The Afghanistan Mirage - Strategic failure explains operational failure.
spychess.substack.com
Was victory possible or even definable? Across two decades, policymakers have focused on operations without strategy.
There is a misconception that the United States has lost Afghanistan and that President Biden bears the responsibility.
First, the United States could only lose Afghanistan if victory were possible. It was not and has never been possible, given the type of adversary, the condition of Afghanistan as a functioning state (it was not) before the Taliban, and the absence of strategic thinking across two decades.
Secondly, President Biden followed through with an agreement made by the previous American president (Trump), similar to President Obama withdrawing from Iraq because the previous administration (Bush) had agreed to do so with the Iraqi government. Blaming Biden is myopic and more of a political exercise than one based on the reality of the past two decades. Blame does not provide insight or a sober and objective assessment of why the American experience in Afghanistan has ended in failure to achieve strategic (were there any?) or operational objectives with regards to Afghanistan as a country.
While there was a strategic victory against Al-Qaeda (AQ) in 2001/2002 when they were smashed and chased out of Afghanistan, this victory was specific to that terrorist organization, not to separate matters–the Taliban and Afghanistan as a modern nation state. Strategic and operational successes against AQ in the first few years after 9/11 have been conflated with what the United States and its allies were doing in Afghanistan for most of the last twenty years.
The failure in Afghanistan needs to be viewed through two related but distinct lenses, the strategic and the operational. The arguments and headlines splashed across social media, print, and television mostly focus on the operational–Taliban forces taking cities and the collapse of the Afghan military. The pundits, a wide-ranging group of different types of “experts,” find themselves trapped in a faulty mindset, one that sees operational failure explaining strategic failure.
They have it all wrong. It is the inverse.
Strategic failure explains operational failure. The operational level cannot explain why things went wrong strategically. Operational failures (strength of the Afghan police/military, corruption, training, lack of institutions, et al) explain how things went wrong but not why, only strategic thinking addresses the issue of why.
Operational competence or dominance, without a strategy, leads to policymakers seeing an illusion, a mirage. Policymakers, the media, and the public have been watching a mirage in Afghanistan for almost two decades. As it falls under Taliban control they continue seeing/asking about details (operational failures) of the mirage to explain why it all went wrong instead of realizing they were seeing a mirage all along. They should be asking about strategy, or lack thereof, because strategy can explain why operational failure is occurring.
The U.S. military and its allies could have kept the Taliban stalemated for the next hundred years with a relatively small footprint. The problem with this approach is that it would have done nothing to answer strategic questions and address the strategic picture.
What are strategic questions with regards to Afghanistan?
Here are a few examples of the type of questions we should be using to frame, create, and analyze strategies for America’s role in Afghanistan.
Why try to build a modern state in Afghanistan?
Are American national security interests strategically threatened by instability in Afghanistan or by a Taliban controlled Afghanistan?
If a terrorist group finds safe haven again, is that a strategic or existential risk to the international order?
From an American perspective, does an unstable Afghanistan not put more pressure on American adversaries like Russia, China, or Iran?
Strategically, could Pakistani elites (political, military, and inside Pakistani intelligence, ISI), who support the Taliban and will now hold more responsibility, be more vulnerable to pressure?
Is there political will in the United States and among its allies to stay in Afghanistan for decades with no end date for withdrawing combat forces?
These are uncomfortable questions and the answers may not be what American policymakers and stakeholders want to hear.
If the answer to the second question listed above, for example, is NO, then it serves as a starting point for sound strategic decision making. If the answer is NO (for example), then operationally what happens doesn’t matter, suggesting that exiting Afghanistan, regardless of what you see on TV, doesn’t matter strategically in the long term.
(Editorial note: Although beyond the scope of this SpyChess piece, it is important to note that recognizing the human element of the disaster in Afghanistan should not be forgotten or minimized. As previously noted in SpyChess, the responsibility for tragic consequences for Afghan people should be highlighted and understood by the world.)
What is the strategic picture?
The U.S. was propping up a corrupt, incompetent, and hollow regime that had little source of internal strength, legitimacy, and raison d’etre compared to a group of religious insurgents motivated by ideology that binds them together, provides an organic sense of legitimacy (for themselves and even from those under their control), receives outside support (elements in Pakistan), can regroup in Pakistan, and strike from Pakistan.
Western political and military leaders became trapped by using the operational mask to hide, distract, or ignore the catastrophic strategic picture that was Afghanistan. The incredible and honorable work done in the civil society space also helped, unintentionally, to mask the reality of how weak and fragile the centers of power have been in Afghanistan throughout the past two decades.
Not understanding the depths of the weakness and fragility reflects the lack of sound strategic thinking by the Western powers. Politicians, jumpy and reactive to headlines as well as perception, have never tried to answer strategic questions. Instead, they have hid behind operational assessments and discussions by/with military leaders whose focus is on the operational and tactical level, not the strategic.
Western military leadership should not be absolved of failures at the operational level. That failure, however, is a separate discussion.
The greater responsibility lies with American and allied policymakers who have, for two decades, failed to think and act at the strategic level.
Perhaps they never asked strategic questions or they didn’t like the answers and chose to ignore them. Regardless, a lot of the blame game will incorrectly focus on the operational, just like the West has done for two decades in Afghanistan, instead of taking a deeper look into the more difficult strategic level of analysis necessary to ensure that we don’t make the same mistakes again.
Additional 2021 SpyChess commentary on Afghanistan.
March 26th - SpyChess warned that the end would come much faster than American and other intelligence service were estimating. Read it here.
April 13th - SpyChess noted to subscribers that events from spring 2021 through July 2021 would be signposts of Afghan government weakness and would signal how quickly collapse was likely to occur.
The Afghanistan Mirage - Strategic failure explains operational failure.
The Afghanistan Mirage - Strategic failure explains operational failure.
The Afghanistan Mirage - Strategic failure explains operational failure.
Was victory possible or even definable? Across two decades, policymakers have focused on operations without strategy.
There is a misconception that the United States has lost Afghanistan and that President Biden bears the responsibility.
First, the United States could only lose Afghanistan if victory were possible. It was not and has never been possible, given the type of adversary, the condition of Afghanistan as a functioning state (it was not) before the Taliban, and the absence of strategic thinking across two decades.
Secondly, President Biden followed through with an agreement made by the previous American president (Trump), similar to President Obama withdrawing from Iraq because the previous administration (Bush) had agreed to do so with the Iraqi government. Blaming Biden is myopic and more of a political exercise than one based on the reality of the past two decades. Blame does not provide insight or a sober and objective assessment of why the American experience in Afghanistan has ended in failure to achieve strategic (were there any?) or operational objectives with regards to Afghanistan as a country.
While there was a strategic victory against Al-Qaeda (AQ) in 2001/2002 when they were smashed and chased out of Afghanistan, this victory was specific to that terrorist organization, not to separate matters–the Taliban and Afghanistan as a modern nation state. Strategic and operational successes against AQ in the first few years after 9/11 have been conflated with what the United States and its allies were doing in Afghanistan for most of the last twenty years.
The failure in Afghanistan needs to be viewed through two related but distinct lenses, the strategic and the operational. The arguments and headlines splashed across social media, print, and television mostly focus on the operational–Taliban forces taking cities and the collapse of the Afghan military. The pundits, a wide-ranging group of different types of “experts,” find themselves trapped in a faulty mindset, one that sees operational failure explaining strategic failure.
They have it all wrong. It is the inverse.
Strategic failure explains operational failure. The operational level cannot explain why things went wrong strategically. Operational failures (strength of the Afghan police/military, corruption, training, lack of institutions, et al) explain how things went wrong but not why, only strategic thinking addresses the issue of why.
Operational competence or dominance, without a strategy, leads to policymakers seeing an illusion, a mirage. Policymakers, the media, and the public have been watching a mirage in Afghanistan for almost two decades. As it falls under Taliban control they continue seeing/asking about details (operational failures) of the mirage to explain why it all went wrong instead of realizing they were seeing a mirage all along. They should be asking about strategy, or lack thereof, because strategy can explain why operational failure is occurring.
The U.S. military and its allies could have kept the Taliban stalemated for the next hundred years with a relatively small footprint. The problem with this approach is that it would have done nothing to answer strategic questions and address the strategic picture.
What are strategic questions with regards to Afghanistan?
Here are a few examples of the type of questions we should be using to frame, create, and analyze strategies for America’s role in Afghanistan.
Why try to build a modern state in Afghanistan?
Are American national security interests strategically threatened by instability in Afghanistan or by a Taliban controlled Afghanistan?
If a terrorist group finds safe haven again, is that a strategic or existential risk to the international order?
From an American perspective, does an unstable Afghanistan not put more pressure on American adversaries like Russia, China, or Iran?
Strategically, could Pakistani elites (political, military, and inside Pakistani intelligence, ISI), who support the Taliban and will now hold more responsibility, be more vulnerable to pressure?
Is there political will in the United States and among its allies to stay in Afghanistan for decades with no end date for withdrawing combat forces?
These are uncomfortable questions and the answers may not be what American policymakers and stakeholders want to hear.
If the answer to the second question listed above, for example, is NO, then it serves as a starting point for sound strategic decision making. If the answer is NO (for example), then operationally what happens doesn’t matter, suggesting that exiting Afghanistan, regardless of what you see on TV, doesn’t matter strategically in the long term.
(Editorial note: Although beyond the scope of this SpyChess piece, it is important to note that recognizing the human element of the disaster in Afghanistan should not be forgotten or minimized. As previously noted in SpyChess, the responsibility for tragic consequences for Afghan people should be highlighted and understood by the world.)
What is the strategic picture?
The U.S. was propping up a corrupt, incompetent, and hollow regime that had little source of internal strength, legitimacy, and raison d’etre compared to a group of religious insurgents motivated by ideology that binds them together, provides an organic sense of legitimacy (for themselves and even from those under their control), receives outside support (elements in Pakistan), can regroup in Pakistan, and strike from Pakistan.
Western political and military leaders became trapped by using the operational mask to hide, distract, or ignore the catastrophic strategic picture that was Afghanistan. The incredible and honorable work done in the civil society space also helped, unintentionally, to mask the reality of how weak and fragile the centers of power have been in Afghanistan throughout the past two decades.
Not understanding the depths of the weakness and fragility reflects the lack of sound strategic thinking by the Western powers. Politicians, jumpy and reactive to headlines as well as perception, have never tried to answer strategic questions. Instead, they have hid behind operational assessments and discussions by/with military leaders whose focus is on the operational and tactical level, not the strategic.
Western military leadership should not be absolved of failures at the operational level. That failure, however, is a separate discussion.
The greater responsibility lies with American and allied policymakers who have, for two decades, failed to think and act at the strategic level.
Perhaps they never asked strategic questions or they didn’t like the answers and chose to ignore them. Regardless, a lot of the blame game will incorrectly focus on the operational, just like the West has done for two decades in Afghanistan, instead of taking a deeper look into the more difficult strategic level of analysis necessary to ensure that we don’t make the same mistakes again.
Additional 2021 SpyChess commentary on Afghanistan.
March 26th - SpyChess warned that the end would come much faster than American and other intelligence service were estimating. Read it here.
March 30th - SpyChess described the American experience in Afghanistan as a chronicle of a loss foretold.
April 13th - SpyChess noted to subscribers that events from spring 2021 through July 2021 would be signposts of Afghan government weakness and would signal how quickly collapse was likely to occur.
April 16th - Afghanistan: Reframing the debate over withdrawal. Beyond the terrorism lens, how do we value life and responsibility?
July 3rd - SpyChess in memoriam -"I will be happy tomorrow in Kabul."
July 29th - No silver bullets but plenty of potential misfires. American strategy in Afghanistan.