It’s impossible to sugarcoat the situation.
Afghan security forces trained, armed, and financed by the United States to the tune of $90 billion, are essentially disintegrating before our very eyes. The Taliban have captured so many provincial capitals over the past week (seven as of the last count) that it’s becoming hard to keep track of developments.
Most of the discussions since President Joe Biden’s April announcement of a full U.S. troop withdrawal have centered on whether the Taliban will take Kabul. But the collapse of the Afghan army reveals something even more disturbing about Washington’s 20-year experience in Afghanistan. Namely, the fact that senior U.S. commanders and officials couldn’t have been more wrong in their public statements about imminent success.
Craig Whitlock is a Washington Post journalist whose blockbuster Afghanistan papers expose in 2019 showed how badly things have gone in Afghanistan. He has a book set for release this month, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, that exposes the huge gap between what U.S. military commanders told the public and what the daily reality actually looked like.
Of course, none of this should be surprising. Successive officials across multiple administrations have glossed over major problems with the Afghan government. Instead, they offered rosy projections of success. This is familiar terrain for U.S. commanders, who have repeatedly shown themselves to be constantly defensive about their legacies. They like to be cheerleaders for the cameras. (Consider William Westmoreland’s 1967 speech to Congress promising victory in Vietnam, for example.)
However, in the case of Afghanistan, the cheerleading has been other-worldly.
It was as if the senior U.S. military leadership was trying to manufacture their own realities, either to preserve their own reputations or to obfuscate the messiness (perhaps both). There are too many flowery comments to mention, but some of the most infamous involve repeated assurances that the war was “turning a corner” (see Gen. David Petraeus in 2011 and John Nicholson in 2017). Or how about the claim that Afghanistan’s army was on the road to becoming an independent, self-sufficient, and professional force.
Others, such as former commanding Gen. John Allen, boldly claimed that the Taliban were getting pummeled on the battlefield and scrounging for funding streams. Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the Taliban remained a lethal, well-stocked, and relatively unified force that challenged the Afghan army at will. And to top it off, the group had the fortunate privilege of a sympathetic Pakistan. Islamabad’s support through its intelligence apparatus has allowed the Taliban leadership to operate unmolested across the border.
But what a commander may have said in this or that interview should not obscure the most fundamental point in America’s 20-year saga: Even the most powerful nation in the world can only do so much in a country whose politicians are uninterested in reform and whose state structure rests on a heap of corruption, parochialism, ethnic competition, political infighting, and side-switching. The U.S. was always fighting a losing battle, too often pulled further into the muck by the sunk-cost fallacy.
Washington could never build a functioning, unitary democracy in Afghanistan. Regrettably, it expended far too much time, blood, and treasure before the U.S. foreign policy establishment finally reached the point of accepting this tough but straightforward conclusion.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
