diplomaticourier | With twenty years to prepare for it, there should be plenty of clarity in the post-mortem on “what went wrong in Afghanistan” for American policy. History warned us with everything but flashing red lights that all was not well as the twenty years progressed. History should also tell us that there will be as little clarity as to how America and allies failed in Afghanistan as the lack of clarity that doomed the enterprise.
The comparisons to Vietnam were already numerous. These will only proliferate as photojournalists -- instinctually sensing a fall of Saigon moment -- capture images of the chaotic and poorly planned evacuation of Kabul. Like America’s involvement in Vietnam, this failure did not happen in a vacuum; it happened in a sequence. Policy failures, lacking political will, military issues, and cultural upheaval all contributed to the images of the helicopter leaving the American embassies in both Saigon, with a long line queued up for an escape that was never to come.
That sequence continued after the Vietnam War. In the decades since, that failure has been studied and debated militarily, politically, and policy-wise. The United States military took the lessons of failure and revolutionized itself, moving to an all-volunteer force, integrating National Guard and Reserve components, and focusing on technological superiority and precision. The result was a much smaller overall force that is more capable, lethal, and diverse, while constituting only 1% of the American population.
The government which that military serves, however, failed to carry out a similar soul searching and rebuilding process. Lip service was given, policy papers were written, debates were had, but the power structure largely remained unchanged. The decades of distance meant the personal lessons of Vietnam were operationally lost to the very impersonal machine of American governance. Accountability for decision-making is lacking. The politics of the day has become more about overseeing the system for what could be gained individually and for one’s party than about operating it effectively for the gain of all. The watchdogs of the free press became increasingly reliant on access journalism to the superstars of the political world, and by omission or commission had their investigatory mandate dulled. A vast majority of the American citizenry, most of them lulled into complacency by a level of prosperity unheard of in all of recorded human history, had little interest in changing the systems that weren’t bothering them, even as the number of individuals suffering from it steadily grew.
The answers to "what went wrong in Afghanistan" begin in that grey area of unlearned history lessons from the last failure of American foreign policy leading to desperate evacuations of an embassy in Saigon to the embassy in Kabul. Afghanistan is a political failure, it is a policy failure, it is a military failure, and it is a human failure. Most of all, it is, was, and will forever be known as an avoidable failure as too many of us watched idly while it slowly metastasized into today’s crisis -- a crisis which history and common sense were warning us about.
Any post-mortem on "what went wrong in Afghanistan" that does not include a root cause of dysfunction within the United States government to operate as a competent and accountable governing mechanism is missing the root domestic cause of the foreign policy disaster that the Global War on Terror has become. The failures of the United States government to learn from past mistakes incubated the current dysfunction that inevitably bled through to foreign policy failures like America’s 20 years in Afghanistan. A United States that cannot conduct conflict resolution within its own government can neither project nor maintain a coherent foreign policy to the rest of the world.
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