America’s military, claim General David H. Petraeus and scholar Michael O’Hanlon, is the world’s best.1 If that is so, why have major post-9/11 military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan turned into bloody and expensive quagmires? Even smaller-scale interventions in places such as Libya, Syria, and Yemen have had poor results. The Chilcot Report, the official inquiry into the United Kingdom’s decision to go to war in Iraq, has important implications about following America’s lead.2 It also reveals the limited influence of American allies on US decision-making.
A consistent shortfall in policymaking for Iraq and Afghanistan was a lack of a war termination framework beyond decisive victory, which induced three significant problems that made quagmires more likely. First, the United States undertook these major interventions with a myopic strategy that assumed decisive military victory. This presumption led to an underappreciation for the importance of critical factors, such as host nation politics and insurgent sustainability. It promoted a tendency to ignore or dismiss early negotiating opportunities. Second, the US government was slow to modify a losing or ineffective strategy due to cognitive biases, political and bureaucratic frictions, and patron-client problems. Third, as the United States tired of each war and signaled a desire to withdraw, bargaining asymmetries prevented favorable and durable outcomes. Attempts at negotiations and transition consistently fell far short of expectations. These problems interacted with one another in unique ways to produce different trajectories into intractable conflicts.
This book uses war termination as a lens to clarify why these conflicts were unlikely to result in a zero-sum decisive victory. The critical factors framework serves as a guide that policymakers can use to assess the likelihood of decisive victory.3 To date, assessments about the prospects of success have relied mostly on subjective judgments and gut instinct. Lyndon Johnson’s Under Secretary of State George Ball, for instance, wrote on July 1, 1965, that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, arguing, “No one has demonstrated that a white ground force of whatever size can win a guerrilla war.”4 Those believing that the United States could be successful countered with other subjective arguments, which President Johnson accepted.
Regarding Iraq, James Dobbins wrote in 2005, “The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that the ongoing war in Iraq is not one that the United States can win. As a result of its initial miscalculations, misdirected planning, and inadequate preparation, Washington has lost the Iraqi people’s confidence and consent, and it is unlikely to win them back.”5 The near-term success of the 2007 surge seemed to vindicate those who believed the war could still be a zero-sum decisive victory. Maliki’s aggressive sectarianism, unconstrained due to the absence of American forces, brought about a Sunni Arab backlash in the form of the Islamic State. The pro and con arguments around Obama’s Afghanistan surge, this book has shown, were similarly subjective and not informed by empirical studies.
Chapter 2, including the critical factors framework, provides a more empirical basis for arguments about the prospects for intervention. In the case of Vietnam, both critical factors pointed in the wrong direction: the insurgency had tangible internal and external support, and the host nation’s government was unable to win the battle of legitimacy in contested and insurgent-controlled areas. The empirical analyses discussed in this book show that no counterinsurgency has been successful when the critical factors are negative.
Iraq and Afghanistan entailed regime changes. Success relied on preventing these two critical factors from materializing. Neglect of the war outcome issue during strategy development impeded the United States’ ability to recognize these factors and take appropriate action. In both cases, the critical factors turned sour. Whether an external power from a different culture can have a successful regime change and prevent the critical factors from becoming contrary requires further research. The critical factors framework and the taxonomy of three ways to win in chapter 1 give policymakers and scholars a methodology to evaluate the prospects of a successful intervention against an insurgency.
The presumption of decisive victory and the belief that with enough commitment and goodwill the United States can solve any problem across the globe could also be part of American strategic culture.6 Such exceptionalism could be motivating the United States to intervene in conflicts that it cannot possibly win or to pursue strategies that have little chance of success. Likewise, the notion of strategic distance could be a factor.7 A longitudinal study could examine how often an intervening power from a very different culture succeeded. Impossible strategic distance could become a compelling explanation. To be sure, the quality of insurgent strategy and capabilities, as well as that of the host nation, is critical to the larger question of which side wins or loses. Those questions are beyond the scope of this book but should be part of the broader explanation for why the conflicts turned out as they did.