The standard rational model of economics assumes that people take risks when odds are favorable and avoid risk when they are not. As intuitive as this may sound, it might not be true. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two of the world’s most prominent scholars on decision-making in risk and uncertainty, discovered that problems such as cognitive bias, availability heuristics, and intuitive decision-making consistently lead to decisions that fail to achieve value maximization.1 The individual tests they performed can be criticized for involving math more complicated than most individuals perform on a daily basis, basing conclusions on answers involving trivial sums of money, and observing decisions made in isolation.2 Nonetheless, the aggregate results reveal that decisions are not always rational—at least from a standard economic model.3
The tendency for plans and forecasts to be unrealistically close to best case scenarios is what Kahneman and Tversky call the planning fallacy. Kahneman notes that executives routinely take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds of success.4 Their decisions, he argues, could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases.5
War is unpredictable. The prospects for success can defy precise modeling and probabilities.6 But knowledge of such probabilities can be useful in checking for overly optimistic assumptions and forecasts. The critical factors framework, for instance, can help policymakers test the likelihood that a particular conflict has the potential for a decisive victory outcome. If a power intends to intervene on behalf of a government of damaged legitimacy to achieve a quick, decisive victory against a sustainable insurgency, the historically low probability of success should force policymakers and strategists to explain why they believe this situation is sufficiently different from historical norms.
Were the emerging problems in Afghanistan foreseeable? A brief review of Afghanistan’s recent history shows obvious red flags.
Regional politics weigh heavily on landlocked Afghanistan. Pakistan, India, Iran, and others have historically co-opted certain Afghan constituencies to secure their interests and to check or undermine the interests of their rivals. Frictions between Afghanistan and Pakistan since the latter’s founding in 1947 created enduring tensions, leading Afghans to view malign activity from their eastern neighbor as the root cause of most of their problems. Support from India and Iran (and often Russia) has been a historic counterbalance.7 The Indo-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan has been intense and bloody, as both countries have sought controlling influence.8 Iran has mainly sought to secure political and economic interests in their near abroad of western Afghanistan and with their Shi’a coreligionists (the Hazaras in central Afghanistan), and to prevent both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia from gaining too much influence in Afghanistan.
Pakistan and Afghanistan have had a particularly difficult history. An 1893 Memorandum of Understanding between Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of British India, and Afghanistan’s Emir Abdur Rahman Khan demarcated the border between British India and Afghanistan. The so-called Durand Line separated various Pashtun tribes between the two empires and placed Baluchistan in British India.9 These were once the lands of the Afghan empire that stretched to the Indus river in the east and the Indian Ocean in the south.10 By 1893, these areas were locally controlled but under the influence of British India. Afghanistan was quick to deny the validity of the agreement.
Taking advantage of British exhaustion after the First World War, Afghans sought to test the boundary during the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919. Afghanistan was defeated, forcing Emir Aminullah Khan to reaffirm the border in Article 2 of the peace treaty that ended the conflict.11
Afghanistan, however, has been persistent in denying the legitimacy of the border. When British India was partitioned in 1947 to create a primarily Hindu India and a primarily Muslim Pakistan, Afghanistan was the only state in the United Nations that refused to recognize Pakistan.12 Since then, tensions have existed between the two countries. They found themselves on opposing sides during the Cold War. Afghanistan sought and received material and economic support from India and the Soviet Union to resist Pakistan.13 The United States and Pakistan, meanwhile, became partners in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), parts of a system of alliances designed to contain the Soviet Union and communist expansion. Pakistan tried twice to call on US military assistance in its wars with India in 1965 and 1971, only to be disappointed.14 This history helped perpetuate a new narrative in Pakistan that would have reverberating effects in later years: American abandonment.
In 1973, Mohammad Daoud Khan, former prime minister and first cousin to Afghanistan’s King Zahir Shah, overthrew his cousin, the king, and established a republic with himself as president.15 Daoud Khan was subsequently overthrown during the USSR-backed communist-led 1978 Saur Revolution, which created the People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (PDRA). This new USSR- and India-aligned Afghanistan created alarm in Pakistan. In Pakistan’s view, a two-front war to dismantle the Pakistani state was now a clear and present danger. Pakistan began to support various mujahideen parties that arose and rebelled against communist Afghanistan.
Seven Pakistan-backed mujahideen parties emerged. The so-called Peshawar Seven (Peshawar is a city in western Afghanistan) consisted of Jamiat-e-Islami (led by Burhanuddin Rabbani), Hizb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar), the Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan (Abdul Rasul Sayyaf), the National Islamic Front for Afghanistan (Pir Gailani), the Afghanistan National Liberation Front (Sibghatullah Mojaddedi), and the Revolutionary Islamic Movement (Mahammad Nabi Mohammadi).16 Alarmed by the burgeoning insurgency, the Soviets installed Babrak Kamal in 1979 and began to provide large-scale military support. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans fled to neighboring countries, mostly Pakistan. Seeing an opportunity to bloody the Soviet nose, the United States began a large-scale covert program, funneled through Pakistan, to support the rebels.17
By 1985, the Soviets were withdrawing from Afghanistan. The 1988 Geneva Accords signed by the USSR, Pakistan, and the United States called for a cease-fire and an end to external support for the Afghan mujahideen.18 Pakistan, contrary to the accords, continued providing support and sanctuary to the Afghan mujahideen. The Soviets kept military advisors in Afghanistan to support the communist regime led by President Mohammad Najibullah. Meanwhile, Soviet-backed communist governments in Eastern Europe began to fall in late 1989 and the Warsaw Pact military alliance crumbled. With the Soviets out of the Afghan war and their grip on Eastern Europe failing, American interest in Central Asia faded.
The loosely aligned mujahideen parties continued fighting against the Najibullah regime from 1989 to 1992. As the Soviet Union collapsed and could no longer fund their Afghan clients, the Afghan state imploded under the combined weight of insurgency and fiscal crisis.
The two largest mujahideen parties, Jamiat and Hizb-i-Islami Gulbuddin, vied for control of Kabul. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Pakistan’s closest mujahideen ally, was poised to invade the capital from the south. Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Shura-e-Nazar (Supreme Council of the North) army, which supported Jamiat, raced from the north. Control of the capital meant leverage in forming a post-communist government. Osama bin Laden reportedly tried but failed to broker a peace agreement between the two sides.19 Poised to seize the capital in April 1992, Hekmatyar hesitated. Reportedly, he wanted to organize his forces to enter Kabul in triumph the next morning. Massoud was quicker: he seized the capital that night.
With the communist government overthrown and the mujahideen in control, Pakistan must have believed it could finally secure a friendly—even client—government in Afghanistan. They would be disappointed. Pakistan hosted the Peshawar Accords of 1992 that created the Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA). This was a power-sharing agreement among six of the seven mujahideen parties, effectively salami-slicing government into warlord-controlled fiefdoms. Hekmatyar refused to sign the agreement because he believed that he deserved to be in charge. His powerful Hizb-i-Islami Party began fighting the ISA, with support from Pakistan. The Afghan civil war had begun.
Pakistan attempted to broker another peace deal in 1993 (the so-called Islamabad Accords). This agreement installed Hekmatyar as prime minister, with Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of the overwhelmingly Tajik Jamiat Party, as president. The cease-fire lasted barely 24 hours. The new prime minister’s forces began shelling the capital in a renewed bid to take Kabul by force.20
With Pakistan backing Hekmatyar, the main parties of the ISA sought funding elsewhere. Sayyaf’s party was reportedly bankrolled by Saudi Arabia, Abdur Rashid Dostum’s Uzbeks by Uzbekistan, and the Shi’a parties by Iran. ISA president Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat-e-Islami (to include Massoud’s Shura-e-Nazar) were funded mainly by India for the purpose of ensuring Afghanistan did not become a client state of Pakistan.21
Back in America, the Clinton administration struggled to find a solution. Ambassador Robin L. Raphel was one of America’s foremost South Asia experts. She spent many years in Iran, marrying another American diplomat there in 1972 just prior to the revolution and the fall of the shah. Raphel continued serving in the region, which included postings in Islamabad and New Delhi. In 1993, as the United States began to recognize the growing importance of the increasingly unstable region, President Bill Clinton appointed her as the first US assistant secretary of state for South Asia.
Raphel raced to Afghanistan in November 1993, braving the chaos to talk with key leaders in an effort to end the civil war. She saw President Rabbani and Massoud in Kabul and met a new group—the Taliban—in Kandahar. She talked with Hekmatyar at his field headquarters just outside of Kabul. Her message was the same to all: there is no military solution; a political resolution is needed for Afghanistan to move forward. They refused. Years later, in June 2018, Raphel and I met Hekmatyar at his home in Kabul (he was given the place after making peace with the Afghan government). “Our last conversation,” he recalled to Raphel with a smile, “was not so pleasant.”
Afghanistan descended even further into chaos. Kabul was rubbled as factions fought in the streets and neighborhoods. Murder, mayhem, and massacres were common. Throughout the countryside, warlords and local strongmen ran amok, murdering, raping, and pillaging. Their crimes against the Afghan people were staggering.22 Seeking advantage, Sayyaf and President Rabbani invited al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan. Bin Laden had fought with the mujahideen parties during the Soviet-Afghan War. He based al Qaeda, an international terrorist organization, in Sudan. Following pressure from the United States, bin Laden was forced to leave.23 Sayyaf and Rabbani believed the terrorist leader’s money, connections, and military support would prove valuable in the Afghan civil war.
The Taliban arose in 1994 in opposition to the wanton lawlessness that had become daily fixtures of life in Afghanistan.24 Warlords on all sides of the civil war set up checkpoints on main roads to control movement, extract tolls, and reportedly rape boys and women. These abuses outraged Afghans. In Oruzgan, Kandahar, and Helmand, self-styled “students” banded together under the leadership of a one-eyed mullah named Mohammed Omar—a veteran mujahideen of the Soviet war—to put a stop to the warlords. Support surged behind them. Afghans wanted an end to the bloodshed and began to believe the Taliban could deliver peace and justice.
The movement gained momentum. As Hekmatyar looked increasingly unlikely to be successful, Pakistan began to move support toward the Taliban. On September 27, 1996, the latter seized control of Kabul and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
The Taliban came to power under the banner of being anti-government. The group’s leaders had little to no experience in government—and the government they knew (ISA) was corrupt and predatory. They believed that minimalist governance according to Islamic principles should bring peace to Afghanistan.
Such hopes vanished in the face of reality. The needs of a desperate population after nearly 20 years of war were overwhelming. The Taliban had no idea what to do. The economy and infrastructure were shattered by the civil war. Homeless and displaced Afghans numbered in the millions. There was no functioning system of government, no institutions that could address such staggering problems. Afghanistan desperately needed international aid. Only three states, however, had recognized the Taliban government: Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, and none of them provided much aid. “We were a government once,” Mullah Omar’s former secretary Tayyab Agha told me in 2011, “But we were cut off from the international community. We did not have the knowledge or the means to govern properly.” Al Qaeda, according to Taliban officials I spoke with, was the Taliban’s primary source of funding.
Without the money or expertise to govern, the Taliban focused on what they knew—enforcing their Deobandi version of Sharia law. They organized so-called Virtue and Vice squads to ensure compliance. They undertook the bizarre decision to destroy the thousand-year-old giant Buddha statues in Bamiyan. They harbored al Qaeda. They staged public executions of women and men in the Kabul soccer stadium. The Northern Alliance factions, some of whom had representations in Washington, D.C., and other western capitals, needed little help in encouraging the view that the Taliban was uniquely evil.
“My life as a woman was no different under the Taliban than under the warlords,” an Afghan civil society leader told me in 2018. “They all had the same views and the same practices.” But by that point, the history of the ISA and the civil war had been forgotten in the West; the Taliban had become a pariah in the eyes of the international community.
By 2001, the Taliban controlled 90 percent of the country. The Northern Alliance, led by Massoud’s Shura-e-Nazar, resisted the Taliban from their remaining strongholds in the Panjshir valley and Badakhshan province. These forces were funded by India, Iran, and others who challenged Taliban control of (and wanted to prevent Pakistani hegemony over) Afghanistan.
If Pakistan had hoped the new regime would become a client state, or at least recognize the Durand Line, they were disappointed. During the five years of misrule by the Taliban, no agreement was made to ratify the border.
To the west, Iran had opposed the Taliban regime and supported the Hazara factions fighting it. Iran strove to prevent the rise of a Saudi Arabian client state in Afghanistan and to reduce narcotics trafficking across its borders.
On September 9, 2001, two al Qaeda operatives posed as reporters to interview Shura-e-Nazar leader Massoud at his camp in the Panjshir valley. Reportedly vain with a keen hunger for public acclamation, Massoud agreed to sit down with them to tell his story. The camera was full of explosives. It detonated, killing Massoud and throwing the Northern Alliance into chaos.
Perhaps this assassination was designed as a favor to the Taliban. Western officials had been pressuring the Taliban to arrest and turn over Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenants after the terrorist attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the attack on the warship USS Cole in 2000. According to former senior Taliban officials, bin Laden had reportedly assured Mullah Omar that al Qaeda was not planning any more attacks against the West.
Then came the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The Taliban joined virtually every state in the world in condemning the attacks. As it became clear that al Qaeda was responsible, America demanded the Taliban hand over bin Laden. The Taliban prevaricated, asking for evidence that bin Laden was behind the attack. Frustrated and out of patience, the United States rapidly planned the military campaign to oust the Taliban regime and kill or capture bin Laden.
That Afghanistan was riven with internal tensions exacerbated by external rivalries was information easily available to American policymakers in 2001. These challenges should have suggested that establishing a post-Taliban regime that would be accepted by Afghan elites and Afghanistan’s neighbors would be extremely difficult. Failure to manage these tensions had the potential of leading to a renewal of violence that could bog down American forces.
The Bush administration recognized as early as October 2001 that some of these regional frictions and interests could be problematic but did not think through how their decisive victory approach might affect the calculations of Afghan and international actors. They presumed a spirit of cooperation in the aftermath: that Afghan elites would sacrifice self-interest for the common good, and that Afghanistan’s neighbors would abandon their intense rivalries and help the new government succeed. They never considered the likelihood that such internal and external frictions could morph into a new and different conflict. A US State Department cable noted optimistically, “We do not see any irreconcilable conflict among these interests as long as Afghans and outside interests are flexible.”25
The Bush administration fell victim to the planning fallacy. In presuming decisive victory, the Bush administration underestimated the post-Taliban regime challenges as internal and external rivalries unfolded in predictable ways.