughout the 20 years, we tried to devalue this critical point because it was against our messaging. And I think we now are seeing that our messaging was wrong and that Carter was ultimately correct. Well, A, I'm glad you brought up the concept of martyrdom and being a Shaheed. I think that's a great angle to look at this at. And for those of you who've been in Afghanistan, you may have heard the kind of, when someone died, there's two ways to say someone dies.

If someone dies normally, it's murder. They died. If someone dies in combat, you can use Shaheed. But you always had to be careful using that because some people said, well, that person's not a Shahid. They didn't die fighting an infidel. And then sometimes someone else on the NDSF side would say, no, no, no, we are Shahid. We died fighting in the war. And therefore, it's okay for us to say we're infidels. We died, you know, fighting Pakistanis or fighting Taliban. But the fact that it was conflicted, just the fact that definition wasn't clear and people were fighting over it, demonstrates this larger issue that was at play. We didn't understand it from a U.S. assistance

perspective either. You know, there are certain aspects of martyrdom that's required. So when somebody's martyred in the realm of battle, you know, there's a certain time period in which that person needs to be extracted from that battle and properly buried to have an honorable bury. And what we did in Afghanistan is a lot of times we did close air support training where our close air support in our medical evacuation capability is to prioritize those that are critically wounded over those that have been deceased. And that went so foreign to the Afghan security forces because burying the deceased quickly was necessary for them to have that honorable martyrdom death.

And so we didn't prioritize that. And a lot of times we tried to leave some of the deceased behind or they didn't have the capabilities to move them off battle. And so their burial was sometimes considered improper, which then even further threatened or jeopardized this type of religious concept of martyrdom and other things that were in play, because we were looking at everything tactically while they were looking at it both through tactics, but also through religion and culture. And we oftentimes extremely missed those latter two. And when we were trying to provide support to them. Various things to remember about this, this argument and resisting occupation. But I don't think we'd

say it's not unique to Afghanistan. There's a variety of countries where this happens, and there's histories of Vietnam that also talk about the importance of nationalism or resisting occupation for the North Vietnamese, for the Viet Minh, for the Viet Cong, etc. And we can look at other places where that's occurred. So it's not to say it's something unique here, nor as I talk about it, am I trying to say that this is a general explanation for why insurgencies do well. Like, I'm writing a history. I'm not trying to figure out the theory for why, for how all insurgencies do well. There may be some things that can apply to a larger extent. And I guess if there wasn't other examples that were similar to this, you might be suspect

of this explanation. If nowhere else in history can we see something similar, does this explanation still make sense? That'd be a reasonable criticism. But since it does apply other places, I think it has that girding. But yeah, so to understand it is not unique, but something that's there, I think is worth remembering. This occupiers dilemma, the idea that the perceptions of the population will be kind of skewed against the external actor naturally. It seems like it has a couple implications for the United States' footprint and approach to Afghanistan. And I have kind of two distinct questions here, but I'll throw them at the same time. The first is, does this mean that despite our best intentions, sometimes doing more inevitably is going to actually cause more problems? So, you know, activity doesn't necessarily lead to progress, which would have implications for our approach.

And the second thing is maybe an alternative explanation for motivation of, for example, the ANDSF or Afghan National Defense Security Forces, which we can come to, which is when we send more resources, does that induce a sense of shirking among them where they're actually less motivated to work because they know that the external actor is going to do a lot of the work for them with their kind of extravagant footprint size? Two very different questions and happy to go whichever direction you guys want to go. Sure, absolutely. So I think for the Afghan National Defense Security Forces side, so working backwards on your questions, absolutely. When we are more invested than they are invested in doing some of these operations, I thought you were seeing time and time again, and Carter probably seen it in Helmand and a variety of other places,

where the Afghans kind of sat back, didn't do much of anything and allowed the U.S. to take on that lead. ISAF, which was the name of the mission that we had in Afghanistan early on, a lot of people actually refer to it as, I see Americans fighting. Not I see Afghans fighting, I see Americans fighting. It's because we did a lot of that heavy lift. But I also think a lot of our discussions as far as us getting more involved in this fight, we also became kind of our own patronage network in Afghanistan, where we were leading and creating relationships with the Afghan security forces. And they were turning towards us for logistics, human resources, salary, food, oil, gas, all these things to survive. They weren't looking to the Afghan government to provide that type of support. They were looking

to the international community. So we kind of became a part of that system because we threw so many resources in it, because we decided to do so much in Afghanistan for them. The one thing that happens in that is capacity substitution. When we start going in with a large footprint, we start augmenting the host nation's capacity. So again, when we did mandated partner operations, which meant that Afghan forces and U.S. forces had to go together on every operation, what that meant was that the U.S. was bringing into the fight close air support, airstrikes, medical evacuation support by helicopter, intel support, all these advanced capabilities the Afghans didn't have.

And then next thing you know, in 2014, 2020, 2021, as we start rapidly withdrawing these capabilities, the Afghans are left without those critical functions that they require to actually be successful in the battlefield. And so I made this comment when the ENDSF fell last year, that it's almost if you took, I mean, we're in the fall in the United States right now, that it's like Halloween. It would be a U.S. soldier with an Afghan mask. The body and the meat of operations was all the United States. And of course, we try to put an Afghan face on it. But in reality, when you took away all of that capability behind the Afghans, they were really left struggling on that battlefield. So more resources, unless we were

willing to commit extremely long term, really altered that fight to where they became increasingly dependent upon us. And I think a lighter footprint, a more tailored footprint, softer footprint, where we enabled them to do most of the fighting, and we did some of the support in the background, probably would have had a better result than leaving them in 2014. And then again, later on, without critical capabilities that they grew to be addicted to in the fight against the Taliban. I have similar thoughts. The angle is a bit different. So I'm going to take the first question on just doing more cause problems, but I'm going to flip the perspective I'm taking on it. And that to me, the main issue to be careful about doing more

is, is it sustainable or not? And that largely is a sustainable for the country doing it, in this case, the United States and its allies. Because in talking about all those different reasons as to why we lost, you should have observed that none of them are easy to solve. None of these things have some easy solution. You can't get rid of Pakistan as a safe haven. Fixing corruption takes a whole lot of time. Dealing with the feelings of nationalism and motivation to resist occupation, that's not an easy thing to fix either. So they're all really tough to fix. And so that should make, as one is intervening and deciding the level of intervention that's going to occur, that should give people pause. occur, that should give people pause. That should make people realize that we're not going to be able to change this quickly. This is going to take, and even in like the Afghanistan example, is no matter how much you do, you don't change what the situation is going to be. So it becomes a question of how long are you going to stay? And if the question is how long are you going to stay, then you need to be worried about how much money you're spending while you're there.

And in that case, you want to be spending as little as possible because what you understand is putting in more resources does not give me a better chance of success. Being there, all we're doing being there is trying to defend certain U.S. interests and make sure things don't go bad. So we want to do that with as few forces as possible. Now, even a few forces is expensive. So the answer to that is you think even that is too expensive? The answer to that is don't go in, like stay out entirely. And so for me, I think, yes, the Afghan part of this is part of it. And there's skewing effects that happen from having more resources. But the most important thing is us. Is it putting in a lot of resources is more expensive?

And therefore, we want to think about doing it as lightly as possible. We want to especially understand that the odds of situations like this in actually winning, in actually walking away and being able to leave a government that can stand on its own, those odds may be pretty slim. and being able to leave a government that can stand on its own, those odds may be pretty slim. I can't say for certain because I don't want to generalize off Afghanistan, but that's the thing Afghanistan makes me think about and worry about. So just to comment on what Carter said, and Carter was in a very unique spot advising the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, but we also take a very centralized focus on Afghanistan. And I participated in a war game in about 2010, 2011. And they put up on the board on the left-hand side, U.S. national security interest. In the middle of the board was U.S. regional interest. And on the right of the board was

Afghan-Pakistan interest. And we did a war game about how can we be more successful in Afghanistan, but there was one catch. You could only make a move that didn't violate any of the things to the left of it. So if we wanted to throw in $17 billion into Afghanistan, because that's what we thought they needed to survive, if the national security interest was for us to counter Russia or China, and we didn't have those resources, we couldn't make that move. And I think a lot of time people look at, we could have done more, we could have done different in Afghanistan, but they often forget what was going on domestically with the recession and economic collapse in the U.S. during some of that time period, with the fact that terrorism was expanding beyond Afghanistan. And right now, looking at places like Ukraine and other conflict zones,

I mean, it's not a singular focus issue. If all we did in our National Security Council meetings was just talk about a single country, we probably would make slightly different things. But it really is balancing all of these various things that the U.S. has to balance from a national security perspective. And then from there, deciding where the resources are needed. And so, again, I think a lot of times, a lot of decisions are, we just needed more time. We just needed more troops. We just needed more money. And I think we failed to account for how much more and what would that have taken away for our ability to do other things that we probably needed to do in the realm of national security. To that last point, was a

lack of focus or a strategic incoherence over multiple administrations and congresses at play in what happened with Afghanistan? So yes, it is at play, but we should be careful about saying if we had a better strategy that we would have won or that we would have enabled the Afghans to stand on their own. The main thing a better strategy would have enabled us to do would have been to have gone through the war with fewer economic costs and fewer lives lost, especially for America and its allies, but also possibly for Afghans. That's the greatest benefit of a better strategy. better strategy? I think from the administrations, a lot of the strategic messaging that we were doing didn't align to the strategy and the ends, ways, and means we were going to implement that strategy. We always talked about the strategic partnership, that we were going to stay in

Afghanistan forever, that we have certain interests in Afghanistan. But every administration from President Bush all the way to President Biden always had one eye on the exit. You know, President Bush's initial strategy was let's do a light footprint approach and be out by the first election. And there was no plans to expand our presence beyond there to do more. But as Carter has kind of mentioned in his book, you know, security conditions and the Afghans have a say in it. And they created an environment in which we decided we needed to stay longer and it drew out our presence more. Whether or not it should have is a debate to have. But then you moved into Obama with the surge and then the withdrawal back to a smaller number. You have President Trump with the South Asia Review and then going into a negotiation with the Taliban and then President Biden, of course,

executing the final withdrawal. But everybody had this one eye kind of out the door. And the creation of the ANDSF was kind of this exit strategy. How do we get out? It was never, how are we going to stay in Afghanistan long term? Afghanistan has strategic interests. We need to have a long-term plan like we did in places like Korea and other places like Germany. It was more of, how do we get out?

We need to do what we can quickly. And then we need to transition to bigger and better things. And so when you have that kind of strategy where you're kind of talking out one mouth that they're the strategic asset that we need to have long term, and then the other way, you're always looking at the exit, you know, those type of strategies, even if you have the best laid plan, if you're just trying to get out, you're not going to be able to execute it in any efficient manner. I think this touches on a bigger question, which is,

it's kind of a known variable in political science and the study of civil wars that civil wars last a long time, depending on the data set you look, between 14 and 20 years on average. So there's not really any quick exit strategy if you just look at the nature of civil wars. And so for a country like the United States, which is a democracy, which has rotating commanders going through every couple of years, do you think it's possible to come up with a coherent and consistent strategy for what is almost inevitably going to be a long intervention unless we figure out how to solve civil war overall, which nobody has figured out how to do yet? So one of the most important points here is that in a strategy and for a war like Afghanistan, and perhaps for any war, we should expect that goals will change. In creating strategy, we shouldn't think from

the beginning that we will be able to create a coherent strategy that is going to last through the war. We should understand instead that strategy is, in this case, is going to have a process to it in which goals are going to change. And we could walk through the Afghan war, I'm not going to put you through it right now, to see how goals change repeatedly. So it's going to be hard to create something from the beginning. Let me throw in another point. One of the mistakes we made consistently was being overconfident. One of the mistakes we made consistently was being overconfident. Or another way to put this is not realizing that our goals could change or the situation could change in Afghanistan.

We often presumed we knew which way things were going to go. In the beginning, the Taliban were toppled and they're not going to come back. Well, that proved pretty wrong during the surge. Well, that proved pretty wrong during the surge. That the surge was going to succeed, would be fairly cost effective, and enable us to stay for longer or the Afghans to stand on their own. That didn't work. Later on, we thought that we were going to withdraw. We were actually going to get out. So there was a variety of things we would have done.

We should have ensured, we should have put in place for the event we didn't actually withdraw. But we were very convinced we were going to withdraw. And then we can talk, you know, we probably talked very specifically about how we, what we thought in those last months and how that proved wrong. So to me, it's that we didn't have enough forethought. And forethought isn't foresight. It's not predicting the future. Forethought is understanding the different ways the future can go. And so you've probably read Jeff Friedman's book, War and Chance, but I enjoyed going through it and just talking about how one should be thinking probabilistically about how the future will go and not assume that it's going to go the way you think it's going

to go. So that failure to think probabilistically, I think we could say is a big reason for the lack of strategic coherence. You know, one of the most egregious that I've heard throughout my time looking at Afghanistan was I had a commander about to go out into Afghanistan around 2014 and into 2015. And he said he wasn't too worried about how security would unfold after we left because there's no way the Taliban and the NDSF would shoot at each other because they're both Afghans and they're four brothers. And I told him that I would love for him to report back to me that that

was the case after his tour. But as we all noticed, that definitely was not. I think we also failed to understand basic game theory, finite versus infinite game theory, right? We try to fight finite wars. This next bomb is going to win. This deal is going to transform society. And we always try to strike that decisive blow because we just have decisive power in our arsenal. In reality, people like the Taliban, and even right now you're seeing it with the National Resistance Front. It's, you know, I'm still in the game. You know, my job is not to be defeated.

My job is to stay involved. And so they're playing more of chess while we're playing checkers. And so we're trying to hit the decisive blow and they're just trying to evade defeat. And so you're starting to still see that happen right now, right? The ANDSF was defeated. It's kind of the mantra that we have. And now you're starting to see the National Resistance Front coming out and saying, we're now having support.

We're now the insurgency against the Taliban. Come and support us. And if they get that support, you're going to kind of go through the cycle again of these civil wars. So all we did in Afghanistan for 20 years is provide an artificial stalemate of sorts. You know, our presence kind of changed the dynamic of Afghanistan for that time being. But now, since we left, the dynamics are evolving and changing. Everyone's still trying to be part of that game. And so it's just a matter of understanding it. As Carter mentioned, the goals are changing. The milestones are changing. The environment is going to change. How do you adapt to those type of environments when you're always

trying to say this next strategy or this next doctrine or this next program is going to somehow transform this into a winning game when everybody, as you had mentioned, you know, this is a long-term multi-generational task. And so one thing that helps here is if you recognize that the future may not go the way you think it's going to go, and there's different ways it can play out, is first of all, consider a wider range of options for what your policy is going to be and what your strategy and what your military action is going to be. This comes up most clearly in the surge, where basically only one option was considered, counterinsurgency and reinforcement of forces. You could say CT plus was a separate one, but the difference in forces that were going to be sent is actually very small.

And you don't have things thought of like, well, should we leave entirely? Should we not surge at all, just keep the current forces? Should we not surge at all and stay for a long period of time, not thinking we're going to be able to leave quickly? Should we make our surge contingent on improvements in Afghan government? Don't do it until we see some reforms. Should we set as a goal some kind of peace negotiations? These kind of things weren't considered. And what these things do is you put any of these in place. Maybe you think that you're going down one path and you're very certain about it. But when you do some of these other actions, you're laying in insurance

that if something goes the other way, you've done some things to ensure for that, to make sure we are more flexible, more ready to address those problems. And in that regard, the cheaper the actions that you take, the less expensive that they are for you to do, the more worthwhile they are and the easier they are to do. And also the more one should be criticized if one happened to overlook them or purposely not use them in making strategy. You know, I would have to give Carter some credit on this one. You know, Carter, when we were doing the South Asia review, led a failure analysis team where we brought in outside experts and a group of us got together and discussed radical ideas.

What went wrong? Why did it go wrong? And kind of opened up that larger net of having discussions on these issues. In the years that I worked at Afghanistan prior to that, there was a few other kind of red teaming exercises on the strategy, but none really that took root in the fact that we need to have this wide net cast on what are the options, what are the various things we're going to face, and what are the things we need to somewhat account for? And I think that we're not reflective enough. Maybe it's because the people who are going in Afghanistan are only there for 12 months, and when they come back, they look at something different and are not held to account to their

actions because their actions have repercussions after they're already gone. But being able to be really reflexive and admit this is not going the way it should be going versus just doubling down on it was a true issue. And some of that goes back to transparency and accountability. You know, how many hearings did Congress have on Afghanistan? How many hearings did they have about why is this not producing the results you told me it was going to produce? You know, every time we had a hearing with a new commander of, you know, U.S. forces out there, that commander had the ability to go, well, my predecessor had this plan that may not have worked well, but my new plan is the golden ticket to our strategy. And so there wasn't enough rigorous oversight to go,

why are we not being adaptive and flexible? And I think without that kind of transparent oversight, you're allowing these agencies to get into that cruise control position, which is just to continue to move forward in one function and not continuously identifying and addressing the goals change, the environments change. We need to modify these approaches because we're not getting the intended outcomes that we want. But we didn't have that rigorous oversight. And then internally, we didn't have that internal rigor that Carter's talking about where we weren't being larger net cast on being able to understand what is the environment we're going to face, and that our decision today may not be the decision we need to make tomorrow. I want to narrow in on the last few months that preceded the fall of Afghanistan, and specifically ask, what happened? And why did the ANDSF collapse in the way that it did? CSF collapse in the way that it did? So I guess I could go through just a couple of the factors.

So, you know, we just recently released an interim report not too long ago on some of the factors, and we're releasing a report coming out probably by the end of the year on a final. But really, you know, one of the things we looked at is the decision made by both President Trump and President Biden to do the withdrawal really changed the calculus of all the different stakeholders in Afghanistan, which led to them making decisions and actions that kind of accelerated the process. Now, again, 20 years of missteps, 20 years of corruption, 20 years of corrosive activities definitely put the NDSF in a position of weakness. So I'm not discounting, you know, the prior months and years before that decision. There was definitely some issues that made us in a

position of weakness when that decision was made. But change the calculus starting on that point. You had the Afghan government not doing a national security plan, not reducing checkpoints, not providing alternative strategies for how they're going to do this without us leaving. You have President Ghani who said he's going to call our bluff. We could never leave. Afghanistan is the most important. And to be honest, he probably had a lot of basis for it. Members of Congress are going public saying that we shouldn't leave Afghanistan. Every administration prior to that, you know, pulled back from their decision to leave. So, again, he just never thought we'd leave and didn't plan to do so.

And he micromanaged security by changing commanders to his loyalists and then removing some of the most professional commanders because they were too tied to the U.S. And the U.S. was leaving and he feared a coup. You had the U.S., we reduced airstrikes. In 2019, we were at like 7,000 airstrikes. We took away almost 6,000 of them the next year, within a day. The next day after that decision was made, the joint operations cell that was being leveraged by the Afghan security forces and the U.S. to fight back the Taliban, the U.S. no longer could provide support within 24 hours. And so you had that. You had us removing maintainers. You had us removing a variety of actors, contractors. As General Barno told us, it was like pulling everything out of a jingle pile when you took the contractors out. We made

these decisions and steps that really put them at a deficiency and at a moment of weakness. decisions and steps that really put them in a deficiency and at a moment of weakness. And then you had the Afghan society and power brokers like Ada and Dostum and Ismail Khan trying to create these resistance movements and then eventually fleeing the country when things got tough. And then finally, you had the Taliban who had the morale behind them. They had the motivation behind them. They had the momentum behind them. They took advantage of the situation.

They realized Andiassef's capabilities were at an ultimate low. They realized their morale was low. They started offering amnesty, really playing that card in propaganda. The Taliban understood the deal and how much U.S. support was going to the NDSF. And so a lot of times it was, we're not going to attack them if they're within a thousand meters of a checkpoint. So what they would do is they would attack the checkpoint. They would hear our F-16s coming. They would run back and hide in the woods a thousand and one meters away, realizing that we can't target them. Then after we need to do a refueling mission, then they go and attack it again. And they knew how to play around our TTPs. And the ANDSF just was really at a deficiency at that point. And the Taliban continued to move even from a hit and run insurgency to amassing its troops and actually going after these isolated checkpoints

with large numbers and being able to do so. So all of these different actors took certain decisions and activities at that time and collectively, it really led to a collapse, a rapid collapse, because each action taken by each of those actors put the NDSF in a weaker position, put the Afghan government in a weaker position, and put the U.S. in a weaker position to provide support to them. So this is not a conversation on Iraq, but we have the benefit of Carter also having written a book about Iraq, which we've actually discussed in a previous episode. And so, you know, if you look at Afghanistan, the U.S. invested a whole bunch of resources, as well as our partners and allies within the coalition, to build it. And then the ANDSF collapsed quickly. And you could argue the same thing happened in Iraq after withdrawal there.

And so this leads to a question, you know, James brought up a bunch of kind of specific issues with this case. But does this indicate there might be some fundamental flaw with the U.S. approach to security assistance that transcends both of these cases in your view, Carter? I don't see it as a, I mean, there are flaws in how we provide security assistance, but I don't see that as the major issue. The major issue is our expectations, that we have an expectation that when we provide the security assistance, that these forces will be able to stand up on their own and fight well on their own, not recognizing often how dependent they are on U.S. airstrikes and advising. Now, that dependency may not be something that we can get around because as we talk about motivational differences, how occupiers create their own problems for those forces, as we talk

about the various frictions that exist within government forces, within tribal forces, there's a very big similarity there between the two. And the cohesion that can exist in the opposition forces, which tend to be able to align themselves better with Islam. Then we're seeing some fundamental things that probably don't have a lot to do with the tactics that we use or exactly how much money we put in or exactly how good an advisor is and whether an advisor is at the lowest possible unit that's probably less important than readjusting our expectations to understand if we're going to go in these places and give this kind of assistance we should not think that these forces are going to be able to fight well on their own once we depart. And I'm not saying I want to be

careful about generalizing that. I wouldn't say that's the case everywhere in the world, but it's definitely something we should be thinking about. And one of the things that I think was challenging as far as expectations is the lack of our ability to assess the will to fight of our partners. And I know that several general officers have said, you know, we didn't have the advisors at the local level to look the Afghans in the eye and determine whether or not they would fight. But, you know, every organization, every company, every agency, they put out these sensing kind of letters or, you know, things that they're inquiring about

amongst their people that are working for them on, are they satisfied with their job, right? They're putting out a lot of these surveys. And if you put out a survey in the ANDSF, you would have realized they're not getting paid. They're barely getting food. They may get ammunition and they're at an all-time low in morale and political will. So the fact that we think that we can't measure these certain aspects, I think is flawed. And so without measuring not how many bullets they have, you know, were they trained to shoot correctly, which is what we do, our expectation is somehow that they're going to stand up and fight when we leave. And there's broader things to look at. I know I looked at very tactical issues in their political

will to fight there, but there's larger issues. There are ties back to the central government. There are ties back to their cause. You is their family dynamics and their willingness to fight in a province that's potentially far away from their hometown? There's a lot of dynamics that are in play, but our expectation somehow is that we created this 350,000 national army that had national identity and had a national cause, and that was going to stand on its two feet. And unfortunately, that definitely was not what we developed and is not what we had, but we expected them to somehow take over this mantle, despite the fact that they were not ready to do so. Well, James, I would say that the evidence was there long before 2021. And I would

say that many people did note that that evidence wasn't there and said so repeatedly. And I venture to say you're one of them. And so, you know, in 2013 and 2013, more than 2014, but, you know, 2012, 2013, you could still see occasions when Afghan forces, units, platoons, police forces would fight on their own. Like U.S. airstrikes didn't happen to be there. They would fight on their own. They would push back the Taliban. That started to decrease over time, partly because we weren't there, but also just that there was this, just because a few had done it before didn't mean everyone was going to do it. That's what you started to see. As we weren't there, then you

see more incidents of forces falling apart, not defending well. And so in 2015, this was extremely clear. Well, the Taliban make their first big push in 2015, take out most of Helmand, including like Marja. They take care of Kunduz, get into the provincial capital. Those were signs. If they weren't going to fight over Marja, if they weren't going to fight hard over kundus those were critical signs that when it came down to being alone without us that they also weren't going to fight and then but after 2015 it is hard to find any examples of the afghan succeeding without u.s air support or u.s advisors that includes the special operations for afghan special operations forces when they didn't have our advising on airstrikes, they also did that. So there is five, six,

seven years of evidence that precedes what happened in 2021. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with Carter. I think the 2015 example kind of goes back to one of the points I made before is when that happened and they lost Helmand and they lost Conduce, I mean, what did the U.S. do? We rechanged our calculus and we started sending in the Marines back into Helmand. We spent special forces into Conduce and we bailed them out. And the growing thought process was when Biden made the decision to withdraw, many Afghans have told us this, is that they thought when Kandahar fell, that we would come and bail them out. When that Mezir Shari'i fell, that we would come and bail them out. And when they started realizing that we weren't, you actually started seeing even more so the Afghans abandoning checkpoints, coming up with negotiations, because they thought at some point we were going to kind

of jump back in and realize that we somehow made some bad decision in leaving. But the fact that we continue to do it, and I think Bagram was one of those big ones. When we closed Bagram, I think a lot of times the Afghans have told us, that really changed my capital. Now I realize you probably are leaving. And so it started modifying them into survival mode. But again, in that 2015 example that Carter talked about is we went back in. Every administration pushed the limits of withdrawal until it started really getting bad, and then they rechanged it. And this time, I think the Afghans were expecting that. We drove that expectation within them. And then we decided this time is going to be different. And the Afghans were caught off guard. And they definitely took different actions after they realized we would not come back and support

them. We've talked a lot about strategy and strategic decision making. But Carter, your book's overarching argument is a cultural one, that the Taliban's tie to what it meant to be Afghan was an essential element of America's defeat in Afghanistan. Does this mean we were doomed to fail from the start? And what are the implications for future American interventions or occupations abroad? abroad? Being a necessary condition doesn't mean that we were doomed from the start, because there's other necessary conditions that you might be able to alter that would allow some kind of success. However, as we've now discussed, it seems it was pretty slim, that there were other chances to actually lead to victory or the Afghans being able to stand on their own. And there's particular things that could have been done early on to bring the Taliban into the political process. There are also things that could have been done to build either a larger or a higher quality Afghan military and police force

early on as the Taliban were starting to reform. And that could have had a bigger effect. And then the thing that's brought up by Thomas Barfield and other major thinkers is that we should have created a constitution that was more decentralized, that put accountability of the governors and of the local leaders, make them accountable to the people, that we should have made those governors, those local leaders accountable to the people. In other words, appointed or elected by those people. And that if that had happened, they would have taken more care of the people and the people wouldn't have turned to the Taliban. Now, for all of you academics, there's a lot of counterfactual in that argument. But just because there's a lot of counterfactual doesn't mean we shouldn't think about it. And we shouldn't appreciate larger structural arguments like that.

So those are some ways. But the last thing I'll say on this particular bit is to jump back to where I began. The biggest changes that we could have seen made regard fewer costs for us and less casualties for us. And that has to do with, again, having some better options, not thinking so much. We knew the way things were going, probably not surging. And there's a variety of other little things that could have been done along the way to create less cost for us. And if I understand, based on your opening comments, a lot of that has to do not just with what's going to happen in Afghanistan, but what's's going to happen in the u.s domestic tolerance for what is inevitably going to be a

long engagement because civil wars last a long time is that a fair assessment yeah so that'll be a constraint on what we do too so being sustainable in this is also important i guess that that is a lot of what i'm saying is that a more sustainable strategy with less uh less involvement footprint, would have been less costly, would have involved fewer, less loss of life. James, what are the policy implications we can take away from our 20-year adventure in Afghanistan when the next one rolls around and we're trying to figure out, you know, looking back at Afghanistan, what did we learn that we can do this next one better? Yeah, there's a lot to learn, I think, from this one. I think there's a lot to learn from other ones as well. I think the first thing is kind of goes back to the first comment of the podcast, which is that we're not learning. You know, we're identifying a lot of these issues.

Carter wrote a great book. We put out reports. A lot of others have put out reports. And they're not changing. There's no change being made. There's no strategic calculus, differences between what we're doing now and what we'll do in the future. I mean, I pulled up reports from Korea, Vietnam, a variety of other places, and things weren't changed then. Why do we think things are going to be changed now? Iraq's another case study that we could look at.

And so we're not learning. We're identifying these things. They're going into Army War College, Marine Corps University. People are talking about it, but we're not actually changing it. And I think that's one of the big ones that we have right now. We need somebody to change it. We will be doing stabilization operations. We will be doing reconstruction post-conflict. These are things we will be engaged in from a national security perspective going forward and things that we need to grasp. We also need to understand that the way forward is going to be by, with, and through our partners. It's coming out in our national defense strategy. It's something we learned in Afghanistan, something we've also learned part of Iraq as well, is how do you work with your partners? How do you set goals and strategy? How do you determine

the costs associated to it? When we talk about political will and political commitment, you know, all we have to do is look inside of the NATO construct. And when President Obama decided to surge, the Netherlands supported the surge. And the day after their support, there was a vote of no confidence and the entire government was removed, right? That was a secondary effect to a decision to support our effort in Afghanistan. I mean, we have to think that these are going to be places where it's not only the U.S., but how does the U.S. and our multinational partners reform, modify, and come up with better practices going forward? And one of the problems is, how do we divest the two,

which is short-term military operations and long-term engagement with that country? In Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries, we put a four-star in charge of all of it. Had the most influence, had the most power. We put in temporary organizations. You look at Ukraine, it's still very military heavy. We're now starting to come in

with alternative funding for Ukraine that's outside of the normal State Department funding. Again, there's a lot of militarizing of that foreign policy, but the military is not going to have that long-term 30-year posture. It's typically going to go back to a civilian-led effort. And so how do we go into these environments knowing we're going to have to prioritize the military campaign and prioritize security first, but ensuring that it doesn't overtake the larger foreign policy being led by our embassies and by our civilian components. And so a lot to unpack. There's a lot to focus on, but it really is going to take people to take that time to be reflective

of what did we do right? What did we do wrong? And for our senior leaders to actually learn from those experiences and change our processes and procedures going forward. That includes Congress, the administrations, and the executive branch agencies. Carter, from you, what policy implications do you see for both policymakers and practitioners? Some of them we've spoken about already for a light footprint and what you need to move forward on that. The larger scale implication will probably be as we think about when's the next place we're going to go in and do we think it's worthwhile to be doing that. And that's going to create some consternation. We should remember when we do that and when we come to that point a few things. First of all, whatever triggers us to get into something,

and this could apply to the Ukraine too, we often will overvalue our interests in the beginning. Emotions often tend to run strong like they did at the beginning of the Afghan war when many Americans honestly wanted revenge. in our calculations. Over time, that's going to change. That interest is going to appear to be less. And so that's something we should think about now with Ukraine and the next time we get involved in something. We're willing to do it now. How long are we going to be willing to do it later on? Next point I would say we should think about in these kind of circumstances is overconfidence. Not letting initial successes make us think that we are able to do more. Not making us then willing to take another bite. Overconfidence can feed mission creep. And we should be wary of that. And then that also feeds into thinking about what are the different ways that things could go. Not thinking it's going to go in one direction,

but recognizing there's multiple different ways things could go. How do we align our options against that? And in defense of all the Intel analysts who got accused last year of not predicting things within 11 days, do we think people predict the future? Do you expect people to predict the future within 11 days? That seems to me to be horribly unfair. Our leaders need to operate in an environment of uncertainty and operate with judgment through that and not expect Intel analysts to tell them exactly when something's going to happen. tell them exactly when something's going to happen. Thank you again for joining us for episode 61 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Laura and Ben will speak with University of Chicago professor Christopher Blattman about his book, Why We Fight. Following that, Kyle and Laura will discuss France's experience with Task Force Barkhan in West Africa with retired French Brigadier General Francois-Marie Goujon

and Professor Will Reno. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. You can follow and engage with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter for access to our content and upcoming community events.

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