In January 1842, British Maj. Gen. Sir William Elphinstone began a retreat from Kabul, Afghanistan. Not considered the brightest bulb in the British military chandelier, Elphinstone traded much of his gunpowder and weaponry in return for a safe conduct promise from the Afghan ruler.
Instead, the Afghans slaughtered almost the entire expedition as it struggled toward Jalabad. Some 16,000 people died, the vast majority of them civilians, including some who had been left behind in Kabul because of illness or wounds. Fortunately, the British Empire survived and was in better shape 50 years later than it had been earlier; but nevertheless, this was considered a disaster without parallel until Singapore surrendered to the Japanese exactly 100 years later.
The French have a saying: Victory has many fathers; defeat is an orphan. Fortunately for Britain, there was a ready scapegoat in the incompetent Elphinstone, although he was not entirely to blame. The government had made blunders as well.
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In the case of what just happened in Afghanistan, the inevitable political sniping is underway. Almost all of it is fairly useless for two reasons. First, neither political side has clean hands in this debacle. We entered Afghanistan under Republican George W. Bush, continued the war under Democrat Barack Obama, continued the war further under Republican Donald Trump and left Afghanistan under Democrat Joe Biden.
Second, picking your least favorite president to blame does nothing to protect us from similar failures in the future. To do that, we have to figure out if there is anything we can learn, and whether we need to reconsider our whole military role in the world.
Some things during this war went right. Our military successfully invaded Afghanistan, conquered the entire country and helped organize a government. These were not small achievements. In addition, the U.S. did learn some things from Vietnam.
First, casualties were extraordinarily low. Some 2,300 American troops were killed fighting in Afghanistan, which averages out to 115 dead per year. This is no balm to their families, but to a military historian, this is an extraordinarily low number.
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Second, no draftees were called up for either Afghanistan or Iraq. President Nixon correctly predicted that the opposition to the Vietnam War was largely a function of the size of the draft calls; sending conscripts into unpopular overseas wars can be a death sentence for a government. The French had found this out before we started to escalate in Vietnam, but as often happens, we didn’t bother to pay much attention to other countries’ experiences.
On the other hand, the military failures in Afghanistan were substantial. Clearly, 20 years of operations in country had done little to cripple the Taliban. It is true that we suffered no major defeats at the hands of Taliban forces, but it is not clear that the enemy was trying that hard. Perhaps they were husbanding their forces for our inevitable departure. The overnight disappearance of the Afghan National Army makes an interesting contrast with Vietnam, where the South Vietnamese army, the ARVN, hung on for two years after our final withdrawal from Vietnam.
Obviously, our intelligence was inadequate; an eventual Taliban victory was apparently foreseen, but I doubt that anyone briefed President Biden that it would happen so quickly. Finally, in Southeast Asia we often used the alibi that it is difficult to fight in jungles.
Afghanistan is not known for its jungles.
No doubt many theses will be written on our problems in Afghanistan, and one area that will be studied is whether we were adhering to the “principles of war” laboriously developed by the Army and taught in military schools and in ROTC programs, by people like yours truly. This led to some fruitful research and writing by others such as Col. Harry Summers and Prof. Roger Beaumont. The latter conducted a study of the nine principles of war and concluded that in World War II, we had used all nine; in the Korean War, five; and in Vietnam, 0.
Certainly one principle whose use was questionable was that of concentration of force. In hindsight, invading Iraq while Afghanistan was unresolved was a mistake. On paper we had the forces to do both, but many military personnel were becoming hopelessly exhausted by having consecutive tours of duty in theater.
However, I think an even greater problem has been our lack of local knowledge. Without knowledge of the local culture, its history, its language, its ways of thinking, attempting to build a nation or at least a strong government and army is doomed. This was a problem in Vietnam on many levels. In the Middle East wars we fought, my greatest shock occurred when we appointed a civilian head of operations in Iraq who did not know Arabic. If you don’t know the language of a country, you are completely dependent on others – advisers, translators, locals – to tell you what is going on. You cannot even negotiate with locals on a truly personal basis.
This may explain why, in several wars, we have tended grossly to underestimate the enemy. The French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the most successful military leaders in history, was fond of saying that “the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” He was referring primarily to the will to win. In the case of the North Vietnam/Vietcong alliance, as with the Taliban, there was a clear vision of total victory that included a willingness to take whatever losses were necessary. We justly mourn the 58,000 Americans lost in Vietnam. The much-maligned South Vietnamese army lost 250,000 men killed, while the enemy forces suffered approximately 850,000 dead. (This does not include civilian deaths.) In both wars, the enemy was motivated by fanaticism.
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Fanatics don’t always win – consider World War II – but they are willing to expend blood and resources without measure. On the other hand, a weak domestic ally in theater can be crippling. Compare the outcomes in Afghanistan and Vietnam to our victory in Korea, where the South Korean army definitely showed a will to fight. In other words, conflicts with an alliance between American and local forces can end in victory. But they won’t without solid local knowledge and operations based on that knowledge. Instead, we tend to put these conflicts purely in the context of something larger, such as the Cold War and the War on Terror. Given recent trends in education, I am not optimistic about the younger generations being well informed about foreign cultures.
So, what can we conclude? First, it will be more difficult to recruit local supporters in future conflicts, as they will suspected that they might be abandoned. Second, we are seriously overstretched. As mentioned above, we had great difficulty in staffing two conflicts in the Middle East.
Today, in East Asia, we are heavily committed in several regions that are on China’s doorstep and would be severely disadvantaged should war break out. Third, we need to become more realistic what we can accomplish with our national power, particularly military power. Fourth, one of the greatest problems with being a major power is that you have to maintain your image of invincibility.
When Spain tried to conquer England in 1588, its greatest loss was not the ships of the Armada or the sailors and soldiers who went down with those ships, but its image as a superpower that could not be trifled with. Henry Kissinger, one of the greatest diplomats this country ever had, said that “being a great power means manipulating the symbols of power.” In other words, how powerful you look is often how powerful you are.
Closing thought: Our current level of political disunity does not help. It interferes with the making of foreign and military policy, and it emboldens our enemies.
Hubert van Tuyll is an occasional contributor of news analysis for The Augusta Press. Reach him at hvantuyl@augusta.edu.
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