This Day in Military History (Afghanistan War Ends in Chaotic U.S. Withdrawal)

Aug. 30, 2021—Less than two weeks removed from the anticipated complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Taliban forces forced that timetable to be radically revised.

Army Major General Chris Donahue represented not just just the last U.S. service member to leave at the end of a chaotic two-week period, but also the failure of America’s two-decade effort at nation-building in the country that harbored the 9/11 terrorists.

More than a few officials bore responsibility for this ignominious end to America’s longest war, but the one left holding the bag was President Joe Biden. Coming eight months into his administration, the images of civilians clinging to a military transport plane and a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members demoralized TV viewers who had never seen or had forgotten similar scenes of disarray in Saigon in April 1975.

Biden’s approval rating fell from 49 percent at the start of August 2021 to 43 percent a month later, according to Gallup polling, and never really recovered after that.

Periodically, American foreign-policy or military failures lead to the question, “Who lost it?”, as occurred in China and Vietnam. The Biden administration was certainly responsible for setting up a symbolic but arbitrary withdrawal date (the anniversary of 9/11) that left inadequate time for planning an orderly transfer to complete Afghan military self-reliance.

But multiple mistakes, as early as America’s initial airstrikes in October 2001, ensured that this would be a waste of American blood and treasure, including:

*Failing to catch Osama bin-Laden quickly: In an August 2021 Wall Street Journal analysis, Eliot Cohen thought that several brigades of light infantry were needed to finish off al Qaeda. Instead, bin-Laden eluded capture and remain the symbol (if not operational leader) of the terrorist network until he was killed a decade later in a raid into Pakistan.

*The Iraq War diverted needed men and equipment from Afghanistan. Five years ago, Jonah Blank, a former policy adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, observed in an article for The Atlantic, “the original sin of the war in Afghanistan was going to war in Iraq.” Bush advisers sought to convince the American public that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a destabilizing force in the region, but he did not have weapons of mass destruction, as they claimed. The result of the change in focus was detrimental to the U.S. long-range campaign in Afghanistan, according to Blank: “Too light a troop presence in Afghanistan meant that security was never truly established; too little money actually delivered meant that the fledgling government was never able to prove its credibility to its own people; too little focus from U.S. policy makers meant that a highly centralized governing structure, imposed on a never-before-centralized nation, could not be prevented from degenerating into nepotism, ineffectiveness, and rampant corruption. Failure to provide enough troops, money, and focus on the front end resulted in exponentially more troops, money, and focus down the line."

*Misguided drone use. Some military experts thought that, after instituting a troop surge following his inauguration in 2009, Barack Obama’s announced mass drawdown five years later occurred when Afghan security forces were still inadequately trained. But his authorization of more drone attacks was arguably worse, leading to civilian casualties that turned much of the population (along with then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai) against the continuing American presence.

*Corruption in the Afghan government: As early as August 2012, in a statement to the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institutions warned, “Afghans have become disconnected and alienated from the national government and the country’s other power arrangements,” resenting “the abuse of power, impunity, and lack of justice that have become entrenched over the past decade.”

*Lies and concealment among American political and military leaders about progress in the war: In December 2019, the Washington Post revealed that American officials, fearing the consequences of what might ensue once Americans left Afghanistan, misled the public by spinning casualty counts and other data. Behind the scenes, it was another story, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, throwing up his hands in a September 2003 memo: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”

*Donald Trump left a skeletal American force in the country just as Biden was to be inaugurated. The administration announcement that only 2,500 troops would remainat that point came despite the lack of an agreement between Taliban and Afghan government negotiators—and a warning by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warns that too rapid a drawdown could expose the Afghan regime to collapse.

The public’s overwhelming feeling of futility at the Taliban’s resumption of control was palpable. But a few other aspects of the conflict got lost along the way:

*American concern about oil at least partly accounted for bin Laden’s murderous rage. George H.W. Bush ordered American troops placed in Saudi Arabia to counter a potential threat after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Those forces remained in the kingdom even after the successful conclusion of Operation Desert Storm to enforce no-fly zones protecting the Kurds. Bin Laden cited that presence as a primary reason for waging jihad against the U.S.

*Questions remain about the full extent of Saudi involvement with 9/11. Though the administration of George W. Bush never specifically claimed that Saddam Hussein collaborated with bin Laden on 9/11, officials mentioned the dictator and terrorist so often together that many Americans jumped to that conclusion. They were far more pointed in claiming there was no high-level Saudi government support for the attack. But most of the 9/11 hijackers (as well as bin Laden himself) came from the country. A lawsuit by 9/11 victim families turned up a growing body of circumstantial evidence that the Saudi government was being disingenuous about these connections.

*The overarching War on Terror distracted from countering the growing Chinese threat in Asia. The phrase “War on Terror” itself provided the Chinese regime with vocabulary to justify cracking down on the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. Moreover, military and intelligence resources that the Bush administration could have devoted to monitoring Chinese saber-rattling in the Far East were devoted instead to Afghanistan and Iraq.

(The image accompanying this post, of U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to the 10th Mountain Division standing security at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, was taken on Aug. 15, 2021, by Sgt. Isaiah Campbell.)

Flashback, September 2001: Bush Urges ‘War on Terror’)

Addressing a joint session of Congress a little over a week after the United States was attacked by al Qaeda terrorists, President George W. Bush stated that the nation was now engaged in a “war on terror” that would involve conventional military action, covert intelligence operations, and disruption of terrorist financing.

The phrase and the commentary surrounding it illustrated both the highly unusual, even unprecedented, nature of the war and the elastic nature of the U.S. government response. Both of these factors explain why it has been impossible to bring the resulting military action to a definitive conclusion.

First, notice what President Bush’s message was not: a request that Congress declare war, even though “war on terror” may have been the most enduring linguistic coinage from the address. Congress has not fulfilled this constitutional duty since WWII. In a way, both the executive and legislative branches get what they want from this state of affairs: a President gets to act with maximum freedom to act, while Congress possesses plausible deniability if a war to which it has explicitly acquiesced goes awry.

Early on, U.S. intelligence determined that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were carried out by al-Qaeda, a terrorist network with training camps in Afghanistan. But unlike, say, WWI and WWII, where the United States deemed that foreign governments were directly involved in infringing on American sovereignty, the U.S. sought to get at the perpetrators of 9/11 initially by confronting a party indirectly responsible: the Taliban regime that allowed al-Qaeda to flourish within its borders. 

The nomenclature of a war how it will be prosecuted and, decades later, how it will be perceived. The conflict that raged for four years after the firing on Fort Sumter was known, particularly among Northerners, as the “War of the Rebellion.” (Its primary documents are known as The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, or the “O.R.” for short among historians.)   

As an “Opinionator” blog post in The New York Times’ by Chandra Manning and Adam Rothman a few years ago noted, calling secession a “rebellion” enabled the federal government to invoke the Constitution’s Article I, Section 8 authority granted to “suppress Insurrections,” and Article I, Section 9 to suspend the writ of habeas corpus for the same contingency.

It was only after 1881, when former Confederate President Jefferson Davis began to refer to it as the “Civil War,” that Union advocates adopted it. (Manning and Rothman note that the new term was more conciliatory than “War of the Rebellion,” but there may have been another reason why it caught on: it was shorter. That convenience probably led them to resist southern sympathizers’ attempt at a more nakedly ideological phrase for the conflict: “The War Between the States.”)

The “War on Terror” (soon known as the “Global War on Terror,” or the bureaucratic shorthand GWOT) was seemingly designed both to describe the asymetric warfare of the enemy and to seize the moral high ground claimed by victims. But it also opened the doors to a situation difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. (No sooner would the resources of al-Qaeda be dramatically reduced, for instance, than ISIS rose from its ashes.)

At the same time, a broader name for the war allowed the Bush administration to push to the limit of public opinion. Within three days of 9/11, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and even Bush himself were requesting reports on possible Iraqi involvement with the attacks—and expressing annoyance when intelligence agencies did not turn up credible evidence of this. (See, for instance, this account of the preparations for the Iraq war with Iraq by Joyce Battle, senior analyst for the National Security Archive at George Washington University.)

Had Bush delivered a sharply focused message after 9/11, he could have confined military and political objectives to the demands he made on the Taliban in Afghanistan (e.g., “Deliver to United States authorities all of the leaders of Al Qaeda who hide in your land”). Those demands might have involved time to bring to a successful conclusion, even bloodshed. But they would not have required a constant change in priorities with new countries and organizations in this regional drama.

Bush thrust these new actors to the forefront only four months later in his next State of the Union address. Not without some controversy, he denounced an “Axis of Evil” of state-sponsored terrorism: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the mullahs of Iran, and one of the last surviving Communist regimes, North Korea. 

Linguistic purists might have noted that the original Axis powers that inflicted World War II on the world were already dictatorial, so the “Axis of Evil” was a redundant phrase and the trio might have been better called “the New Axis.”

But the Bush Administration missed an even larger point: in the run-up to WWII, Germany, Italy and Germany were formally bound by treaty, facilitating the military actions of each around the globe. In contrast, 21^st-century Iraq, Iran and North Korea might have been hostile to the U.S., but had shown no inclination to cooperate militarily. (In fact, tensions between Iraq and Iran remained high, only a dozen years after a drawn-out, bloody war between the two.)

Moreover, none of the three could be shown to have aided al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. The “Axis of Evil,” then, was an advertising slogan more than an actual structure of international affairs. If you want to be charitable, you could call it a metaphor.

But the use of metaphor was a huge part of the problem with the term “the war on terror” itself, which was no more of a metaphor than WWI, WWII, or any other 20^th-century American war. Thousands of service personnel are not put in harm’s way for a “metaphor.”

There have been instances when “war” has been used, correctly, as a metaphor: Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” and a phrase that Jimmy Carter borrowed from philosopher William James to describe his energy conservation program: “the moral equivalent of war.” If any of these “campaigns” resemble the war on terror, however, it lies in the meager results achieved despite immense Presidential ambitions and government expenditures.

The War on Terror not only defined Bush’s presidency, but limited the options, linguistic and otherwise, of his successor. In a 2010 article in The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder pointed to a new initiative of the Obama Administration, intended to replace the War on Terror: Countering Violent Extremism (CVE).   

The new term, meant to promote the use of “soft power” in stemming terrorism, displays none of the imagination of its predecessor, however. It reeks of the bloodless bureaucrat, someone ready to talk an issue to death rather than to solve it. It’s death by linguistic rather than military drone.

 

Quote of the Day (Karen Armstrong, on a ‘Distorted Image of Islam’)

“It has never been more important for Western people to acquire a just appreciation and understanding of Islam. The world changed on September 11. We now realize that we in the privileged Western countries can no longer assume that events in the rest of the world do not concern us. What happens in Gaza, Iraq, or Afghanistan today is likely to have repercussions in New York, Washington, or London tomorrow, and small groups will soon have the capacity to commit acts of mass destruction that were previously only possible for powerful nation states. In the campaign against terror on which the United States has now embarked, accurate intelligence and information are vital. To cultivate a distorted image of Islam, to view it as inherently the enemy of democracy and decent values, and to revert to the bigoted views of the medieval Crusaders would be a catastrophe. Not only will such an approach antagonize the 1.2 billion Muslims with whom we share the world, but it will also violate the disinterested love of truth and the respect for the sacred rights of others that characterize both Islam and Western society at their best.”— Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History (2002)

Too bad that today’s Republican candidates for President don’t realize this…

Quote of the Day (Jean Bethke Elshtain, on 9/11)

“An image that crowds out many others in my mind is that of tens of thousands fleeing New York City by foot. As I watched and wept, I recalled something I had said many times in my classes on war: ‘Americans don’t have living memories of what it means to flee a city in flames. Americans have not been horrified by refugees fleeing burning cities.’ No more. Now we know.”—Political philosopher and ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013), quoted in Paul Vitello, “Jean Bethke Elshtain, A Guiding Light For Policy Makers After 9/11, Dies at 72,” The New York Times, August 16, 2013

(Photograph of dust-covered 9/11 victims taken by Don Halasy)