The Many Lies Of David Petraeus
One year after the fall of Kabul, the lessons of America's failure in Afghanistan are still being ignored
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up below.
Quick housekeeping note: apologies for getting the newsletter out to you so late this week, but emergency dental surgery has a way of delaying even the best laid plans! I will be Zoom Chatting on Friday. Link is here: more info to come!
This week marks the one-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban and the subsequent withdrawal of US troops, which ended the 20-year American odyssey in Afghanistan.
Over twenty years, the US spent $2.3 trillion dollars in direct and indirect costs (the most expensive war in US history) in trying to create a functioning government in Afghanistan that respected women's rights, provided key public services, was economically self-sufficient, and could defend itself from the Taliban. All of that failed.
As I wrote last year, the tragedy that unfolded in Afghanistan "is a quintessentially American failure — a collective one 20 years in the making, the result of American hubris and a misguided belief in what US power can achieve."
The last point is critical: the root of the calamity in Afghanistan was an assumption — rarely questioned by US policymakers — that the United States could succeed in Afghanistan
Indeed, prominent US officials and foreign policy analysts still argue that America's numerous errors in Afghanistan — and the catastrophe that unfolded last August — could have been avoided. The problem, they argue, wasn't a misguided and unrealistic strategy or the undertaking of a task far beyond the resources and capabilities of the United States but rather a lack of political will to see the mission through.
Last week, writing in the Atlantic, David Petraeus, who commanded US troops in Afghanistan and spearheaded the counterinsurgency tactics used by the American military after the surge of US troops in 2009, makes precisely this argument.
Despite the selfless, courageous, and professional service of our military and civilian elements, and also of our coalition partners—as well as that of innumerable great Afghans—we underachieved in Afghanistan. In fact, across our 20 years there, we made significant mistakes and fell short over and over again. Had we avoided, or corrected, enough of our missteps along the way, the options for our continued commitment to Afghanistan would have been more attractive to successive administrations in Washington—and might have precluded withdrawal entirely.
…. our foundational mistake was our lack of commitment. In essence, we never adopted a sufficient, consistent, overarching approach that we stuck with from administration to administration, or even within individual administrations.
Petraeus hits on a point that defenders of US policy in Afghanistan have made for years: if America had simply gotten all the inputs correct, then the US mission in Afghanistan could have worked.
And according to Petraeus, for a fleeting moment, that happened.
After Barack Obama took office and thoroughly reviewed the situation in Afghanistan, we did finally get the inputs roughly right for the first time, though even when the president announced a buildup of forces, he also outlined when the drawdown would begin. Regardless, by late 2010, we had finally established the right big ideas and overarching strategy; deployed reasonably sufficient forces to halt and roll back the Taliban's momentum; increased civilian capacity to complement our military efforts; established the right organizational structures; made much-needed adjustments to the push to train Afghan forces; developed a structured program to transition select Afghan districts to Afghan control; commenced an organized effort to reconcile with the Taliban rank and file while negotiations were pursued with the Taliban leadership; and took on the issues of civilian casualties, corruption, and cultivation of illegal narcotics, among other problems.
There is a major problem with this argument. It is not true.
The US did not deploy sufficient forces to conduct the kind of ambitious counterinsurgency favored by Petraeus — and considering that the troops surged to Afghanistan were on an 18-month timeline for withdrawal, the buildup of forces was clearly not sustainable. Civilian capacity did not significantly increase. The State Department struggled to find enough people to send over to Afghanistan, and many only surged temporarily, making it nearly impossible to maintain any progress.
The effort to train Afghan security forces was, for almost the entire 20-year mission in Afghanistan, a complete disaster — a point highlighted by the fact that the security forces disappeared once US troops began to withdraw.
The reconciliation effort, which Petraeus touts here, was another ill-fated effort —hamstrung by the fact that the Obama Administration forbid anyone but low-level fighters from participating. Taliban commanders and mullahs were considered "irreconcilable" and thus not eligible to participate in the program. They could either surrender or die.
Negotiations were not seriously pursued with the Taliban during Petraeus's tenure in Afghanistan. Indeed, his strategy — one largely defined by ramping up military aggression and, in particular, air strikes — did little to take into account the need for a political resolution to the conflict.
As for the notion that the US took on "civilian casualties, corruption, and cultivation of illegal narcotics," this is laughable. Civilian casualties increased between 2009-2011, from 2,412 to 3,133.
US counter-narcotics strategy in Afghanistan was a perennial disaster, one informed by an inability of US policymakers to agree on a workable strategy. According to a report by the Special Instructor General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), "no counterdrug program undertaken by the United States, its coalition partners, or the Afghan government resulted in lasting reductions in poppy cultivation or opium production."
As for corruption, no serious observer of the war would suggest that the US ever got a handle on the issue. Indeed, in February 2012, at the tail end of the surge, a period in which Petraeus says the US had the right strategy in Afghanistan, "Army Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified to Congress that the Afghan government was plagued by "endemic corruption" and the country's army and police had "persistent qualitative deficiencies." Left out of Petraeus's revisionist history is that the surge, which he so energetically supported, pumped billions of dollars in US aid into the country, actually made the corruption situation worse.
As Craig Whitlock argues in his recent book "The Afghanistan Papers," military officials consistently lied to the American people about the US war in Afghanistan. Over and over again, they claimed that progress was being made … when privately, they were deeply skeptical about the chances for success in Afghanistan. And when policymakers said it was time to pull the plug, they said that with just a bit more time, the situation could be turned around. Even after twenty years of war and zero appetite for a continued US presence in Afghanistan, they continued making the same tired argument, all the while labeled as defeatist anyone — including President Biden — who said it was time to bring the troops home.
But perhaps the most glaring problem is a fundamental contradiction that Petraeus wilfully ignores. On the one hand, he argues that under Obama, the US finally established the right "overarching strategy," while on the other hand, he says that while the president "announced a buildup of forces, he also outlined when the drawdown would begin."
Indeed, Petraeus points to the drawdown of troops as a frustrating inflection point that showed the US was not focused on "long-term nation building" but rather "repeated exit seeking." But it's not as if the withdrawal came out of the blue. Obama said in December 2009 that while he would accede to the military's request for more troops, those soldiers would start coming home in 18 months. If Obama intended to pull troops out within a publicly announced deadline, how can Petraeus argue that the US had the right strategy in Afghanistan?
Petraeus further argues that "managing the situation (in Afghanistan) would have required a sustained, generational commitment, one that would have continued to be frustrating and inevitably less than ideal." But for 20 years, that was never the view of America's civilian leadership, a point that even now Petraeus is incapable of acknowledging.
For the four-star general and many military leaders who tried to fit a square peg into a round hole in Afghanistan, the political constraints on the military's preferred strategy of nation-building or waging a fully resourced counterinsurgency — constraints that existed for the entire conflict — were ignored.
The Biggest Blind Spot
But Petraeus's greatest blind spot is the same one that defined the entire US mission in Afghanistan. He assumes there was a successful, magic bullet approach that would have led to US success in Afghanistan.
What if no combination of better tactics would have led to a different outcome in Afghanistan? What if "a sufficient, consistent, overarching approach" adhered to "from administration to administration" simply doesn't reside within the skill set of the United States government? What if the United States lacks the resources, core competencies, and political will to fix a country as broken as Afghanistan?
As Gen. Douglas Lute, who coordinated the Afghan war from inside the White House during both the Bush and Obama administrations, said in 2015 about the US war effort," We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."
The fact that across 20 years, the US "made significant mistakes and fell short over and over again" provides a valuable lesson that Petraeus doesn't want to consider. Like so many of those intimately involved in Afghanistan policy, he refuses to interrogate the assumption that success in Afghanistan was ever achievable.
All of this is understandable on some level. When the US military is assigned a task, it tries to figure out a way to complete it. Generals might push back while that mission is debated, but once a decision is made, failure is no longer an option. For Petraeus and his ilk, there is no point when they go to their civilian overseers and say, "we can't do this." That's largely a good thing. It's what makes the US military so effective. But such mission-oriented thinking is not how policymakers should approach the issue.
Even though he is a private citizen, Petraeus still thinks like a soldier. He is incapable of looking at Afghanistan as anything other than a challenge to be overcome. But the inescapable conclusion that the rest of us should draw from the disastrous 20-year war is that sometimes success is not possible — and to paraphrase a classic movie line from my youth: perhaps the winning move is not to play.
What’s Going On?
I wrote about Liz Cheney’s electoral drubbing last night and the continued descent of the Republican Party into the political fever swamp.
Very interesting piece on the larger political shift happening among Wyoming Republicans.
Good long read in the New York Times magazine on the Arizona Republican Party’s experiment in anti-democracy.
Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin looks like he is in serious political trouble.
Phenomenal reporting by the Washington Post on the run-up to the war in Ukraine.
I generally assume that JD Vance is going to win the Senate race in Ohio, but at some point, you’d expect that state polling would reflect that … right?
Musical Interlude
Last week I saw Elvis Costello live in New York City with Nick Lowe opening up for him. Back in 2001, Lowe put out a fantastic album called “The Convincer.” The lead track is some sultry greatness.
I’m a huge Elvis Costello fan, but my favorite songs of his tend to be the ones that would not appear on a greatest hits record. Here are a few worth checking out. Please leave your picks in the comments.
The other glaring omission on the issue of Afghanistan is that this was, in essence, a civil war between the Taliban and the people who didn’t want Taliban rule. Regrettably, the Afghan forces were not sufficiently willing or motivated to fight the Taliban.
We were occupiers. No different than the Russians in Afghanistan and now Ukraine. No different than the redcoats in 1775. People will continue to resist occupiers until they succeed or until they merge cultures with dignity. Why do we believe that we're desired saviours?