Why have the major post-9/11 US military interventions turned into quagmires, and what can we learn from these conflicts about war termination and its role in policy and strategy? Despite huge power imbalances, major capacity-building efforts, and repeated tactical victories during the wars in Afghanistan (2001–present) and Iraq (2003–2011; 2014–present), the US military and its coalition partners have been unable to defeat, quickly and decisively, poorly trained and equipped insurgencies.
Former Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) chief General Stanley A. McChrystal, reflecting on his fight against al Qaeda in Iraq, observed that the world’s most elite counterterrorist force struggled initially “against a seemingly ragtag band of radical fighters.” Despite the massive advantages in technology, resources, education, and training, he recalls, “things were slipping away from us.”1
This study is important because the war termination expectations for major American military interventions (quick, zero-sum decisive victory) are very different than the results (quagmire), and the US national security community does not know the cause. Part of the challenge is that the outcomes in these wars are not solely in the hands of the United States. Adversaries, partners, allies, and voters, for instance, all make choices that affect the outcomes of the conflict—none of which the US National Security Council can fully control or influence.
I have undertaken this study to understand and isolate what appear to be systemic US policy and strategy errors in recent large-scale interventions against insurgencies. This volume focuses on the problems that are largely under the control or influence of the US National Security Council and that have played an important role in the significant deviation between expectations and results. Understanding these issues is an important step in undertaking reforms to address them.
A very common explanation is that the American military is not suited for such messy wars waged “amongst the people” within states.2 The United States should thus avoid irregular wars against insurgents and nonstate actors, argues Lieutenant General (Ret.) Daniel Bolger, and concentrate on conventional state-on-state wars against uniformed militaries. Bolger blames the quagmires on the generals for their failure to develop a winning strategy and for misusing the armed forces in counterinsurgency campaigns for which they were ill-suited.3 Bolger, to his credit, accepts his own responsibility for these problems. This sentiment is understandable but raises serious civil-military questions. The president might feel compelled to intervene militarily in what is or likely to become an irregular war—such as President Bush did after 9/11. Should the military be allowed to veto such a decision because it doesn’t do counterinsurgencies?
A related argument is made by Brendan Gallagher, currently a serving US Army officer, in The Day After: Why America Wins the War but Loses the Peace. He blames American political leaders and the foreign policy establishment for setting unrealistic goals and for failing to plan for what happens the “day after” the military wins the war.4 The military, however, was engaged every step of the way in the policy and strategy making for these conflicts and signed up for each one of them.
These points of view, moreover, reflect the conventional wisdom of the national security establishment that the military is responsible solely for winning wars. This assumption is well-expressed by political scientist William C. Martel in his work on victory in war. “Policymakers,” he notes, “have the primary responsibility for determining what victory means . . . and how precisely the use of military force will meet those goals.”5 Then it is up to the generals to develop a strategy to deliver those objectives.6 Most irregular wars, however, seem to elude military solutions.
A different argument is posited by Lieutenant General (Ret.) H. R. McMaster, President Trump’s former national security adviser, who suggests that so-called forever wars are the new normal and that Americans need to show greater patience. Burden sharing, he argues, makes these wars manageable.7 Instead of trying to bring wars to a successful conclusion, this argument suggests the United States should simply keep them going, as long as the costs are tolerable, in hopes that the country can wear down the adversaries until they are no longer a threat.
In this absence of ideas, the war in Afghanistan alone has racked up an estimated $1 trillion cost to the American taxpayer.8 As of 2018, the war, with its smaller military footprint of about 14,000 American troops, is costing about $45 billion per year. Having troops tied down in the far corners of the world reduces America’s ability to address arguably larger priorities, such as Social Security solvency, infrastructure, heath care, and education. It could also reduce the capacity to deal with larger threats.
There are some merits to the arguments made by Bolger, Martel, and McMaster, as well as some obvious challenges. However, there is a more central problem, which originates in a basic misunderstanding of war’s purpose: that the military is to achieve a zero-sum decisive victory so that the United States clearly wins and gets all it wants, while the enemy clearly loses and gets nothing. The 2015 US National Military Strategy, for instance, states that “[t]he U.S. military’s purpose is to protect our Nation and win our wars. We do this through military operations to defend the homeland, build security globally, and project power and win decisively.”9 According to the US Army’s Doctrine Publication 1 (ADP 1), “The Army of 2028 will be ready to deploy, fight, and win decisively against any adversary, anytime and anywhere, in a joint, multi-domain, high-intensity conflict, while simultaneously deterring others and maintaining its ability to conduct irregular warfare.”10
American college football is a zero-sum game: the game continues into multiple overtimes until one side wins the match. War is not college football. Its purpose is not to score points by crossing the goal line, as it were, in capturing an enemy capital or destroying an enemy conventional army. Nor is it to simply keep the game going into multiple overtimes, continuing the killing and human suffering, until one side wins and one side loses.
The national security establishment’s focus on what is sometimes called “decisive victory” thus misses the point. The 19th-century Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that war is a means to political ends, hence the purpose is to achieve a political outcome, not to achieve military ends for their own sake. Real, durable, political outcomes from the use of force require a primary focus not on some clear-cut military victory, as desirable as that might be, but on stable political outcomes that address the political issues that gave rise to the fighting in the first place.
This means that real victory in war is usually a matter of harnessing military violence to a political strategy that will normally require some kind of negotiated settlement to end the fighting. It thus follows that war termination decisions should hinge on gaining durable policy outcomes, not on whether clear-cut military victory is achieved. The American obsession with decisive victory too often gets in the way of this kind of politico-military strategizing by substituting destruction for negotiation, and violence for politics. For wars that hinge on political legitimacy, as many irregular wars do, military-centric strategies may have low probabilities of success. The zero-sum decisive victory presumption thus establishes an impossible standard, and one that is inducing major policy and strategy errors.
In short, the American national security establishment’s assumptions about war and war termination seem dangerously misguided. The belief in the military’s centrality to waging war until a zero-sum decisive victory is achieved has limited the presidents’ policy and strategy options, damaged America’s reputation and strategic position, given the generals and admirals an inappropriately large voice in national security affairs, and heightened the risk of quagmires.
This mindset has clear implications for what political scientists call war termination—the set of activities associated with the end of a conflict. Historian Lawrence Freedman describes strategy as “the best word we have for expressing attempts to think about our actions in advance, in light of our goals and capacities.”11 The quality of a strategy may be revealed in how well an actor finishes the war, not simply in how well it is fought. “If war is simply a ‘grammar’ in which the logic of political purpose is expressed in violent terms,” explains historian Bradford Lee, “then it is in war termination that the purpose finally achieves its ultimate definition or refinement in political demands.”12
The US Department of Defense, however, has no definition or doctrine for this seemingly critical aspect of war. Options other than decisive victory do not exist in the national security lexicon.13 Scholars, too, have struggled to provide comprehensive guidance on how to approach war termination in irregular wars. They discuss war termination as a phase of activity nestled between the end of organized hostilities and the beginning of peace.14 “In the time between war and peace,” writes historian Matthew Moten, “it is easy to lose sight of the objectives for which one embarked upon war in the first place, and to forfeit the grasp on accomplishments bought at great expense to the treasury and the lives and health of the nation’s soldiery.”15 This view of war termination as a sort of transition from the military to the diplomats seems too narrow, even for conventional wars. A strategy that stops at the military objectives is short-sighted, Bradford Lee notes. The United States “has failed again and again to translate military success . . . into the most favorable and durable political results.”16
Decisive victory, if achieved, makes the transition from military to diplomatic activity easy to comprehend. The fighting stops and the talking starts. This, however, is not the only way wars end. There are four broad outcomes for wars against insurgencies: decisive victory, negotiated settlement, transition-withdrawal, and decisive loss. As a consideration for policy and strategy, this work defines an intended war termination outcome as how the United States seeks to achieve a favorable and durable result that meets policy aims at acceptable cost.
Bradford Lee found that throughout the wars of the 20th century US political and military leaders rarely, if ever, properly considered war termination during the policy and strategy process.17 Lack of forethought about war termination can lead to decisions that undermine the ability to achieve a favorable and durable outcome. During the 1991 Gulf War, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin L. Powell waited until the Iraqi Army was in headlong retreat before discussing war termination. When he offered to bring a recommendation to President George H. W. Bush the next day, the latter responded, “If that is the case . . . why not end it today?”18 Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor discuss how this shortfall undermined America’s ability to capitalize on such a stunning battlefield victory.19 This lack of thinking through the endgame is part of the reason the United States, in political scientist Gideon Rose’s words, tends to “trip across the finish line.”20
The existing scholarship focuses mainly on the termination of conventional wars. The United States is consistently surprised by the complexity of endgame challenges, Gideon Rose argues, and often must improvise through uncertain and ambiguous strategic terrain.21 Interventions in irregular wars may present very different challenges. The lack of attention to war termination in such conflicts creates three significant gaps in scholarship.
First, the conventional war paradigm may overestimate the military factors and underplay the political and diplomatic issues that tend to be more salient for wars against insurgencies. This could lead scholars to ignore implicit assumptions in intervention strategies that sow the seeds for war termination problems.22 For instance, conventional wars tend to be fought between military forces until one side wins or a stalemate ensues. Because the clash between fielded forces is so central to success, political and military leaders work to “define a military objective that, if achieved, can deliver the political objective.”23 Once hostilities conclude, diplomats negotiate agreements that seek to maximize the advantage of battlefield results. Interventions against insurgencies tend not to hinge upon the clash of opposing forces. There might not be a realistic military objective that could deliver the political aims. Ivan Arreguín-Toft, in fact, argues that stronger powers have been losing to weaker ones increasingly often since the 19th century.24 Insurgencies tend to avoid rather than bring about decisive battles. Several longitudinal studies show that the ability of the insurgency to sustain tangible support and of the government to win the battle of political legitimacy play more decisive roles in the war’s outcome than battlefield engagements.25 Thus, intervention strategies that assume or fixate upon decisive military victory for war termination may have a low probability of success against insurgencies.
A second major gap in the existing literature is that it does not help us understand why the United States has been slow to abandon losing or ineffective strategies. Realists such as Kenneth Waltz and John J. Mearsheimer argue that a state at war will adopt strategies with the highest likelihood of success and take advantage of conflict situations when the benefits outweigh the costs.26 If this is the case, then states should abandon a losing strategy quickly. As will be discussed in this book, the United States did not change strategies in Vietnam until 1969, in Iraq until 2007, and in Afghanistan until 2009—five, four, and eight years into the conflicts, respectively. By each point the American public tired of the war and demanded withdrawal. What accounts for the strategic paralysis? Scholars differ on the factors that may impede decisions about war termination. Elizabeth Stanley and Fred Iklé describe important political and bureaucratic obstacles that can affect decision-making, such as uncertain battlefield outcomes, poisonous “patriots versus traitors” domestic politics, and bureaucratic politics.27 In examining cases from the US Civil War to the Korean War, political scientist Dan Reiter asserts that domestic politics has been of “curious insignificance . . . in war-termination decision-making.”28 Stanley, however, marshals significant amounts of evidence that suggest a change in domestic coalitions was a key driver in bringing about an end to the Korean War.29 Distinguishing between conventional wars and interventions against insurgencies might yield some answers to this puzzle. The amount of ground taken or lost is normally a reasonable indicator of progress in conventional war. This is not necessarily the case for irregular war. Valid strategic metrics may be more difficult to develop, which could increase the risk of poor decision-making. The presence of bureaucratic silos may shape how progress is measured and could lead to in-silo positive indicators even as the war is going poorly overall. The interface between interagency silos that are forced to work together may leave important but undetected vulnerabilities. The nature of the host nation government likely plays a heightened role in counterinsurgency. Governments most likely to need assistance from an external power might also be the ones most vulnerable to insurgency, and more resistant to changes in strategy that require them to make reforms or compromises. The increasingly rich fields of decision theory, organizational management, behavioral economics, and agency theory may be of assistance in understanding potential causes of strategic paralysis.30
A third issue with current scholarship is that it tends to ignore that bargaining behavior could be very different for interventions against insurgencies. Conventional wars that settle into stalemates could be more likely to produce opportunities in which both sides are motivated to end the conflict. Thomas Schelling suggests that “most conflict situations are essentially bargaining situations.”31 Historian Roger Spiller argues that combatants always “converge toward an agreement to stop fighting.”32 This symmetry makes the fallback to negotiations possible. “Uncertainty causes war, combat provides information and reduces uncertainty,” Reiter argues, “and war ends when enough information has been provided.”33 I. William Zartman refers to this as ripeness: a “mutually hurting stalemate” in which both actors are in “an uncomfortable and costly predicament,” which makes parties ripe for negotiation.34 Thus, if decisive victory does not work out, combatants can fall back to negotiations. Are those same opportunities present for irregular wars? Once an intervening power decides the war is unwinnable and wants to withdraw, bargaining leverage may shift to the insurgency. The former may seek negotiations to end the conflict, but the latter might have large incentives to play for time. The insurgency might calculate that its negotiating leverage will be much higher after the intervening power withdraws. Why settle for half the loaf now when a little patience might give you three-fourths of it? Alternatively, the intervening power, as it withdraws, might seek to transition security responsibility to the host government as it builds their capacity. Capacity-building efforts, however, might create crippling dependencies that impede battlefield performance or give the host government false confidence that it can maintain the predatory and exclusionary practices that gave rise to the insurgency in the first place.
Overlaying these gaps in scholarship is a presumption in much of the literature that war termination boils down to a political decision to end a war when the enemy offers to surrender, or when decisive victory is deemed no longer possible or cost effective. Is it possible that restricting the range of successful outcomes to decisive victory is heightening the risk of quagmires? Martel offers a useful typology of victory, all of which are variations on the decisive victory theme.35 Wars, however, can end successfully with negotiated settlements, which do not necessarily have to come about after bloody stalemates have settled in. For interventions against insurgencies, a successful conclusion can also result, in theory, by building host nation capacity to carry on the war successfully as the intervening power withdraws—an outcome described as transition. Exploring these different outcomes during the policy and strategy processes could open wider possibilities for success.
There are many reasons that major post 9/11 US military interventions have turned into quagmires. Adversaries, host nation actors, and regional powers all played a role. So did unpreparedness for fighting large-scale irregular wars. This book explores the systemic problems in US policy and strategy that emerge from flawed presumptions about war termination.
The United States has no organized way to think about war termination or its place in policy and strategy. The US government has a military doctrine that covers how to fight wars but no shared interagency framework for how to wage wars, which should include war termination.36 As Colin S. Gray argues, there is more to war than warfare and thus more to strategy than military strategy.37 Fighting war is a competency of the military. Waging war includes the integration of all elements of national power into a coherent policy and strategy that define and outline how to achieve the political purpose of the war. This difference between waging and fighting gets lost in practice. One result is what might be called America’s bureaucratic way of war. The US government tends to view war in agency-centric stages: diplomacy to prevent war or build a coalition (State), armed conflict (Defense), diplomacy to negotiate peace (State), reconstruction (USAID), which may be useful for conventional war but badly limits strategic options for waging wars that rely less on military, force-on-force outcomes. The failure to distinguish between waging and fighting has reinforced the military’s exaggerated influence in national security decision-making. The recent habit of presidents to turn to the military in times of national security challenges for “military options” creates a situation in which one of the means (military) is controlling the ends and limiting the exploration of alternatives.
An important part of this problem includes the absence of an agreed terminology for successful war outcomes. The United States has no authoritative language for describing results that could meet the political purpose of the war. The default position is decisive victory—a vague and dangerous belief that the expert application of military power will force an adversary to capitulate, thereby giving up on its own interests and agreeing to give the United States all it wants. American political and military leaders thus work to “define a military objective that, if achieved, can deliver the political objective.”38
Certainly, a clear battlefield victory that obliterates the opposing conventional force can put the United States into a strong, perhaps dominant, position to impose a settlement, but this option is often unavailable in irregular wars. There normally is no realistic military objective that could deliver the political objective. Without a shared understanding of alternative outcomes, such as a negotiated settlement or transition, the United States struggles to define plausible outcomes that could meet the political purpose of the war.
Consequently, there is no authoritative body of knowledge for how to organize instruments of national power for outcomes such as negotiated settlements or for what has become known as transition—the handover of security responsibilities to the host nation and withdrawal of American forces. These outcomes tend to rely more on diplomatic and political rather than military instruments, so the absence of a shared framework undermines policy and strategy development, often creates civil-military tensions, and impedes interagency communication and coordination, which can lead to major problems in execution.
These broader problems have led to specific, systemic policy and strategy errors in Afghanistan and Iraq that have undermined the prospects of success.39
First, the United States entered both wars with military-centric strategies that had low probabilities of success. Once the spectacular military campaigns overthrew the sitting governments, the US government was at a loss for how to achieve a favorable and durable outcome. In both cases, the United States, intent on decisive victory, ignored or dismissed early opportunities to negotiate with the militarily defeated parties and unwittingly allowed predatory and exclusionary governments to form. The combination led to insurgencies that became sustainable. The stage was set for quagmire.
Second, policymakers had difficulty changing these failing or inadequate strategies due to cognitive bias, political and bureaucratic frictions, and relationship problems with the host nation. In both cases, US officials believed their strategies were working even as the situations deteriorated. Confirmation bias was evident as officials emphasized positive indicators of progress and rationalized or, in some cases, even used negative indicators as evidence of success. Political frictions combined with confirmation bias and loss aversion led the Bush administration to dig in its heels on Iraq, and similar factors led the Obama administration to resist changes to drawdown timelines in both conflicts.
The tendency in both administrations to operate in bureaucratic silos reinforced the narrative of progress. Many in-silo milestones and indicators were positive. The problems were happening at the interface of the silos. Seams or gaps between them were ably exploited by the host governments and the insurgencies. In Iraq and Afghanistan, political elites in host governments took advantage of these gaps to manipulate unwitting US officials into advancing their predatory and exclusionary agendas. When silos interacted with one another, fault lines could result in which efforts in one silo damaged progress in others. Civilian casualties from military operations, for instance, undermined the legitimacy of both governments and international missions.
Patron-client problems diluted American capacity-building efforts, created frictions between the United States and the host governments, and, in some cases, between Washington and American military and diplomats in Baghdad or Kabul. These toxic factors intensified the conflicts, reduced public support in both countries, and impeded US decision-making. Although the United States made important strategic changes in both conflicts, it paid penalties in public support along the way as the wars dragged on, inconclusively. The so-called crossover point, when the host nation government could assume the security lead and defeat the insurgency after the US troop withdrawal, never occurred.
Third, when Americans tire of the war and the president decides to withdraw, the United States has lost critical leverage for successful negotiations or transition. This results in worse outcomes than those that were available earlier in the war. In Iraq, Bush was unable to gain Iraqi prime minister Nouri Maliki’s agreement for a “conditions-based” withdrawal and had to settle for a fixed timeline. The very limited amount of support Obama was willing to commit for an enduring presence led Maliki to calculate that the benefits were not worth the political cost. Just over two years after the last American troops withdrew, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) arose and humiliated the Iraqi Army, which America had spent so much blood and treasure to build.
In Afghanistan, initial efforts from 2010 to 2013 to bring about negotiations with the Taliban ended in disaster. Although the Taliban were willing to discuss the conditions of the US withdrawal, they were uninterested in negotiating an end to the conflict. They could play for time until international forces left. Deep problems in the US-Afghan relationship led Afghanistan’s President Karzai to refuse to sign a bilateral security agreement to extend American troop presence beyond 2014. This was later signed by the incoming National Unity Government of President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, but not by one of these elected leaders. Obama’s drawdown timeline, meanwhile, had to be modified because of larger than expected gains in territory by the Taliban and major problems within the Afghan security forces. Peace talks would not start again until late 2018.
America’s bureaucratic way of war creates an absence of in-theater authority and accountability, which impedes sound execution, undermines the United States’ ability to keep pace with a dynamic environment, and thus heightens the risk of quagmire. The US government deploys to conflict zones in bureaucratic silos. As such, there is no organizational entity on the ground that is responsible and accountable for achieving US aims. The upshot is that no one below the president of the United States has the authority to direct and manage US efforts in the combat theater. The result on the ground is chaos. Efforts among agencies are unprioritized, tend to be poorly coordinated, and often conflict with one another. Host nation actors and adversaries exploit these silos to their own advantage. The whole of US efforts in these wars is less than the sum of their parts.
This book originates, in part, from my own frustration at the inability of the US government to develop and execute a sensible strategy in Afghanistan. A fellowship at King’s College, London, under the direction of Professor Theo Farrell, then head of the War Studies Department, gave me the opportunity to investigate why the US government could not seem to get its act together to defeat a “rag-tag” militant group like the Taliban. It also provided a way to reflect upon my experiences—both successes and failures—and contribute my insights to help improve policy and strategy decisions over war and peace.
I offer a unique perspective on this issue as one of the very few Americans to have commanded in combat at the unit level in Afghanistan and served as a senior adviser to three four-star commanders in Afghanistan as well as to cabinet-level officials in the Pentagon. My role in the grand scheme of things has been relatively minor, but I’ve been able to support and observe the key actors and decision-makers.
The paratroopers I was privileged to command in Kunar and Nuristan are the only ones, to my knowledge, in the now 20-year history of this war to have motivated a large insurgent group (in this case, a branch of Hizb-i-Islami Gulbuddin [HiG]) to stop fighting and join the government. I later helped develop the Obama administration’s strategies for Afghanistan and the military’s implementation strategy in Kabul, served as the secretary of defense’s personal representative during the 2011–2013 exploratory talks with the Taliban, and later, through Track 2 efforts in 2017–2018, helped convince the Trump administration to resume talks with the Taliban.
In short, I have witnessed some of the most extraordinary aspects of the war from different positions and occupations. Everyone experiences war in their own way. Others have had equally unique and interesting experiences in this war, and I hope they, too, will enrich the study of war and peace with their insights.
As the detailed work on reconciliation began in 2010, I realized very quickly that, despite the talent and experience of those engaged in the process, the US government had no idea what it was doing. We had no useful doctrine, concepts, or body of knowledge for bringing about a negotiated outcome with an insurgent group like the Taliban. We often wasted time negotiating with ourselves while alienating our partners in the Afghan government, leading the Taliban to conclude that the United States was operating in bad faith. None of this was due to malfeasance or lack of effort by American officials.
I fully accept my own errors in this endeavor, which include, but are not restricted to, failing to frame issues with sufficient clarity to promote better policy decisions and unintentionally upsetting my colleagues in Defense, State, and the White House when we talked past each other when debating issues and approaches. Conducting research for this book has helped me to understand these failings even further. Throughout these strategy-making endeavors, I combed the existing literature to determine whether some useful models or analogies existed that could guide decision-making. What I found was very interesting, but ultimately disappointing. This book seeks to address this gap in the literature.
To address the concern that America’s challenges in Afghanistan are entirely unique, I examined the US intervention in Iraq. While the Iraq conflict developed its own trajectory and unique characteristics, I found the three major policy and strategy errors were present there, too.
This book develops a new understanding of the systemic policy and strategy errors that exacerbate the war termination challenges facing the United States during large-scale interventions against insurgencies. The universe of possible cases to analyze for this study is naturally limited. Since the United States emerged from the Second World War as a global power with a new national security architecture and powerful bureaucracies, it has not successfully prosecuted a large-scale military intervention against an insurgency. This work defines large-scale military intervention as one in which the United States deploys military forces of division-size or greater (over 10,000 soldiers) to play a leading role in ground combat operations to fight an insurgency. Only three conflicts qualify: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They have all been quagmires.
Comparing the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to one another to understand strategy failures very broadly follows John Stuart Mill’s method of agreement; when similar systems produce similar outcomes, their similarities, not their differences, best explain the outcome.40 Both wars were started in the wake of the 9/11 attacks as part of the Global War on Terrorism, with the aim of overthrowing an existing government; the people involved on the US side were similar and often the same in both wars; so were US bureaucratic structures and assumptions about war termination and the use of force. Eventually, both wars turned into counterinsurgencies. These similar systems produced similar outcomes—quagmires.
War is complex, so it might be possible that even within similar systems different paths can lead to the same outcome. Hence, in addition to cross-case comparison, a detailed within-case analysis has been used to test existing theories and derive new hypotheses. Within-case variation also helped to eliminate certain variables. The fact that challenges within each war continued after the administration changed, for example, rules out party affiliation or any other personal characteristics of the president and his team as explanations on the US side.
The Vietnam War, the only other post–World War II large-scale US counterinsurgency, has been used as a plausibility probe to see whether recent war termination challenges are unique to their post 9/11 context. The different time and context of the Vietnam War helped eliminate some further possible explanatory variables and supported the outcome of the Iraq-Afghanistan comparison. The fact that all three systemic errors were present in all three wars supports their explanatory value.
The gaps in theory and scholarship noted in the introduction meant that an abductive research approach was likely to generate the richest insights. Abduction combines “deductively derived hypotheses” and “inductively derived insights.” It involves “moving back and forth between the two to produce an account that will be ‘verisimilar and believable to others looking over the same events.’”41 Rather than proceeding linearly from theory to case research, this approach intertwines theory and empirical observation to enhance the understanding of both. The result is a pragmatic framework that enables theory to confront the real world and empirical observation to challenge theory.42 Hypotheses have been deduced from existing theories of war termination, strategy theory, and theories of rational decision-making. When reality did not correspond to what these theories suggest, recourse to other fields, especially economics and organizational behavior, has been used to understand these deviations.
Abductive inference is more appropriate for this effort than a primarily deductive approach for several reasons. First, existing war termination theory focuses mostly on state-on-state conventional war. New concepts are needed to understand the complexity of war termination challenges for intervening powers in irregular conflicts. Second, the universe of cases is limited. There have been no instances of a successful US large-scale military intervention against an insurgency since World War II. Comparing smaller-scale interventions and advisory missions, for instance, with large-scale interventions can yield useful insights that will nevertheless have to remain limited due to their different character. Likewise, comparing these cases to the successful US suppression of the Philippine Insurrection (1899–1902) would surely be an interesting exercise, but might be limited in the conclusions one can draw for contemporary decision-makers, due to the vastly different national security decision-making architecture and the powerful bureaucracies that emerged after the Second World War. Comparing American interventions with those by other powers, such as the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan or the British interventions in Sierra Leone and Malaysia, also presents methodological challenges due to vast amount of dissimilarities in doctrine, national security architecture, and decision-making, to say nothing of domestic politics, strategic culture, and span of global responsibilities and interests. Studies of the above are beyond the scope of this book but would yield rich insights nonetheless.
Given the methodological challenges, the claims in this book are rather modest: the United States’ lack of an organized way of thinking about war termination and thus its implicit fixation on zero-sum decisive victory are inducing three major, systemic errors that are increasing the likelihood of quagmire: first, the United States has tended to adopt military-centric intervention strategies that have a low likelihood of attaining a favorable and durable outcome. Second, the United States has had difficulty modifying a losing or ineffective strategy due to cognitive biases, internal bureaucratic and political frictions, and patron-client challenges with the host nation, thus extending the length of the war and increasing penalties in public support. Third, when the United States tires of the war and announces its intention to withdraw, bargaining asymmetries with the host nation and the adversary occur, impeding the ability to use transition or negotiations to secure a favorable and durable outcome.
This volume does not claim, for instance, that the US policy and strategy problems in Afghanistan and Iraq are the only explanation for the quagmires. To be sure, the resilience of the insurgencies, the existence of external sanctuary and indigenous support for the insurgencies, and deep legitimacy problems in the host nations, among other issues, contributed substantially. Local actors in Afghanistan and Iraq made decisions to advance their particular interests, not US objectives. Key decisions by those actors that played important roles in each war’s trajectory, such as President Karzai’s 2005 decision to allow warlords into his cabinet, the Sunni-Shi’a civil war in Iraq, Prime Minister Maliki’s Charge of the Knights operation into Basra, and Pakistan’s arrest of Taliban deputy Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in January 2010 had little to do with the United States. The policy and strategy errors on the American side include its inability or reluctance to recognize the strategic salience of these factors and adjust the war termination policy accordingly.
Likewise, there is no claim to a universal theory of war termination challenges for intervening powers in irregular conflicts. The extent to which these three systemic errors can be generalized beyond the cases addressed in this book is an important subject for future research. It would be interesting, for instance, to examine the extent to which the Soviet Union’s quagmire in Afghanistan (1979–1987) exhibited similar policy and strategy errors. Likewise, an analysis of the United Kingdom’s rather successful interventions in Sierra Leone and Malaysia could yield insights on the extent to which these errors were avoided or had less impact. Of course, conclusions from such case comparisons would be tenuous as well, given substantial differences in matters such as strategic culture and decision-making architecture.
In sum, the methodology I have chosen is imperfect but reasonably sound to yield insights on the war termination-related policy and strategy errors that heightened the likelihood of turning America’s major post-9/11 interventions into quagmires. Uncovering the systemic errors common to the interventions addressed in this book provides a highly useful starting point for further scholarship as well as for important national security reforms. These suggestions are addressed in the concluding chapters of this book.
Data for the case study analysis has come from a variety of sources. This research has benefitted from personal access to key decision-makers in both the Bush and Obama administrations. I have interviewed over 30 former senior officials who were instrumental in developing policy and strategy for Iraq and Afghanistan and were present for discussions in the White House Situation Room, in Baghdad, and/or in Kabul. Many of these former senior officials agreed to speak “on background” due to the sensitive nature of the issues.43
The interviews are complemented by a significant number of published memoirs, which include those of a president, a national security adviser, three former secretaries of defense, and two theater-level commanders. This book has also made use of a wide range of US government documents that are publicly available. Among these, congressionally mandated Department of Defense semiannual reports beginning in 2006 have provided exceptional detail on policy, strategy, operations, and assessments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Reporting cables have offered insights into how officials viewed and interpreted issues at the time they occurred. These sources plus a wide array of journalistic reporting and academic studies have helped to control for first-person biases or incomplete recollections. The book has also benefitted from my personal experience as a combat commander in Afghanistan, on strategy in headquarters in Kabul, on policy in Washington, D.C., and in secret talks with the Taliban.
I have organized the book into eight major parts. After the prologue gives an overview of key war termination challenges during the Vietnam War, Part I works toward a taxonomy on war termination and potential integration into the policy and strategy processes. It also explores the focus on decisive victory in developing a strategy for Afghanistan. Parts II to VI further explore the Afghanistan and Iraq case studies. Each country case study is organized according to the major problems that spring from the fixation on zero-sum decisive victory: military-centric intervention strategies that had low probabilities of success; cognitive bias, political and bureaucratic frictions, and emerging problems in relations with the host nations that created strategic paralysis within the US government; and the loss of leverage as the United States grew exhausted, decided to withdraw, and tried in vain to transition the war to the host nation or negotiate. Key theoretical concepts that are relevant to the argument are introduced at the beginning of chapters (mainly in the parts on Afghanistan), and then imbedded into the narrative. Part VII discusses implications for US foreign policy and scholarship.
America’s policy and strategy failures have received little scrutiny. Congress fails to ask hard questions. Senior civilian and military officials work countless hours in their silos. Most soldiers and civilians on the ground perform their jobs, as they understand them, to expected standards. That performance, however, is not producing sustainable success in any post-9/11 conflicts. In fact, the 1991 Gulf War stands alone since World War II as an outright military success in a large-scale intervention, but even there the United States fumbled the negotiations. Key competitors, meanwhile, have figured out how to take advantage of America’s bureaucratic way of war. Whether the United States can overcome its fixations and bad habits could become one of the defining global security issues in the twenty-first century.