We lost. Again.
It pains me to say it because I’m just as patriotic as the next American but looking back on almost 20 years of endless war in Afghanistan, we lost.
Again.
In my lifetime in fact, which spans every war since World War II, I count sixteen countries where we put boots on the ground and went to war. I covered a few of them myself, including the first Gulf War to oust Iraq from the rich oilfields of Kuwait. That one was both a military and moral victory. But a sad summary is, where American security has been at stake, we’ve lost more wars than we’ve won, or at best, fought to a costly but inconclusive draw.
That hurts. It especially hurts because in most wars our motives have been noble. It hurts because by most measures we are the most powerful nation on earth. And as much as anything, it hurts because if we’ve learned any lessons from losses— ours or anyone else’s— we have too often ignored them the next time around
Afghanistan is the best example of that. It has long been in invaders’ sights because in centuries past it was seen as a gateway to India. Then in modern times, a gateway to oil.
Historians will remind us of the Afghans’ tenacious defeats of foreign armies clear back to the age of Alexander the Great, who tried to conquer the land nearly 2,500 years ago and has long been quoted for the lesson he learned: it was “easy to march into, hard to march out of.”
But we don’t have to look back two-and-a-half millennia. We only have to look back to 1979 when the Soviets tried the same thing. And, at a debilitating cost, learned the same lesson.
On a trip there after the Soviets invaded, a camera crew and I trekked into an Afghan valley with a unit of U.S.-backed guerrillas— Mujaheddin is what we called them then, before they turned into the Taliban— ferrying supplies on the backs of mules. We were spotted by a Soviet helicopter gunship, patrolling the valley floor. As it fired on us and we scattered to the insubstantial shelter of enormous slabs of stone, I couldn’t help but think, these men with their mules can be no match for the Soviets’ Mi-24s, which looked like monstrous armored insects spewing poison from their pores.
But they were. They wore down the Soviets. Just as they’ve now been wearing down the United States of America.
Why? Because while WWII serves as an exception to the rule, usually when an outsider invades a nation, the advantage goes to the insider. The outsider begins with no knowledge of the local language, no map of the local neighborhoods, no havens as safe hideaways, no allies on the ground.
In his book Say Nothing about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, another war I covered, Patrick Radden Keefe writes about one IRA figure escaping from British soldiers, evidently coming to arrest or assassinate him: “He knew these streets, the hidden alleys, the fences he could scale. He knew each vacant house and laundry line.” Things only an insider knows.
Then there is a quote in the book attributed to Mao Tse Tung: “The guerrilla warrior must swim among the people as a fish swims through the sea.”
It’s true. In Northern Ireland I saw it firsthand. The guerrilla warriors there swam among the people. They sometimes got the better of the British military because when it came to owning the streets, the soldiers weren’t connected. The insiders were. The soldiers had nowhere to swim. This insider, eluding the armed forces of the United Kingdom, did. He swam away.
Just as the Taliban, eventually our prime prey in Afghanistan, have too often swum away, and now are on the verge of victory. It’s their neighborhood, not ours. They have ties that protect them, we don’t. They can melt into the landscape. We can’t.
There are parallels to our failed war a half-century ago with a comparatively crude but uncompromising enemy in Vietnam. As outsiders, at least in retrospect, we never had a prayer. As the BBC put it, “The Vietcong had an intricate knowledge of the terrain. They won the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people by living in their villages and helping them with their everyday lives. Their tunnel systems, booby-traps and jungle cover meant they were difficult to defeat and hard to find.”
They swam among the people as a fish swims through the sea. We didn’t. We couldn’t.
Now, that’s our Afghan enigma.
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote the other day of another loose parallel, another elusive lesson we should have understood in Afghanistan, but didn’t. “It was… reasonable to fear from the start that trying to graft a Western political culture onto such a deeply tribalized, male-dominated and Islamic fundamentalist culture like Afghanistan’s was a fool’s errand.”
Ever since I saw Afghan men playing polo on a dirt lot in Kabul, batting around the decapitated head of an enemy, I’ve understood what Friedman just said. Their culture, their comrades, their neighborhood, their landscape. Their advantage.
One more lesson of course is the outcome of this long war. At the outset, we succeeded. In the wake of 9/11, we chased al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. But as President Biden’s national security adviser said last weekend on CNN, “The terrorist threat has changed dramatically over the last 20 years,” pointing to al-Qaeda’s expansion to Syria, Somalia, and Yemen among other unstable places, and citing ISIS, which has official cells or copycat cells in more than two dozen countries on almost every continent.
We chased them out. But we didn’t put them away. They don’t need Afghanistan as a safe haven any more.
Whether to enhance security or to establish democracy, it’s hard to swallow but an historical truth: in certain wars the losses have eclipsed the gains. Despite some American successes over twenty endless years, Afghanistan is poster boy for that.
But that deserves a cautionary note: if all else fails, some wars are worth fighting. In the “Annual Threat Assessment” just released by the Director of National Intelligence, it says, “Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang have demonstrated the capability and intent to advance their interests at the expense of the United States.” For example, former presidential candidate Howard Dean recently posed questions about adversarial states that we cannot ignore: “What if China invades Taiwan? What if Russian tanks roll across Ukraine?”
To say nothing of the non-state terrorists.
If history is any guide, the United States will fight in yet another war. But before we do, we have to understand that just because someone once taught us a lesson, it doesn’t mean we learned it.
That’s what has to change. For as Winston Churchill famously said, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
We don’t want to repeat Afghanistan. Ever again.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies at home and international crises around the globe. He won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his essays also are published— with images— on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
Thanks for your analysis and perspective. On target, as always. I once carried a sign at a protest that said, "I'm already against the next war." I hope I never have to pull it out again.
Your hard earned wisdom always strikes home Greg. Thank you for grounding us.