How the Afghan Mission Failed

[Series] The spectre of protracted war looms large as the Taliban changes its tactics, looks beyond NATO's departure.

This is the second part of a three-part series examining the outcomes and legacy of the Afghan war. Part 1 outlined how the international intervention was lost, and described the grave consequences that that failure is likely to have for a people intimately familiar with war. Part 2 offers a focused discussion of what factors led to NATOs failure, and highlights why the resurgent Taliban, and the departing western forces, raise the spectre of a return to protracted war and violence in a post-NATO landscape.

One could say that the Afghan war was already lost by the time NATO had expanded in earnest across the country in 2006. Neglect and missteps early in the intervention, as well as errors of omission and commission, have reverberated throughout the decade-long state-building process and military mission, placing both on a rather precarious and shaky foundation.

Among those early mistakes was, first and foremost, the UN’s failure to authorize the expansion of a peacekeeping presence across the country in 2001-02, which was largely a result of U.S. objections. At the time, then-defense-secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others, worried that a countrywide UN peacekeeping mission would interfere with U.S. counterterrorism operations, and potentially sap U.S. resources from the looming war in Iraq.

Second, a combination of grossly flawed assessments of the costs of reconstruction and the fact that some donor states (particularly the U.S.) were averse to nation-building produced a reconstruction effort advanced on the cheap and with a light footprint. By the time the Taliban were driven from power, the U.S. had already shifted its gaze to Iraq, leaving debilitating shortfalls in resources and initiative. Former UN envoy to Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi would later refer to the light-footprint approach, which he presided over, as “original sin.”

Missed Part 1 of this series? Check it out here.

Third, the Afghan government and international donor community’s unwillingness to launch a legitimate peace process in order to draw opposition and spoiler groups like the Taliban in from the cold while they were still weakened and on the run was a missed opportunity. They chose, instead, a victor’s peace that disproportionately privileged some groups on the inside and alienated those on the outside.

A fourth factor was the failure to construct an effective regional strategy that could prevent the blatant interference of states like Pakistan, India, and Iran, while encouraging more constructive and beneficial co-operation.

Finally, there were the problems with strategy and resource shortfalls in the Afghan National Security Forces’ (ANSF) development process, which was always seen as the international community’s exit strategy and the key to long-term stabilization.

Combined, these factors seemed to stall Afghanistan’s transition process before it even got out of the starting gate, such that the country essentially lost two to three years in its transition. This is not to say that significant achievements have not been made, with major breakthroughs in health, education, and rural development. But what are schools and clinics without peace?