Conversations on Strategy Podcast – Ep 7 – Dr. Thomas F. Lynch III, Dr. Todd Greentree, Dr. Conrad Crane – Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces
The rapid collapse of Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) in August 2021 was widely anticipated and due to its structural constraints and qualitative decline from 2018–21. This article provides a targeted analysis of ANDSF operational liabilities and qualitative limitations, referencing often overlooked statements by US and Afghan political and military officials, data from official US government reports, and prescient NGO field analyses. The painful ANDSF experience illuminates several principles that must be considered as US policymakers turn toward security force assistance for proxy and surrogate military forces in conflict with the partners of America’s emerging great-power geostrategic competitors—China and Russia.
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Episode Transcript: “Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces”
Stephanie Crider (Host)
Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.
Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Thomas F. Lynch III, Dr. Conrad C. Crane, and Dr. Todd Greentree. Lynch is the author of “Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces” (“Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces”), which was featured in the autumn 2022 issue of Parameters. Lynch is a distinguished research fellow in the Institute of National Strategic Studies (Institute for National Strategic Studies) of the National Defense University. A retired Army colonel with Afghanistan tours, Lynch publishes frequently on Afghanistan.
Crane is currently a research historian in the Strategic Studies Institute of the (US) Army War College. A retired Army officer, Crane holds a PhD from Stanford University
Greentree is a former US foreign service officer. Currently, he is a member of the Changing Character of War Centre at Oxford University, and he teaches at the Global and National Security Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico.
Thanks so much for making time for this today. Tom, would you please just give us a brief synopsis of your article?
(Thomas F. Lynch III)
Yeah, hi, Stephanie. Thanks for having me here, and great to be with, uh, Con and Todd. I thought it was a good time to publish something that reviewed the history of why it was not surprising that the Afghan national military wound up where it is. And so my article kind of goes into that, focusing in three substantive areas. First, it’s to define the fact that the Afghan military was never designed by the US and its partners to stand alone. There were critical capabilities that it would have required to stand alone against an autonomous insurgency with external patrons that were never present and could not have been expected to be present. Second, I thought it important to chronicle the fact that the important linkages between the Afghan military and, particularly, American support military structures—these were already pulling apart as early as 2018—not in the last year, not subsequent to the Doha Accord (Doha Agreement) of February 2020, but have been pulling apart pretty visibly for those that were paying attention, starting at least in 2018. So I kind of go through what those were as well. And then, finally, I offer here this notion that it is a myth that the Afghan national military fell apart unexpectedly at the end.
There were a number of government organizations, government agencies, military leaders, as well as nongovernment agencies on the ground that were reporting flaws, particularly in the morale that were very, very visible starting in 2018 and became acute subsequent to the Doha Accord (Doha Agreement)—that was an accord between the United States government and the Afghan Taliban. The government of Afghanistan was not a party to that. And, indeed, the accord that we signed in February of 2020 really committed the United States to withdraw and committed the Afghan government to negotiate with its enemy, the Afghan Taliban.
And the Afghan Taliban, in response to that, gave several promises. They made a formal promise not to attack American and coalition forces, but not to stop attacking Afghan government or Afghan military forces. And indeed, this put the Afghan military forces formally in a place where they had been—at least, informally, since 2018—as the monkey in the middle without the organic, qualitative ability to fight a qualified and capable Afghan Taliban insurgency, but with the knowledge that the United States had a clock ticking, and we were going to get out, and they were going to be left alone. And therefore, it made great sense that they were already bartering and bantering behind the scenes to cut the best deal they could for them and their families and, therefore, to collapse rather quickly once the United States military was fully out of the country and the Afghan Taliban had not politically reconciled with the government of Afghanistan.
Host
Con, you say our approach to security assistance in Afghanistan was flawed in the very beginning by a problem with advising and assisting. Will you expand on that, please?
(Conrad C. Crane)
Sure, glad to. My point is this: Since World War II, the United States has made a common mistake in its attempts to advise and assist as we always try to create indigenous security forces that are modeled like us. So we end up with a force that is heavily dependent on firepower, requires extensive sustainment that they really cannot do, which is one of the points that Tom brings up. We create forces that can’t really be maintained or sustained if we’re not there.
A new twist in the model has been also an overreliance on elite units. Sir William Slim, in his excellent memoir on World War II, Defeat into Victory (Defeat into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942–1945), has a part where he really criticizes the creation of elite units because they take the best troops out of conventional forces and dilute the quality of those conventional forces. In Afghanistan, we did the same thing. We quickly created an Afghanistan special forces and took the best troops out of the conventional forces, which were much more important than the special forces group we set up. We also had a similar problem with the air force. We gave them the right aircraft, the Super Tucanos, which are much more appropriate and much easier to maintain than sophisticated jets. But at the same time, we set them up as a separate air force. I actually did some consulting with the leadership on trying to fix the problems of the air force, and the air force may have been configured to support the ground forces, but they wanted to fly independent missions like they had B-52s.
And also it became the bailiwick at the Afghan elites. So between this idea they were gonna be an independent air force and the elite attitudes, it made any kind of joint operations almost impossible. I mean, a better model would have been US Marine Corps instead of US Air Force . . . have a Air Force was tightly tied to ground forces that independent. But you had the same thing in Vietnam. We tend to repeat these same problems with the way we structure these indigenous security forces.
Host
Tom, what are your thoughts here?
(Lynch)
First, as Con notes, there’s this issue we have post-World War II of trying to make ‘em look like us. But when we don’t make ‘em look like us—and there are many instances where we didn’t, to include going back with the South Korean forces prior to the North Korean attack in 1950—we tend to limit things where we think we have innate ability and where we want to constrain that side from having that ability for fear that they have a different political agenda. So in the case back in the 1940s, early 1950s with the South Koreans, we were concerned that South Korean leader Syngman Rhee would use souped-up artillery and American-style aircraft to go attack the North, which we didn’t want to happen unt il after the North attacked first. We also—early on, in South Vietnam—limited the design and things we provided them because we didn’t want them ranging north and going after the Chinese, for example, and provoking a war there.
Here is a highlight in the article. There are two other things that influence the design of the Afghan military forces to, as Con says, look like us, but not all the way to the high end, which is back to my point about them not being able to just stand alone to provide their own security against neighbors in a dangerous neighborhood. The first of those is our concern over costs. We’re concerned that if we give them too much high-end stuff, it’s gonna be too expensive, too difficult. And so, as Con mentions, sometimes, we look beyond that, but other times, we find ourselves constrained by that. And I argue here that’s what we were with the Afghan national security forces, particularly in the 2000s—and we were back and forth and back and forth about “Give ‘em more.” “No, give ‘em less.” “No, we can’t afford it. So let’s us use our equipment that allows for these things that we don’t want them necessarily to have: long-range aircraft that could range into Pakistan, for example, or long-range artillery that could be threatening to other neighbors or lots of long-haul logistics aircraft. But the second piece of that has to go with the regional geopolitics, and that is the limitations imposed by the fact the United States was also conducting the Global War on Terror (war on terrorism) with Pakistan as a vital, non-NATO partner. And the Pakistanis had their own regional concerns.
The Pakistanis would work with us when we were going after certain kinds of global terrorists, but, in their mind, there were other kinds of people that we call “terrorists” which they saw as indigenous quasimilitary groups that were important to their existential fight against India, the country that they see as their most worrisome security threat and a country that they felt, for decades, was always trying to find a back door through Afghanistan to produce at least mischief, if not try to topple the Pakistani government. And so it was in an appreciation of our other partner Pakistan’s interests—the fact that Pakistan not only feared India, but also kind of saw the Afghan Taliban as one of those trustworthy militant groups that would stand against Indian nefarious activity in Afghanistan. This also circumscribed the design of the Afghan military forces so they didn’t have long-range strike aircraft. They didn’t have long-range artillery. They didn’t have the kind of logistics that would allow them to campaign because not only do we not want to pay for it, but the Pakistanis didn’t want that on their doorstep, unmanaged by the Americans.
So there were those limitations that were always there. Meaning you were either gonna get an Afghan government that was gonna succeed and topple the Taliban insurgency, which we really never got close to when you look, in large measure, because the Pakistanis weren’t with us in causing that to happen. They found a gray-zone area and acted like they weren’t supporting the Afghan Taliban. But, in reality, they were supporting them as a hedge against India. When push came to shove and the Taliban were still resilient and there were no clear political negotiations happening between the (Ashraf) Ghani government and the Afghan Taliban, now, the Afghan military and security forces are truly the monkey in the middle. They’re looking at a US government that said, “We’re getting out.” And they’re saying, “We can’t stand alone against this resurging group of insurgents. As a matter of fact, these insurgents are attacking us now proportionally far higher than they’re attacking the American, the coalition forces, separating us further, splitting us apart, and we can’t manage that because we’re not designed for that.”
So there are two parts of this that I try to highlight in the article. There’s our own internal fiscal considerations, constraints, and ideation where we think we’re better to provide these high-end capacity things ourselves to limit the cost of building this Afghan security force modeled like us versus the Pakistani security concerns, which do not want to see those independent characteristics in the Afghan force more willing to trust us as counterterrorism partners with these high insecurities—but, in the process, making it so the Afghan military cannot stand or hope to stand against a lively, vibrant Afghan Taliban insurgency with safe haven in Pakistan when push comes to shove in 2020 and 2021.
Host
Back to you, Con.
(Crane)
All excellent points. I mean the dilemma, I guess, is the fact that we were always going to leave, and that the question is for those of us involved in the security assistance, trying to create these structures, it’s nice to have an idea when that’s gonna be so you can structure the horses to do that. And, oh, I’m sure I’ll get into this later, and that’s did we really have to leave? We stuck around in Korea for 30 years waiting for democracy to appear and fought a very nasty, low-intensity conflict there in the 60s and 70s. But we still stuck around. You know, Tom’s right. We had a lot of structures there that only we could provide.
Again, the question is “Should we have done a better job planning for the for the exit strategy
Host
Todd, we haven’t heard from you on this yet.
(Todd Greentree)
What I have to say is based on experience and things that occurred to me at the time when I was in Afghanistan. I think that both Tom and Con, also, because they were involved, are not dealing from a rearview mirror perspective.
I love the monkey-in-the-middle analogy because there are so many dimensions or ways to unpack that idea and see how it applies.
The US-Pakistan enormously fraught, complex relationship with lots of history, and the Pakistanis with enormous history. One of the reasons that we never really got a handle on that relationship is because we were not aware enough of our own history with the Pakistanis. So another dimension of their early involvement in Afghanistan has to do with Pas̲h̲tūnistān, and this is the idea that there’s this Durand Line that the Brits drew that crossed across the Pashtun population where the Taliban insurgency came from. And Afghanistan had always tried to take advantage of that with Pakistan by stirring up cross-border sentiments.
This was the reason that Pakistan started supporting early Islamic militants in Afghanistan in the early 1970s—to oppose them. But the Pakistanis sent their first Pashtun groups to create problems. Where? Into Indian-controlled Kashmir in 1948. They go way back on this issue.
Going back to the security force assistance issue, which I think is a critical piece of putting together the whole strategic picture of what went wrong in Afghanistan: Adding on to Con’s comments about American way of war clashing with Afghan way of war—we also have a huge problem, which is from the very beginning, what was it that the US was focused on? It was focused on counterterrorism—basically, fighting a war. And as we got more and more involved in Afghanistan, that combat role retained its importance. So as we would expect with American way of war, combat forces—elite and not—receive priority. That left security force assistance distinctly in a second-ranked place. A couple of quick ideas from experience: One—first commander I worked for: great guy by the name of Scott Spellman. Scott Spellman is currently commander of the Army Corps of Engineers. And I realized for the first time, working with him: “Hey! Engineers make great counterinsurgents.” Because they build things in difficult circumstances, and he got that.
There was, in that same command, a young (military police or) MP who was a National Guard MP who came out of state police force. He brought something to working with police forces that I hadn’t seen before. He wasn’t involved in combat, but his role was extremely important. And then, of course, the negative example which I think everybody saw a lot of: US majors who were assigned as mentors to Afghan general officers.
Question for Tom: Given that the intent of the US negotiations with the Taliban was exit and not peace, would it have been possible to somehow or other preserve the integrity of Afghan security forces and maintain the role of the US as a source of stability rather than instability?
(Lynch)
Yeah. Excellent question, Todd. In the article, I intentionally pick up in the summer of 2018 on that point because the way in which we do start finally negotiating with the Afghan Taliban, I would argue—as I do in this article and in some previous writings—does prejudge the outcome. And in this case, the outcome was that we were not gonna have a future military-to-military role or relationship absent something directly happening, which would have been the Afghan Taliban finding a political accommodation with the democratic government of Afghanistan—or, I should say, the government of Ashraf Ghani at that time. And even if that were to happen, as I mentioned in the article, then you would have had to do some kind of combination between current constructed Afghan military forces and Taliban forces to bring those together to do some kind of disarmament, demobilization, disaggregation, stand them in position, and yet here you would be bringing together a insurgent guerrilla force with a counterinsurgent national force. And even there, it was gonna be extremely difficult to do that. The history of governments trying to make that happen is very sketchy in terms of how well it works, how well it doesn’t work, and whether it holds together politically. The bottom line here was so long as the Afghan Taliban was not defeated or neutralized, then two things were vital to understand: Either the Afghan government and its military would have to have continuing outside assistance (the United States, principally, with its coalition partners) militarily as well as to support its economics and government status or the Afghan military would have to stand alone against the Taliban, which was favored by the Pakistanis as a better alternative to a government in Afghanistan that might get too cozy with India in the absence of Big Brother America sitting over the top of everything. So you had this kind of a perfect storm here, so that once you made a decision to depart, when the Afghan Taliban was not out of the picture, you were gonna come up with two very awkward outcomes either trying to piece together a combined military of these two other militaries that were very much opposed to each other—or you’re gonna have an Afghan military that couldn’t stand alone against a well-enabled and well-motivated Afghan Taliban military arm.
Once, in 2018 the Trump administration makes the decision to independently negotiate with the Taliban, the writing is on the wall. Informally, at that point, the Taliban and, I would argue, their handlers in Pakistan (meaning the intelligence services in Pakistan)—they got this, and, starting in mid-2018, when the administration signaled they were gonna move in the direction of negotiating America getting out, we see an informal drop that’s noteworthy in the number of Afghan Taliban-claimed attacks against American military or coalition military forces and, also, coalition political and diplomatic support forces. It’s palpable, starting in mid-18, as the Trump administration shifts into this negotiating phase from what had been kind of a miniature surge that was approved by the Trump administration in late 2017 to kind of go and put the Taliban on their heels.
By mid-2018, the Trump administration has given up on that, and they’re announcing that they’re gonna start negotiations. And, indeed, by that fall, September of 2018, they announced Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, a former ambassador to Afghanistan and expat Afghan, to go and start these negotiations. From that point forward, as I chronicle in the article, you see the Afghan Taliban taking an informal, calculated step to not attack Americans but continue to put the pressure on the Afghan military.
And this starts to, I argue, pull psychologically apart what had been a very close and necessarily close relationship between those two. And then, in February of 2020, you get the Doha Agreement signed between America and the Afghan Taliban. And now, it’s formally laid out. The Afghan Taliban agree, “We’re not attacking you Americans. We’re not attacking the coalition. But we’re not making any promises about anybody else.” And we went back to them, and General Scott Miller and others got a special, classified annex—which we know is there, but we can’t know for sure it was in there—but, basically saying, “Well, wait a minute now. If you guys start vigorously attacking the Afghans, then we’re gonna have the right to defend them.” We know, in retrospect, the Taliban never really agreed that that was legitimate. They just tried to step around it enough so they could continue the military campaign while they waited for America to continue to get out. And so I mentioned that because this pulling apart of a military that had to have these support structures—without a concurrent drawdown of the military capacity of the Afghan Taliban in large measure, but not solely, because the Pakistani military intelligence services didn’t wanna see the Afghan Taliban vanish, you were at the point where it was always a matter of how quickly the Afghan military forces were gonna collapse when you pulled out, as we finally did a year ago.
Host
Con, I’d love to hear your answer to this as well.
(Crane)
For me, the big problem in Afghanistan is we don’t really decide to come up with a counterinsurgency strategy until we’ve been there almost a decade. And by then, it’s just too late. I mean, we have so many lost opportunities early on to try to do it right, and we just don’t.
(Carl von) Clausewitz talks about “recognize the nature of the warrior,” and we never quite figure out the great game in that area or what our real purpose is until it’s really too late.
(Lynch)
Yeah, Stephanie, on this point, I think it’s clear that we didn’t devise a workable counterinsurgency strategy. But I think there’s some caveats that matter here.
First and foremost, in the mid-2000s, as we were focused on counterterrorism, we treated the Afghan Taliban as a defeated insurgent group. And we, particularly in the Bush administration of the 2000s, accepted the word of our counterterrorism partner, the Pakistanis, that, quote, “They got the Taliban.” They would take care of the Taliban. So that set in place a framework where, as Todd says, we kind of misunderstood the history there. We thought “take care of” meant “take out.” What (Pervez) Musharraf said and what he meant were two different things as we heard it. He didn’t mean “We’re gonna take them out.” He meant “We’re gonna take care of ‘em.” And, in his mind, it was “take care of ‘em as long as you guys are over there are doing counterterrorism stuff and until you leave us alone because we don’t trust that the Indians aren’t gonna come backdoor on us, and we think the Afghan Taliban—as difficult as they are because of Pas̲h̲tūnistān and other things that Todd mentioned—they’re a better choice than a lot of the other choices that could be in Afghanistan.” And the Pakistanis stick to that all the way through.
And I have always referred to our efforts at surging in Afghanistan, as we did in ‘04 and ‘05; as we did again in the Obama administration; and as we did again to counter (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or) ISIS in 2014–15—I refer to all of those as, at least in some measure, an effort to test the hypothesis that if we put enough military force into Afghanistan and showed kind of a counterinsurgency blanket of Americans that somehow, the Pakistanis would change their security framework enough to say, “OK, we don’t need the Afghan Taliban or people like that. We’re OK with you guys.”
And the bottom line is the Pakistanis never made that step. They couldn’t. They found their challenges with India still too dominant and too worrisome, and they didn’t trust that we’d stay there. And, in the latter point, they’re probably right. Whether they’re right about nefarious Indian activity, no matter what, unless the Afghan Taliban are in the mix for them, I don’t know that that’s true or not, but that’s their perspective. Basically, if you count our initial invasion, we took four cracks at changing that security paradigm. It didn’t change. And so, when you talk about inevitability: Were we able to ever win a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan? My answer is not without a change in the Pakistani security narrative about India and Afghanistan backdoor mistrust. And that didn’t happen, and we tested it two or three time. And as a consequence of that, we could never win an insurgency in Afghanistan. But we could succeed in both deterring and then, potentially, defeating a global terrorist network that would take advantage of the Afghan Taliban to plan, plot, and then launch credible international terror against America and our allies.
The jury is not still fully in because bad things can still happen in Afghanistan. But if you look objectively at the 20 years we were involved there, you will see that we had measurable success in preventing global catastrophic terror from emanating out of Afghanistan. We have examples, multiples, of exchanges of information between us, the Afghans, even the Pakistani intelligence services allowing us to disrupt plots, plans, and activities either at the source—that is, arresting or killing those on the battlefield, we’re making those plans—or even arresting things that were about to happen, like plots against bridges in Baltimore and other things, plots against American forces in Germany, where we intercepted a guy who was an operative for al-Qaeda before that all happened.
So I mentioned all that just to say Todd makes an excellent point that Con falls in on: counterterrorism versus counterinsurgency—it’s fair to say we never got that right. But it’s important to know that Pakistan played heavily in that. But it’s also true to say that if you look at the terrorist side of the ledger, arguably—you know, we can debate whether the cost was too much—but, arguably, we did achieve that particular outcome over the course of 20 years.
Host
Todd, do you have any comments on that?
(Greentree)
Yeah, like, maybe we should have a whole another opportunity to continue the discussion and just fall in on that costs of counterterrorism, its effectiveness, versus becoming accidental counterinsurgents because that’s what we were. Of course, Dave Kilcullen has that book that he wrote, The Accidental Guerrilla (The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One), in which the central idea is that “Hey, the Taliban are fighting us in Afghanistan because we happen to be in their space. And that’s who they are. They’re Islamic warriors who fight against foreign infidels.” We were accidental counterinsurgents by the same token. The only reason we ended up fighting the Taliban was because they helped al-Qaeda, which got into our space on 9/11—that whole trigger of contingency dragged us into this long, long war that ended up a failure.
I’d like to swing back just for a minute and go back to the idea of war termination where we were talking about the problem of “Could the negotiating process have worked out in a way that ended up keeping the Afghan security forces intact and the US having a stabilizing role rather than a destabilizing one?”
Start with Pakistan again. I don’t want to make this about Pakistan. But, in some ways, Carlotta Gall came up with a great title for a book about Afghanistan by calling it The Wrong Enemy (The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014). And, in that sense, the Pakistanis really were the key to getting a handle on this. And because we failed with the Pakistanis, we failed in Afghanistan.
Quick point related to that: This was the second time that the US failed with war termination in Afghanistan. The first time was when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and we were entirely unprepared to play a constructive role, although there was an effort in actually resolving that conflict. And, again, the Pakistanis were in the middle of that. So the point to me on the second failed effort at war termination is we weren’t really trying to end the war. We were just trying to negotiate an exit. That’s what it was. And if anybody thinks that we were actually involved in war termination or peace negotiations, I think they’re fooling themselves, and we were fooling ourselves at the same time.
Host
Todd, you brought up some really good questions in our prepodcast discussion, and I’m just gonna throw these out here. And we have about five minutes.
Was Afghanistan ever winnable? What should the aims have been? What conditions and time frame might have produced success? Tom, if you wanna start, you can just dig in and start.
(Lynch)
In terms of a counterinsurgency, Afghanistan was not winnable. And the monkey in the middle of the Afghan security forces is just a data point of evidence that that was not gonna happen. And a lot of the reason for that is the dimensions of the Indo-Pakistani security dilemma and how we could never find our way through that Gordian knot. We had tried. We hoped that Musharraf would take care of it in the early 2000s. We hoped that a big surge in ‘09 and ‘10 would show our determination and whack the Taliban so hard that they would have to be abandoned as this go-to insurgency inside of Afghanistan. But the Pakistanis looked at that and didn’t take parallel action. They didn’t have any better alternatives, and they still thought we were gonna get out, and they were right. We wound up trying to get out. And then we tried one more time in 2014–15 as ISIS started to appear there and as the Afghan, uh, military, you know, seemed to lose track of al-Qaeda types, and even that didn’t change the Pakistan security [unintelligible word].
So my answer previously applies here. I don’t think that the counterinsurgency was ever winnable. Now, what about the counterterrorism aim? The original aim, the dominant one, the thing that brought us there in the first point: to prevent Afghanistan or, by extension, the Afghanistan-Pakistani border from becoming yet again, as it had on 9/11 and before that with other plans and plots by al-Qaeda or global terrorists, from being a point of successful planning, plotting, training, and then execution of global, catastrophic terrorism events on the United States and our allies and partners. There, I think the record is, at least debatably, positive. That is, we succeeded. We didn’t win, OK? We’re not done yet. Al-Qaeda is not gone. ISIS is not gone. Salafi-jihadi terrorism is not gone. But it’s been on its heels for the last 20 years, and we’ve not seen successful execution of catastrophic terror against America and its allies since 9/11 emanating from that part of the world.
So I would argue that we can and did achieve success in the counterterrorism mission as defined. We could not have and did not have the ability to win the counterinsurgency. Now the fruitful debate in the future was was it worth the cost of trying to manage both a counterinsurgency and a counterterrorism effort for 20 years to get there? And I think that’s a different and legitimate question that perhaps we can address another time. Thank you.
Host
Con, we haven’t heard from you in a while. What do you think?
(Crane)
I just hope people are listening to this podcast and read Tom’s article because one of my favorite sayings is “We have never been able to never do this again.” So we’ll be talking about this again. I guess I just think there was so many lost opportunities early on. Victory in counterinsurgency is very hard to define. There’s a lot of times the result is a very messy one that can be interpreted either way. It usually ends up in some kind of political compromise where everybody gets something. You know, the problem is the whole campaign in Afghanistan—they were only planning about 72 hours ahead. I mean, we criticize going into Iraq in 2003 for having an incomplete plan for what happens after major conflict ended. In Afghanistan, we had none.
And so we were a blind man to start with, roaming around in the dark. Again, we staggered around a decade, and I think there were so many lost opportunities. I’ve been on a couple of panels with . . . with General (David) Petraeus since, and we’ve discussed about could some kind of an American presence have created a more stable result—some kind of a different outcome? Again, victory’s very hard to define. Tom’s talked very well about the impact of when we decide we’re gonna leave, and everybody knows we’re gonna leave.
So the question is “Would some kind of a longer-term presence made much of a difference?” I don’t know. Pakistan’s not gonna change. Situation’s not gonna change. I read the press reports every day about what’s going on in Afghanistan right now, and it’s so tragic. Just, is there some way that we could have moderated some of that? I just don’t know enough about if we could or not.
Host
Todd?
(Grentree)
Yeah. Well, I do have an opinion about that. It requires some counterfactual thinking and arguing, but it’s based in, uh, an option that actually existed at the time. And if I can mention, uh, my own article for Parameters in the winter issue: “What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?” It’s really the central point of it. So I thought that one of the things that Tom captured accurately in his article was that as the negotiations picked up steam, by the time the end game came on, the fighting was not what mattered in the Afghan security forces disintegrating. Rather, it was the negotiations that were taking place—not between the Americans and the Taliban, because those were done, but between the Taliban and the Afghan forces directly. Forget the Afghan government. And a lot of those negotiations were being brokered by local elders to get people who are gonna walk away from the army and the police and fold back into their communities or move back, move out entirely. And those negotiations work pretty well because that was one of the things that enabled the Taliban to take over so fast without a lot of residual fight.
My argument is that in December of 2001—I gotta go back two decades—those conditions were reversed. The US leading coalition with, you know, the famous, CIA-supported operation with Afghan militia had just overthrown the Taliban emirate. They were done. And the Taliban at that time, in accordance with Afghan way of war, were flowing in to swear fealty to the new Afghan government, which had just been named at this conference in Bonn, Germany, with, uh, Hamid Karzai as the interim president. Local elders were complying with that as well. And very much this is the Afghan way of war. It’s basically common to tribal warfare everywhere that people who are involved in fighting are figuring not their membership in, uh, national institutions or the oath they take to a national government but where their survival is going to exist the best for them and their group, their clan of people.
I got to learn very closely when I was in with the command group with 10th Mountain Division in Kandahar at the height of the Obama surge. We were very involved in the areas of traditional Pashtun strength that was both that where the Karzais and sort of the ruling Pashtun aristocracy and the government and the Taliban had their origins. Same exact place. And what the people in the Afghan government were saying—of course, this is many years after the fact—was “Wow, you should have listened to us in 2001 and 2002 because we wanted to disperse the Taliban. They were coming in. They wanted to go back to their villages. We were gonna let ‘em keep their AK-47s but nothing else. Key to this, we wanted to break the relationships with Pakistan, particularly by bringing their families back across the border and back where they had been for many years and back into their communities.” That was an option that was put to the US government during the course of the Bonn Conference. This idea of involving Taliban in negotiations, not necessarily to achieve a share of national power but just to be recognized as a part of the Afghan political process. And that was explicitly vetoed. That option was explicitly vetoed, of course, with Vice President Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld calling the shots that “No, we’re nt dealing with the Taliban.” And that in my assessment on this regard—that really is what led us down this path. The enemy was al-Qaeda. They were the ones who had attacked us. They were the focus, and we essentially confused the Taliban with al-Qaeda.
Host
In a few sentences, final thoughts from each of you. Con, why don’t you start?
(Crane)
I just hope people (are) listening to this podcast and reading these articles because we have never been able to never do this again and all these issues that could come up again. And we just can’t make the same mistakes. We eventually gotta learn from all this.
Host
Todd?
(Greentree)
So several years ago I wrote an article about the three movies that help us understand Afghanistan. And, really, they’re about ourselves. But the movies are, of course, The Godfather, Chinatown, and the third one is Groundhog Day.
And the point of Groundhog Day is not just that you keep reliving the same day over and over again—because that’s what we’ve been doing on this, as Con says. But because in Groundhog Day, the idea is that you learn from repeating each today over and over, and you advance on that. And that’s where I think that the importance of Tom’s article lies and the three principles, the three conditions that he brings in there at the end: These are things to pay attention to. Otherwise, we’re gonna be stuck in that cycle without ever getting out of it because this is going to happen again.
Host
Tom, will you wrap this up for us?
(Lynch)
Yeah, thanks. I think that’s a perfect setup, and thanks again to Con and Todd for joining in today because that’s where I wanna kind of end as well. It is one thing to go back and say “Yeah, you could see this slow-motion train wreck happening. You could see how we had set the conditions for it in terms of the (Afghan National Defense and Security Forces or) ANDSF and its challenges at the end of the day.” But the question is “To what effect do we go forward from here?” And the first thing I tried to address at the end of the article is that, as Con has said and as Todd alludes to, we’re gonna be here again. We’re gonna be at a point where we have to look at advising allies and partners in the pursuit of our national interests in a region or an area where there are conflicting, competing, or challenging political and security dynamics that don’t necessarily perfectly align with ours. And so the question is “How do you pursue those?”
At the level of military forces, you know, my recommendations in the article are that we should make sure that we’re tailoring our support packages for the countries in question if they’re gonna be countries that are working with us or for groups in question if they’re going to be nonstate actors in accordance with what they can do and what they can accomplish—not build them beyond that, not build them so that they’re platinum outcomes, but do that in a way that allows that to be tailored to what they can accomplish in their area, not US-centric forces or combinations.
Second is morale of fighting forces that are our partners is not just an afterthought. We have to consider that. Especially, we have to consider that at a time when maybe our political interests and theirs are diverging, right? In Afghanistan, clearly, the divergence was as we decided “We’re going to get out, and we’re going to negotiate independently.” But let’s take, for example, what’s going on right now, perhaps, in Ukraine. Right now, there’s a commonality and alignment of purpose in Ukraine, basically, as the partner/surrogate force standing against the great-power Russia’s viewpoint of domination of its periphery and, you know, establishing who is and who is not in its sphere of influence. Right now, we’re aligned, but that doesn’t mean we’re gonna be aligned necessarily going forward. So how do we plan for that so that we do not come to the unhappy event where we wind up either dislocating a partner, abandoning a partner, or setting the conditions for us to come out worse than we went in?
And, finally, there’s this inherent principle agent arrangement any time you’re engaged with assisting partners, whether they be state militaries or surrogate partners that are nonstate. And so you gotta have a plan in place for what happens when you now have divergent interests or divergent ideations where they may want to go one way—i.e., maybe want to go and start, you know, attacking a great-power rival of ours and we like don’t want that because we don’t want the nuclear specter, right? What’s our plan for that and how do we implement it, understanding that sometimes you gotta have these plans quietly because saying the obvious thing out loud also can have very debilitating consequences? In Afghanistan, saying the debilitating thing would have been saying in the middle of the summer last year, 2021, that “Yeah, the government of Afghanistan is not gonna stand. Its military can’t stand. And so we’re just getting our people out of here.” Well, the problem then for the US government was to say that would almost be like assuring the outcome. And that’s what they were hearing from President Ghani and his interlocutors here in America: “No, no. Don’t start withdrawing more people fast. Don’t start taking folks out that have been helping us for 20 years to get ‘em out of the way of the Taliban. Because if you do that, we’re gonna collapse.” Now he wound up collapsing anyway. But, nonetheless, that’s kind of what happens when the principal agent dynamic diverges. And my only point in the article is, as Con says, so we don’t wind up doing this again and doing it badly, think about that going in. So thanks so much for the time, and I really appreciate the opportunity to discuss this.
Host
Thank you to all three of you.
If you’re interested in learning more about the collapse of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces, you can download the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 52, issue 3.
If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and any other major podcast platform.
Conversations on Strategy Podcast – Ep 7 – Dr. Thomas F. Lynch III, Dr. Todd Greentree, Dr. Conrad Crane – Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces | Conversations on Strategy Podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast
