Six strategic mistakes the U.S. made in Afghanistan

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has wrought institutional amnesia at the White House, State and Pentagon about the war in Afghanistan. Two years ago this month, Joe Biden ignored his military advisers and abruptly abandoned the country. It was the worst strategic blunder in modern American military history.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the war — starting, of course, with the Pashtun Taliban, who let Al Qaeda train 10,000 fighters and protected Osama bin Laden while he planned 9/11. The U.S. made six strategic mistakes, however, and that buck stops with the commander-in-chief.

The first strategic mistake was President Bill Clinton’s failure to kill bin Laden. He had the actionable intelligence and opportunity to do so, as many as nine times, from 1998 to 2000. Bin Laden’s terror attacks killed almost 3,000 Americans, and marked the start of the war.

A counterterror operation led by the CIA and the Northern Alliance started immediately thereafter. It quickly overthrew the Taliban government, pushing bin Laden and the Taliban leadership into Pakistan. It was a fast, historic, decisive victory, executed on the orders of President George W. Bush. He deserves credit for that strategic decision. The second strategic mistake, however, was his. He failed to order a sustained kinetic campaign against Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders as they found safe harbor in Pakistan. Later presidents kept the policy. Limiting the Af-Pak war to just the Afghan theater doomed the conflict to permanent stalemate.

Overthrowing the Taliban left a governance vacuum, and in November 2001 the U.N. convened a meeting of Afghan opposition leaders in Bonn. They installed Hamid Karzai as Chairman of the Afghan Interim Authority. President Bush strongly opposed nation-building at the time, favoring quick counterterror strikes and regime change. Major combat operations were declared over in May 2003. The Taliban had regrouped by 2005, however, and by 2006 they controlled parts of southern Afghanistan.

American troop levels ramped up in response, along with comprehensive nation-building in an effort to stabilize the country. In spite of $137 billion, and enormous progress on everything from health to hydroelectric power, stability through nation-building proved wildly aspirational in this hyperkinetic ethno-religious war. Afghanistan’s institutionalized kleptocracy didn’t help. This third strategic mistake, allowing the campaign to morph into nation-building, is on President Bush.

In December 2009, President Barack Obama announced a troop surge of 30,000 and, in the same speech, a demobilization date eighteen months later. Announcing our intention to leave was an astonishing military blunder and the fourth strategic mistake. Our allies in the field stood slack-jawed, while the Taliban planned for an end game that was now clearly visible.

Obama ended counterinsurgency in 2014, and pivoted to Security Force Assistance. The coalition supported the Afghan military while the latter did the fighting. From 2015 to 2021, Afghan military casualties were both brutal and unsustainable. But as coalition troop levels dropped to under 20,000, casualties fell 96% and U.S. costs fell 37%.

In August 2017, eight months after taking office, President Donald Trump gave a thumping speech that promoted a visionary new Afghanistan strategy. Unfortunately, within a year he abandoned it and started negotiating an exit with the Taliban. Obama had negotiated with the Taliban as early as 2010, but this was the fifth strategic mistake. Trump’s February 2020 Doha Agreement foreclosed both the option of long-term security force assistance like America has provided in Korea and elsewhere, and the option of establishing a long-term regional counterterrorism platform out of Bagram Air Field.

The sixth strategic mistake was Joe Biden’s unilateral decision in 2021 to abandon conditions-based withdrawal, and suddenly bug out of Afghanistan. It’s been called “one of the most egregiously incompetent self-inflicted debacles in modern military history.” That blunder was Biden’s alone. He sold out our allies in arms, ceded the Khorasan heartland to the Islamist fanatics, left hundreds of U.S. citizens hostage, and delivered the Afghan people into the hands of the Taliban. Biden’s State Department tried to put lipstick on it, but Biden ordered the fiasco and it’s his name that will live in infamy for it.

Our strategic objective, to ensure that Afghanistan would never again be used to launch a terror attack against us or our allies, didn’t change in 20 years. And for 20 years the objective was met. The cost was $2.3 trillion, 3,590 military coalition deaths, 4,000 coalition contractor deaths, 35,000 coalition casualties, and 200,000 or more Afghan casualties. Plus, of course, profound long-term damage to America’s credibility and moral authority.

Islamic jihad is the only true forever war. Now, exactly two years after the fall of Kabul, with the world’s attention focused on Ukraine, Taliban-run Afghanistan is again fertile ground for those who would launch 9/11-type terrorist attacks on us and our allies.

Jeff Goodson is a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer. In 29 years with the U.S. Agency for International Development, he worked on the ground in 49 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He served 31 months during three tours in Afghanistan. From 2006-2007 he was Chief of Staff and Head of Civil-Military Planning and Operations at USAID/Kabul, and from 2010-2012 he served as the DCOS/Stability Director of Development under General Petraeus and General Allen.