Wall Street Journal explains why US lost the Afghan war, but doesn't

Discussion of article by Sune Rasmussen in August 4 review section

I don’t think I have ever have seen an author review his own book before, but that’s what the WSJ titled Rasmussen’s story adapted from his book, Twenty Years: Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation. They corrected it in the online version, calling it an essay. In any case, while the story may be an interesting biography of a young Afghan fighter and others, it doesn’t accomplish, or even try to accomplish what it purportedly set out to do, namely explain the U.S. loss in Afghanistan.

There are three simple reasons why the US lost. The first is, as an alien Christian invasion force the U.S. was never ever going to have legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people. The average Westerner may not see the invasion in religious terms but the Afghans surely did. The US invaded Afghanistan to punish the people who hosted Osama ben Laden even though it is now accepted that the Taliban knew nothing of his plans, and while it was culturally impossible to give up someone they had hosted, the Taliban sought face saving ways to do so, but the US was too angry and too impatient to wait while that played out and invaded. Only later was the invasion rebranded as an attempt to bring democracy to a place that didn’t understand the West’s concept of democracy. It was also suppose to liberate women, an idea that, as laudable as it was, would mean Afghan’s wouldn’t be Afghans anymore. This and other modernizing rationalizations were simply an updating of the colonial “white man’s burden” attitude towards “natives”. Imagine if the Taliban had invaded the US and demanded that women should be removed from public life. Culturally this would be unacceptable and would lead to war against the occupiers. To reiterate, the US and its allies were always going to be alien invaders who had to be repulsed.

Secondly, the army that the US sought to build was unfit for purpose and unsustainable. The U.S. for inexplicable reasons, tried to model the Afghan army it attempted to build on its own. That meant combined arms with tanks, lots of artillery, airpower, and (what was thought to be) ubiquitous surveillance. With an illiteracy rate of 80% there was no way the Afghan army would find recruits to accomplish this goal. Equally important, with almost zero national income the Afghan state could never sustain anything like this force. As long as the U.S. paid for everything it could pretend it had created something just as you can grow grass on a concrete block as long as it was supplied with water and nutrients. Take them away and the grass will very quickly shrivel up and die, just like the Afghan army.

Thirdly, the tactics used by the U.S. were unsuitable to the nature of the battlefield. This was not simply a U.S. fault. Invaders from Alexander the Great, the British Raj, and the Russians with well led, well organized military machines failed to deal with the terrain, the guerrilla tactics, toughness, and high motivation of their foes.

The U.S. went into Afghanistan knowing literally nothing about its people, history, and geography. Compounding this problem there were few, perhaps four or five people who were experts in the West they could turn to for advice. Research in Afghanistan has always been perilous even before the Russian invasion which rendered in country scholarship impossible. Most of the few people who really knew the country were older and more interested in its archeology and history than current events. The British did some good field work, but mostly confined to what is now the North West territories of Pakistan. That knowledge was accumulated 100 years ago or more. The Afghan “experts” the U.S. had to rely on came into being only after the Russian defeat and U.S. invasion with very sketchy credentials. Breaking the forth wall, I was part of the Army’s “Human Terrain” project, an attempt to supply cultural experts down to the battalion level. This unsuccessful and ultimately lethal attempt to help the boots on the ground understand the culture they were operating failed because there were no experts to supply the army and no kit bag we could give them would make them experts. A number of the few “human terrain” personnel who actually made it to the field met gruesome ends.

In conclusion we had very foolish people in Washington making policy and ignorant officers running our military (actually the same people as today). They would not learn from history. What made them think they could do what Alexander the Great couldn’t, nor the British Raj, nor the Soviets? The answer is pure hubris.