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Lawrence Butler of Thomaston is a retired ambassador. He worked with NATO and U.S. commanders in Afghanistan.
Winston Churchill once quipped that one could count on the Americans to do the right thing, eventually. The corollary is Butler’s law of unintended consequences: For every well-intentioned deed, there is an opposite, and unequal effect. Witness our legacy in Afghanistan: ISIS-Khorasan, a brutal, low-tech, highly complex terrorist organization with global ambitions that emerged from the ashes of two decades of the Global War on Terrorism.
Afghanistan is known as the graveyard of empires for good reason. Alexander the Great foundered there. The British lost tens of thousands of soldiers there; khakis were invented there, as the Brits needed a color that hid the country’s dust. So did the Soviet Union.
We made a fundamental mistake when we cleared Afghanistan of brutal Taliban rule in a remarkably short time, with even more remarkably few casualties in 2001-2002, and then stayed. And then we found out that the U.S. military can neither build a Western-style effective military nor can well-intentioned social engineers (aka American diplomats, and aid workers) create a country in our image.
But still we tried. And paid the price. American hubris was on full display in thinking that we could impose a Western-style democratic system, replete with the full spectrum of the human rights we take for granted, on a land composed of rival tribal, ethnic and religious groups. Funded by the American and European taxpayers.
Was this ambition noble and worthwhile? Absolutely? Was it achievable? Twenty years of American, and NATO, occupation, with the expenditure of more than $2 trillion and the loss of more 2,500 American lives (and permanent injuries to tens of thousands more), provides the answer: No.
Why then should we have gone to Afghanistan, cognizant of Russian and British failures? Deterrence. We went to Afghanistan to avenge the Sept. 11 attacks, which will mark their 20th anniversary this month. We wanted to punish the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden and friends, as well as track them down to exact justice for the wanton murder of thousands of innocent people on a clear September morning in 2001.
The resulting Global War on Terrorism was, I believe, a jingoistic slogan to get the American people behind a contrived campaign to smite terrorists wherever they might be, to deter them from attacking us and our allies.
With Afghanistan seemingly firmly in our hands, my fellow diplomats and aid workers became social values missionaries, seizing the opportunity to export American values, developed over the course of 250 years, to a country still tied to its version of the Middle Ages. We rejoiced when girls could go to school and women claimed their places in Afghan society. But in a few years, there will literally be no trace of our two decades in Afghanistan, except broken dreams, relics of war moldering around the country and hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees. And the wreckage extends to the greater Middle East.
In the words of a noted scholar of the region, William Galston of the Brookings Institute, “we had to react forcefully to al-Qaeda’s murderous assault, and we did. Just as President Biden acted swiftly to punish ISIS-Khorasan for the Kabul airport bombing. But counterfactual history helps us understand how badly our reaction went astray. If we had simply deposed the Taliban and accepted their surrender, which they offered and we spurned, captured Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, and stopped there, we would have been much better off than we are today.”
He concluded with this epithet: “In his long war against America, Osama bin Laden has won a sweeping if posthumous victory. … The 9/11 era began in Afghanistan, and now it has ended there, in humiliating defeat. The United States is weaker, more divided, and less respected than it was two decades ago, and we have surrendered the unchallenged preeminence we then enjoyed. Although our response to 9/11 is not solely responsible for these negative developments, it has certainly contributed to them.”
My final bottom line is counterintuitive. Sometimes American military intervention and support for authentic, indigenous nation building is justified and succeeds. The Balkans are testimony to this. Stopping mass atrocities and genocide is a moral imperative. Except when intervention in Libya leads to regional chaos and even more destruction.
Trying to turn lands far, far away into little Americas is a fool’s errand. American foreign policy needs to focus on what really matters to our national security and well-being. To Mainers. Afghanistan did not, and alas, does not, meet that test.