I want to shoot. You know, Matt Waldman probably needs no introduction.
Became very famous in many ways for his article The Sun in the Sky, about the ISIS involvement in the Taliban movement.
Cynical everyone's attention and that's pedigree is much deeper than that.
He's research fellow on the International Security Program for the Belfer Centre, a Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
He has practised as an international lawyer in London, serves as a foreign office so far as I can.
UK and the European Parliament's works on Afghanistan and the whole region since about 2005, and he's been Oxfam's head of policy for Afghanistan.
It's been called Centre for Human Rights by his own writing and analyst and commentator.
He spoke in Paris. He's serving most recently as a senior UN official in Kabul, covering conflict resolution, reconciliation with the Taliban.
He's currently organising running research on American foreign policy making and conflict resolution in the context of Afghanistan,
and is a consultant on mediation initiatives in the Middle East and Africa more generally for the NGO Insert Mediate.
Of course I could go on, but nothing particularly new.
Thank you. Thanks, Rob. And thanks, everybody, for coming.
I felt I'd start with just telling you as I came in, flew in a couple of days ago, coming into London at night.
The pilot on the intercom said, if you look out over London, you'll see fireworks in the distance.
That's because we celebrate Guy Fawkes, his attempt to blow up parliament.
There's a little silence. This is the this is the captain again, actually, clarification.
We celebrate the fact that the attempt was foiled.
We do not condone that kind of behaviour here at British Airways pilots.
Anyway, here to talk about something a little bit similar to that, given what the Taliban have been up to.
But I just want to I'll just see if this works.
Anyone so they don't want to hear. Just let me just start with the excellent language.
So talking to colleagues at Harvard. You know, I asked them a few years ago what makes a good talk, and they all resoundingly came back with photos.
So you've got some photos, I'm afraid. I want to start just with my background.
And the reason for that is that I'm not an academic, actually, I'm a practitioner.
And so and I think the background might help to explain where I'm coming from in this talk.
So as Rob said, I was in the UK Parliament and actually, you know,
spent three years purporting to be a foreign affairs adviser and came to the conclusion fairly early on that nobody
really knew what they were talking about and there was very little accumulated expertise on countries like Afghanistan.
People like me were expected to advise on it.
As a result, I went out to Afghanistan and spent five years there living and working there as a researcher, an analyst and a UN official.
And again, a lot of that experience is guided me in the research and in the, you know, the research I've done, the presentation I'll make today.
Perhaps a peculiarity about my experience is that from 2010 to 12,
I had a number of meetings with the Taliban and that was commanders at the local level,
people who would command, say, 40, 50, bend up to figures at a political level and very interesting meetings.
And I can't resist at least just one anecdote which was asking one commander where he got his money from.
The answer, Pakistan's ISI. Trafficking, drugs and kidnapping people like you.
So we then had an interesting discussion about how much I was worth.
He said, quarter of a million. I insisted I was worth at least a million.
Anyway, the the more recent work that I've done is, is Harvard researching U.S. foreign policy.
And that's what I'll be covering in the talk today.
I'm also working at Chatham House and which I can talk separately about a big project on political transition in 2014.
So just an overview of the talk. An explanation is, you know how I came to the research that underpins this.
I'll just briefly look at the situation now as it currently stands and look at some data which I think is helpful to us.
I'm going to argue that there were two major errors that were made in the US intervention in Afghanistan.
I think we misjudged the enemy and we pursued a flawed strategy.
You know, in a way I think what we're saying here is that that's a violation of two of the fundamental tenets of strategy.
That you know your enemy, you develop a viable strategy to achieve your goals.
Now, my the principal interest I had was not in how things went wrong because lots of people have already done that.
Look at Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Look at Ahmed Rashid.
There's a number of people who've looked at how things went wrong.
I'm more interested in why. And, you know, in a sense, what I'm looking at is, you know, we can consider causation at two levels.
Obviously, there's the direct and particular causation of a given individual making a decision that has consequences.
But I think we can also look and that, you know, I see that as being very important.
We've got to do that.
But we can also look at structural factors, underlying factors, which is what I've tried to consider in the course of this research.
I'm going to argue that I think there are three main structural flaws in U.S. policymaking organisational,
psychological, strategic, psychological, strategic, cultural.
And yeah, there's overlap between them.
And just a brief word on the research that, you know, as I said, I'm drawing on my experience over five years there,
but also on research that I did last year with, you know, in D.C. largely,
but with U.S. officials, 51 U.S. officials and experts, including the majority.
Well. 16 of those were at the Department of Defence.
There's a I've included quotes from those interviews because I think they're instructive and often insightful in terms of,
you know, helping to explain these structural errors.
And I will also, just briefly at the end, look at the implications of this work.
So just the only happy ending that we see today in Afghanistan and we'll go through this very briefly and I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with it.
But the intervention, as you note at the beginning, a hands off approach to then very significant investment in terms of troops and money.
And then in recent months and in the last year or two, you've seen quite a rapid withdrawal.
There are now only 51,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan from a height of 100,000.
It's been a costly endeavour. It's cost the United States over half a trillion dollars.
2200 U.S. servicemen and women have died, as you know, over 400 U.K. soldiers.
Costly in terms of Afghan lives, too, since 2007.
16,000 Afghan civilians have been killed.
But what do we have from all of this as what is the outcome?
Well, clearly, I mean, just again, on this very concise, obviously and generalising, but clear gains in development,
especially considering the state of Afghanistan after the Taliban regime and the civil war, and clear gains to in civil liberties.
Freedom to to associate freedom of speech.
But again, as you all know, a corrupt, deeply corrupt, predatory regime probably saw that.
Only last week, Afghanistan's judiciary was set to be the most corrupt in the world by Transparency International.
Petraeus himself described the government as a criminal syndicate, and he wasn't far wrong.
As you know, since 2005 and by the way, a lot of people misjudge a misstate.
The commencement of significant insurgent activities.
And that was 2005. It was not 2002.
It was 2005. And the reason I say that, because I keep hearing this longest war in history for various countries.
Well, actually, it may be. It isn't, because we didn't have anything like a war until 2005.
But anyhow, since 2005, the Taliban have really, you know, really mobilised, pushed back against ISAF and the government.
And I think one of the things that I'll mention now, because I think it's been overlooked is the Taliban counter surge.
You all know about the surge from 2009 of U.S. troops and obviously an increased increment of British troops.
But really the way the Taliban responded to that was that a number of strategic and tactical adaptations,
which I can go to another point, but centrally the core response was a counter surge.
And if we that I mean, that's ISAF data on enemy initiated attacks.
I mean, look at that from 2008.
They're beginning on the left to towards the end of 2012 here on the right hand side.
And it's worth just bearing in mind that in 2008, the average number of attacks per week that the Taliban was able to launch was about 200.
In 2012, it after the surge, it was about 500 a week.
And essentially what I think we need to be clear about is that the Taliban has emerged stronger after the surge than it was before it even this year.
A number of monitoring organisations is saying that attacks are up on last year.
I think a good measurement. And again, I just but this is briefly touching on the current state of the conflict.
A good measurement is casualties, civilian casualties.
It's an indicator, you know, and that's all. But it's worth considering.
And here, this chart shows average monthly civilian fatalities by cause.
And you can see that. And this is widely available U.N. data from 27 rapidly increasing.
And you can see the slight fall in 2012.
And yet, when you look at 12 of the the first six months of 12 compared to the first six months of this year,
you see that there seems to be an increase of about 20% or so that the UN is very concerned about.
And as you can see, the red that is insurgent caused deaths, whereas the yellow is the pro-government,
that's the ISOF or Afghan National Security Forces own assets.
Worth mentioning also that. Yeah.
And again, this isn't covered often in the media that there's a huge amount of displacement being caused by the conflict.
So on average, 2300 Afghans displaced every week.
That's figures for the first half of this year. There's a total of over 600,000 displaced in Afghanistan as a whole.
But just to look a little deeper at those figures, the civilian casualty figures,
I think it's worth noting and again, I just bring this to your attention is it often isn't highlighted.
Is that the as a part of that number of civilians who are being killed, you've got this increment here,
which is the average monthly targeted killings by the Taliban, essentially.
The reason I highlight this, because I think it's important and it shows that on average you are seeing,
you know, in, say, 2013 here you're seeing over 12 civilians a week are being assassinated by the Taliban.
And I highlighted because I think it's it has a huge effect in terms of those people who feel.
Yeah, are making decisions about who to support in their communities.
That's just the people who are killed, not the people who are threatened or intimidated in other ways.
That's huge impact on the ability of the Taliban to, you know, sustain their campaign,
to move amongst the population and to have a a relatively benign operating environment.
Just want to look at this graph, which shows ISOF and A.F., the Afghan security force casualties.
And again, I want to show you this because I think it says a lot about what is currently happening in the conflict.
So you can see the blue here is ANP, Afghan National Police, the yellow is Afghan National Army, and the red is ISAF.
And these are fatalities. So what you can see there is a massive increase in the number of police that are being killed by the Taliban.
In fact, the average for the first half of 2013 was 75 a week and a hundred wounded.
We're thinking about, I mean, that there is a slaughter going on of Afghan national police less.
Yeah, that's absolutely clear. And in fact, the latest figures from the government just from a few days ago show that that has risen to 85 now,
85 a week on average for the past six months.
That is, by the way, 85 week and 200 wounded a week.
That's just the police. So, again, what you're seeing, that's just reflecting the fact the Taliban are turning their guns on Afghan national forces,
having in the early days or a few years ago, been equally concerned with with international forces.
So I want to come now to you. Okay. I said, you know, I thought there were two major errors that the US or the West made.
The first, as I said, was misjudgement of the Taliban.
And I'll just cover that briefly and look at next.
The second was the the floor strategy. So misjudging the Taliban, I think we misjudged the.
Just to begin with the strength of the Taliban and the support they had.
I happened to be working in Parliament for a largely marginal political individual, Nick Clegg and I.
I submitted a parliamentary question on his behalf in 2006 asking the British government.
This was just as British troops were being deployed, what they thought the strength of the Taliban was.
And they replied about a thousand.
By the way, I submitted about a dozen other questions before and it it's quite difficult to get that estimation out of it.
They said about a thousand, I think British forces probably killed a thousand and in 2006.
But but as a former commander of ISAF said to me, NATO's grossly underestimated the strength of the Taliban.
I think that is abundantly clear. Now, of course, you know, the Taliban was smaller in in strength in those days in 2005 and six.
But I think we didn't appreciate even then that their strength we didn't also appreciate the
extent to which the Taliban were able to galvanise a level of support within communities.
Now, the Taliban are not popular in Afghanistan. The people who actively support them, probably 10%, I would guess something in that region,
no one really knows 10 to 20% maybe in parts of the south or the east.
But but they were able to at least have the acquiescence of communities, especially in Pashtun areas.
And of course it's acquiescence that they need. They need people not to inform on them.
That is what the Taliban need. And in many cases that is what they got.
I think we misjudged their motivation and objectives.
I was told by a very senior U.S. diplomat that in mid 2009 we had almost no intelligence on what the Taliban wanted.
I personally, being in Kabul over that period every year, I was being asked by by diplomats, senior diplomats and spies, who are these guys?
What do they want? It was only in 2010 that things changed.
We really started to get an idea.
We, of course, I'm referring to the US and to some extent the Brits and others that they really started to start to understand what was going on.
And finally, I think we misjudged their resolve and their regenerative capacity.
And I think here the key element to consider is the fact that for many Talibs they believed that we were invading forces.
Now we weren't. But that's not the point.
The way is that they source those individuals.
I'm not talking about the whole population, but the way that many Taliban source was as invaders.
And of course, if your local mullah, who you respect, is telling you that's what we are or Westerners are, then you'd be inclined to believe it.
People who think that their country and their sovereignty is at risk will fight and they will fight and die,
as many of us perhaps would if if we felt our countries were invaded.
So huge sense of purpose amongst not all Talibs.
There were many who were criminals and thugs, but amongst a number, especially foot soldiers who genuinely believed that Afghanistan was invaded.
And of course, that gave the Taliban great ability to regenerate.
So despite all of the losses, which were very significant, especially during the surge,
they were able to regenerate their numbers, and they're now larger than they were back in 2006, seven, eight.
In my view, I mean, and again, if you look at, say, Antonio Justo Z,
probably one of the world's leading experts on the Taliban, he would make that case that they are in strength overall.
They are bigger than they were before the surge. A few words about what I would say was a flawed strategy.
I think it was a failure to match means and ends.
I think that is beholden on any country prosecuting a campaign such as this to
consider rigorously at regular intervals what the principal goals are and how.
Considering the context and considering the obstacles, how yeah, how those goals could be achieved.
And I think we lost sight of the principal goal of the intervention, which was mitigating the threat from Al Qaeda.
In a sense, I think what happened is there was the perception at the beginning that the way to
mitigate the threat from al Qaeda is to remove the Taliban from power and subdue them.
And that that continued to be a sense of how to achieve our goals, actually became an end in itself.
That became the subduing of the Taliban rather than actually dealing with the threat from al Qaeda.
And finally, I think we had.
A whole panoply of unrealistic objectives, building a liberal and democratic state through principally our activities rather than Afghan work,
to do that radically improving development over a short period of time.
I think many development experts would say that is just not possible to do, especially in a sustainable way.
Winning the support of the population through COIN.
Defeating the Taliban is unrealistic, in my view, not always consistent and went well beyond the original goal.
And just for fun, I've included the COIN plan for Afghanistan.
Let us not be surprised that it didn't work out very well.
So I want to come now to the core of my talk, which is the structural factors that help explain why we made those errors that I talked about,
misjudging the Taliban, getting a strategy wrong. And first of all, and to talk about organisational factors and within that these three points.
So first of all, acquisition of information, it's pretty obvious, isn't it,
that if we're going to make good decisions in policy makers are going to make good decisions, they've got to have good information.
But actually, I think in the case of Afghanistan, that's actually rarely the case.
Why was that?
First of all, I mean, there's an obviously a huge number of factors here, but I'm trying to narrow it down to what I see as the most significant.
First of all, rotations.
That's one ambassador telling me that just as you learn the job, you're an 80 to 90% of the U.S. embassy in Kabul rotates out on an annual basis.
How do we expect people to understand a country that is so different today as that is so complex.
In the space of 12 months.
And that applies right at the top. General Dunford is Isa's 15th commander in 11 and a half years.
Risk aversion.
So these people who deploy for Afghanistan to Afghanistan for a year actually rarely get out and actually talk to people and engage with them,
build trusting relationships. And actually, if you don't build a trusting relationship, an Afghan is not going to tell you what he really thinks.
It's going to take time. It's going to take years, actually, before he will tell you he or she will tell you what they really think.
And as I was told by a very senior U.S. diplomat, most diplomats never leave the compound, the embassy compound.
That is, I think, another problem with operational bias to intelligence gathering.
So and as I told here, a senior DOD official, most of the intelligence is focussed on trying to understand where the next attack is going to be.
So the big consideration of force protection, especially now the withdrawal is underway.
And of course, that needs to happen. I mean, soldiers need operational intelligence,
but you can't neglect some of those other fundamentals about the social, political nature of the enemy.
I think it's worth you know, that is absolutely consistent with what we know about the CIA and their preoccupation with actually
carrying out some of some operational activities rather than rather than information gathering.
You know, in fact, there's a quote here I saw recently from Michael Hayden, the former CIA director.
A lot of things that pass for analysis right now is really targeting, secondly, under this category, interpretation of information.
Now, of course, it's going to be difficult under any circumstances to interpret information in Afghanis, because really a lot of it.
We know from the NSA that, you know, it's going to be an awful lot of it, but it's going to be fragmentary and it's going to be inconsistent.
And I think actually one of the big problems is, is just understanding what it means.
As one U.S. ambassador told, it's not that they don't have the information.
It's actually understanding it. And that's why I think one of the key things here is a lack of specialists.
Now, just one quote here.
I mean, you're probably all familiar with this kind of point, but one quote, I couldn't name a single Pakistan expert, a State Department.
Now, just think about that.
That extraordinary country of 180 million that has nuclear weapons, that is home to al Qaeda, the hosts, and has supported the Afghan Taliban.
And there isn't a single known expert on Pakistan, a state bomb.
Why is that? Well, that's because there is there are human resources rules that favour generalists.
And people don't want to be, you know, in most cases, just focussed on one, you know, one area, all of that career.
And therefore you have this kind of extraordinary absence of expertise.
I mean, it's worth perhaps mentioning that, you know, in 2000, if you look at language speakers,
which sometimes are a reflection of the number of specialists in 2011,
early 2011, the U.S. had a hundred thousand troops in Afghanistan and six Pashtu speakers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And of course, they have twice as many Pashtu speakers in Pakistan as Afghanistan.
The UK in 2010 had 10,000 troops, three local language speakers, only one of whom spoke Pashtu.
And I knew that actually because he was a spy and he was a friend of mine.
And he said to me, Do you know, I heard the Prime Minister, the dispatch box the other day saying,
we are deploying language speaking people who can speak Pashtu to Afghanistan.
He said, I was looking at that thinking, [INAUDIBLE], that's me.
So secondly, in terms of interpretation of information, we don't have the specialists in our governments.
So what do they do? Very late in the day, they import expertise.
The problem there is that when you look at the people who are on McChrystal, General McChrystal's team or General Petraeus,
his team they hadn't spent on this was I mean, this was a member of McChrystal's team told me this.
Most of them hadn't spent much time in Africa. They didn't actually know much about Afghanistan.
Rather, they had they were, some of them military experts or experienced in counterinsurgency.
And there was a sense that they're appointed because they kind of would be likely to agree with what the generals wanted.
And there's a concern also that when you bring someone in and again,
this was this was a comment made to me by one took by by one of the experts that was recruited by Holbrooke.
You know, he said they won't really trust us, so we can advise you.
And actually, this individual was very familiar with Afghanistan, but they wouldn't take his advice because he wasn't one of them.
And I think, finally, that the problem of, you know, we know that there are preconceived, pre-existing,
preconceived ideas about, you know, what the campaign is about, who the enemy are, what we're trying to do.
And there's a lot of pressure on people to sort of fit information into those paradigms
as the quote makes clear that finally under organisational factors is the absence,
in my view, of self-evaluation and.
As it was, I was told by U.S. official U.S. officials that there was a reluctance to give back.
No one wants to give bad news. Not good for the career, sometimes.
Not good for the institution. And there's a reluctance to challenge openly official policy.
So you see these quotes here which reflect that.
I mean, that's an extraordinary quote there underneath about, you know, not being able to say you made the wrong choice.
Of course, it's very difficult to change course if you can't admit that you've made a mistake in the first place.
Of course, there are some measures that are taken.
So there's military red teaming. But of course, that is largely an attempt to identify vulnerabilities and is largely operational and
is also constrained by the lack of knowledge and experience that I just mentioned.
And of course, there's a Government Accountability Office in the United States.
Does SIGAR the special inspector.
But I think there's a problem there anyway, because many of the indicators that we use to measure what is happening have a success bias.
So in other words, they measure inputs and outputs rather than quality utility and impact.
So the second main area that I want to look at in terms of structural causes of errors is psychology.
And these are the three points that I want to cover, and you'll be familiar with a lot of the theoretical work that has been,
you know, Robert Jervis, Virts, Berger, Tetlock, Stein.
You know, a lot of people have written about these sorts of factors.
So first Manichaean struggle. Now, what I found in the course this research was that the idea of the struggle of right against wrong,
good against evil was that it lasted long after George Bush and his with or with against, you know, you're either with us or against us philosophy.
I think it manifests itself to some extent in a reductionism.
So a simplification of what is inevitably quite a complex situation.
And I think, by the way, I don't think this is a marginal issue. I consider this to be one of the fundamental reasons that we got it wrong.
We assumed that if there was an enemy, it was, and that all of the people who are fighting us must be must be bad.
And of course, as you know, that simply isn't the case.
As I said, many people were fighting because they thought they were invaded.
They decided to sacrifice their lives because they felt that that was the right thing to do.
Now, of course, they were wrong. Actually, they weren't invaded with the intention was never to occupy and exploit Afghanistan.
But many people thought that was what we were there for.
And when you consider the number of civilian casualties that we were causing and the, you know, the propaganda,
the myths, the history of Afghanistan, the easy to understand how people could have that conception.
I think what happened when you when you take that kind of binary approach,
you misjudge your allies because there's an assumption that my enemies enemy is my friend.
And that is not always the case, as is clear with the government of Afghanistan.
And many of those figures were in it for themselves and were exploiting the people, exploiting their positions of power.
See that that that quote from an adviser at the Department of Defence.
And the final point here, I think, is this oversimplification and demonisation of the Taliban.
The idea that the Taliban are somehow less than human, perhaps you might, you know, can do sort of analysis you might say is ethnocentric bias.
And again, we're unable to see the sense in which they may be driven by legitimate grievances or ideas.
I think the consequence of all of this, by the way, is that it led to a kind of perspective which saw the conflict as a zero sum confrontation,
and that, in turn, precluded the idea there could be any kind of outreach or negotiation with the Taliban.
And, of course, that happened.
That has happened in the last three years, really to two and a bit years in a complete reversal of international policy.
And I because I think this is so important, I just wanted to look at.
Just very briefly. Briefly, if is why why that happened, why do we see it in this way?
Well, some of the interviewees I talk to, you know, I talked to said it was propaganda, polarised rhetoric, the Cold War and the war on terror.
I think, and it came through some of that in some of the interviews that lack of empathy and perspective taking has something to do with this.
As this military official told me, we didn't get inside their minds.
And a sense that actually trying to really understand why they were doing what they were doing was dangerous or wrong.
And clearly, in my view,
you've got attribution error at play where obviously undesired behaviour ascribed to dispositional rather than situational factors.
The quote there from a US official,
and you know that last quote reflecting what we know and what we should expect when we see attribution error that you know,
we won't appreciate how we are seen by the other side and,
and the extent to which perhaps we cause their behaviour and of course vice versa to exactly the same on the Taliban side.
The final point I'll make on psychological factors is to sorry to more than two more points, but overconfidence.
This ambitious war fighting counterinsurgency and state building goals.
If you look at the London Compact 2006, it looks like a work of fiction.
And this is me perhaps being overconfident in thinking I could persuade General Petraeus that he was wrong.
And why is that? You know, the can do attitude, the idea that, you know, no mission is impossible.
What was interesting and I didn't really expect was that that's also found at State Department to.
And the sense that you can all argue for something that is mediocre and that is a big problem in a
part of the world where the vast majority of outcomes of anything you do are likely to be mediocre.
Again looking at why? Well, people, you know, had different explanations as to why some of them are mentioned there.
Clearly there are some benefits to confidence.
But as you well know, dangerous, too, if you're attempting to do things which cannot be done.
And then the fight. So this is the final point on on psychological factors is processing of unfavourable information.
And as you know, all of these types of response to bad news were at play in Afghanistan.
And it's summarised nicely by that quote from a senior U.S. diplomat.
You know how many times we heard we'll break the Taliban in?
Never happened. And yet they always found claim. They always found facts to substantiate those claims.
When I think you then look at all the factors.
So prospect theory,
the fact that you on the whole it seemed that people were willing to take more risks to avoid losses than they were to make further gains means that,
you know, we were defending what we'd achieved in those early years.
We didn't want to let it go. When you add to that the weighing of sunk costs, which of course not a strictly rational thing to do.
Yeah, we've let this we've lost this many lives. We spent this much money.
We have to keep going. That kind of attitude, when you consider all of these things together,
what I think it means is that you there is a powerful effect of, you know, weighing against the revision of defective policy.
So when I've just come to the third and final element to the structural factors that I think help explain major errors,
and there are these three that I want to look at. First of all, faith in force.
There is a postcard that I picked up at ISAF headquarters.
Not one I sent back to my mountain, by the way.
I think, you know, there's often the assumption that decision made decision makers are capable of making good strategic decisions.
I do not believe that to be the case.
Tendency to turn to force even to address political problems.
It's interesting, if you look at you know, if you read the Woodward book and look at the debates inside the White House in oh nine,
the choice there was between counterinsurgency and drone strikes, essentially counter-terror approach.
It wasn't a consideration of a political approach of seeing whether U.S. ends could be achieved through negotiations now.
And, of course, the U.S. did come to that conclusion in 2011 12, by which time it may.
We still don't know. It may have been too late. Most you know, and again,
this is coming from what I'm being told by U.S. military officials who are speaking frankly and in
a non attributable basis that the there was a heavy pressure to deliver results in the short term.
Got to show some progress so that often even at the highest levels can.
You know the concern with achieving. And what can you most easily achieve on a short term basis?
Either building stuff or killing people? Very often it was the latter.
And as one very senior U.S. military figure told me, there was this conception that when you kill bad guys, what you leave behind will be better.
Obviously, as we all know, that simply isn't the case, certainly in Afghanistan and in many other places.
I think, you know, if you look at some other work that's been done on this, you you know, you can see why that simply didn't apply.
And actually, even in the American military, if you look at a paper by General Mike Flynn, who's a very talented intelligence officer in Kabul,
who said it's an inescapable truth that merely killing insurgents usually serves to multiply enemies rather than subtract them.
Yeah, I think that's a fair proposition. I think it probably applied in Afghanistan.
Yet still, the emphasis, particularly under General Petraeus, was to kill as many insurgents as he possibly could.
Again, linked to this point, the idea that politics is subordinate or you do it later.
And really at the end of the day, I think the consequence was instead of strategy as a substitute for strategy,
what we had is an effort to build more forces or deploy more of our own forces or build more Afghan forces.
It was a sense that force was the only real tool that matters.
The second point I want to cover on the strategic cultural factors was this idea that if you work hard enough, you will achieve results.
And it's a lovely quote that from, again, a DOD official, the activity is equated with success.
Of course, that is not rational and is not necessarily the case and often will not be the case.
If if what you're doing does not contribute to your goals.
And alongside that, you had the flood of aid, which we're all aware of.
And I've just shown it graphically then and consider for a moment that the U.S. that the
Afghan government's revenue from its own sources within the country was around $2 billion.
And U.S. this is U.S. assistance was $15 for 2010 and 11.
Absolutely. Flooding Afghanistan and of course, perpetuating corruption.
And yeah, one might also make the point here that, you know, more putting more resources into a policy that is not working does not make it work.
Fairly elementary, but we violated simple principles such as that.
The final point I want to make on strategic cultural factors is misreading of history.
Sorry about the line that I'm not trying to cross analogies out.
I think that's an important part of it, a misreading of history and false analogies.
So I think the oversimplification of history or neglect of it was a major problem.
And as a very senior former diplomat told me, he thought America was beguiled by its victories over Germany and Japan,
which again play into that sense, that fusion of force and your derive results.
Obviously, the United States could have learned from the experience of the Soviets in Afghanistan where
there are some remarkable parallels in what happened and their own experience in Vietnam.
You only need to look at the works like Barbara Tuchman, Gordon Goldstein, to know that, again, many of the same kinds of errors were made in Vietnam.
And I think one might add to this the seduction of prevailing doctrines.
So, of course, neo conservatism, the counterinsurgency doctrine treated as religion.
As one official told me.
And the idea that you just find what works elsewhere or supposedly works and you apply it to another situation to, in this case, Afghanistan.
And there a comment made to me that we carried all the Iraq lessons to Afghanistan, and some or many were not.
The attempt, obviously, in mind with this,
the idea that one could replicate the Anbar Awakening when there were very different circumstances in Afghanistan.
So I just want to review. Okay. What I've argued that there were two major errors misjudging the enemy bungling strategy,
and then I think they're explained by interrelated structural flaws.
Of course, there are direct and particular explanations too,
but in this case I'm interested in the structural explanations, and I think they fall into those three categories.
One might add to that the problem of domestic politics.
And of course, as you know, Obama presided over the surge.
And as I was told by senior political aide, the idea was to surge and get out.
And of course, many would argue that that in itself undermined the prospects for the surge succeeding.
It is worth, I think, bearing in mind that so far as I am aware and tell me if I'm wrong,
there is no precedent in history for a commander in chief to announce the date of withdrawal for forces that have not yet been deployed.
If you know of such an example, please tell me.
But I think that was extremely problematic because it undermined U.S. political leverage and it gave the enemy an advantage.
It knew our plans, the Taliban, to put in simple terms, knew that they could outwait the United States of America.
And they did. And they all doing now. What's the consequence?
I think it's system failure. I think the system doesn't succeed given these flaws in it.
And just as a final point, I mean, I think there's a number of things that we could do.
But I think recognising these flaws, greater humility and prudence,
and I think inevitably there's got to be structural changes in the system to compensate for those flaws.
And these are the sorts of things that I think might or could potentially make a difference,
especially given that the United States will intervene elsewhere in the world.
And if we want to see them, if we want to see them avoiding the kinds of errors they made,
I think they've got to see these kinds of changes, whether it's building expertise, and that means country or regional expertise.
I think we've got to see them self evaluate rigorously and also test assumptions and beliefs.
I think assumptions arise and they just perpetuate it and they don't get challenged within the system.
My view that's going to happen. And finally, you'll be relieved to hear.
I think actually what is necessary is an attempt to empathise.
And this is not going to solve all of the problems.
But I think it's clear to me that the United States failed to understand fundamental attitudes where these people are coming from,
as one interviewee put it to me. They didn't get inside the minds of the enemy or their allies.
And whether you're thinking of the Taliban, the government of Afghanistan, or senior security figures in Pakistan,
and I think that has to be a critical factor in avoiding the kinds of major errors that were made in Afghanistan anyway.
I've taught for long enough. But many thanks. Look forward to the question.
Answer.