In the fifth installment of the SRAD Director’s Corner, “Afghanistan: The Logic of Failing, Fast and Slow,” George Shatzer focuses on the failure of the US-led war and reconstruction campaign in Afghanistan. He reviews The Forty-year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold by Tariq Ali and The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman. He brings personal experience to bear in his review, painting a picture of why the United States failed in Afghanistan and posing these failures as lessons that must be learned before the next war. The books also provide insights for strategists attempting to plan for security in the region.

Keywords: NATO, policy, strategy, Afghanistan, logic

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/4/

Episode transcript: “Afghanistan: The Logic of Thinking Fast and Slow”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Decisive Point.

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.

In your SRAD Director’s Corner series you review books of possible interest to contemporary military strategists, especially those serving in US Army and Joint positions. The spring issue contains the fifth installment of this series, and the focus is on Afghanistan. Thanks for joining us again.

Colonel George Shatzer

Thanks as always for having me. I enjoy discussing these important issues.

(Host)

Each of you articles in the series include a personal component. You have had direct experience in dealing with the issues and strategies discussed in the books you review. That’s true again with the topic of the US war in Afghanistan.

Shatzer

Yes, very true. I don’t claim to be an expert on Afghanistan but that country and the US war there have factored significantly in my Army career. The terror attacks of 9/11, emanating partly from Afghanistan, inspired my interest in national security and strategy and were a big part of the reason I chose to become an Army strategist in 2005. As a much younger officer then, I felt strongly that the so-called Global War on Terror should have remained centered on Afghanistan and the terror groups operating there. My views on that have changed some over the years, but the issue of our commitment to campaigning in Afghanistan remained the vital question all the way to the collapse of the campaign in 2021. And, I know we’ll take more about that later. I was also a student at the Army’s Command and General Staff College in ’05 and decided to write my master’s thesis on proxy warfare which led to me to research and write a lengthy case study on the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980’s and the subsequent Afghan civil war that led to the development of the foreign terrorist base there. And while I would continue to follow events in Afghanistan closely, it would be another nine years before I actually served there in country. The experience was probably the most difficult of my entire career. That tour challenged me the most intellectually and was personally and professionally very trying.

Host

So, an easy question then – why did the US war in Afghanistan fail?

Shatzer

Oh boy. Joe Collins’s article in the same edition of Parameters does a great job at answering this. I offer many reasons why in my article as well. The reality is that the array of problems in Afghanistan is vast and their nature is so complex as to almost be alien to us as Americans. But if I had to select the one issue that set up the US campaign for failure it would be the mismatch in the aims of US political leaders and those of the US military.

For the Department of Defense, and especially the Army as the lead service in the campaign, there was a deep-seated reluctance to fully commit to a war in Afghanistan. Even years before 9/11, the DoD and the Army actually did a fair job of examining the British and Soviet experiences in Afghanistan and concluding that operating there was a dead end – a graveyard of empires as the phrase goes. So many books like the Bear Went Over the Mountain by Les Grau, The Bear Trap by Mohammed Yousef, and post 9/11 works like Soldiers of God by Robert Kaplan were very popular and all played on the same theme: that powerful militaries go into Afghanistan and cannot deal with the terrain, the culture, and myriad other issues, and only end up wasting years and precious resources. So, DoD and the Army planned what amounted to a very large-scale raid of Afghanistan beginning in October 2001 to punish and oust the Taliban and to capture and kill as many Al-Qaeda and other terrorists as possible – and, critically, to not become so decisively engaged with a large footprint of conventional forces that would only lead to a long-term and aimless campaign vulnerable to failure.

But US civilian leadership had a different view. While they recognized what history had to say about major powers entering Afghanistan, they were rightly aggrieved by the Taliban’s treatment of its people, especially women and children and the internal violence that had gripped the country since at least the mid-1970’s. To US political leaders, 9/11 was proof that a deep commitment to and investment in Afghanistan was needed to end the decades of conflict there and eliminate so-called “ungoverned spaces” – the underdeveloped and seemingly chaotic hinterlands of Afghanistan that gave bad actors like terrorist groups free range to operate. So, while DoD and the Army were thinking “in and out with some training to get the new Afghan security forces up and running so they could quickly take over,” the US civilian authority was thinking, “nation-building, democratization, remaking Afghan society and bringing it into the modern era.” This fundamental misalignment of views set the stage for what followed – a never-resolved tension between a “realist” view (held mostly by the military) and an “idealist” view (held mostly by civilian authority. The military, imbued with a can-do mission first attitude, dutifully followed orders but never fully committed to Afghanistan because it assessed the country as beyond help. The civilian reconstruction mission was deeply committed to the future vision of Afghanistan but failed to be cleared-eyed about the profound difficulties there. Unfortunately, this created a tendency by both camps to overstate progress year after year.

This disconnect in views, aims, and assessments created a dynamic that badly undercut the campaign and made it much less able to deal with the whole host of other problems in Afghanistan that it faced.

Host

So, from a very high-level view there were serious issues. During your tour in Afghanistan you experienced how that played out day-to-day. Describe that.

Shatzer

Sure. Expanding on what I mention in the article, what I experienced even preparing for deployment to Afghanistan demonstrated the limits of our commitment. I should say that I deployed to Afghanistan as an individual augmentee to the mission, not as part of a deploying unit. The Army’s individual augmentee deployment preparation was geared almost exclusively toward training service members for personal self-protection while in country and refreshing on basic tactical soldier tasks. To the extent that there was training on Afghan culture or on the US campaign, it was barely more than what you might find on Wikipedia. Even as a senior lieutenant colonel who had done serious study on Afghanistan in the past, and did another round of my own professional study before deploying, I felt grossly unprepared to deal with the tough operational and strategic issues facing the plans team that I joined at NATO headquarters.

On top of that, as I mention in the article, the turnover in personnel in the NATO headquarters was tremendously disruptive. Most personnel were on six-month long tours with a small minority assigned for a year. In my year-long tour, the plans section had four US colonels serve as the chief of plans. Two different British brigadiers would serve as the plans director. It seemed every month there was an officer either joining the section, leaving the section or going on R&R leave. This contributed to a pervasive sense that many were just putting in their time – doing their reports, delivering briefings, engaging with Afghans – but at the same time detached from it all as they anticipated the next drawdown or going home. For most of my tour, LTG John Campbell commanded the mission and he recognized this short-timer attitude and approach. He tried to combat it. He frequently said, “Make the days count, don’t count the days.” Too many individuals were just counting the days. Institutionally, the Army was doing much the same.

Host

That’s a major point that Elliot Ackerman makes in his book, The Fifth Act.

Shatzer

Yes, he does. He relates how after nearly a decade in Afghanistan that the US Combined Joint Special Operations Task force headquarters was still made from plywood – a fact noted by our Afghan partners in the observation that “wars are not won with plywood.” Ackerman extends this point into a metaphor. The Afghan army was a plywood army, effective for some things but foundationally unsound in so many ways for trying to win an actual war. His point of course, is that our short-timer, always partly-preparing-to-leave approach undercut the effectiveness of everything we tried to do. We were always dealing with expedients, trying this and that for “quick wins,” but frequently shifting means and methods when priorities invariably shifted as people passed through the mission.

Ackerman recounts how he, like many other veterans of Afghanistan, tried in August 2021 to coordinate the evacuation of former Afghan allies as the Taliban completed taking control of the country once again. He describes doing this while on a family vacation to Italy, making frantic phone calls and direct messaging with people to try to arrange passage for Afghans through the chaos swirling around Kabul’s airport to get these people on flights out of the country. As a story-telling device, Ackerman doing this while on vacation is a great illustration of how we treated the entire mission in Afghanistan – doing what we could, constantly at the spur of the moment, while trying to get back to what we would rather be doing.

What seems so strange to me is the lack of concern or attention the failure in Afghanistan seems to garner from the American public. One really has the sense that after nearly 25,000 US deaths and causalities in Afghanistan, 20 years and over $2 trillion spent, that no one seems to care much. One would think the American people would be demanding more in terms of examining our actions in the war and holding people to account. But it seems we’re just not interested. On one level, this isn’t surprising. Most Americans were never invested in the war. It was something a small group of volunteers were dealing with in faraway backwards country. Americans went about with their daily lives. Perhaps they knew somebody that deployed or was hurt in the war, but probably not. On another level, Ackerman worries that the American character has weakened and we’re unwilling to hold ourselves to account. He attributes these to a number of mostly partisan and societal factors that he sees as threatening the very integrity of the United States.

What worries me more immediately is that the Army itself also seems uninterested in studying its conduct of the war. We used to pride ourselves as a learning organization, deeply committed to the after-action review process and to professional study. So far as I know, the Army is not conducting any major study of the war. In my list of other books to consider, I include a two-volume study that the Army published that looks at the war through 2014. The Army really needs to write volume three through 2021. I worry that the Army’s unwillingness to learn from Afghanistan is a sign of something lost professionally within the service.

Host

What does Tariq Ali’s book, The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan add?

Shatzer

Well, like Ackerman’s book, Ali publishes this collection of his writings very soon after the fall of Kabul in late summer 2021. The collection pulls together some of his writings since 1980 on the conflicts in Afghanistan. The subtitle of his book is “A Chronicle Foretold.” And his writings since the beginnings of the Soviet invasion do indeed seem to hit the mark across the decades in nearly every instance. Ali, a Pakistani-British political activist, clearly has an anti-American bias, but it’s hard to fault his conclusions about the results of foreign intervention in Afghanistan since they all unfold much as he predicts.

Oddly, the thing that’s remarkable about Ali’s book is that it really says nothing new about the failures in Afghanistan that many others, including Ackerman, haven’t already said. That’s the point – here is yet another work, written over the course of four decades that arrived at the same conclusions as those coming to the subject thirty or forty years later. It speaks to a fundamental lack of understanding about what Afghanistan is and what we were doing. This is beautifully illustrated in a reprinted series of letters from 2003 between Ali and the UK minister for trade, investment, and foreign affairs. In the letters, Ali is hypercritical of what he sees as abject US and NATO failures even in year one essentially. The UK minister takes him to task noting there has been positive progress made. Ali counters that the Soviets claimed the same things while ignoring just how bad the situation truly was.

This links back to my earlier point about the split between realists and idealists. Both camps turned a blind eye to the true difficulties. The realists were numb to them, expected them and so didn’t take any new actions. The idealists would minimize these issues, trying to convince themselves and others that the Afghans were improving their ability to deal with them when they really weren’t. Either way, the US never substantially altered its strategy or campaign in twenty years.

Host

You make very brief reference to two other books at the end of your article.

Shatzer

Yes, The Logic of Failure by Dietrich Dörner and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Dorner makes a very convincing case that failure is not accidental. That there are real, substantive shortcomings in logic and attitudes that cause us to make bad decisions when dealing with complex problems. Similarly, Kahneman’s work explains the different logical processes (especially in deliberate and instinctive thinking) that we use in decision-making and how that often leads us to have too much confidence in our judgment. Neither book is about Afghanistan. But, for my money, both books nail the logical failures that to campaign failure in Afghanistan. The point is we have to make deliberate study of our logic in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes. And, again, I don’t see us doing this with respect to our conduct of the war in Afghanistan.

The DoD and US Army are understandably very concerned about building the capability to deter, and if necessary, win a future war with powerful nation-states like China. But, that can’t come at the expense of being ready for wars like we experienced in Afghanistan. Failure to learn from them today will set us up for failure again.

Host

It’s always a pleasure working with you. Thanks so much for making time for this today.

Shatzer

I appreciated the opportunity to discuss this today.

Host

Listeners, if you want to learn more, read the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53, issue 1.

About the author:

Colonel George Shatzer is the chairman of the Strategic Research and Analysis Department in the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College.