I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what went wrong in Afghanistan, where we failed as a nation — and where I made mistakes as an officer.
No. 1 was going to Iraq. Like many, I backed that invasion. But in retrospect, it distracted our forces for a war that had nothing to do with 9/11. We should have stayed focused on Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, meanwhile, one of our biggest mistakes was with the Afghan army. And I was part of the problem.
We built an army that was similar to Western armies, which are designed to employ overwhelming firepower and enjoy endless logistics and exquisite intelligence assets. When these were removed, the Afghan security forces were not able to fight as we’d expected. We should have designed them to be more in harmony with Afghan culture and society, along tribal and family lines, like the Taliban. The corruption at the highest levels of government and leadership gave those Afghan soldiers and police in many cases little reason to want to fight.
As director of operations in Regional Command-South, Kandahar, from August 2009 to November 2010, I saw many brave, competent Afghan officers and units. I believed it was possible that they could eventually stand on their own. I left Kandahar at the end of 2010 very optimistic about the future. But I failed to believe what I was seeing with my own eyes — that the most effective Afghan units were actually those that looked a lot like the Taliban. Those were the units led by US Green Berets, which moved with speed in pickup trucks, wore no boots or helmets, yet knew the people and the culture. I was part of the problem.
Following my deployment to Afghanistan, I was director of the Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordination Cell on the Joint Staff for all of 2011. As such, I led a team of experts on Pakistan and Afghanistan that helped to develop/coordinate policy for the region and represented the Joint Staff at the weekly deputies meeting at the White House.
We thought Pakistan was an ally. They were not. We were concerned about their nuclear weapons and believed that we could spend enough money and give enough aid that they would keep control of their nukes and also deny safe haven to the Taliban and to al Qaeda. Instead, we found Osama bin Laden living in a large home down the street from the military academy of Pakistan, and the Taliban enjoyed nearly unfettered safe haven in Pakistan’s mountainous western territories. They were, in effect, an arm of Pakistan’s intelligence service. Our strategy was overly focused on Afghanistan.
We never did fully implement a strategy that included Pakistan and, by necessity, India. In retrospect, it is clear that I failed to push forcefully enough for a strategy that included Pakistan. Even worse, I failed to realize that dissenting views by Pakistan experts were suppressed or ignored.
Our government should have raised a tax specifically to pay for Afghanistan. Without such a tax, most Americans remained unaffected by our deployment to Afghanistan. Therefore, there was little pressure from the American public on Congress or any administration to have the sense of urgency needed to review our strategy and assumptions and bring this deployment to a successful conclusion.
So how do we move forward?
The immediate priority is to get everybody out who needs or wants to get out. This is already a humanitarian disaster, and it’ll get worse if the US, our allies, and the United Nations can’t prevent it. The scenes we are all seeing coming out of Afghanistan now are tragic, chaotic, frustrating and sad. But what many may not see are the incredible efforts by soldiers and Marines on the ground, and the amazing skill and courage of airmen flying in and out of Kabul’s crowded airport. Even less visible and appreciated are the round-the clock work by commanders and staff from the Pentagon and US Central Command.
What they need is time — and the failure of the Biden administration to plan ahead means that the military must rush to hit the Aug. 31 deadline. The Taliban should never be the ones dictating our actions.
This is going to launch another refugee problem in Europe that will be destabilizing, and that can have negative consequences for the US given that the European Union is our largest trading partner.
The second step is to reassess our strategy for the region. We must look at this as a regional security issue, not just an Afghan issue. The Chinese will surely move in quickly with lots of money and zero concerns for human rights or women’s safety in order to gain access to the vast amounts of precious minerals waiting to be extracted from the mountains of Afghanistan.
Finally, I think we need to do some rigorous introspection in all of our government, diplomatic and defense/security institutions. I’ve been doing it about my own actions, but the military needs to study where things went wrong and try not to make the same mistakes again. And if we don’t learn, it will happen again.
Gen. Ben Hodges, now retired, was the former commanding general of the United States Army Europe.