30 United States The Economist July 10th 2021
What a way to spend $2trn
F
ive yearsago the usembassy in Kabul unveiled an $800m re
fit. With 1,500 desks and 800 beds within its fortress walls, it
was a third bigger than America’s next biggest embassy, in Bagh
dad. Meanwhile Barack Obama’s special representative to Afghan
istan, Laurel Miller, had a troubled conscience.
Her State Department talkingpoints insisted she should speak
of America’s “enduring commitment to Afghanistan”. But Ms Mill
er reckoned the trilliondollar American effort was on borrowed
time. “The phrase was dishonest enough to make me wince,” she
recalls. “I didn’t think the strategic rationale for the mission or po
litical commitment to it would endure.” She avoided the term.
That might have seemed odd in Kabul, in the shadow of Amer
ica’s concrete citadel. But it was fairly obvious in Washington. Mr
Obama, having dispatched 47,000 additional troops to Afghani
stan early in his presidency, had lost faith in the mission. A steep
reduction in casualties—the year the embassy relaunched saw
one combat death—meant Congress and the media largely ig
nored it. And the foreignpolicy establishment had never paid it
the attention its claim on American blood and treasure warranted.
Where the wars in Vietnam and (to a lesser degree) Iraq in
spired generations of area specialists, America’s small cast of Af
ghanistan experts has to this day changed little since 2001. Having
spent a fair bit of time in the country during the first decade of the
American mission, though very little in the second, your colum
nist is sometimes mistaken for an expert himself. It shows how
low the bar to Afghanistan expertise has been set.
This mismatch between America’s vast investment in Afghani
stan and the scant attention paid to it in Washington might seem
paradoxical. In fact it helps explain how the slowrolling debacle
of America in Afghanistan came to pass.
From the start, the American effort was not merely illin
formed about Afghanistan; it was only partly about Afghanistan.
After bombing the Taliban from power, George W. Bush’s adminis
tration was advised to reach an accommodation with the group. It
posed no direct threat to America. And though unpopular in Ka
bul, the mullahs represented a large population in southern Af
ghanistan who found the Taliban’s northern rival—and America’s
proxy—repugnant. Yet the administration considered any distinction between terrorists and their abettors incompatible with its
expansive vision for the war on terror. It therefore ruled the Tali
ban irreconcilable. America has spent almost two decades being
punished for that mistake.
The insurgency it gave rise to ensured that America’s stabilisa
tion effort was dominated by generals, for whom force is the an
swer to most setbacks, and local politics a distraction. Yet the in
surgency, because based in neighbouring Pakistan, was unbeat
able. The result has been waves of terrible violence that have cost
tens of thousands of Afghan lives and left many of the country’s
people craving order from any hand. This was the circumstance in
which the joyless mullahs arose in the 1990s; it is why rural district
after district is now falling to them as easily as they did then.
The scholar Robert Kagan has suggested that America’s history
of large foreignpolicy blunders is connected to its isolationist
sentiments. To overcome them, American presidents embrace un
realistically grandiose schemes, he suggests; and at first blush Af
ghanistan looks like evidence for that. In pursuit of a Utopian ide
al—to eradicate terrorism—America sought to produce an unprec
edented Afghan state while fighting an unwinnable war.
Yet the war’s context has changed. Public opinion has played
little part in it, because for most Americans it has been invisible.
In 1968 America had half a million disgruntled conscripts and vol
unteers in Vietnam. At the height of the Obama surge it had 98,000
professional soldiers in Afghanistan—too few to fill the biggest
college football stadiums—and suffered modest casualties. In a
country of 330m people—a tiny minority of whom have any con
nection to the armed forces—the war has scarcely registered.
This gave Mr Bush’s successors freedom to try to fix his mis
takes. But Mr Obama and Mr Trump doubled down on them, by
initially bowing to the generals’ demand for more troops and more
fighting. They did so partly for political reasons. Mr Obama had
talked up the war’s importance so much on the campaign trail that
he felt compelled to give it a fresh push. Mr Trump wanted to make
Mr Obama look weak. But it was also, in both cases, for want of a
more compelling alternative suggestion.
Nationalsecurity hawks remained largely opposed to the only
conceivable way to end the conflict, negotiations with the Taliban.
Few in the foreignpolicy intelligentsia, which had come to con
sider Afghanistan a strategic byway, challenged that view. Mr Oba
ma ended up passing the war on more or less as he had inherited
it, with little conviction that it could end well. Mr Trump, to his
credit, launched peace talks with the Taliban, but only after signal
ling his intention to withdraw America’s remaining troops, doom
ing the talks from the start. This suggested that America no longer
cared who controlled Afghanistan—a position that Joe Biden, by
proceeding with the withdrawal, has underlined. What a way to
spend $2trn.Back to Gandamak
It might at least be hoped that the lessons of this debacle will be
learned. The main one is so obvious: an overmilitarised foreign
policy that embraces unrealistic objectives is liable to fail. Yet, as
Mr Kagan and many others have shown, this appears to be more a
feature of American foreign policy than a bug. And indeed the
light—almost imperceptible—mark Afghanistan has made on the
Washington establishment suggests it may be forgotten especially
quickly. Ms Miller predicts that Afghanistan will soon barely be
mentioned in America’s foreignpolicy circles. Her forecasts have
a solid record.nLexington
America’s fiasco in Afghanistan has been sustained by mistakes it seems destined to repeatBanca do Antfer
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