Amin Saikal

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the United States and its allies ousted the Taliban from power in Afghanistan in retaliation for providing safe havens to al-Qaida. By the 20th anniversary of the attacks, however, the Taliban had returned to Kabul.

The story of how and why the U.S. fought a 20-year war in Afghanistan – and how it ultimately lost that war – is a complicated tale. Four U.S. presidents oversaw the war in Afghanistan. The mission evolved, as did the wider foreign policy strategies onto which it was mapped. By one measurement, the United States spent $2.3 trillion on the war from 2001 to 2021 – a mind-blowing sum in light of the devastating conclusion.

In his book, “How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan,” Amin Saikal lays out the convoluted path from a retaliatory intervention to defeat. In the following interview, Saikal, emeritus professor and founding director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University, helps explain the war’s evolution, the dysfunction of successive Afghan (and American) governments, and the fatal mistakes that doomed the effort to re-make Afghanistan into a democracy.

The Bush administration envisioned a “light footprint” as sufficient to achieve its aims in Afghanistan. It also sought to set the war within its wider foreign policy aims of “democracy promotion” and the “war on terror.” How did this constellation of circumstances and strategies hamper its ability to actually achieve its stated aims in Afghanistan?

Initially, the U.S. limited force deployment, spearheaded by the CIA and air power, rapidly prevailed against al-Qaida as the perpetrator of 9/11 and the extremist Taliban regime as the protector of al-Qaida under Osama bin Laden. But it resulted only in the dispersion of al-Qaida and the Taliban leaders and their operatives rather than in their total defeat.

Washington’s plan was not to “get bogged down” in Afghanistan. It was to help transform the country into a stable, secure, and democratic state within a relatively short period, and at minimum cost, in close relationship with the U.S. to ensure the country would never again become a hub for international terrorism. However, the failure to capture bin Laden as the main target of the intervention sooner rather than later led to a “hunt” for him that lasted 11 years, obliging America to deepen and widen its involvement in support of the difficult task of “nation-building” in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, America’s Afghanistan campaign was conflated with two wider foreign policy objectives: democracy promotion and the war on terrorism. The first objective motivated the Bush administration to influence the shaping of the strong presidential system of governance with which Afghanistan was endowed and which was more akin to the American model than in accord with the mitigating prevailing and historical conditions in Afghanistan. The system proved unworkable in a highly socially divided and traditional country. It produced dysfunctional and kleptocratic governments under leaders who personalized politics and could not be effective and reliable partners of the U.S. on the ground.

The second objective spread out American power with the prime aim of toppling the defiant Saddam Hussein’s autocratic rule in Iraq, which Washington falsely linked to al-Qaida and accused of possessing weapons of mass destruction. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq diverted many American military and intelligence resources from Afghanistan to Iraq in order to quell a raging insurgency there.

The Iraq war was prioritized over Afghanistan at a time when the Taliban, in alliance with al-Qaida, backed by Pakistan, rapidly regrouped and made a comeback with a vengeance before the U.S. and its Afghan and NATO allies could consolidate the situation in Afghanistan. U.S. forces remained thin on the ground and in need of more troops and military equipment, which only worsened as the Taliban-led insurgency expanded. By 2006, despite an increase in military assets, American forces and their allies were struggling to gain the upper hand over the Taliban and their supporters – a trend which continued, with the U.S. incapable of fighting two wars at the same time in contrast to the Pentagon’s doctrine.

You titled both chapters about Afghanistan’s two presidential administrations – Hamid Karzai (2001-2014) and Ashraf Ghani (2014-2021) – “Dysfunctional Governance.” In what ways did U.S. strategy in Afghanistan amplify legacies of contentious and dysfunctional governance in Afghanistan?

U.S. policymakers were often conscious that the U.S. should not be seen as the occupying mover and shaker in Afghanistan. It wanted the management of Afghanistan’s transition to be viewed as Afghan-owned and shaped. They noticeably left Presidents Karzai and Ghani to run their administrative affairs in ways that suited them.

While taking over the reins during very difficult times, these two leaders resorted to a more traditional mode of change and development rather than turning their back on past practices that had historically hampered the consolidation of Afghanistan as a viable state since its foundation in the mid-18th century. They engaged in the personalization rather than institutionalization of politics as the foundation for political stability and continuity.

The constitution of 2004, the rule of law and separation of powers were often overlooked or undermined in favor of enhancement of personal power based on family, tribal, ethnic, and factional connections. Priority was given to holding onto power rather than laying firm bases for what was needed to build a democratically functional system of governance.

As the political and security situation, along with the construction aspects of state-building, deteriorated over time, the U.S. relaxed its emphasis on democratizing and contended with the need to have someone in charge in Kabul to whom it could pass on responsibility for the conduct of the war as part of a strategy to exit from an unwinnable war. The process started under President Obama (2009-2017) and continued under his successors, strong critics of the Afghan war Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The result was a peace agreement with the Taliban in February 2020 and total withdrawal and return to power of the Taliban eighteen months later.

The United States promoted electoral democracy in Afghanistan, but several times stepped in to tip the scales of that democracy – such as the 2014 National Unity Government scheme – to ends that Washington perceived as suiting its interests best. How seriously did this impact the ability of genuine democratic processes to take root in Afghanistan?

As disputes and rival claims of success in the presidential elections of 2009 by Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, and 2014 and 2019 between Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah became the norm, Washington could see that Afghanistan was not moving in a desirable direction. It viewed the preservation of at least an electoral or primitive democracy as an act of salvation.

Secretaries of State John Kerry and Mike Pompeo found it necessary to intervene to resolve the disputes over the 2014 and 2019 election results. Kerry’s intervention finally led to the creation of a National Unity Government (NUG), led by Ghani as the president and Abdullah as chief executive (CE). Pompeo’s action helped bring about a resolution, allowing Ghani to hold onto the presidency and Abdullah to be appointed to a new position outside the executive as the head of the High Council for National Reconciliation (HCFNR).

The NUG – unprecedented in Afghanistan – quickly degenerated as unworkable. Ghani and Abdullah could not agree on many senior civilian and security appointments or policy initiatives. Ghani used his constitutional position to personalize power and failed to facilitate a constitutional amendment to formally change Abdullah’s CE position into prime minister, as had been agreed. Abdullah resisted many of Ghani’s administrative and policy actions. Kerry and Pompeo acted in desperation to secure a workable government in Kabul, but their efforts hardly paid off.

One figure that exists as a kind of throughline in the story of U.S. engagement in and with Afghanistan is Zalmay Khalilzad, from his presence at Bonn in 2001 to the deal he settled in Doha in 2020 on behalf of the Trump administration that precipitated the final U.S. withdrawal he continues to pop up as a significant actor. Why did multiple U.S. administrations turn to Khalilzad? What responsibility do you think he bears for the ultimate outcome of the war?

Zalmay Khalilzad played a very critical role in various capacities in Afghanistan’s transition under the United States’ aegis. He acted as a linchpin in advising and influencing the Bush and Trump administrations’ Afghanistan policy. As Bush’s personal envoy initially and as ambassador subsequently to Afghanistan, he closely worked with Karzai in setting the direction of Afghanistan’s domestic and foreign policy settings. Even afterwards, he remained an influential voice in relation to Afghanistan as American ambassador to Iraq and the United Nations.

He made a comeback as the U.S. ambassador for National Reconciliation in Afghanistan under Trump and concluded the infamous peace agreement with the Taliban without the participation of the Ghani government and other forces from inside Afghanistan. The deal secured a ceasefire between the Taliban and the U.S. and allied forces but left the field wide open for the Taliban and their Pakistani backers to intensify their operations against the largely U.S. and allied dependent Afghan government forces for a final victory.

All along, by virtue of his formal position, Khalilzad represented the American administration of the day and acted in its policy interests. The fact that he was born and brought up in Afghanistan was of secondary concern in his approach.

Both Democratic U.S. presidents that oversaw the war – Barack Obama (2009-2017) and Joe Biden (2021-present) – turned to time-bound plans for withdrawing from the conflict. Obama’s exit plan was of his own design, while Biden essentially took up the exit plan set by his predecessor, Donald Trump, in the Doha agreement, with very little modification. Obama’s withdrawal plan was ultimately pushed back, and Biden’s withdrawal went ahead, resulting in what most consider a disaster. Was there a time, across the 20 years of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, when a withdrawal would have yielded better results? What conditions do you think would have been necessary for any such final withdrawal to have been a success?

The U.S. could have potentially negotiated a viable settlement with the Taliban only from a position of strength. The time for this was when the U.S. had some 100,000 troops and their NATO allies another 47,000 in Afghanistan in the early years of the Obama presidency. But instead, Obama, backed by Vice President Joe Biden, found it politically and electorally desirable to end America’s involvement, in what had already become the longest war in its history, by the end of 2014. Changing American intervention from a condition to time based one only emboldened the insurgents and their Pakistani patrons.

Finally, a lot of ink has been spilled about the war in Afghanistan. What aspects of the war, or Afghanistan’s political history, or U.S. strategy, do you think have been overlooked and deserve great examination?

The U.S. overlooked the historical and prevailing complexities of Afghanistan and its neighborhood. It lacked a viable plan of action that could enable it to deal effectively with unforeseen contingencies. It overestimated the power that the U.S. military could bring to bear in changing Afghanistan and underestimated the fact that the application of such power can only work when there is also success in the political and reconstruction dimensions of state building as well as non-interference by other outside actors. The governance system badly faltered, as did the economic and security reconstruction, including the building of the Afghan defense and security forces, which suffered from serious shortcomings.

Meanwhile, Pakistan was allowed to maintain its relentless support of the Taliban to the very end, although Islamabad has now realized that it may have pursued a misguided policy. Its backing of an al-Qaida-linked Taliban, along with their affiliates, as a widely designated terrorist outfit has in many ways rebounded on Pakistan since the Taliban’s resumption of power.

According to several U.N. reports, under the Taliban not only al-Qaida, together with another 10 violent extremist groups, including the Islamic State of Khorasan, but also Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have found fertile habitat in Afghanistan. The TTP wants to transform Pakistan along the same lines as the Afghan Taliban, and has established bases in Afghanistan with full support of the Taliban regime. No wonder the U.N. is alarmed by the rise of terrorism emanating from Afghanistan.