Another Perspective on American Foreign Policy and Afghanistan

I asked one of my former students, Jaimie Orr, to add his thinking about Afghanistan and American policy. Jaimie is a former Navy judge advocate now teaching at the National War College, and a graduate of Heidelberg ('81) with degrees in Law and in Military History from the Ohio State University, University of Virginia, and Norwich University. These comments are provided in his personal capacity and his personal opinions only; they do not represent the views of the National War College or the Department of Defense.

Like many of the readers of your blog, I have been thinking about the events of the past few weeks and talking about it with my colleagues, many of whom served and lost friends, American,  Afghan, and other Allies.  Here are my thoughts – mine alone, for which I am responsible.

First, although it is quite fashionable now to criticize and lay blame on this President, the previous one, or the two before him, there are a few things we need to keep in mind.  It is always fashionable to decry American hubris, imperialism, exceptionalism, greed, or negligence. We seek to blame the military-industrial complex or the liberal social scientists who allegedly failed in their analysis and advice.  Rarely do we blame ourselves – the body of citizens who allowed all of the above.

I’ll share an observation from one acquaintance:

The fact is that no war is won until there is some form of political reconciliation. The Afghan people chose that form of reconciliation. By hook, crook, bribe or intimidation they have accepted Taliban rule.

We did our part for 20 years. We achieved our primary goals of 1) preventing another 9/11 2) punishing Al Qaeda 3) eventually killing OBL. We built for a time the beginnings of a government and gave people a taste of what they could have. If they want it again, maybe they will earn it for themselves. Perhaps it's also affected the Taliban. Certainly, their cooperation over the last few weeks is not indicative of what they were 20 years ago. We also built intelligence systems and homeland security to prevent another terror attack akin to 9/11.

Most criticism of American foreign policy operates from an expectation that our decisions should be without flaw, our strategies unassailable, and their implementation without error.  It also assumes that America’s policies operate in a vacuum. And failures of accurate prediction are condemned as simply failures. We perhaps ought to remember a few things:

1.       First, the observation, “it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” attributed to a baseball-playing philosopher.

2.      Second, that most social sciences like to divide things neatly into dependent and independent variables – when in reality, at least where human behavior is concerned, all variables are interdependent.

3.      Third, there is an observation about American foreign policy that seems (at least to me) related to the observation of Winston Churchill that “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.” American intervention is the worst possible intervention – unless we consider the effect of the other forces that would have intervened.

America’s past is filled with mistakes and with the harm we caused.  But much of that was undertaken in an effort to actually make things better for those involved and also often in an effort to counter the perceived greater harm risked by the behavior of actors we believed – justly, I might add – who would be much, much worse – a militarist Japan, A psychopathic Kaiser, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China. And yes, the Taliban of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

On two occasions in the past century we, as a nation, committed the necessary time, effort, expenditure, and human effort to “nation-building:  post-War Germany and Japan.  Many assert that, to the degree nation-building has failed, it fails for the same reason doctors tell us to make sure we take the full dose of an antibiotic until it’s all gone – because to do less doesn’t only mean that the medicine will “fail,” but that the infection will actually become resistant. We have never put the level of troops and other personnel into an occupation that our doctrine called for and, in many cases, we started out with levels about 1/5 of what was recommended and went down from there.  In 1954 the U.S. Army Constabulary Force in Germany – the Military Police alone – numbered over 50,000, and total troops strength stationed there ten years after the war’s end was almost 500,000.  There is no shortage of analysis that told us where to look and what to do to avoid these errors – from Sarah Chayes, Rachel Kleinfeld and Tom Carothers of the Carnegie Institute to Nadis Schadlow, author of War and the Art of Governance, to name just a few.

Every criticism that has been levied in the posts on this site and elsewhere have a measure of validity and I agree that the after-action reports (AAR), the post-mortems that follow must look at all of these. Part of what we need to consider is whether we missed the mark to begin with by calling this a ‘war” . Michael Howard, probably the greatest military historian since Thucydides, argued that this was a mistake (https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/michael-howard-it-was-a-terrible-error-to-declare-war-5362723.html).

I know that these thoughts will engender others, and the conversations will go on.  My institution will continue to do what we can to educate our leaders.  But I’ll close with some of the final observations from my colleagues’ post:

Ultimately, we can choose to wallow in a sense of failure, or not. What we must do are 1) take care of the people we still need to get out; 2) take care of our service members and their families, and indeed help them through this time of 'cognitive dissonance'; 3) AAR the hell out of the debacle and [try to] ensure it never happens again; and  4) try to establish some accountability (even as Scheller said, but not in the way he said it).

1-3 are possible, 4 may be more difficult.

But we don't even have to be entirely successful in any of the steps - except 1 really - in order to achieve (or at least start) the much-needed learning and healing required.