By Anthony H. Cordesman

It would be unfair to accuse any element of the US. Government as having had the wrong strategy for Afghanistan. The real accusation should be that it has had so many partially conflicting strategies that it never properly resourced or implemented overtime, or actively reversed, that it has had no real strategy at all. The United States has been remarkably inconsistent and ineffective in both its military civil programs in Afghanistan since its first great successes in aiding Afghan forces to drive out the Taliban in 2000-2001.

United States attempts at strategy have varied by year. Many new strategies have been false starts that have never been seriously implemented, and they often had wild swings in funding from year-to-year. The United States delayed funding and supporting the build-up of effective Afghan forces for half a decade because of the priority it gave to Iraq and intelligence assessments that sharply understated the resurgence of the Taliban. It then reversed this position and "surged" more United States troop into Afghanistan, only to suddenly begin a major effort to rush into a full-scale military withdrawal beginning in 2014.

This withdrawal effort has since been partly reversed, but only in partial and poorly defined ways. The United States has not provided the military personnel to implement the kind of train and assist program the ANSF need, and has pulled back from efforts to create effective civil and civil military programs. As noted earlier, it has talked about making aid "conditional," but largely just talked. Ironically, as Congressional Budget Office (CBO) studies have shown, it also has had to keep a massive support effort going for fewer and fewer troops, getting only marginal savings for providing too few personnel.

For all the faults of the various Afghan forces involved in limiting or ending Afghan progress, the lack of consistent, effective United States efforts is probably as much to blame. The United States will also be primarily to blame if it repeats any aspect of the United States "strategy" in leaving Vietnam. It should have already learned that cutting United States support for half-ready Afghan security forces does not magically make them effective, any more than "Vietnamization" could suddenly and magically transform the ARVN.

Suddenly announcing a potential 50% cut in the 14,000 United States troops in Afghanistan without any prior consultation of the Afghan government and our allies is a mistake. Doing this while holding something approaching unilateral peace talks with a Talban that refuses to even talk to the Afghan government has done more than provide a twisted mirror image of United States actions in Vietnam. It not only has discredited the United States as an ally, but it has given the Taliban a great incentive to keep fighting while rejecting any serious compromise with the Afghan government.

Worse, the Afghan "peace talks" to date seem to be based on the fantasy that the Taliban will shift its positions so radically that it both recognizes the legitimacy of the current Afghan government and accept a limited and non-violent role in that government – andthat the end result will be better than the peace between North and South Vietnam. In practice, the Taliban has already turned United States peace efforts into an extension of war by other means. It is clearly seeking either military victory or a decisive edge at the negotiating table. It may well conclude that any peace that pushes the United States out will leave Afghanistan so fragile and divided that it can violate the peace settlement just as North Vietnam did. One has only to look at Cambodia, Nepal, the Balkans, and Nicaragua for examples of rebels and factions who used "peace" talks and negotiations to win. This mix of United States force cut announcements and peace efforts in December and January has also undermined the already faltering United States effort to get Pakistan to stop tolerating and support the Taliban. It has shown the limits to Ghani's influence to his people, and undermined any Afghan effort to create enough unity to keep United States support. Inevitably, it will affect ANSF morale and desertion rates at every level, act as more reason for Russia and Iran to play the Taliban off against the United States, and further undermine United States leverage and any real United States efforts to make aid conditional.

Is there a case for a thorough review of United States options in Afghanistan? Yes, the preceding analysis shows there clearly is! However, a long and agonizing United States failure in Afghanistan is clearly worse than a short one. The options are either to provide the time, resources, and conditionality that have a credible chance of ending the war with some form of victory, or to conclude that the United States take the risk of actually leaving and develop a strategy based on an honest assessment of the risks and costs to U.S. security and the Afghan people. Blundering into repeating Vietnam redux, and relying on the "fog of peace" to replace the "fog of war" is not the answer.

This is the second part of his analysis. For full analysis see:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghanistan-vietnam-redux-bomb-declare-peace-and-leave

The article was first published in CSIS on January 15, 2019.

Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He has served as a consultant on Afghanistan to the United States Department of Defense and the United States Department of State.

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