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.)

Quote of the Day (Cecil Day-Lewis, on War, Fear and ‘This High Delirium of Nations’)

“Today, I can but record
In truth and patience

This high delirium of nations
And hold to it the reflecting, fragile word.” —Anglo-Irish poet (and British Poet Laureate) Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972), “Ode to Fear,” in The Complete Poems (1992)

In case you were wondering: Yes, this poet is the father of Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis. He wrote against the backdrop of the outbreak of Fascism in Europe, and the world war that resulted.

The anxiety of our time is of a different tenor than the poet’s, but the potential for resentment, unrest and a widespread conflagration of bellicosity is every bit as real now as it was then. In particular, the mood swings now afflicting the American public over the collapse of the Afghan government pose real concern.

Twenty years ago, a widespread consensus existed for military action into the country. There are any one of several reasons why that mission failed, but—after the longest war in American history—it is clear that the American withdrawal has triggered scenes reminiscent of the fall of Saigon.

Whether it’s the Russian experience in Afghanistan or Germany’s after WWI, a futile military mission can sow the seeds for national bitterness over the loss of face and the loss of lives.

We should not imagine immunity from such feeling in the United States. But, even as scenes of chaos and carnage fill our TV screens and many question the point of so much American sacrifice, instead of lamenting “another Vietnam” or “another Munich,” lawmakers might want to explain how:

*Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai acted erratically, emotionally, in a paranoid manner, and in deep complicity with those pocketing American aid all around him—and why so many in Congress barely made a peep; 

*Just-departed President Ashraf Ghani cut and ran in the face of the Taliban only a day after a televised address in which he said he still hoped to “stop the ongoing imposed war on Afghan people";

*The Bush administration widened the focus beyond finding Osama bin Laden to a wider war in Iraq;

*Out of $7.8 billion spent by the U.S. on reconstruction projects since 2008, $2.4 billion in assets were unused, abandoned, deteriorated, or destroyed, according to a report by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR); 

*Donald Trump can claim that Biden had lost the country when he himself wanted to withdraw four months earlier--and few in his party were willing to denounce the plan loudly at the time, when it could have made a difference.

If historical analogies are in order for Afghanistan, there is another one at hand. The question of “Who Lost China?” in 1949 poisoned American foreign policy—and provided endless grist for Republican talking points—for two decades before Richard Nixon, a Cold Warrior of unimpeachable credentials, moved towards normalizing relations in 1972.

As today, a Democratic President was in office in China when our client government fell with shocking speed in 1949. 

But Harry Truman, like Joe Biden now, correctly saw that there were limits in how much the U.S. could accomplish with a corrupt regime that took American money without building up a stable government or the nation’s will to fight. ("All the money we [have] given them is now invested in United States real estate," Truman observed in explaining why "We are not going to give the Chinese a nickel for any purpose whatever," according to historian Michael Beschloss' Presidents of War.) 

The “high delirium of nations” that Day-Lewis fought against is a dangerous state of affairs. But so is a populace with a cable-bred, one-minute attention span constitutionally incapable of remembering the lessons of history. 

Instead of braying about the Afghanistan disaster, posturing politicians and pundits owe it to a war-weary American people to explain how much longer they were prepared to stay in a remote, mountainous nation long renowned before U.S. troops ever set foot there as "the graveyard of empires"--and when they would know it was time to go.

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.

 

This Day in CIA History (U.S. Misses Out on Chance to Eliminate bin Laden)

December 20, 1998—In the second of three documented chances from May 1998 to February 1999, U.S. intelligence reported that it had positively identified the whereabouts of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and that the terrorist mastermind could be killed if authorities acted quickly. President Bill Clinton, however, decided to pass, fearful of “collateral damage” – i.e., the number of innocent bystanders who might be killed or wounded--to a nearby mosque.

Following 9/11, the question of responsibility for the disaster became a political football. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats wanted to be tagged as the party responsible for the nearly 3,000 lives lost in the suicide attacks.

But, as Noel Sheppard has noted in the blog “American Thinker”, the 9/11 Commission produced “a purely political report that tap-danced around specifics to protect both presidential Administrations involved from embarrassment. As a result, we ended up with more questions than answers, wasting a lot of time and taxpayer money in the process.”

The Bush administration has rightly come in for criticism for failing to pursue the threat posed by al Qaeda both in the nine months leading up to 9/11 and especially in the 30 last urgent days before the attacks. Hillary Clinton noted that if her husband had received a classified report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States,” he would have paid it far more urgent attention than the Bush administration did.

One problem, though: Bill Clinton had received an urgent warning in his Presidential Daily Brief on December 4, 1998, entitled: “Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” That report, as well as the Aug. 7, 1998 al Qaeda truck bombings against U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that killed 247 people and wounded 5,000 more, formed the backdrop to the events of December 20.

One of the principals involved in the planning of the December 20 operation on bin Laden was Michael Scheuer, a 22-year-veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who headed up the bin Laden unit of the Counterterrorism Center from 1996 through 1999. As soon as he received the report that bin Laden would be spending the night at the Haji Habash House, part of the governor’s residence in Kandahar, Afghanistan, he relayed the message to CIA Director George Tenet and his deputy, John Gordon.

A teleconference was immediately arranged to consider the feasibility of a cruise missile strike to take out bin Laden. The principal question that came before the principals in the teleconference was the potential for collateral damage.

A sharp division of opinion developed over this. General Anthony Zinni, who had been busy that month organizing air strikes against Iraq to degrade its weapons of mass destruction program, insisted that collateral damage could amount to more than 200 people, as well as the mosque.

A senior intelligence officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff thought the mosque wouldn’t be touched and that collateral damage would amount to no more than 100 people. By the end of the meeting, the parties involved agreed to recommend to President Clinton that he not order a strike on this occasion.

Conservative critics of Clinton have seized on the results of this meeting to claim that the President missed a golden opportunity to take out bin Laden. They found some support in Scheuer himself (who, it happens, is a stringent critic of George W. Bush as well as Bill Clinton), who claimed afterward that he could not sleep after the decision.

I don’t think that claim is quite the “slam-dunk” it appears. With the hindsight of 20/20, it may seem obvious that we shouldn’t have passed up the chance to seize the terrorist who was fast becoming a mortal enemy of the U.S. But seven years after the U.S. struck back against the Taliban in Afghanistan, collateral damage remains a controversial issue in the country. General Zinni was rightly worried about the disastrous effect this could have on public opinion in that country.

Passing up three occasions to strike against bin Laden in a nine-month period, however, is excessive. It is, in fact, illustrative of a larger pattern of the past 40 years.

As I argued in a prior post, American authorities had been blind for more than 30 years, dating back to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan, to the grave threat to America posed by Islamic extremism. With each passing year, that threat came closer and closer.

Both parties were distracted in fighting it, their minds consumed by more immediate threats (in the Reagan years, as suicide bombing manifested itself as a serious threat in Lebanon, the Republicans were obsessed by Soviet relations; in December 1998, Clinton and the Democrats were not only juggling bin Laden and the attacks on Iraq, but the impeachment of Clinton—the President had declared his intention to fight his ouster only the day before the urgent teleconference on bin Laden).