In an upcoming book, slated for release in October 2025, Paul D. Miller – a professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service – chronicles the 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan from its inception in 2001, across four presidential administrations, and to its disastrous conclusion in 2021. “Choosing Defeat: The Twenty-Year Saga of How America Lost Afghanistan” joins an ever-expanding stack of books about the war; it takes a granular approach to charting out 20 years of decisions made and why.
Miller knows intimately the ins and outs of strategic policymaking in Washington, having served as a director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council staff from September 2007 to September 2009, worked as an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, and served as a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army.
For “Choosing Defeat,” Miller spoke to dozens of key policymakers and sketches out every major decision made, the cumulative consequences of which was defeat.
In the following interview with The Diplomat’s Managing Editor Catherine Putz, Miller frames the mission in Afghanistan as encompassing both counterterrorism and nation-building. “We just failed to execute any part of the mission competently aside from killing terrorists,” he concluded. He also explored the influence of bureaucracies, Pakistan, and the question of responsibility.
Miller’s most poignant critique is for the academic concept of “realism,” which he called “hopeless and nihilistic.”
Why was the United States in Afghanistan in the first place? What was the initial mission? Did the U.S. stray from that original mission or merely fail to persecute it fully?
The U.S. invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban government because the Taliban refused to hand over al-Qaida after 9/11. The mission was to bring al-Qaida to justice, permanently end its terrorist safe haven, and deter future terrorism.
The U.S. stayed in Afghanistan for so long because we never accomplished those things – we never got all of al-Qaida, never permanently ended the safe haven, and never sufficiently insured against future attacks. We also stayed to ensure a stable transition to a new government and to prevent a collapse of public order, which were requirements of international law. (If you overthrow a government, you are responsible for public order.)
These reasons for staying are connected: it is much easier to do counterterrorism if the country is stable and the new government is friendly. That was also the long-term exit strategy: build the Afghan government and army so they can deny terrorist safe haven on their own and the U.S. can leave.
None of that was mission creep. We just failed to execute any part of the mission competently aside from killing terrorists.
You identify the “graveyard of empires” trope as a myth that was sustained throughout the war, a reference that influenced how many in the media framed the war, and how some policymakers thought about it. Where did the “graveyard” idea come from, why was it so compelling, and why is in the wrong way to think about Afghanistan?
The phrase “graveyard of empires” has been around for a long time, but it was not applied to Afghanistan until October 2001 in an essay for Foreign Affairs by Milt Bearden. It’s a catchy phrase and seems, superficially, to capture the history of the three Anglo-Afghan wars and the Soviet-Afghan war.
But it isn’t accurate.
As Thomas Barfield has noted in his work (“Afghanistan: A Political and Cultural History”), most of the territory of modern Afghanistan was regularly conquered and annexed by more powerful neighboring empires in Persia or India throughout history. Only a thin mountainous strip along what is now the Afghan-Pakistan border was usually overlooked by the empires, and that was not because of their fabled skill at guerrilla warfare but because mountainous terrain is too expensive to administer in an undeveloped society.
Taliban propaganda nonetheless successfully played up the label, assisted by a credulous international media.
Among many reasons the U.S. “lost the war,” you cite “habits of thinking refracted through the nature of bureaucracy.” How did bureaucratic structures – in the State and Defense departments and elsewhere – impede strategic thinking about the war? What habits of thinking were most problematic?
Bureaucracies are set up to do routine tasks. By definition, those tasks have been broken up into discrete activities with standard procedures whose outcome is measurable and usually quantifiable. Designing a nation-building and counterinsurgency intervention is not a discrete task with standard procedures and quantifiable outputs.
Bureaucracies are designed to handle tasks with known solutions. Afghanistan was a complex problem whose solution had to be invented on the fly. The habits of mind fostered by bureaucracy are directly harmful to the kind of creative, adaptable, strategic thinking that Afghanistan demanded.
Pakistan is a recurring charactering in the saga of the war in Afghanistan. At one point, you write, in reference to the Bush years, “It took time to overcome the cognitive dissonance of Pakistan acting like an ally and an enemy simultaneously. Pakistan had been consistent and reliable in the fight against al-Qaida.” How do you square that claim – that Pakistan was a “consistent and reliable in the fight against al-Qaida” – with the fact that al-Qaida’s leader, Osama bin Laden, was found hiding out in Pakistan?
Pakistan was a strong ally against al-Qaida (not the Taliban), certainly in the early years. Most of the senior al-Qaida leadership that was caught or killed in the early years was caught or killed directly by Pakistani intelligence and law enforcement, or through their collaboration with U.S. forces.
Pakistan’s hostility to al-Qaida was so well-known that al-Qaida tried to assassinate Pervez Musharraf twice in 2003.
I’m persuaded that some elements of the Pakistani state actively collaborated with the Taliban (that is the argument of Steve Coll’s book, “Directorate S”), and I think it is conceivable that some may have eventually extended that collaboration to al-Qaida, which could account for bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad. But, truthfully, nobody knows.
Many have sought to apportion blame for the war in Afghanistan. I’d rather ask about responsibility: Who is ultimately responsible for the decisions make in regard to the war in Afghanistan? Presidents, generals, the American people? How should Americans, as a society, process and take responsibility for the failure of the war in Afghanistan?
The four commanders-in-chief who oversaw the war are principally responsible, but I’d add that their choices were an accurate reflection of the will of the electorate who put them in office.
You write that, after the Trump administration signed its deal with the Taliban, then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton, and the U.S. special representative on Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, “were each eager to avoid blame for the process, if not the content, of Doha.” Was the way the Doha agreement came into being unusual? How consequential was the Doha agreement in triggering all that came afterward?
I would quote Bolton, who said something to the effect that there was nothing normal about the way national security decisions were made in the Trump White House, including the Doha agreement.
Historians will be writing for decades to come about how the Trump White House broke all norms. The Doha process was railroaded by Pompeo at Trump’s direction over the objections of the Department of Defense and the national security adviser. That’s just baffling. When you’re fighting a war, you typically do want to coordinate wartime negotiations with your own Defense Department.
Was it consequential? Of course. Trump signed the deal and Biden implemented it. Doha is directly responsible for the U.S. withdrawal and Kabul’s collapse. Some people (including Pompeo) want to try to separate Doha from the withdrawal. That’s nonsense. Doha committed the U.S. to withdrawal, and that’s what happened.
Finally, you have choice words for “realism” – a theory with wide subscription in Washington – writing that it is “a hopeless, nihilistic vision of the world…” What is so seductive about realism? What is the alternative?
I always put academic “realism” in quotes, because it is not actually a realistic description of the world. It is an ideology masquerading as a neutral, hard-nosed take on politics, but you should always be on guard against an ideology that denies it is one. “Realism” is best understood as principled opposition to moral aspiration in politics, which is why I say it is hopeless and nihilistic. I wrote a 10,000-word essay explaining why it is historically inaccurate and morally problematic here, if you’re interested.
Political life is the common pursuit of justice, peace, and order among a people who share a history and territory together. If we do not share a hope that justice is possible, if we give up on any such aspiration, then political life itself is no longer possible, and politics becomes indistinguishable from civil war.
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