The U.S. Failed in Afghanistan Because We Tried to "Win"
Lessons to avoid the next twenty-year war.
Generally, for someone to “win,” someone else must “lose.”
In any ongoing relationship, winning is only temporary. Short of obliteration and genocide, defeating someone today only puts off the problem until the future. In an ongoing relationship, the choice is different: everyone wins, or everyone loses. This August/September, everyone lost: The Afghan people, the U.S. American people and the world as a whole. We all “lost” because we didn’t even try to find a win-win solution.
The U.S. American 20-year intervention in Afghanistan ended in August. There is nearly universal disappointment in both the process and the outcome. We’ve said a lot about how it started, what went wrong, how it all happened, and who’s to blame for the failure. With more than 176,000 lives lost,1 over $2 trillion spent by the U.S.,2 and significant damage to U.S. American credibility, integrity, and humanity, it makes sense to wonder if this was a total waste of time, money, and lives.
This 20-year experience could be a total loss, but it sure doesn’t have to be.
It depends on whether we can learn the critical lesson hidden within: The only way for the U.S. to win was for Afghanistan to win too. We need to find a win-win (omni-win) solution, so we’re prepared for the next time a country acts wrongly.
We’re not good with that kind of thinking. Either/or questions have dominated U.S. discourse around the war and intervention in Afghanistan for the last twenty years.
If we’re wondering why treating Afghanistan and its people like enemies for 20 years didn’t result in friendship, it’s because we’ve been asking the wrong question all along.
The False Choice
As far as I can see, the grand error of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan is that once we met the military objectives, our goals got blurry. We were not transparent or honest about what our objectives were to ourselves or others. For the next 18 years and three presidencies, we couldn’t figure out if we were there to punish or help, to meet our needs or theirs. That made it challenging to get our strategy straight.
A U.S. official, who worked with NATO, said: “What were we actually doing in the country? What were our objectives? Was it nation-building? Women’s rights? It was never fully clear in our own minds what the established goals and timelines were.”3 That approach is problematic. Acting without clear goals or guiding principles is a sure path to disaster. As a river rafting guide once told me, “Hesitation is devastation.”
Half-hearted engagement is not new.4 Robert Kagen explains, “Afghanistan was a classic case, repeated many times throughout American history, of a United States with one foot out the door from the moment of intervention.”5 As former U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker put it, “Americans are short-term. Our adversaries count on that, and our allies fear it.”
How did the most powerful and resourced military/government/country act for twenty years without having a well-defined goal?
We got stuck in a false choice.
Is our goal to protect ourselves by punishing the bad guys?
or
Is our goal to ensure a stable Afghanistan by helping it heal and rebuild?
As a conflict transformation professional, this confusion is not a surprise to me. It is a variation of the question that is at the heart of all conflicts: Do I look out for my needs at the expense of others, or do I look out for everyone else’s needs at my expense?
The problem is that the choice between self and other is a false dichotomy, and it will always lead us astray. Yes, both are important and interdependent. John Paul Lederach says it well in The Moral Imagination: “We are in a web of relationships that includes our enemy.”6 That means the only way forward is to get our own needs met AND meet the others’ needs. What’s more, the only way to meet our needs is to meet the needs of others and vice versa.
This dilemma is an example of an interdependent polarity7. Choosing one option and rejecting the other is degenerative. However, when we hold the options in dynamic balance, they become generative.
It is not a choice between two things. As interdependent polarities, the important question is how to manage the tension between them to mitigate the harm while supporting the positive aspects of both options.
The question that we should have been asking in Afghanistan was:
How can the U.S. ensure its ongoing safety by holding its enemies accountable for harm done and support Afghanistan’s sustainable healing and transformation?
We went into this war to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks by removing Al-Qaeda, its leaders, training camps, and infrastructure. Part of that was also to stop the Taliban from providing a sanctuary for terrorist activities. Within six months, the U.S. accomplished those goals.
Soon afterward, the Bush administration realized the U.S. could not sustain the victory. They had no choice but to stay for a while. They needed to establish a government so American troops could eventually depart without fear of returning to pre-9/11 circumstances. After experiencing decades of suffering, the only way of ensuring sustainable change in Afghanistan would be to strike a balance. An equilibrium between the stability and security provided by the military and police and the healing and transformation to provide long-term accompaniment and peace-building.
The national interest of the United States and its citizens is bound up with the national interests of Afghanistan and all the Afghan people.
We needed both a military and a humanitarian solution.
Effective Use of Military Force
The U.S. military is the most influential force in the world for hurting and stopping an enemy. Taking military control of a situation is a necessary step in any peace-building process. Juan Manuel Santos, former President of Colombia, helped bring a 50+ year civil war to an end. Santos explains the conditions for negotiating peace,8
“You have to have the military balance of power in the favor of the state. As long as the insurgency… think they can win by using violence, it is very difficult to negotiate peace. You need the commanders of the insurgency to personally consider that for them on a personal level, it's better to negotiate a peace agreement than to continue the war.”
Punishment and control are only short-term solutions to a problem, just like war. Violence and force can be helpful to address an immediate issue, but it doesn’t create healing. Trying to use the military to heal a country or build democracy is the same as trying to heal urban communities with more policing or trying to heal police culture by protesting it.
We designed the military to “win,” ensuring its enemy “loses.”
The problem is, winning and losing in war is an illusion. Everyone loses when war happens. War doesn’t resolve long-term issues. I like to think about this in the way we think about sports or a game. If we have two teams, and one wins, we don’t say that team won the sport forever. Similarly, winning an election doesn’t mean you won politics. We measure politics, sports, and war by the outcomes they produce and the quality of the process.
The U.S. military needed to “win.” So, it shifted from its legitimate goal of winning against Al Qaeda to the illegitimate goal of removing the Taliban. It’s not the right goal, and it’s a bad idea. Military dominance can bring adversaries to their knees, but continuing to humiliate and punish them is cruel.
The idea of eliminating enemies, especially if this enemy is a group bound by their way of thinking, is just a form of limited genocide. It’s horrible, counter-productive, and impossible. You can’t get rid of a belief system or population through violence or control; you only embolden the next generation or the next. People hold grudges. Examples of this include Israel/Palestine, Cuba, ISIS in Iraq, and Afghanistan, of course.
There are alternative examples too, where leaders walked the line between peace and justice and eventually ended violence by bringing their enemies into the fold. Once again, Juan Manuel Santos has some great words on this: “You need to give enemies a way to get what they are fighting for without violence… a dignified way out.”9 This strategy has also worked in South Africa, Argentina, Rwanda, East Timor, and Germany.
The need to “win” the war caused us to lose track of who the enemy was. We were never going to war with Afghanistan and its people; we were going to war in Afghanistan with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Similarly, we went to war in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, but we were not at war with the Iraqi people. In both cases, this line got blurred.
The military and government need to make the distinction between military targets and civilians from the start. As much as we talk about hating an enemy, we need to spend equal time and energy talking about how much we love and respect the impacted population. To help a country, this needs to be part of the national discourse throughout any military intervention. Talk about how much we value these people, how important their culture is, how they’re in the grips of oppression, and how we will liberate them.
The military’s skill set is not healing, democracy building, nor even relational social skills. It’s good at moving fast, but it’s not good at long-term thinking or adapting. The skills needed to rebuild a society and ensure it is not a breeding ground for hatred require us to draw on different expertise. So, at some point, we needed to switch strategies.
Joe Biden said: “If the Taliban ends up back in control and women end up losing, no, I don’t bear responsibility, zero responsibility. The responsibility I have is to protect America’s national self-interest and not put our women and men in harm’s way to try to solve every single problem in the world by use of force. That’s my responsibility as President.”
Liberation and Transformation
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
If you want long-term change or long-term elimination of an enemy, you need to change the culture that makes that enemy viable. Alternatively, it is possible to try to change the enemy; work with them to help them figure out ways of meeting their goals without violence.
A Culture of Empathy and Harmony
There was a total absence of discourse about what the Afghan people wanted. I didn’t hear anyone asking whether the Afghans wanted a democracy. Their wishes were not central. In 20 years, we never learned to care about the Afghan people. We didn’t garner the collective courage to talk about and consider the best long-term outcome for everyone involved.
We didn’t develop a culture of empathy. We were there to help people, and we needed to remember their dignity and humanity. What’s great about their culture? What’s their long-term future going to be, what do they want? It’s not something that we ever paid attention to.
If we wanted the Afghan people to feel empowered and strong in how they were doing things, we needed to work on that from the beginning. I’m sure we didn’t do much of that. People are talking about whether the turmoil is inevitable. If we’d started working on avoiding chaos 15 to 20 years ago, it wouldn’t be a tumultuous situation.
What would it look like if the goal was to harmonize US-Afghan relations? Imagine cultural exchanges for Americans and Afghans to connect, interact with each other, and set up the conditions for us to fall in love with each other. We got to the end of this war, and I know nothing more about Afghan culture. I don’t think we’ve collectively developed any more love for Afghans.
Promoting Culturally-Relevant Democracy
You can’t force anyone to change. The only way you can get anyone to change is by showing them a better way is possible and making it look enticing. We need to ensure that they’re the ones guiding. If we’re trying to create change, we need to act in integrity with who we are. We want to be a model for the future, so we’ve got to bring our best selves to the table. We shouldn’t have used the military to create a sense of democracy.
If you want people to decide that democracy is a good idea, or trust themselves in that, then giving them a democratic experience could be helpful. There was a chance to give people a lived experience of democracy while creating it, but we tried to import our culture, values, and government instead. The locals are the ones who know what improvement is going to look like, not the U.S. In reports, people said the worst decision was trying to create a central power. Afghanistan has been a tribal culture for a long time, with distributed power and culture, not mutually intelligible languages, and all spread out around the country. The idea of having one central government in Kabul wasn’t a good idea.
It astounded a USAID official that the state department thought an American-style presidency would work. “Why did we create a centralized government in a place that has never had one? [It] set us up to fail.”10 There’s blindness here because it’s evident that building democracy is slow work. We need to consider how to create long-term stability from the beginning.
Fundamentally, building a democracy is hard, and it requires the participation of the people. The United States took eleven years to get from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution, and the leaders were already committed to democracy.
Some say the timeframe of creating a strong central government is about a hundred years. We didn’t have that time in the last 20 years, but the U.S. was involved with Afghanistan for at least 40 years. There are plenty more years to come in the future. Wouldn’t it have been great if we had taken the time to make sure we were all moving in the same direction from the start?
The U.S. presidential cycle means we’re always thinking about the next election four years into the future. We need a better way to think and talk about long-term goals and stick with them long enough to see them through.
Before the U.S. tries to bring democracy to a country acting in ways we disagree with, we should consider this poem from William Stafford in Every War Has Two Losers:
Those who champion a democracy, but make a fetish of never accepting anything that they don't agree with -- what advantage did they see in democracy?
How to Correct Bad Behavior
How do we respond to bad behavior if it’s not punishment and control? To truly deal with it, you need to invoke change and ensure it doesn’t happen again. You need to understand where they’re coming from and hold them accountable; tell them what isn’t working for you. If we wanted to change the Taliban’s way of doing things, we needed to understand why they were doing it. The next step would be telling them precisely what’s wrong with their actions and then committing to being with them through the journey of healing, integrating, and learning.
Holding people accountable applies everywhere in our lives, and it’s something we miss a lot in our culture. If you want to change how someone acts, it’s not adequate to tell them to stop. Holding them with care and accompanying them through the learning and healing process is paramount to avoid repeated bad behavior.
Help them understand the impact of what they did, integrate their grief and shame for having done that, and then you can go deeper. Why did you act this way in the first place? What caused it? Once you’ve gotten to that, then you can help them begin the long process of facing what they’ve done, finding self-forgiveness, and engaging in the long, slow work of deep healing. This care allows people to make changes at the base of who they are so they can act in a new way.
In short, everyone longs to be seen, held, and called to account for their actions. Accountability without care and holding is cruel, vengeful. Forgiveness without accountability is corrosive. We can only provide accountability or care when genuinely seeing and understanding someone. With compassion, we need to help them understand where their behavior arises from to help them heal and find self-forgiveness. Only then are they able to change.
The gift of forgiveness is also powerful. Forgiveness isn’t saying that someone didn’t do something wrong. It’s saying, “I don’t need anything from you anymore.” Telling them, “there are no repercussions now,” is a gift that allows them to do inner work.
When people have not been acting the way you want, it’s okay to tell them to stop. You might need to force them to stop. Once you have their attention, explain what was not right about their actions. Tell them you see them, want them to learn this lesson, and you’ll stick around until they can.
Embracing the Taliban?
The Taliban have done and continue to do horrible things. There is no doubt about that. Nonetheless, by making them the enemy, we made it impossible for them to change or ever become our friends. If we had engaged them in peace negotiations, at least we would have a line of communication to monitor what is going on and have some degree of influence. Instead, we tried to marginalize and destroy them.
“A major mistake we made was treating the Taliban the same as al-Qaeda,” Barnett Rubin, an American academic expert on Afghanistan who served as an adviser to the United Nations at the time, told government interviewers. “Key Taliban leaders were interested in giving the new system a chance, but we didn’t give them a chance.”11
By not listening to the interests of those involved nor giving them dignity, we missed a chance to meet their deeper needs.
Dozens of U.S. and Afghan officials told interviewers the problems reflected a much deeper flaw. Despite years and years of war, the United States still did not understand what was motivating its enemies to fight. Without knowing, the focus was purely destructive. An Army Civil Affairs Officer said: “To clear, you need to know your enemy. You don’t know your enemy — [you’re just] tearing things down and pissing people off.”12
The Taliban’s presence “was a symptom, but we rarely tried to understand what the disease was,”13 an unnamed USAID official said in a Lessons Learned interview in 2016.
In “Afghanistan: The Rise of the Taliban,” people explain that they asked the Taliban to come to power to stop the violence of civil war, to bring morals to society, and to keep out foreigners. That isn’t what they got from the Taliban, but the people wanted peace, morality, and independence.
What if those were our goals all along?
The Potential
This disaster offers U.S. Americans an opportunity to finally talk about and answer a question we’ve been struggling with for over a century.
How do we want to relate to the rest of the world?
How do we want to wield our power and influence? What kind of leader do we want to be? How do we want others to see us? How do we want others to treat us and each other? What role are we willing to play in supporting and modeling that behavior?
Answering these questions will help us avoid repeating the cycle of war, regret, and withdrawal in the future. The answers will directly influence what kind of country the U.S. becomes and the quality of how we grow together with other countries. How we answer this question is directly relevant to several important challenges the U.S. is currently facing, from international issues like climate change, COVID, or domestic ones like the legacies of slavery and colonialism.
The behavior of individuals and countries arises from the shared understanding (or intersubjectivity) of the relationship, forming the basis of their interactions. If we treat others as friends, then they’re friends. If we treat them as enemies, then they’re enemies. If we are selfish and disrespectful, or generous and caring, the rest of the world will respond accordingly.
We are one world, bound up with each other, and we have to decide how we want to relate to that. Here are some options:
In 2007, the recently ousted Afghan President Ashraf Ghani explained:
“We live in one world. That’s easily said, but we are not dealing with the implications of the one world that we are. And that is that if we want to have one world, this one world cannot be based on huge pockets of exclusion and then inclusion for some. We must now finally come to think about the premises of a truly global world in relationship to the regime of rights and responsibilities and accountabilities that are truly global in scope.”
-Ashraf Ghani (2007)14
I believe Americans want to be participants in building a better world for the future, the rest of the world, and the next generations. The United States has the tools for effective communication and collaboration, with the power and resources to be a tremendous force for good. We have access to the knowledge, wisdom, and skills learned through our history.
The United States could be an incredible force for good in the world and make impactful contributions. However, we might not have a sustainable, positive impact until we dare to commit to it. We need a cultural shift. Adopting some new guiding principles in our interventions and politics could be the answer. We need to commit to a world where we all win, where friends and enemies can move towards their best lives, now and in the future.
We all have a role to play in the whole; our differences do not have to divide us.
I am Duncan Autrey, a conflict transformation facilitator and educator.
For more information on my work, conflict transformation, my new podcast and discussions about thought-provoking topics:
Visit my website:
Check out my other posts and subscribe to Omni-Win Visions here on Substack:
“Human Cost of Post-9/11 Wars:” Costs of War Project, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll
“What Did the U.S. Get for $2 Trillion in Afghanistan?” Sarah Almukhtar and Rod Nordland. New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/09/world/middleeast/afghanistan-war-cost.html
SIGAR
https://www.sigar.mil/
The sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 inspired the U.S. to join World War I, but people regretted entering the war within ten years.
“It wasn’t hubris that drove America into Afghanistan. It was fear.” Robert Kagan, Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/26/robert-kagan-afghanistan-americans-forget/
The Moral Imagination. John Paul Lederach.
Other examples include: Grievance & gratitude, action & reflection, stability & change, compete & cooperate, mercy & justice
“Civil War is Solvable (Again)” Solvable Podcast, Pushkin Media. https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/civil-war-is-solvable-again/
“Civil War is Solvable (Again)” Solvable Podcast, Pushkin Media. https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/civil-war-is-solvable-again/
“Built to Fail” The Afghanistan Papers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-nation-building/
“Stranded Without a Strategy” The Afghanistan Papers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-strategy/
“Stranded Without a Strategy” The Afghanistan Papers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-strategy/
“Stranded Without a Strategy” The Afghanistan Papers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-strategy/
“Ashraf Ghani: How to fix broken states” TED Talk.