The commentary below is based on the remarks shown in the above video, which I made on November 13, 2024, at a conference convened by the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The conference was entitled, “GNSI Policy Dialogues: Rethinking Afghanistan, Strategic Competition in the Heart of Asia.” I spoke on a panel about lessons learned and not learned from the United States’ 20-year war in Afghanistan.
The program asked my panel to address the following questions:
1. What key policy lessons were learned during the 20-year war in Afghanistan?
2. What effective “soft power” strategies can the U.S. deploy in Afghanistan to better serve U.S. and regional interests?
Here is an elaboration of what I said:
The classical Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote: “Know the enemy, know yourself; one hundred battles, one hundred victories.”
Previous speakers have discussed how the U.S. failed to understand the enemy in Afghanistan. But equally if not more egregious was our failure to understand ourselves. This failure renders the U.S. incapable of learning lessons.
SOFT POWER
The main source of the “soft power” of the U.S. has been its claim to be an “indispensable nation” representing, however imperfectly, the values of democracy and human rights. In my travels throughout the world, I have found that many who criticize the hypocrisy or “double standards” of the U.S. do so out of disappointment as much as anger, because they very existence of a country standing for such ideals, secretly gave them hope.
In 2017 in Beijing, a Chinese official on the staff of the standing committee of the Communist Party Politburo commented as he gave me a ride in his private car, that though he did not believe that China could become a democracy, the very existence of a country such as the U.S. gave him hope. Over dinner at a stylish Peking duck restaurant, the only topic he wanted to discuss was the growing anti-democratic movement in the U.S. led by Donald Trump.
A few days before the GNSI conference I had returned from a trip sponsored by the Stimson Center to China, Qatar, and Pakistan. In one of these countries’ capitals, as I was leaving a small diplomatic lunch devoted to discussing Afghanistan, an Iranian diplomat pulled me aside. He asked me, out of hearing of the other participants, if the U.S. understood how its support for Israel’s destruction and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was destroying any U.S. claim to stand for democracy and human rights, and even discrediting those very ideals. He did not confront me in front of the others; his demeanor conveyed not anger, but anxiety and alarm.
I had these and other experiences in mind as I listened to speakers on a panel on human rights and humanitarian affairs in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. They praised the work of Richard Bennett, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, who continues to document violations of human rights, especially those of women, by the Taliban interim authorities. Panelists discussed how the Taliban regime has violated international agreements on human rights and women’s rights and suggested that they might be held accountable through the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or the International criminal court (ICC).
While the U.S. cites Richard Bennett as an authoritative source on violations by the Taliban, it simultaneously seeks to undermine, discredit, and defame his colleague, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian Territories, calling her “unfit” and even antisemitic. Anyone comparing the reports of these diligent and principled international experts cannot help but notice both that their methods and standards are identical and that the scale of death and destruction wrought by Israel far exceeds anything the Taliban have done.
The U.S. and other Western countries who have derided and defied the jurisdiction over Israel of the ICJ and the ICC are in no position to use these same mechanisms to hold the Taliban accountable. The U.S. has astoundingly characterized as “unfounded” the ICJ’s nearly unanimous judgment that there are plausible grounds to conclude that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, found in the voluminous evidence presented to the court of genocidal acts and intent.
While making meaningless mild statements “opposing” Israeli settlements in the Palestine territories, which the ICJ has ruled violate international law, the U.S. continues to provide indispensable material support for the policy of settlement and creeping annexation. Belated sanctions against a few individuals and NGOs involved in illegal settlement cannot outweigh the U.S.’s full-bore support of the Israeli state. Both Israeli officials and nominees of President Trump are vowing to complete the annexation of the remaining Palestinian territories.
The U.S. has characterized as “shameful” the ICC war crime indictments of Israeli officials issued at the request of prosecutor Karim Khan In response to the possibility that the court’s investigations in Afghanistan might extend to the actions of the United States, the U.S. revoked the visa of the ICC chief prosecutor and enacted sanctions against ICC employees who might investigate U.S. actions.
The U.S. bipartisan consensus to provide material and diplomatic support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the West Bank, war crimes against the population of Lebanon, and state terrorism such as targeted assassinations throughout the region; plus its insistence on total impunity for its own actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere, have destroyed whatever moral authority the U.S. might claim to invoke international standards and mechanisms for enforcing standards of human rights and humanitarian law against the Taliban. President Trump’s nomination for defense secretary of Pete Hegseth, who successfully campaigned for amnesty for US servicemen convicted of war crimes, signals, unsurprisingly, that the incoming administration will double down on the Biden administration’s contempt for international law.
The moral blindness and dehumanization of Afghans that allowed President Biden to declare that the U.S. has “zero responsibility” for the welfare of the Afghan women to whom it falsely promised a better future, is identical to the moral blindness and dehumanization of Palestinians that enables a bipartisan consensus in the U.S. to support Israeli genocide and war crimes as legitimate self-defense. Both are obvious to others, if invisible to us.
CORRUPTION AND “TRIBALISM”
The United States has shown that it is institutionally unable to provide usable support for sustainable institutions in a country like Afghanistan, one of the poorest in the world. Rather than help create conditions for an economy capable of sustaining stronger institutions, the U.S. poured cash into training and paying Afghans and high-priced international consultants to go through motions of governance that superficially resembled U.S. or Western institutions. These organizations were mechanisms for injecting obscene amounts of cash – many multiples of Afghanistan’s own gross domestic product -- into one of the poorest countries in the world. The tsunami of cash drowned Afghan society’s own governance mechanisms in a tidal wave of corruption.
In the economy the U.S. created, the biggest industry was not the production of any usable goods, but the provision of services to the United States. Virtually none of the pseudo-institutions reliant on foreign funding survived the U.S. withdrawal. They simply collapsed; the Taliban had no need to destroy them.
Some conference speakers attributed the collapse of U.S. models to the failure to understand Afghan « tribalism. » This formulation makes it sound like the U.S. needed to devise better programs to help Afghans overcome their backwardness.
So-called “tribalism” is not backward or “traditional.” It consists of mechanisms for governance and producing public goods in a society whose economy does not produce a sufficient surplus above subsistence to fund a hierarchical bureaucratic state and the educational, legal, and other institutions that it requires. Instead, such a society relies on relations of kinship (broadly construed) and reciprocity for governance. Such a society is composed not of the autonomous individuals posited by liberal theory, but by a variety of collectivities — familial, religious, commercial, military, and others — that interact in a framework of customary and religious law.
These mechanisms adapt to new situations that require more resources, such as military threats from more powerful states, by creating mixed systems that combine “tribalism” with hierarchical forms of authority. But creating such systems depends on access to new resources and sophisticated understanding of the functioning of both “tribes” and states. However wise and foresighted the founders of the American republic may have been in designing institutions that melded the doctrine of natural rights with chattel slavery, they did not design any institutions fit for the purpose of understanding or intervening in a society like Afghanistan’s.
Lacking any framework for understanding or interacting with such a society, U.S. and international bureaucracies labeled Afghans as “lacking capacity,” i.e. deficient in imitating them, and tried to train Afghans in the skills needed to run organizations that could not function in Afghanistan. Hence the doctrine of “counterinsurgency,” calling for the U.S. to build new institutions and transfer them to indigenous owners, turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. Military leaders responded to its repeated failures by calling for more troops and more funding. Training and paying people to carry out organizational procedures imposed on their society created not new institutions but fragile simulacra thereof.
TERRORISM
In sessions that preceded my panel, three of the most senior U.S. officials who dealt with Afghanistan – Zalmay Khalilzad, former Ambassador to Afghanistan (as well as Iraq and the U.N.) and Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation; General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr., former commander of U.S. Central Command; and P. Michael McKinley, former Ambassador to Afghanistan (as well as Brazil, Peru, and Colombia) – all observed that the U.S. missed its best chance to succeed in Afghanistan after the quick victory of its military operation against al Qaeda in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
After evading inadequate efforts by U.S. forces, al Qaeda had decamped from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Virtually every senior Taliban leader except Mullah Omar had surrendered, offered to cooperate, or laid down arms and returned home. Even if it was impossible to include them in the Bonn Talks while the war was still going on, the process agreed upon at Bonn to create a more representative government provided mechanisms for integrating Taliban leaders into the new system.
Instead, the U.S. hunted them down, even treacherously arresting them when they came to meetings under guarantees of security, and sent them to Guantanamo. They were left with no alternative but to flee to Pakistan and fight. I have documented these events in detail in an article, “The Two Trillion Dollar Misunderstanding – Sowing the Seeds of Instability from the Very Beginning,” forthcoming in the Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies.
One source of this blunder was historical and political blindness to how decades of war and foreign interference had produced the Taliban, and an inability to perceive their differences from al Qaeda, obscured by the apolitical catch-all concept of “terrorism.” Blind or indifferent to the political origins of “terrorism,” and especially its own role in provoking it, the U.S. elevated a millennia-old tactic to the level of a strategic threat. It declared a War on “Terror,” while ignoring, denying, or aggravating the political conflicts that provoked it.
Why did the U.S. not succeed in Afghanistan? Because it never tried to succeed in Afghanistan. If U.S. policy makers had sought to help Afghanistan become stable and sustainable, they might at least have defined the right objectives. But President Bush declared that the U.S. goal was to “rid the world of evil.” “This nation is peaceful,” he said, raising self-delusion to a first principle. To rid the world of evil, President Bush declared, the U.S. would inflict the same fate on those who harbor terrorists as it did on the terrorists themselves. The aim was the nonsensical one of waging war on a tactic, as long as it was used by those we considered our enemies.
In 2001, when CIA operatives on the ground who were working with Taliban leaders after 9/11 offered alternatives aimed at separating the Taliban from al Qaeda and involving them in the country’s political process, the White House, led by Vice-President Cheney, swatted them away. The result was a threat that the U.S. knew how to meet only with troop deployments whose indiscriminate firepower pushed many Afghans into the arms of the Taliban and expenditures that inflated expectations before collapsing.
In practice U.S. policy toward Afghanistan treated that country as a theater for a global struggle against a tactic, which aggravated the political conflicts that give rise to violence. The U.S. policy discourse as I experienced it in and out of government had no place for the actual Afghanistan, with its history, economy, politics, society, geography, and cultures. Instead it was based on a mindset in which the lack of knowledge of both its enemies and itself condemned the U.S. to failure without even defining what success might be.