How America lost Afghanistan

Bonnie Kristian
Some 16 years in, the war in Afghanistan is the longest in the history of
The United States. It is also our most disproportionately ignored, and
with a new president in office after an election in which Afghanistan
was barely mentioned perhaps our most uncertain major
intervention going forward.

Defense Secretary James Mattis will soon present President Trump with
a recommendation for the future of U.S.-Afghan engagement. The
nature of his proposal is difficult to predict, pressured as it is by a
Pentagon eager for fresh escalation and a president whose decrial of
nation-building and labeling of the war "a total and complete disaster"
has never been accompanied by a concrete exit plan. Of course,
whatever policy Trump selects will have its greatest impact outside of
Washington on American soldiers tasked with what has devolved
into a self-perpetuating nation-building endeavor, and on the American
people, who have long since soured on a conflict most no
longer believe was worth its costs.

For insight into the shape of the war so far and its prospects under the
Trump administration, I spoke with Douglas Wissing, an award-winning
journalist who is most recently the author of Hopeless but Optimistic:
Journeying through America's Endless War in Afghanistan. Here's a
lightly edited, partial transcript.

Hopeless but Optimistic is the result of three stints embedded

with U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The portrait you paint is
significantly one of waste, corruption, and frustration, so for
readers who may not be familiar with your book, will you share
the source of the title and especially the source of your
optimism despite that grim assessment?

[Let's] work our way through the hopeless part and then get to the
optimistic part.
Hopeless but Optimistic is my second book on the war in Afghanistan.
My first one was Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the
Taliban. I was embedded with U.S. soldiers, and they began telling me
that we were essentially funding both sides of the war, that the
counterinsurgency was so messed up and so dysfunctional that
essentially everybody was running their wars on our money. We'd be
riding around out in Taliban country in these armored vehicles with
machine gunners on top and the soldiers would be saying, "We're
funding both sides here."

One really smart intelligence officer one day in Laghman Province, he

was on an embattled forward operating base and he clearly had been
up all night. We were standing outside and he started telling me that
he had been a narcotics detective in Las Vegas. "You know, this war is
just like the Mafia. It's just like Las Vegas, you know. Everybody gets
their cut," he said. "It's the perfect war. Everybody makes money."

I took that and started talking to more officers and began to learn
about things like how our money helps finance the Taliban. I started
doing hundreds of interviews with everybody from security soldiers
who had been on the ground to generals and ambassadors and
congress people, and I began to understand that there was this toxic
network that connected ambitious American careerists who profit on
military development and industrial development corporations, corrupt
Afghan insiders, and the Taliban. It was as the soldier said: It was the
perfect war. Everybody was making money. Everybody was benefiting
everyone, of course, but the American taxpayers and the Afghan
people.

I confess at this point I'm struggling more than ever to see

where the optimism comes in.

Well, in the first book, Funding the Enemy, I told that story and at
the time I was writing that book it was a pretty controversial thing to
say that we were losing the war and we were losing the war because
the enemy was us. The reality was, the cost of these two post-9/11
wars is probably about $5 trillion, and we had failed to accomplish our
strategic, diplomatic, and military goals.
After the first book created a stir, I decided I wanted to embed for the
third time in Afghanistan, to go through the war zones again and find
out if there were any lessons learned. People understood that things
were not going correctly. So I went back to find out, "Had things
changed?"

The answer was no, it hadn't. By the time I got back to Kabul after
going through the war zones, I saw how badly counterinsurgency was
continuing to go. So I decided that I needed to find something that had
worked in Afghanistan.

A lot of our development programs make no sense in Afghanistan. It's

just a way to have phantom aid push enormous amounts of tax money
to corporations that do very little. There's very little positive outcome. I
went around Kabul and I interviewed these people that had
longstanding organizations doing work that was very sustainable and
appropriate to Afghanistan.

I found these groups and I began to understand the strength of Afghan

culture, the resilience of that society, and the poetry of their society. I
began to be optimistic about the Afghans as a people. They have done
these extraordinary things. They will continue to do extraordinary
things. I have faith in certain kinds of sustainable aid. I have faith in
Afghans' capacity to run their society in a way that makes sense for
them.

I think the other reason for optimism is that I can see the American
public is clearly tired of this endless war, and Congress understands
that mood. A congressman told me, "Well, sometimes Congress has to
be shamed into doing the right thing." I can see that emerging
consensus against the war. I can also see the emergence of pragmatic
foreign policy strategy that is beginning to counter some of our very
over-militarized post-Cold War international strategy. While I am
somewhat hopeless about the outcome of a continuation of the way we
have waged war in Afghanistan, I am cautiously optimistic that a
change is on the way.
We recently learned President Trump is seriously considering
some sort of re-escalation of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan,
and that comes after an election in which Afghanistan was
almost never addressed. I was reviewing the three general
election debates today, and Afghanistan was mentioned
literally once. It was not a substantive discussion; it was
merely a passing mention of this 16-year-old war. Given what
we know of the Trump administration so far, do you think this
potential new surge is likely and do you think it's wise or
avoidable?

In the election, Afghanistan was the forgotten war, and this isn't
actually the first election where that happened. In 2012, it was the
forgotten war even then. It doesn't poll well. Nobody's going to bring it
up if they don't have to.

At the Pentagon, Gen. Nicholson made that pitch for "a few thousand
more" troops. That's clearly the opening gambit of Pentagon efforts to
engage President Trump in a re-escalation. Some people laugh and say,
"We haven't had a 16-year war in Afghanistan, we've had 16 one-year
wars." Thats because with each new rotation you get the new "good
idea" which sometimes is nothing more than the failed "good idea"
four rotations prior.

Still, I think we're putting off the inevitable. We're really propping up a
very dysfunctional proxy government, trying to define victory by
saying, "Kabul hasn't fallen." That only lasts for so long.

We all have the images of the helicopters plucking people off the roof
from the Saigon embassy. There have been questions about, "Do we
have appropriate landing pads in the embassy in Kabul?" Because
Kabul's besieged. The way insurgencies work is they go through the
countryside. They're centrifugal. They move towards the capital and
you've got capitals that are in a pretty precarious state. In the east and
in the south and in the west now. Things blow up with great regularity
in Kabul.
The question is: Are our efforts relevant? Are they consequential? If the
Pentagon says they want to have "a few thousand more" troops and
somehow that's going to turn the tide why would 2,000 more
soldiers turn the tide when 100,000 couldn't?

I think it's important to remember that the Taliban-led insurgency has

grown in double digits every year since at least 2005. They control
growing amounts of territory. I think the conservative estimates say
they control around half of the country. I've had some intelligence
analysts tell me they're controlling 90 percent of the countryside. The
long-time special forces saying is that if an insurgency isn't shrinking,
it's winning. U.S. government officials are trying to say this is a
"stalemate." It's not a stalemate. It's a lost war.

We have spent more money on Afghanistan than we spent on the

Marshall Plan, adjusted for inflation. Afghanistan has a population of
about 30 million people that make on average $400 a year. When we
invaded it was a basket case of a country. It was at the bottom of every
human development industry. Sixteen years later, with more than the
Marshall Plan invested there, they're still at the bottom of virtually
every human development category. Most of that money was wasted.

I think we are stumbling toward that great economic term, "sunk costs
bias," which warns that the costs that have been invested should not
be part of the discussion for future action. President Trump is a
business man. He's declared bankruptcy four times. He knows how to
cut his losses. Perhaps that's our best argument. Why throw good
money after bad?