Operation Enduring Freedom seemed an outright success. By the end of 2001, the Taliban regime had disintegrated, with many senior Taliban and al Qaeda leaders fleeing across the border into Pakistan.1 Northern Alliance forces moved into and beyond Kabul.2 The Bonn Conference in November 2001 began the process of forming a new government and political order in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai was selected to lead the transitional administration; he would be elected president in 2004 and again in 2009. All that was left, the Bush administration believed, was to hunt down the remaining al Qaeda and Taliban senior leaders while the international community rebuilt Afghanistan, so the United States could move to the next phase in the Global War on Terrorism.3
After the United States rejected the peace overture in December 2001, however, the Taliban began reorganizing.4 They would continue to grow well into 2006, largely due to such factors as external financial backing, sanctuary in Pakistan, and local support in Afghanistan.5 At the same time, the Afghan government was transforming into a predatory kleptocracy that fomented widespread resentment and fueled the return of the Taliban.6 By 2019, according to the Department of Defense, the Taliban controlled or contested over half the country.
Afghanistan had the potential for a successful outcome. The Taliban in 2001 was among the world’s most maligned and incompetent governments.7 The September 11 attacks generated global antipathy toward their brutal regime. The state of ruin in Afghanistan after over 20 years of continuous conflict and misrule engendered international support for ousting the Taliban. The regime collapsed quickly after the US-led attack. Although Afghanistan is a polyglot of several ethnicities and a small, ethnically distinct Shi’a minority, no ethnic or sectarian conflict stirred in the wake of the Taliban’s fall.8
How, then, did things deteriorate? New York Times reporter and long-time regional expert Carlotta Gall blames Pakistan for “driving the violence in Afghanistan for its own cynical, hegemonic reasons” and criticizes the ineffectual US responses to it.9 Journalist and regional expert Ahmed Rashid adds American neglect of nation-building.10 Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin cites additional US mistakes, such as an overly militarized focus, bureaucratic dysfunction, failure to utilize early opportunities for reconciliation, and torture at American detention facilities.11 Former ISAF and Pentagon senior advisor Sarah Chayes points to US acquiescence and unwitting promotion of corruption in the Afghan government.12 Political scientist Stephen Walt and retired US Army lieutenant general Daniel F. Bolger underscore overly ambitious aims and the underestimation of the means required to achieve them.13
These views have merit. In many ways they are a product of a more fundamental problem. The administration failed to examine various war termination outcomes to determine which held the best prospects of a favorable and durable result: one that prevented Afghanistan from once again becoming an al Qaeda safe haven, and permitted the United States to pivot to address other threats. Instead, the administration assumed that a decisive military victory that ousted the Taliban and was followed by helping Afghan allies develop a new government would lead to a favorable and durable political outcome.
US policymakers should have examined multiple war termination outcomes. Decisive victory, as the Bush administration envisioned it, amounted to the Taliban’s elimination, to include their acceptance of the new government, imprisonment, submission to interrogation and war crimes trials, and provision of intelligence that led to the capture of Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants. Success under this construct required the support of neighboring and regional countries, especially Pakistan, to apprehend and turn over Taliban senior leaders who fled from Afghanistan. It also required the formation of an Afghan government that could win the support of people who had backed the Taliban. Once the key requirements for a decisive victory outcome were established, policymakers should have determined the necessary ways and means to bring the outcome about and then war-gamed the likelihood of success compared to other options.
A second option, for example, might envisage a negotiated outcome with the Taliban after the latter’s military overthrow. The Taliban leverage would be very low, so they might accept major concessions in exchange for being allowed to participate politically in Afghanistan. This approach would likely engender greater support from neighbors and regional actors. It would also bring a defeated Taliban into a new Afghan political fabric. The resources needed for this option would probably be lower than the decisive victory and would rely more heavily on diplomacy than military force. International peacekeepers could be needed, too.
There is no evidence, however, that war termination options were ever examined.
The intellectually lazy presumption that the overthrow of the Taliban would result in a decisive victory was reinforced by two other currents at play in 2001: antipathy toward so-called nation-building and a belief that information technology and precision munitions would revolutionize war and reduce the need for sizeable land forces.
The September 11, 2001, terror attacks by al Qaeda on the American homeland were psychologically dislocating. The day was deadlier than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 6, 1941, and left Americans with a chilling sense of vulnerability. President Bush felt compelled to respond but carefully sought to limit the scale and duration of the American commitment because of perceived terrorist threats across the globe.
The Bush administration’s approach to the war in Afghanistan was rooted in a rejection of nation-building and a desire to avoid getting bogged down in a remote, landlocked country. As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush had campaigned against nation-building to distinguish himself from President Bill Clinton and from his election opponent, Vice President Al Gore. The peacekeeping mission in Somalia, begun during the George H. W. Bush administration, had ended disastrously early in the Clinton administration.14 Similar missions to Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo were unpopular with many military officials and critics, who viewed such efforts as a distraction from the primary mission of fighting and winning the nation’s wars.15 Although the Balkan missions had kept the peace, the NATO military footprint was sizable. Bush argued during the campaign that they had drained resources, sapped readiness, and undermined the military’s morale.16 As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later put it in December 2001: “Nation building does not have a brilliant record across the globe.”17
The fear of getting bogged down was reinforced by Afghanistan’s history as the so-called “graveyard of Empires.” Afghanistan had earned a reputation—justified or not—for forcing occupying powers into quagmires.18 The Soviet defeat, having occurred less than 15 years earlier, was still in the memories of senior officials such as Vice President Richard Cheney and Rumsfeld. The administration wanted to avoid the same trap.19
A related current in the Bush administration’s thinking was Secretary Rumsfeld’s belief that the Pentagon needed to lose its fixation on large-scale ground forces. Information technology, he believed, had revolutionized military affairs and permitted wars to be fought and won with far fewer “boots on the ground.” The new defense secretary had challenged what he considered to be an antiquated view of war by the Pentagon’s brass, particularly the army. Enthusiastic about concepts of “network-centric warfare,” which promised “dominant battlespace knowledge,” Rumsfeld envisioned wars of the future fought from the air and by small special operations forces teams calling in precision fires on massed enemy formations.20 In a war with global dimensions, harnessing such promise would be critical for success. Afghanistan was to be a proving ground for his vision of future war.
Operation Enduring Freedom thus envisioned US special operations forces teaming up with the Northern Alliance—a collection of armed militias—to oust the Taliban regime. The daring military campaign was a spectacular success. Special operations forces on horseback called in American firepower that obliterated Taliban positions and annihilated the Taliban’s efforts to move reserve forces. Having never experienced such devastatingly accurate firepower, many Taliban leaders complained that their forces became demoralized and began to disintegrate. Northern Alliance forces poured through the breaches. The Taliban were collapsing. The race to Kabul was on. Meanwhile, other special operations forces sought local allies in the south and east. Hamid Karzai returned from exile to lead resistance forces in his native Kandahar—a critical province in the Taliban’s heartland of southern Afghanistan.
By using special forces and local partners instead of a large-scale conventional attack, the United States could conserve valuable resources, maintain strategic agility, and, ideally, prevent a feared backlash against foreign presence.21 Experts on Afghan history reportedly reinforced the administration’s fears of getting bogged down, leading Rumsfeld to believe that a very limited military footprint that continued hunting al Qaeda and Taliban leaders would best prevent reported Afghan hostility toward foreigners from developing into armed conflict.22 The United States wanted to win using minimal resources, then exit as quickly as possible—an approach later dubbed as “light footprint.”23
The Bush administration, moreover, was seeing the conflict as part of the Global War on Terrorism rather than as a war in Afghanistan alone. “This military action is a part of our campaign against terrorism,” Bush told the American people on the eve of the Afghanistan invasion, “another front in a war that has already been joined through diplomacy, intelligence, the freezing of financial assets and the arrests of known terrorists by law enforcement agents in 38 countries. Given the nature and reach of our enemies, we will win this conflict by the patient accumulation of successes, by meeting a series of challenges with determination and will and purpose.”24
Terrorist attacks on the Indian Legislative Assembly on October 1, 2001, and on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001, for which Pakistan was deemed culpable, seemed to add credibility to the claim that the threat was global.25 Meanwhile, the Bush administration was convinced that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism.26 If the latter provided al Qaeda with weapons of mass destruction, future attacks on the United States could be far more damaging than those of September 11.
“We’re a peaceful nation,” Bush argued, “Yet, as we have learned, so suddenly and so tragically, there can be no peace in a world of sudden terror. In the face of today’s new threat, the only way to pursue peace is to pursue those who threaten it.”27 In his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, Bush famously called out Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an “axis of evil” that threatened America and its allies with weapons of mass destruction through “a terrorist underworld—including groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Jaish-i-Mohammed—[that] operate[s] in remote jungles and deserts, and hide[s] in the centers of large cities.”28 The threat was shadowy, dispersed, and deadly. From this perspective, the United States could not afford to get fixated on Afghanistan.29
The problem was not so much the overall aim of defeating al Qaeda and preventing their return to Afghanistan, nor the desire to retain strategic flexibility to address the unpredictable challenges of a larger Global War on Terrorism, but the contradiction between a decisive victory outcome and the minimalist ways and means devoted to it. Returning to the critical factors framework, the Bush administration needed to ensure that the post-Taliban government could win and retain popular legitimacy and that the Taliban would be unable to foment a viable insurgency.
There is no evidence that the Bush administration thought in detail about these challenges nor the war termination outcome that would best address them, given the strategic aims and selected means. There seems to have been an implicit belief that the Taliban were a regime without any internal constituency and thus incapable of organizing resistance after being overthrown. The United States also assumed implicitly that once the Taliban were overthrown, all Afghans would work together peacefully for the common good to bring about an inclusive, democratic government. Likewise, the Bush administration seems to have assumed that Afghanistan’s neighbors, Pakistan in particular, would welcome whatever outcome emerged. None of those beliefs proved valid.
The failure to test these assumptions by examining other war termination outcomes blinded the Bush administration to a damaging contradiction: the pursuit of decisive victory increased the likelihood of a Taliban resurgence from sanctuary in Pakistan and a long-term, large-scale military commitment to deal with it. A negotiated outcome after the Taliban’s overthrow, on the other hand, was more likely to avoid the quagmire in which the Bush administration soon found itself.