Four years ago this month, the US ended its longest war in a most embarrassing fashion. The Taliban efficiently retook the entire country in a matter of months, culminating in the surrender of Kabul. The world watched as Afghans chose to fall to their deaths from departing aircraft than to become captives of the Taliban. Newly released terrorists killed even more Americans at the airport gate and the US amateurishly responded by bombing an innocent contractor’s water truck. Amidst all of this, CNN reporter Clarissa Ward famously proclaimed:
“If this isn’t failure, what does failure look like exactly.”
In August 2021, SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) released a report called “What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction.” While focused on the reconstruction debacle, the beginning of the report makes a troubling point that can be generalized to other parts of America’s failure.
“What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction is the 11th lessons learned report issued by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The report examines the past two decades of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. It details how the U.S. government struggled to develop a coherent strategy, understand how long the reconstruction mission would take, ensure its projects were sustainable, staff the mission with trained professionals, account for the challenges posed by insecurity, tailor efforts to the Afghan context, and understand the impact of programs. There have been bright spots—such as lower child mortality rates, increases in per capita GDP, and increased literacy rates. But after spending 20 years and $145 billion trying to rebuild Afghanistan, the U.S. government has many lessons it needs to learn. Implementing these critical lessons will save lives and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse in Afghanistan, and in future reconstruction missions elsewhere around the world.”1
The truly shocking part of the SIGAR report and the seemingly for show bipartisan government testimonies after the war was that the knowledge of why the US failed in 2021 had been there for over a decade. For just shy of two decades, the US military and political leadership had at best a flat learning curve and no real desire to win. Analyses of failure written before 2010 were extremely similar to the ‘smart’ generals and politicians’ admissions after the last US troops had left the country. So, what has the US military and government done about it?
The failure in Afghanistan spanned 20 years and almost an equal number of red and blue presidents. No one side can take the blame. Both parties failed America.
Hellbound and Down 