America sought to produce an unprecedented Afghan state while fighting an unwinnable war
Her State Department talking-points insisted she should speak of America’s “enduring commitment to Afghanistan”. But Ms Miller reckoned the trillion-dollar American effort was on borrowed time. “The phrase was dishonest enough to make me wince,” she recalls. “I didn’t think the strategic rationale for the mission or political commitment to it would endure.” She avoided the term.
Where the wars in Vietnam and Iraq inspired generations of area specialists, America’s small cast of Afghanistan experts has to this day changed little since 2001. Having spent a fair bit of time in the country during the first decade of the American mission, though very little in the second, your columnist is sometimes mistaken for an expert himself. It shows how low the bar to Afghanistan expertise has been set.
From the start, the American effort was not merely ill-informed about Afghanistan; it was only partly about Afghanistan. After bombing the Taliban from power, George W. Bush’s administration was advised to reach an accommodation with the group. It posed no direct threat to America. And though unpopular in Kabul, the mullahs represented a large population in southern Afghanistan who found the Taliban’s northern rival—and America’s proxy—repugnant.
The scholar Robert Kagan has suggested that America’s history of large foreign-policy blunders is connected to its isolationist sentiments. To overcome them, American presidents embrace unrealistically grandiose schemes, he suggests; and at first blush Afghanistan looks like evidence for that. In pursuit of a Utopian ideal—to eradicate terrorism—.
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