The unnecessary chaos accompanying America’s panicky withdrawal from Kabul is heartbreaking, was entirely avoidable, but is largely beside the strategic point. Instead, the impending collapse of nation-building as an overall US strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq was anticipated in foreign policy circles as far back 15 years ago in my book, Ethical Realism, co-authored with Anatol Lieven. In it, we accused the liberal interventionist-neoconservative Democratic-Republican alliance of criminal malpractice in foreign policy-making, predicting that both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would lead to calamity, a calamity that we are presently witnessing.
Yes, the withdrawal process should have been handled with more care and consideration. For example, in departing a firm control of an airport was obviously necessary. The US had, in Bagram Air Base, just north of Kabul, one of the best airports in the whole of the region, with a two-runway capability, easy access to and from the capital, and longstanding military control of the area. Instead of using such an ideal exit point, inexplicably, on July 4, the US abandoned this strategic asset in the middle of the night, slinking away without even bothering to inform the Afghan government.
Just weeks later, amidst all the chaos surrounding the bottleneck at Kabul International Airport, the obvious question remains: Why in the world did the US not use Bagram for this obvious purpose? This is a mistake of criminal proportions, and not the only one made during this calamitous withdrawal.
However, we must keep our eye on the strategic ball. All of the heart-rending pictures of suffering and chaos are being used by the very US foreign policy establishment that got us into this mess in the first place as a very convenient excuse not to take responsibility for the absolute and utter failure of the Afghan War, a failure that was seen coming a long time ago. To avoid letting them get away with it, here are the real lessons that need learning from the Afghan fiasco, precisely so that such catastrophe is never happens again.
1) Afghanistan is merely a part of the larger phenomenon of failed US nation-building everywhere (Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan). Those liberal interventionist/neo-conservative proponents of nation-building are not hoping the rest of us have short memories; they are betting we have no memories at all. Failure in Kabul is not the problem. Rather it is part and parcel of a more broadly failed nation-building strategy in Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan.
In Somalia, the US intervened, then cut and ran after only minor casualties, precisely because Washington had no significant interests of any kind there. US intervention did nothing to stop Somalia’s slide into endemic civil war, chaos, and terror. America has intervened literally a dozen times in Haiti over the past century; it remains a voodoo-riven, kleptocratic, economic basket case. A similar failed case was witnessed in Iraq. US intervention in Libya (urged on by America’s feckless European allies), as Barack Obama rightly put it, was the dumbest thing he ever did. Libya went from being a stable state run by a dictator (Gaddafi), to a failed state riven by civil war, where the ISIS has managed to regroup. Libya now poses a grave refugee threat to Europe’s southern flank, which is just a comeuppance for unraveling its stability. Afghanistan is not some unique case. It is merely the cherry on top of the sundae of a generation’s worth of US nation-building failure.
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2) You cannot nation-build a country of which you know nothing. Anyone who knows anything about Afghanistan knows there is no nation there to build. Since the days of Alexander the Great, Afghanistan has been largely a geographical expression. The political reality is that the area is dominated by a loose collection of tribes (the Pashtun, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Tajiks, et al.) who only temporarily unite to throw off foreign oppressors before going back to fighting amongst themselves. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the place would have known better, but that is just the point. None of the great and the good staffing the White House for the past two decades had even a basic knowledge of Afghanistan necessary to make successful nation-building a possibility.
This knowledge gap happened in Iraq as well. Then, I was tasked with briefing soon-to-be senior American staff heading off to govern Iraq about the basic differences between the Sunni, the Shia and the Kurds. This is where the war in Iraq was lost, for how can nation-building work when senior American staffers don’t know who a Kurd is, let alone the history, culture, religious orientation and strategic desires of each group?
Rather, as Lawrence of Arabia, T.E. Lawrence, made clear in his magisterial book, The 27 Articles (the only way to work with local cultures successfully is to make an unremitting study of them. This has palpably not been the case in Afghanistan, or indeed in any of the other recent nation-building examples.
3) Leaving was always going to be ugly; but that is not a reason to indefinitely stay, as was mentioned in my most recent book To Dare More Boldly: The Audacious Story of Political Risk. One of the basic psychological hang-ups of policy-makers can be termed the ‘Losing Gambler Syndrome’, an intellectual fallacy that convinces the player to keep gambling despite successive losses, thereby creating a false rationale to keep on playing. This basic intellectual fallacy led America to disaster in Vietnam, and more recently in the ‘Forever Wars’ of Iraq and Afghanistan.
About the only argument the humanitarian interventionist-neoconservatives have left after 20 years of failure in Afghanistan is the Losing Gambler’s Syndrome; after two decades, US $1 trillion, and 2,500 American deaths we just have to stay, given all we have invested. Of course, by this terrible logic, the inevitable further sacrifice and further failure will simply compel America to never leave. Joe Biden was entirely right to end this doleful cycle by ripping off the psychological band-aid and leaving.
Losing a war is a course of action that by definition will end badly and chaos (though not the ocean of it we have seen) was bound to ensue, along with some reputational costs. Biden did the right thing almost entirely the wrong way. But we mustn’t let the interventionists re-write history; after two decades there simply was no rationale whatsoever for staying in Afghanistan, other than to kick the can down the road even further, putting off defeat (at the price of further US blood and treasure) while never having a chance at victory.
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4) Strategically ending the ‘Forever Wars’ in Afghanistan and Iraq is a very good thing for the US, as it allows the country to pivot to the Indo-Pacific and deal with peer competitor China, rather than squandering blood and treasure over areas of far less strategic importance to America.
The first rule of the serious study of foreign policy is that all nations have interests, and that these national interests tend to guide their foreign policy-making. As such, not all countries and all regions are of equal importance to the United States, or indeed any other country. One of the major reasons a generation’s worth of US nation-building happened when it did was because structurally during this time America lived in a very permissive geostrategic world; it was the planet’s only superpower and could indulge its nation-building whims without much genuine strategic consequence to its position.
If this unipolar moment explains why nation-building occurred, the lack of strategic importance of each of the countries involved explains why nation-building failed. Somalia, Haiti, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan simply could not be more different places, having only one strategic fact in common: None of them are of more than secondary importance to the US. Once things got tough, leaving always made more sense than staying, as unlike in Germany and Japan after World War II, these were not areas of primary American national interest.
This has become even more true as the basic strategic outline of our new era has definitively changed; we now live in a world of Sino-American superpower competition, with India, Japan, Russia, the EU, and Anglosphere great powers also having a lot of room to make independent and consequential foreign policy decisions. Gone are the days of easy and unfettered American power, as we now live in a time of great power competition, where the frivolities of indulging in nation-building look wasteful and entirely beside the point.
Looking beyond the present chaos and hysteria; these are the real lessons of Afghanistan. Americans must hold those who led us down the nation-building rabbit hole to account, never letting them run the country again. The world is simply too dangerous to let the old, failed, US foreign policy establishment to continue to hold sway.
This article was first published on ORF.
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