In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the Americans accumulated mistakes and crimes in the very first year, and those missteps damned the occupation for the next twenty. Many Afghans had fantasized about a new nation based on their own memories of a better time in their country rather than an imitation of the West. “For many Afghans, the arrival of the Americans and their NATO allies inspired hope of a return to a more liberal order of the past—in the 1970s,” Rasmussen writes. Omari’s father, who had once adopted the Mujahideen’s anti-Soviet, anti-imperialist stance before joining and quitting the Taliban, felt that “if the Americans could bring peace and prosperity to Afghanistan, he had no issue with them.”
But the Americans arrived with a crucial and possibly willful misunderstanding about the Taliban (and how much ignorance or spite caused the Americans’ blunders is always a question). The Americans believed that if the Taliban harbored international terrorists like al-Qaeda, that meant they were international terrorists, too. As Rasmussen writes, despite its anti-Western ideology, “the group had never carried out an attack against a Western country.” Some Talibs were even open to participating in a negotiated settlement with Hamid Karzai, the new interim president. The Americans refused this rapprochement. The Bush administration wanted to play the punisher. The Taliban escaped to Pakistan and waited.
Another major failure was not catching bin Laden. The Americans compounded this humiliation—after the humiliation of his September 11 attacks—by turning it into a vague crusade to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a haven for terrorists. The pledge to prevent another September 11 would become the excuse to enter a forever war. The Americans “were there to hunt every last terrorist in the country,” Rasmussen writes, but bin Laden’s Arab fighters had disappeared, and “there were very few terrorists left to be found.” That left the Afghans, whom the Americans rounded up, often in alliance with rapacious Afghan warlords. This effort could be called clownish if it weren’t so deadly. In Gopal’s book, for example, the Americans keep confusing Muslim first and last names, hauling innocent people to prison at the Bagram Air Base and Guantánamo.
As the Afghan academic Amin Saikal writes in How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan, a “sense of euphoria” in Washington muddled American strategy. Saikal is an emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian history at Australian National University, as well as the brother of Mahmoud Saikal, Afghanistan’s representative to the United Nations between 2015 and 2019. How to Lose a War draws on sources including his brother and Karl Eikenberry, the US army general and ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011. Readers may be skeptical of this influence, but Saikal’s central argument is a persuasive one: that the Americans’ twin messianic obsessions, promoting democracy and “destroying” terror, condemned the American enterprise from the start.