THE AMERICAN WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
A History
By Carter Malkasian
The AFGHANISTAN PAPERS
A Secret History of the War
By Craig Whitlock
In the predawn hours of July 1 they departed, the few remaining U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan,
the center of operations for America’s longest war. At its peak the
sprawling compound — there were two runways, a 50-bed hospital, shops
and restaurants, and a notorious “black jail” prison — housed tens of
thousands of U.S. service members; now the last of them flew off,
without fanfare and after shutting off the electricity. It marked the
symbolic end of America’s 20-year military intervention in a war-ravaged
land.
Left behind at the base were
some 3.5 million items, carefully cataloged, including furniture and
electronics, small arms and ammunition, as well as thousands of civilian
vehicles and hundreds of armored trucks. The plan was for the material
to be inherited by the Afghan military; most of it was, but not before
looters made off with a substantial haul.
It
will be up to historians of the future, writing with broad access to
official documents and with the kind of detachment that only time
brings, to fully explain the remarkable early-morning scene at Bagram
and all that led up to it. But there’s much we can already learn —
abundant material is available. When the historians get down to work,
chances are they will make ample use of two penetrating new works: Carter Malkasian’s “The American War in Afghanistan” and Craig Whitlock’s “The Afghanistan Papers.”
The
two volumes constitute a powerful one-two punch, covering as they do
the key developments in the war and reaching broadly similar
conclusions, but with differing emphases. Malkasian provides greater
detail and context, while Whitlock’s United States-centric account is
fast-paced and vivid, and chock-full of telling quotes. Both authors
paint a picture of an American war effort that, after breathtaking early
success, lost its way, never to recover.
My
recommendation is to read the Malkasian first. A former civilian
adviser in Afghanistan who also served as a senior aide to the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Malkasian speaks Pashto and has a
doctorate in history. In this, his third and most comprehensive book on
Afghanistan, he provides a broad-reaching and quietly authoritative
overview of U.S. involvement, from 9/11 onward. He is good on military
operations, including the Battle of Marjah
in 2010. No less important, he enlightens us on the Afghan part of the
story — on the tribal system and its variations; on the forbidding
geography, so vital in the fighting; on the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and his decision-making; on the complex and ever-shifting relationships between the government of Hamid Karzai and the warlords in the provinces.
Whitlock,
a veteran Washington Post reporter, expands on a much-discussed series
of articles that appeared in The Post in late 2019 and that were based
on interviews and documents gathered by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction
(SIGAR) for several “Lessons Learned” reports. (Malkasian also makes
copious use of these materials.) In Whitlock’s grim assessment, American
military and civilian leaders in three successive administrations from
George W. Bush’s to Donald J. Trump’s engaged in an “unspoken conspiracy
to mask the truth” about the almost continuous setbacks on the ground
in Afghanistan.
It wasn’t always that
way. At the start, in early October 2001, the United States rode a wave
of international support following the 9/11 attacks to launch a
sustained aerial campaign against Al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban and
dispatched Special Operations forces to assist a resistance organization
in northern Afghanistan. The result was a rout. Within 60 days, the
Taliban was driven from power, with the loss of only four U.S. troops
and one C.I.A. agent. It was a stunning victory, even if Osama bin Laden
and top Taliban leaders eluded capture.
Flushed
with success, U.S. planners were uncertain about what to do next. They
feared that Afghanistan could descend into chaos, but didn’t want to be
saddled with the tasks of nation-building. Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, who is a key figure in both volumes, personified the
indecision. Empowered by George W. Bush to oversee the mission, Rumsfeld
shared the president’s inclination to view the Taliban and Al Qaeda as
inseparable. Yet he also showed a subtler side. More than many of his
colleagues, he worried about getting bogged down in Afghanistan, and
about the potential cost of the struggle to U.S. taxpayers. He
understood that American power, no matter how great in relative terms,
was limited.
“Respectful
of Afghanistan’s history,” Malkasian writes, Rumsfeld “was aware that
U.S. troops could upset the Afghan people and trigger an uprising. He
wanted to outsource to Afghan partners and be done with the place as
soon as possible. In hindsight, he was prescient. Yet his actual
decisions cut off opportunities to avoid the future he so feared.”
Thus
Rumsfeld ignored entreaties to include the Taliban in the postwar
settlement in late 2001, despite support for the notion from Karzai.
Thus he sanctioned overly aggressive counterterrorism operations that
alienated ordinary Afghans and in short order drove former Taliban
supporters to resort again to violence. And thus he and Bush turned a
blind eye to the repressive actions of Karzai’s government and its
warlord allies.
Most
important, Rumsfeld neglected to build up the Afghan security forces.
He dismissed as “crazy” a January 2002 request from the Afghan interim
government for $466 million a year to train and equip 200,000 soldiers.
The Afghans scaled back their request, then scaled it back some more,
until Rumsfeld agreed to a cap of 50,000 soldiers. Even then, little was
accomplished, as Rumsfeld, increasingly preoccupied with the planning
for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, insisted that training and housing costs
for the recruits be minimized, and pay be kept low. By the beginning of
2004, a mere 6,000 Afghan Army troops had been trained; by 2006, when
Rumsfeld stepped down, the figure had risen to 26,000, still far too few
to counter the major and successful offensive the Taliban launched that
year.
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
Who are the Taliban? The
Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal
of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public
punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to
enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.
The
offensive proved a turning point, showing in stark terms the immense
challenge the Bush administration had set for itself. The United States
had entered a country it didn’t understand, one that had flummoxed great
powers in the past, and it had done so without a clear long-term
strategy. Its client government in Kabul was beset by corruption and the
lack of broad popular backing, while the Taliban was dedicated and
resourceful and able to repair to sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan to
rest and plan. From an early point, moreover, U.S. leaders were
preoccupied with the deteriorating security situation in Iraq.
Afghanistan became a sideshow. (Robert Gates, who succeeded Rumsfeld as
secretary of defense in 2007, recalled that he had three priorities upon
taking office: “Iraq, Iraq and Iraq.”)
Yet
even as American planners acknowledged — behind closed doors — that
they were losing in Afghanistan, they kept up the bullish public
pronouncements. “Lies and Spin,” Whitlock titles a particularly
devastating chapter, as he quotes general after general declaring to
reporters that the trend lines pointed in the right direction, that the
enemy was on the ropes, that victory would soon come. Never mind the
plethora of intelligence assessments showing the opposite — the Taliban,
far from reeling, was expanding its reach, ever more confident it would
prevail in the end. Or as a Taliban commander put it to a U.S. official
in 2006, sounding much like a North Vietnamese counterpart from circa
1966: “You have all the clocks but we have all the time.”
The
surge of 2009 under Barack Obama should loom large in any account of
the war, and so it does in these books. It involved a major but
temporary escalation, which had the aim of using enormous resources to
reverse the Taliban momentum within two years and then turning over
security operations to the Kabul government. One wishes for more on the
domestic political intricacies that shaped the policy’s contours, but
both books make clear that the surge failed to bring lasting results,
even though, as Malkasian puts it, “the best minds, accomplished
generals and a careful president led the way.” Malkasian is sympathetic
to Obama’s plight — the president, new to the office and faced with a
menu of terrible choices, was boxed in by pressure from the military and
from Republicans in Congress. “Bush had enjoyed freedom to maneuver for
half his presidency,” he writes, while “Obama never enjoyed such
freedom.”
Whitlock is less forgiving,
faulting the Obama team for adopting a new counterinsurgency strategy
that achieved little except to further alienate the local population;
for failing to clamp down on pervasive Afghan government corruption; and
for refusing — like its predecessor — to level with the American
people, instead insisting on a “false narrative of progress.” Though
Obama in his second term reduced sharply the scope of military
operations, “The Afghanistan Papers” castigates him for failing to
deliver on a promise to end the war, and for conjuring up “an illusion”
that the remaining American forces would be on the sidelines, in an
advisory capacity; in reality, they were still in the fight, on the
ground in counterterrorism operations as well as from the air. And so
they would remain under his successor, Donald Trump, who swallowed his
initial inclination to get out and instead vowed to achieve the victory
that had eluded Bush and Obama.
Could
it have gone differently? Neither of these authors gives much reason to
believe that an alternative American strategy would have brought an
appreciably different result. Malkasian, the more sanguine of the two,
identifies some missed opportunities to limit the bloodshed and cut back
U.S. involvement, but concludes that Afghanistan was always destined to
be a long and difficult slog (“something to be endured”). Whitlock, for
his part, credits President Joe Biden for his April 2021 decision to
pull the last U.S. forces from what the author terms an “unwinnable
war.”
Indeed, one puts down these two
estimable works with the strong sense that the very presence of the
United States created a monumental problem for the Kabul government.
Much like South Vietnam a half century before, it could never escape
being tainted by its association with a foreign occupying power. Vast
quantities of American aid, necessary to any hope of prevailing in the
war, wiped out any hope of securing robust popular support. Or, more
simply: One couldn’t win without the Americans, and one couldn’t win
with them.
Could some way have been
found out of the dilemma? The question loomed larger than ever as the
last American aircraft rumbled down the runway at Bagram on that early
July morning and flew off into the darkness.
Fredrik
Logevall, a professor of history and international affairs at Harvard,
is the author, most recently, of “JFK: Coming of Age in the American
Century, 1917-1956.”
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