An Exemplary Defeat: The West in Afghanistan,2001–2021

Abstract

The Western defeat in Afghanistan was due to an inadequate process of strategic reflection informed, first, by an overestimation of the attractiveness of the Western political agenda to Afghans and, second, by overconfidence in the effectiveness of its military approach. As a corollary, popular support for the Taliban was underestimated. The insurgents possessed a degree of what we term strategic cohesion—a sociopolitical and military embeddedness within society—that produced a far stronger strategic effectiveness than we could replicate in our Afghan allies. Furthermore, a military-professional mindset underestimated the degree to which political considerations permeated the battlefield. The political effect of military actions was insufficiently integrated into strategic practice. Specifically, the linchpin officer in staff planning and field operations in Western armies struggled to act as what we term strategic colonels. In both respects, the war continues to offer important lessons for Western involvement in future conflict, including with Russia and China.

The roads of travel for explanations for the Western defeat in Afghanistan are largely predictable and were amply, although sometimes mutedly, presaged in the literature on the conflict over the past 20 years. As with Vietnam, we can expect the claim that our armed forces never lost on the battlefield and that typically lackluster and indeterminate political direction was the culprit (Bailey et al., 2013). Some will argue that existing government structures were perfectly adequate in principle but that inefficiencies in civil–military coordination (Cohen, 2002; Strachan, 2013) or in the military application of force cost us the war (Elliott, 2017; Ledwidge, 2017). A better bundling of resources, or a cleverer use of force, or just more force, would have done the trick of beating the Taliban (Farrell et al., 2013; Kaplan, 2013). In short, we knew what worked but, as is usual in liberal democracies, failed to grasp the nettle wholeheartedly. For those small powers operating in the shadow of the United States, one may hear the cynical and exculpatory claim that the only reason they joined in was “alliance solidarity,” implying that they never had any intent to achieve anything serious for the Afghans (Berdal & Suhrke, 2018). A few will assert, with odd, determinist logic, that as the Afghans have always defeated Western invaders, they would also overcome the present lot (Jones, 2010; Porter, 2009). Others will pin the blame on external factors, notably the duplicitous role of Pakistan (Coll, 2018; Whitlock, 2021). The blame may even be put squarely on our Afghan allies: Their criminal corruption doomed any chance of building popular support and creating an effective state that could establish a monopoly of violence (Fairweather, 2014; O’Hanlon & Sherjan, 2010). Some may say, finally, with more than a whiff of orientalist bias, that “Afghan culture” was irredeemable (Porter, 2009). An overall conclusion may be reached that the war was “unwinnable” (Farrell, 2017). Failure was foreordained in this “war of choice.”

Strategies of war and intervention, however, cannot be approached as an ultimate form of tragedy—as an undertaking that will escape human control and must end in disaster. One must assume (certainly in liberal democracies) that the choice for war is never taken lightly. It may be marked by miscalculation, faulty reasoning, overoptimism, and stupidity even, but it is not undertaken without serious cause. And as Clausewitz (1832 –1834)already argued, the risks and uncertainty inherent in war make participants act with trepidation and caution, but the choice to commit to war starts from the premise that something important and positive can be forged by it. War remains the most serious instrument for bending an opponent’s will in the direction of one’s own. A war of 20 years’ duration offers ample opportunity to reflect and improve performance and, if needed, reset the political and military course. We argue that the West failed not because of tragically unavoidable factors, but inadequate strategic reflection regarding two key issues. The first concerned the relative level of popular support for the competing political agendas of insurgency and counterinsurgency (COIN). The second related to the ways in which the political effect of military actions should be integrated into strategic practice.

This short contribution is based on our forthcoming book An Exemplary Defeat: Sweden and Finland’s War for Peace in Afghanistan. This analysis is largely based on primary sources—official documents and interviews—mostly in the original Swedish and Finnish languages. Interested readers are referred to the book for a fuller development of the arguments and a full set of references. As we claim in the book and also here, European experiences and perspectives—including that of the usually neglected smaller powers—offer valuable, generalizable lessons. The war in Afghanistan was not a war of any one country, but of an international coalition of mainly liberal democracies. The study of other, smaller participants brings out similarities and differences in strategic thinking and practice and so can help bring into sharper relief than only major country studies may, the fundamental challenges that liberal democracies face in common in contemporary warfare.

This piece will propose two arguments and one key takeaway. The first argument is that strategic reflection was impeded by a political and military hubris that overestimated the attractiveness of the Western political agenda to the local population and the effectiveness of its military approach. Or, to put it another way, it fatally underestimated popular support for the Taliban and what they stood for. They possessed a degree of what can be termed strategic cohesion—a sociopolitical and military embeddedness within society (Honig, forthcoming; Käihkö, 2021)—that produced a far stronger strategic effectiveness than we judged possible and than we could replicate in our Afghan allies. Second, although Western political and military leaders constantly intoned that the war could only be resolved by political and not by military means alone, the role and contribution of the military to a political solution were not subjected to careful enough analysis. In particular, the degree to which political considerations permeated the battlefield was underestimated. No longer could officers remain content with acting as mere “managers of violence” in the Huntingtonian mold. Instead, their actions had to be planned and executed on all levels with political intent and consequences directly in mind. Specifically, this called for the transformation of the linchpin officer in staff planning and field operations in Western armies into what could be termed strategic colonels. The takeaway is that the war continues to offer important lessons for Western involvement in future conflict, whether it be against nonstate actors or states like Russia and China. Politics and the battlefield have become inextricably intertwined. Afghanistan shows the importance of correctly gauging—and this is essentially a political and not a military judgment—where the people stand in the theater of war. Armies and their leaders must be cognizant of this development. Janowitz’s call for a politically attuned military has, if anything, become more pressing today after the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan (Janowitz, 1961, 1971; Nielsen & Liebert, 2021; Travis, 2020).

The article will proceed by first considering the political assumptions that underpinned the Western intervention in Afghanistan and how these structured their strategy. That prepares the way for identifying two fundamental politico-strategic miscalculations, one pertaining to the question of where the political loyalty of the Afghan people lay and the other to where the insurgency could be best attacked and defeated. These miscalculations underline the importance of possessing an understanding of what we term a society’s strategic cohesion by a cohort of strategic colonels. The concluding paragraph briefly points out why the key challenges manifested in the Afghan war remain relevant.

The Western Intervention in Afghanistan and the Issue of Indigenous Popular Support

The West’s political aim of developing Afghanistan into a democratic and prosperous society was ambitious and amounted to nothing less than a revolutionary makeover of Afghan society and politics. The establishment of democracy was nonetheless believed to stand a good prospect of success because of the firm conviction, common to liberal democracies, that not only does democracy serve the interests of most people best, but most people also readily recognize this to be true (Fairweather, 2014; Ikenberry, 2011; Williams, 2011). If the innate good sense of the people failed to assert itself, then this was the result of oppression by “the mad or bad,” to use British military historian John Keegan’s memorable phrase (quoted in Swain, 1998). The case of Afghanistan seemed to exemplify a presence of both malicious actors in the form of the religious extremist Taliban and selfish, exploitative warlords. The U.S.-initiated liberation of Afghanistan in late 2001 brought down the former with extraordinary speed and appeared to offer an opportunity—although the latter were still around—to move the country forward with a sudden, drastic jolt. Unlike the Bush Administration, the European participants in the intervention did not expect this to happen by itself, without external help (Suhrke, 2011). Also sensing an opportunity to distance themselves from what they saw as an overly narrow, militarily focused U.S. operation (the cruelly misnamed “Enduring Freedom”), the Europeans sought to concentrate instead on peacekeeping and peacebuilding activities. Their preferred strategy came to coalesce around what were called three lines of operation: governance, development, and security. These were seen as the three key elements of weakness in Afghan society where help could make the greatest difference (Rynning, 2012; Suhrke, 2011). Once these three were assured, society would be able, in peace and freedom, to choose its own future—a future that would surely lie with democracy.

In terms of implementation, the governance and especially the development lines of operation used well-established Western means and methods of development assistance and cooperation. There were, however, also original elements: a central one was the creation by the military of a novel form of unit that became known as “provincial reconstruction team” or PRT for short (and perhaps against some expectations U.S. forces were early converts and supplied the greatest number; International Security Assistance Force [ISAF], 2009b, p. 8). Because the security situation in Afghanistan seemed somewhat uncertain at first, it appeared logical for the military to play a role in providing assurance to the population. However, as security was not dire, an opportunity was also seen for combining the provision of security with the other two lines of operation of helping deliver development and strengthening governance. Across Afghanistan’s provinces, some 14 lead-nations, mostly North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, deployed 26 joint military–civilian PRTs containing personnel from many more nations. They faced significant practical challenges. PRTs were generally small in personnel terms. Financial means to support development activities were frequently in short supply. Engaging with development and governance (and low-level violence) was unfamiliar (Eronen, 2008). However, the political aim of building democracy seemed just to governments, parliaments, their electorates, and their militaries, and the strategic means made sense. Finally, it was assumed that the Afghan population was on the side of the democracy-builders.

Yet, even with a relatively small uptick in violence, the strategy slowly unraveled. ISAF militaries began to fall back on familiar operational patterns and, over time, abandoned the governance and development lines of operation. Although much was made of the turn to counterinsurgency in 2009, ISAF militaries had already reverted to a narrow understanding not simply of their role and what they could effect but also of the nature of the problem they faced. Internal Swedish military reporting from the field demonstrates that they had adopted a counterinsurgency prism years earlier. However, they failed to see the extent to which they directly faced a political challenge rather than a military technical problem. This is where the example of the Swedes and Finns is especially telling. The countries prided themselves on being “the superpowers of peacekeeping,” highly experienced in stability operations and conflict resolution through deployment of friendly soldiers and generous amounts of development aid. They were also fortunate that the security situation in their PRT area across four provinces in northern Afghanistan remained much better than elsewhere (Honig & Käihkö, 2014). One would therefore reasonably have expected that they would have performed well in the mission and stayed the comprehensive “population-centered” course. Officially, government and military maintained to the end, to quote a Finnish commander, that they were not engaged in all-out war or violent counterinsurgency but “in a demanding crisis management task under warlike conditions and with military capabilities” (Lindeman, 2021, p. 25).

But rather than being the least likely to militarize their operations, the Swedish–Finnish PRT moved, as said, toward violent counterinsurgency operations well before the ISAF mission styled itself as such in 2009. As a careful analysis of operational practice reveals, the Nordics, in common with all modern Western professional militaries, saw the management of violence not only as their key distinguishing professional attribute, but they also viewed the use of force to be the ultimate decider in war (Honig & Käihkö, forthcoming). The reason was that ultimate political success was believed to be dependent on the destruction of the enemy’s means of resistance. Whether the enemy was conventional or insurgent in nature made little difference: Once one side had physically weakened the other side to such an extent that further resistance became pointless, the enemy would sue for peace and the war would end. Where insurgency differed from regular warfare was that irregular combatants would hide among the population and only show themselves when they decided to. That they would need to emerge publicly and violently from time to time was nonetheless believed to be certain as they would otherwise be unable to advance their cause to the necessarily violent final finish. All ISAF forces were thus inexorably drawn to the enemy’s violent activities. As one typical Finnish report on operations noted, the military firmly believed “security incidents” were the only indicator available for assessing the evolving security situation (Pääesikunta, 2021, p. 9). ISAF mapped, measured, categorized, and analyzed every violent incident in Afghanistan, in the hope of finding opportunities to identify, pin down, engage, and destroy insurgents (e.g., “WarDiaries,” n.d.).

However, the insurgents largely held the initiative and controlled the pace of the war. Tempting, let alone forcing, them to show themselves on terms laid down by ISAF troops was a difficult and frustrating process, as Swedish and Finnish military reports and analyses show in detail. They displayed one major source of hope, though. It was strongly believed that “the Afghan people” were on the side of the counterinsurgents. Like all normal human beings, they were assumed to abhor war and innately support the Western political agenda as offering the best prospect for peace and prosperity. Support for the insurgency was not voluntarily given, but most likely coerced. Insurgents thus constituted little more than an asocial minority. ISAF Commander General Stanley McChrystal claimed 5% insurgents against 95% of the population “that deserves and needs our support” (ISAF, 2009a, p. 5). An opening must thus exist to get the people “to marginalize and stigmatize” insurgents (U.S. Army and Marine Corps, 2006, pp. I–130). In COIN doctrine speak, the people’s hearts need little inducement; only their minds need convincing through change in their physical environment that the right moment had arrived to rise up, as it were, against the insurgents and give them up for the kill. A series of rather predictable operational techniques were developed and applied, which found their summation in “clear, hold, build” of population centers (Chaudhuri & Farrell, 2011) and “capture or kill” of enemy leadership targets (Spiegel, 2014).

The Importance of Understanding Strategic Cohesion

These techniques failed to arrest, let alone roll back or defeat, the insurgency. This was not simply due to limited military means or inadequate civil–military and ISAF–Afghan coordination, but rather to two fundamental politico-strategic miscalculations. First, ISAF and their directing governments consistently underestimated the ability of the insurgents to draw upon popular support for their cause. The insurgents were better plugged into society’s solidarity and authority structures and so could more effectively mobilize support than could ISAF and the ISAF-created Afghan security structures. This is evidenced by the principles underpinning the recruitment and organization of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). They reflected the miscalculation most directly and exposed a fatal flaw in the Western approach to winning the war. In line with Western models, ANSF recruitment relied on the presumed existence of a free labor market that individuals entered in search of a paid job and where they gravitated toward the military out of a sense of national duty (Hammes, 2015). These presumptions in turn relied on a belief that the immediate pull of monetary gain and the identification with a remote and abstract national community and state would prevail over other forms of solidarity and authority. In the Afghan case, these propensities were not entirely absent, but for many a belief in individual choice, national identity, and state authority was often trumped by more immediate, familiar, and tangible social solidarity networks and alternative authority structures, most prominently religiously rooted ones (see the unsurpassed analysis by Roy, 1990; see also Barfield, 2010; Martin, 2014; Roy, 2004; Rubin, 2020). Building on these, and exploiting their greater familiarity to the population, provided the insurgency with what could be called a strategic cohesion with which ISAF failed to compete. The lack of this form of cohesion was on display in the total, near peaceful collapse of the ANSF in the summer of 2021—an event presaged by a very similar rout of the Western-trained indigenous forces in Iraq in 2014.

The Importance of Choosing the Right Battlefield

The second miscalculation was that ISAF, and the national forces it trained to take over, chose to fight on the wrong battlefield. The site where the overt clash of arms took place was not where the struggle was primarily fought out and decided. Arguably, the war largely inverted the commonly accepted logic of war whereby the mobilization of popular support and armed forces are preparatory steps in a process where battle has the last say and superior firepower can correct any mistakes made earlier. Insurgent success was largely decided by a slow and steady campaign of proselytization in which combat did not matter greatly. Bringing the Afghan people on board did not on the whole require much force or overt coercion, but a quiet effort that exploited, to oversimplify the process, the politically overarching and unifying authority of Islam and the solidarities of the qawm, the complex patchwork of communal groups molding people’s sociopolitical identity, position, and loyalty (Barfield, 2010; Martin, 2014; Roy, 1990; Rubin, 2020). Under these conditions, ISAF could do little more than slow the insurgency’s progress, mainly indirectly, through the disorganization wreaked by capture or kill operations. In the best case, this would keep the Kabul government in power and eventually tempt the insurgents into a violent push to overthrow it—which ISAF could fend off by superior firepower. Unable to seize the initiative, ISAF could then do little except wait patiently for another attempt. ISAF’s chosen strategy in effect prolonged the war, preventing an insurgent victory, but unable to deliver one for itself—unless there was a fundamental change in strategy.

These issues did not go completely unrecognized and attempts were made to engage with the population to build and exploit support. “Mapping the human terrain” was one avenue (Zitelmann, 2011). Another was U.S. proposals for establishing local militias (Dirkx, 2017; Felbab-Brown, 2016). But these, and others, ran into opposition because they were politically suspect. Ethnology and anthropology were not usually associated with military applications while arming militias was easily equated with supporting warlordism. The least contentious in the end was building up the ANSF—provided it was created in the image of a Western professional, apolitical, technocratic force. In all of this, the role of religion was avoided, again because of politico-cultural sensitivities. Still, the three lines of operation provided a basic framework for a strategy that promised to undermine the strategic cohesion of the insurgency and turn the tables. The central challenge was turning good ideas into sound strategic practice. For this to have worked, what was needed was a large international cohort of trained strategic colonels.

The Need for Deploying Strategic Colonels

Given the structure of staff planning activities and with battalion-size units being the major maneuver units in regular armies nowadays, the rank of colonel constitutes a linchpin in achieving strategic and operational effectiveness. The PRTs that were tasked to implement the three lines of operation in Afghanistan were commanded by colonels. A major issue they and their brethren colonel planners on higher international staffs encountered was the novel challenge of turning the lines into actionable plans and operations. What tended to happen was that the goals set by the NATO Council and the highest military staffs were not broken down in an array of subordinate, ever more practical aims, arriving on the desk of the PRT commander as a set of actionable, clearly circumscribed operations. As revealed by an analysis of the way NATO directives were pushed down the line of command essentially unaltered, it was in practice left to PRT commanders to put flesh on the bare bones of the lines of operation and make strategy (Honig & Käihkö, forthcoming). Their rank had not traditionally been associated with such responsibility and it is not surprising they struggled. Understanding and attacking the enemy’s strategic cohesion was, to boot, a deeply political process—something generations of professional officers had been taught to avoid. That they nonetheless tried was the result of a sense of duty and lack of choice. A reliance on civilian help did not work at all well due to their hesitation to see their expertise militarized and a tendency of their home bureaucracies to retain independence, as well as the mounting insecurity complicating their deployment. And whereas their fellow colonels on the staffs could shirk the responsibility, the senior officers in the field could either remain holed up in camp during their generally short deployment tours or step up and try to venture out to engage their enemy (Honig & Käihkö, 2012).

In the end, strategic reflection fell short. The doctrinaire faith in the viability of the West’s political ambitions and military-professional rigidity regarding strategic-operational method meant that no consistent, thorough interest was developed in the all-important sources of insurgent strategic cohesion. In particular, the colonel class was not prepared in terms of education and training, nor encouraged properly to think strategically and engage with the critical politico-strategic level. As Morris Janowitz (1971) already argued well over half a century ago, officers need to be “sensitize[d] . . . to the political and social consequences of military action” if they were to serve their nation best (p. 426). ¹ If violence is the peculiar attribute of the military profession (and there are strong arguments to broaden that understanding), it cannot at a minimum leave thinking about the utility and utilization of force to a separate profession of politicians. Simply granting the top military a seat at the top political table is not enough (and certainly not if it only highlights the very limited political usefulness of the military instrument in conflict situations). Thinking about the political utility of force needs to percolate down the ranks and permeate the profession with a special focus on the cultivation of strategic colonels.

The Continued Relevance of the Afghan War

The reemergence of great power conflict does not invalidate the continuing relevance of our diagnosis. The modern battlefield is populated by human beings where one cannot take for granted with whom they stand. The Putin and Xi regimes may believe that a brute coercive approach to political challenges is highly effective and that this suffices to maintain their authority in the final analysis. Nonetheless, as the wars in Afghanistan and now in Ukraine illustrate, they, like us, would be wise to consider issues of popular loyalty and solidarity, both on their own and their opponents’ sides, and approach mobilization of their support or resistance as a dynamic process that their militaries will influence greatly through their actions, whether forceful or not. This dynamic recognizes no clear borders between peace and war that are codified in law or delineated plainly in time and space. Modern great power conflict is no longer a classic struggle conducted and decided by elite regimes with their regular armies, nominally acting on behalf of their nations. What British general Rupert Smith (2019) has aptly called “war amongst the people” is more democratic than that. It may be tempting to resurrect the classic forms of civil–military relations and military professionalism of the Cold War once again, but today not only does the combatant enemy get a vote, but so do many shades of actual and potential enemies and friends. That truly makes the conduct of war and conflict a more political occupation than before.