Five big mistakes the United States made in Afghanistan

Given the spectacular collapse of the Afghanistan government, and by extension the calamitous end of the United States’ intervention, it is germane to do a retrospective look at what did the US do wrong. After all, it has been 46 years since the US suffered such a public and undeniably humiliating defeat. The scenes of desperation eerily similar to the fall of Saigon in 1975.

When the US went into Afghanistan in 2001, it had a legal casus belli. After all Osama bin Laden who bore responsibility for the 9/11 terror attacks planned these on Afghan soil. Had it been a simple case of punishing both terrorist and host, then the mission would have been a straightforward one.

As it happened goals such as nation-building and the emancipation of women were added to the list. This was the first big mistake. Now, any anthropologist would tell you that the cardinal sin is isomorphic mimicry, which is to say imposing certain paradigms from a differently-evolved society on to another whose trajectory of development has been entirely different. After all, how could Afghanistan, a sedentary, pastoralist society with a majority of its population following codes from a bygone era, overnight transform into a democracy with respect for the rule of law, human rights and gender equality. To paraphrase Napoleon’s foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the US’ actions were ‘worse than a crime, it was a blunder’. This original blunder essentially poisoned the well for everything that came after.

The second big mistake was how the US chose to deal with Pakistan. Had Pakistan not gone along with US plans for Afghanistan, it was made abundantly clear that Pakistan would be bombed “back to the Stone Age”. Pakistan’s generals came up with an audacious plan that would help them under-deliver on what they considered Washington’s excessive demands.

Primarily this focused on the need not just to protect the terror apparatus that they had created, but to also maintain the doctrine of strategic depth they had developed. Barely three months after the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan carefully calibrated attacks on India’s Parliament. This wasn’t happenstance, this was calculated; the calculation being that if Pakistan generated a big enough crisis on its eastern border (with India) it could avoid throwing the full weight of its military in supporting the US mission in Afghanistan. Moreover it could make a convincing case to the US that it needed terrorists or ‘sub conventional combatants’ in order to offset India’s military superiority.

India fell for the trap and set in motion a menacing military posture which directly threatened Pakistan — and the US also fell into a trap accepting Pakistan’s excuses as genuine.

The third big mistake happened a few years into the US occupation of Afghanistan. By 2004, it had become clear that Pakistan was running with the hares and hunting with the hounds. The ‘sub conventional assets’, ostensibly for use against India, were now being used to great affect against US forces in Afghanistan. Even the pretence of masking its actions was not taken because by this time the US was almost entirely dependent on Pakistan to supply its Afghan mission.

Yet in spite of overwhelming proof of Pakistani State complicity in deadly attacks on US soldiers, Washington thought it could simply make Islamabad see the light. Essentially the Taliban were the symptom and Pakistan was the disease, and the US persisted in treating the symptoms and not the disease.

Even finding Osama bin Laden hold up in a house just a few hundred metres away from a Pakistan military academy could not make the US bureaucracy see sense as to who the puppet and puppet master was.

The fourth big mistake was to base the Af-Pak policy on the empty chatter of Washington think-tanks, which were essentially auditioning platforms for government jobs that required you to parrot accepted dogma. The fact that much of the Af-Pak analysis was heavy-coloured by conflict of interest, specifically with regards to the authors of such papers who depended heavily on the good graces of the Pakistan Army and the high-level access provided by it. At one level US President Donald Trump exposed this in relation to West Asia. Trump after all managed to get more peace deals signed between Israel and the Arabs than the previous eight US Presidents combined. For exposing their perfidy Trump is hated by the think-tanks and yet he never explored options that did not emanate from the echo chamber when it came to South Asia.

The fifth big mistake was to foist on Afghanistan a bunch of irredeemable ‘leaders’ such as Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani. Neither of these men were chosen for their leadership abilities; rather they were chosen because they were malleable. They had the basic sophistication to charm New York socialites but had no clue on how to run a government, especially one wracked by an insurgency. They were essentially the Afghan versions of Ahmad Chalabi, who at one point was US’ bet to become President of Iraq.

Compare to these five big mistakes all the other mistakes that the US made in Afghanistan are minor and tactical because they could’ve been fixed. However, these big mistakes waylaid the entire course of action and trapped the US into a toxic cycle of both self-delusion and failure-reinforcing behaviour where corrective action was actively discouraged. In short, the Taliban did not defeat the US, the United States defeated the United States.

Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.