20 August 2021. Afghanistan…

Trying to make some sense of it

Aug 20, 2021

Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.

There’s only been one story this week. In a break from the usual format I’ve just pulled out some of the things I’ve seen that help to make sense of the American withdrawal.

#1: Lessons from the reconstruction

It’s hard to tell if this is the best of timing or the worst, but the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) published their 20-year review (pdf) a few days ago.

Here’s a section from the executive summary:

The U.S. government has now spent 20 years and $145 billion trying to rebuild Afghanistan, its security forces, civilian government institutions, economy, and civil society. The Department of Defense (DOD) has also spent $837 billion on warfighting, during which 2,443 American troops and 1,144 allied troops have been killed and 20,666 U.S. troops injured. Afghans, meanwhile, have faced an even greater toll. At least 66,000 Afghan troops have been killed. More than 48,000 Afghan civilians have been killed, and at least 75,000 have been injured since 2001—both likely significant underestimations.
The extraordinary costs were meant to serve a purpose—though the definition of that purpose evolved over time. At various points, the U.S. government hoped to eliminate al-Qaeda, decimate the Taliban movement that hosted it, deny all terrorist groups a safe haven in Afghanistan, build Afghan security forces so they could deny terrorists a safe haven in the future, and help the civilian government become legitimate and capable enough to win the trust of Afghans. Each goal, once accomplished, was thought to move the U.S. government one step closer to being able to depart.
While there have been several areas of improvement—most notably in the areas of health care, maternal health, and education—progress has been elusive and the prospects for sustaining this progress are dubious.

On his Memex 1.1 blog, John Naughton listed the ‘lessons learned’ in the report:

1. Strategy: The U.S. government continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve.
2. Timelines: The U.S. government consistently underestimated the amount of time required to rebuild Afghanistan, and created unrealistic timelines and expectations that prioritized spending quickly. These choices increased corruption and reduced the effectiveness of programs.
3. Sustainability: Many of the institutions and infrastructure projects the United States built were not sustainable.
4. Personnel: Counterproductive civilian and military personnel policies and practices thwarted the effort.
5. Insecurity: Persistent insecurity severely undermined reconstruction efforts.
6. Context: The U.S. government did not understand the Afghan context and therefore failed to tailor its efforts accordingly.
7. Monitoring and Evaluation: U.S. government agencies rarely conducted sufficient monitoring and evaluation to understand the impact of their efforts.
Further on there are other interesting reflections on the general idea of trying to helicopter flatpack-democracy kits into medieval deserts.
1. They are very expensive. For example, all war-related costs for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan over the last two decades are estimated to be $6.4 trillion.
2. They usually go poorly.
3. Widespread recognition that they go poorly has not prevented U.S. officials from pursuing them.
4. Rebuilding countries mired in conflict is actually a continuous U.S. government endeavor, reflected by efforts in the Balkans and Haiti and smaller efforts currently underway in Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Yemen, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
5. Large reconstruction campaigns usually start small, so it would not be hard for the U.S. government to slip down this slope again somewhere else and for the outcome to be similar to that of Afghanistan.

The conclusion—where the above five points are listed—also includes this revealing paragraph:

This report raises critical questions about the U.S. government’s ability to carry out reconstruction efforts on the scale seen in Afghanistan... (A)fter 13 years of oversight, the cumulative list of systemic challenges SIGAR and other oversight bodies have identified is staggering. As former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley told SIGAR, “We just don’t have a post-conflict stabilization model that works. Every time we have one of these things, it is a pick-up game. I don’t have confidence that if we did it again, we would do any better.”

#2. British delusions

Michael Clarke, at the RUSI site, suggested that the collapse of the Afghanistan state represented some ugly truths for Britain’s sense of its geopolitical place in the world:

One of the most unpalatable may not emerge very easily. The fact is that for two decades UK national leaders pretended, to themselves as much as to everyone else, that they were enacting a national strategy for Afghanistan. In reality, they were operating little more than the UK’s tactics within a US strategy over which they had next to no influence.

This dawning realisation—the President didn’t even call—may have been one of the reason for the anger directed at the government from all sides of the House in the Commons. And it leaves a biit of a gaping hole in the government’s post Brexit Britain story:

All of this is another tragedy for Afghanistan and a sobering story for the UK as it embarks on its ‘Global Britain’ future in the 2020s. It marks the end of the UK’s fourth Afghan War, the first of which began in 1839. …. In this fourth Afghan war, there were no battlefield defeats – indeed, the UK enjoyed tactical success throughout – but as is painfully evident, there has been a complete failure to achieve strategic objectives.

As he notes, there’s also a big gap between the Afghanistan story and all of the bright and shiny doorknob polishing statements (my phrase, not his) made about Britain’s new global role in the Integrated Review:

The UK’s Afghanistan experience demonstrates none of this. Instead, it speaks to a generation of political leaders who have too easily fooled themselves that being Washington’s most reliable military ally constitutes in itself an effective national strategy. Such a relationship may be one element of an effective strategy, but it cannot simply be the strategy.

Academic Peter Sloman wrote a short Twitter thread that made a related point about the image of the military in Britain’s projection of itself:

Since the Falklands War, military effectiveness has been central to a broadly conservative narrative of Britain as a post-imperial state which 'punches above its weight in the world'.

Maybe not any more.

#3. The forever war

But that’s enough about us. 1854 had a recent piece about the French photographer Stephen Dupont, who has been documenting the country for a quarter of a century:

Mostly I feel for the people of Afghanistan. I fell in love with the country because I felt for the people, and it breaks my heart to know that they’re going to be sacrificed, like lambs to the slaughter.”
As our interview draws to a close, I ask Dupont for his favourite anti-war photograph. It’s a black and white image from 2005 above, taken during his time with the US marines in Kunar province. A young boy rests nonchalantly against a mud hut. He is staring intensely at an armed US marine, but he’s not intimidated. Instead there is an unmistakable look of fierce defiance in his eyes. “He’s not scared, he’s just fucking angry and he’s only about 12 years old,” Dupont says. “He’s saying: ‘Fuck you and your big military machine. This is our country. This is my village, this is my home.’”

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