In the fifth installment of the SRAD Director’s Corner, “Afghanistan: The Logic of Failing, Fast and Slow,” George Shatzer focuses on the failure of the US-led war and reconstruction campaign in Afghanistan. He reviews The Forty-year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold by Tariq Ali and The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman. He brings personal experience to bear in his review, painting a picture of why the United States failed in Afghanistan and posing these failures as lessons that must be learned before the next war. The books also provide insights for strategists attempting to plan for security in the region.

Read the article here.



Keywords: Afghanistan, NATO, policy, strategy, logic
Episode transcript: "Afghanistan: The Logic of Thinking Fast and  Slow"
Stephanie Crider (Host)

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In your SRAD Director’s Corner series you review books of possible interest to contemporary military strategists, especially those serving in US Army and Joint positions. The spring issue contains the fifth installment of this series, and the focus is on Afghanistan. Thanks for joining us again.

Colonel George Shatzer

Thanks as always for having me. I enjoy discussing these important issues.

(Host)

Each of you articles in the series include a personal component. You have had direct experience in dealing with the issues and strategies discussed in the books you review. That’s true again with the topic of the US war in Afghanistan.

Shatzer

Yes, very true. I don’t claim to be an expert on Afghanistan but that country and the US war there have factored significantly in my Army career. The terror attacks of 9/11, emanating partly from Afghanistan, inspired my interest in national security and strategy and were a big part of the reason I chose to become an Army strategist in 2005. As a much younger officer then, I felt strongly that the so-called Global War on Terror should have remained centered on Afghanistan and the terror groups operating there. My views on that have changed some over the years, but the issue of our commitment to campaigning in Afghanistan remained the vital question all the way to the collapse of the campaign in 2021. And, I know we’ll take more about that later. I was also a student at the Army’s Command and General Staff College in ’05 and decided to write my master’s thesis on proxy warfare which led to me to research and write a lengthy case study on the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980’s and the subsequent Afghan civil war that led to the development of the foreign terrorist base there. And while I would continue to follow events in Afghanistan closely, it would be another nine years before I actually served there in country. The experience was probably the most difficult of my entire career. That tour challenged me the most intellectually and was personally and professionally very trying.

Host

So, an easy question then – why did the US war in Afghanistan fail?

Shatzer

Oh boy. Joe Collins’s article in the same edition of Parameters does a great job at answering this. I offer many reasons why in my article as well. The reality is that the array of problems in Afghanistan is vast and their nature is so complex as to almost be alien to us as Americans. But if I had to select the one issue that set up the US campaign for failure it would be the mismatch in the aims of US political leaders and those of the US military.

For the Department of Defense, and especially the Army as the lead service in the campaign, there was a deep-seated reluctance to fully commit to a war in Afghanistan. Even years before 9/11, the DoD and the Army actually did a fair job of examining the British and Soviet experiences in Afghanistan and c...