South Asia

Afghanistan: What Just Happened? What Comes Next?

Can the United States escape the vortex of its 20-year war?

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by Carl Conetta, 09 Sept 2021.

This article assesses the calamitous end of America’s 20-year war and the effort of US interventionists to use public distress about the airport chaos to blunt and distract from an adequate appraisal of the war that produced it.

The war was defined from the start by an impossible mission shrouded in misinformation. Intelligence agencies failed to give useful intelligence over a span of not just 4 months, but 20 years. And the article asks, Can we escape the political and strategic dynamics that produce and sustain such wars?

It concludes by examining how some Western powers are now looking to continue the conflict via other means. Against this, the author proposes a stability-oriented approach that would energetically explore areas of possible US-Taliban cooperation, a new positive context in which areas of difference might be productively addressed.

Afghanistan: The Fog at the End of the Tunnel

 

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by Carl Conetta, 19 June 2021

What is causing the uncertainty about when US ground forces will exit Afghanistan?

The Biden administration insists that logistical factors explain its breach of the 2020 US-Taliban agreement, which reset the exit date from May to September. Logistical factors were also used to explain why the date may be moved back to July. Actually, logistical issues explain neither. Using current data and historical precedent, this short analysis shows why.

An alternative explanation for the delay is that it gave Washington more time to pursue some of its unfinished goals regarding Afghanistan. In this, the lingering troop presence serves as leverage.

What goals? Improve Kabul’s military posture, polish plans and preparations for US forces to “fight from afar,” and pursue dramatic new international initiatives aiming to lock the Taliban into a cease-fire, peace settlement, and government reform plan substantially defined by the USA. This high risk-gambit won’t succeed, but it might prolong the conflict and America’s involvement in it.

They made a desolation and called it “A Good War”

 

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By Carl Conetta, Reset Defense Blog, 04 February 2021.

This article (with extensive bibliography) surveys, at the 20-year mark, the consequences of the US regime change, occupation, and nation-building exercise in Afghanistan. Drawing on US DOD and congressional research agency reports, media investigations, and NGO analyses it anchors the broad public impression of full-spectrum failure. It reviews the human and financial costs of the war, the failures of reconstruction, and the ongoing dysfunction of Afghan governance.

America’s debacle in Afghanistan, which echoes the Soviet failure during the 1980s, indicates that nations are not the type of thing that can be built according to a foreign blueprint, and especially not at the point of a gun. Outsiders lack the knowledge, indigenous roots, legitimacy, and degree of interest to prevail. Indeed, their very presence is provocative, especially given differences in language, religion, and culture.

Why is withdrawal so difficult? The article concludes that domestic political and institutional considerations are more important than any strategic rationale or cost-benefit analysis. Once committed, no political or military leader, nor the Pentagon cares to own responsibility for failure. And hubris generates an endless succession of imagined “new paths” to success. But as success proves forever elusive, so does withdrawal. In a perverse sense, it is persistent failure that keeps America mired for decades in this and other desultory wars.

Dissuading China and Fighting the ‘Long War’

by Carl Conetta, World Policy Journal, 01 July 2006. ➪ PDF

The 2006 US Defense Review advanced two new strategic vectors for the US armed forces – one targets a putative “global Islamic insurgency”; the other puts America on a collision course with China.

(A longer version of this article was published in November 2006 under the title The Near Enemy and the Far: The Long War, China, and the 2006 US Quadrennial Defense Review.)

Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a “New Warfare”

by Carl Conetta, PDA Research Monograph #9, 18 February 2004.  ➪ PDF ➪ summary PDF  ➪ HTML  ➪ summary HTML

 

Collateral in Iraq
Examines the Pentagon’s treatment of the civilian casualty issue in the Iraq and Afghan wars, reviews the “spin” and “news frames” used by defense officials to shape the public debate over casualties, and critiques the concept of a “precision warfare” as misleading.  Case studies include the Baghdad bombing campaign. An appendix provides a comprehensive Guide to Surveys and Reporting on Casualties in the Afghan and Iraq Wars.

Dislocating Alcyoneus: How to combat al-Qaeda and the new terrorism

(HTML version) (PDF version) by Carl Conetta. PDA Briefing Memo #23, 25 June 2002. The memo outlines a “strategy of dislocation” for defeating the new terrorism. Al Qaeda is analyzed as a “distributed transnational network” that uses terrorism in order to catalyze political-cultural polarization and mobilization. Published in Hegemonie oder Stabilität: Alternativen zur Militarisierung der Politik, edited by Volker Kröning (MdB), Lutz Unterseher, and Günter Verheugen (Hrsg.) Bremen: Edition Temmen, August 2002.

Strange Victory: A critical appraisal of Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan war

(printable PDF version) (HTML version) (summary) by Carl Conetta, PDA Research Monograph #6, 30 January 2002. Why the inadvertent effects of the war are now overtaking the intended ones. Includes appendices addressing: the war’s impact on the humanitarian crisis; the missing political framework for American action; the source of power and the strategy of the Taliban; and the limits of the Bonn agreement and the challenges facing the interim government.

What Justifies Military Intervention?

(HTML version) commentary by Charles Knight, 27 September 2001. Examines the problems for international security associated with U.S. military intervention abroad. Includes a Postscript on the “war on terrorism” (revised 01 March 2002) and Selected Readings on the doctrines of Just War, Total War, and Strategic Bombing (revised 01 March 2002).