Strategy and Culture in the Graveyard of Empires – Jason Gehrke

About two weeks after America’s final withdrawal from Kabul, Al-Qaeda issued an open letter praising “the Almighty, the Omnipotent,” the one who “broke America’s back” in Afghanistan “the graveyard of empires.” Al-Qaeda’s boast transformed a self-fulfilling prophecy into the Taliban’s triumphant honorific, according to Choosing Defeat, a new book by Paul D. Miller, Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University. A former Army intelligence officer and CIA analyst, Miller was on the ground at Bagram in 2002, just three years after graduating college; he eventually rose to serve as NSC Director for Afghanistan from 2007-2009. In his telling, the phrase “graveyard of empires” haunted U.S. policymaking for twenty years. Every wartime president invoked it, as did American generals, senior civilians, defense intellectuals, and journalists. There’s only one problem: Afghanistan never was known as the graveyard of empires—not until Milt Bearden penned an article in 2001. When asked, Bearden said he “just came up with the name for [his] piece for Foreign Affairs.”

For Miller, American leaders’ perennial incantation of one analyst’s catchy headline typifies a dangerous national security culture in which ahistorical bromides and short-term political calculation ensure Americans learn nothing from their recent humiliation. The phrase has its counterpart in the “shallow, hot-take analysis” that led the Washington Post’s 2018 Afghanistan Papers to condemn “nation building” as a doomed attempt “at imposing democracy on an ancient, tribal society.” In its combination of “overt racism” and “appalling ignorance,” Miller argues, the Post blames a winning strategy – nation building – rather than the bureaucratic culture that failed to implement it. Choosing Defeat documents the failures of that culture in meticulous, yet impassioned detail, but Miller refuses to follow the implications of his own devastating analysis to their evident conclusion. And thus, getting most things right, his central argument goes wrong.

Part research monograph, part memoir, Choosing Defeat examines twenty years of misjudgment, bureaucratic ineptitude, and moral weakness, hoping to prove that American policymakers chose defeat by refusing the very kind of long-term nation-building effort, which post-war analyses now scapegoat as doomed from the start. “Simply put, there was no twenty-year nation-building campaign in Afghanistan,” Miller insists. Rather than implement a coherent nation-building effort that could have secured strategic resolution, American leaders “prioritized killing and capturing jihadist militants while investing just enough in … stability operations to preserve operational freedom for … counterterrorism forces. This was a clear strategy, and it was not the strategy I recommended,” Miller writes.

Choosing Defeat thus expresses the frustration of a man who believes he spent a career watching politicians make bad decisions for stupid reasons. In their preference for quick strikes at the expense of victory, American leaders were like “children learning to play chess for the first time, [who] mount a frontal assault on the opponent’s king, over and over … while ignoring the state of play, the shape of the board, and the future of Afghanistan.” When Miller denies the existence of any twenty-year nation-building campaign, he therefore means that from the first Bush years onward, American efforts were insufficient relative to the problem. He does not refer merely to insufficient financial investments, but also to the policy instability and ineffectiveness that result from political hesitation and bureaucratic incompetence.

In Miller’s telling, the American nation-building effort proceeded in self-defeating fits and starts. His nearly comprehensive narrative of US policy begins in December of 2001, six weeks into the US invasion. Instead of pivoting immediately to stability operations when the Taliban were weakest, Bush’s team outsourced Afghanistan to incompetent international partners and then turned its attention to the invasion of Iraq: “The Bush administration’s hostility to nation building,” in that early period, Miller claims, “was small-minded, historically ignorant, and morally callous—an attitude that, to his credit, Bush eventually repudiated.”

Nonetheless, President Obama undermined Bush’s belated progress. In the Obama team’s debate over the war’s central issue—counterinsurgency or counterterrorism—“the short-term goals of counterterrorism won out over the long-term vision of counterinsurgency.” In the 2009 strategy review, Vice President Joe Biden reversed Senator Biden’s former position and led the charge against further investment in Afghanistan. Double-minded, Obama adopted half-measures. He authorized a too-small troop surge, while simultaneously announcing a timetable for their withdrawal. When the surge predictably failed, the administration blamed the convenient boogeyman of nation-building. In fact, Obama’s arbitrary limitations were guaranteed to produce the “forever war” he most feared.

After the long Obama years, Miller argues, the Trump and Biden administrations rejected the nation-building effort peremptorily: “Trump replicated Obama’s error of withdrawing troops and depriving himself of leverage while supposedly trying to negotiate with the enemy.” President Biden doubled down on Trump’s folly. In rare praise of his predecessor, Biden credited an ephemeral reduction in violent events to Trump’s Doha negotiations and later defended his own withdrawal decision by recycling platitudes first heard from Donald Rumsfeld: “It’s up to the people of Afghanistan to decide on what government they want,” Biden claimed, “not us to impose the government on them.” Biden thus defended American failure by the same misjudgments that led Bush officials to reject crucial investments at the outset.

Despite its passion and detail, Miller’s account of America’s bad choices also documents very substantial efforts at nation-building over an extended period. He acknowledges, for instance, that already in 2002, Bush recognized a real gap between resources and requirements in Afghanistan, invoked the Marshall Plan, and passed the “Afghanistan Freedom Support Act.” That legislation launched the “Accelerating Success” program, by Miller’s account, the “first attempt at a comprehensive plan to invest in Afghan reconstruction.” It doubled US aid to almost $2.6 billion in 2004 and $4.8 billion in 2005—still below the $15 billion required, given Afghanistan’s nearly “bottomless” needs. Even then, Miller explains, the bureaucracy could not implement Bush’s policy skillfully enough to make up for time lost from 2002–04. The realities of strategic policy adjustment, congressional appropriation, and program development could not keep pace with real-world conditions. “A lower level of aid started sooner and sustained more consistently would have been easier to administer over the long run, and thus likelier to achieve results,” he explains. “Having delayed too long, we rushed to catch up and tried to show results too fast, which loosened standards and fueled corruption and waste.” For Miller, the negative consequences show that better planning and execution could have achieved a better outcome.

Miller’s description of US aid efforts under Obama relies on the same sort of reasoning. He argues that the troop surge was too small and the timeline arbitrary, even while conceding that even the little resources provided were poorly administered. Although the troop surge did reduce violent incidents in 2010–11, Miller explains, Obama’s “extra bodies and dollars did not add up to a coherent civilian strategy”—the essential component in counterinsurgency. Instead, “the Obama administration ran into the same buzz saw of bureaucracy, ineptitude, red tape, and infighting that had paralyzed the Bush administration’s reconstruction efforts.” Obama’s half-measures thus recycled infamous New Deal-era absurdities: “The U.S. would build roads that the Afghan Ministry of Transportation could not maintain or repair, for example.” Nonetheless, Miller calls for more and better versions of those policies, even as he explains that the reconstruction bureaucracy became “a self-licking ice cream cone … that came to exist for no other purpose than its own perpetuation.”

Despite his careful narration, Miller’s argument rests on moral and prudential judgments that control his analysis of the history. The book opens with an ostensibly historical argument: “If we are to understand why we lost, we must understand why we were able to get some things right, some of the time, and why we were unable to sustain or expand those successes,” he writes. This apparently historical claim is predicated upon a faulty non-historical axiom: “Getting some things right proves that getting the rest wrong was not inevitable, and policymakers are accountable for their poor choices.” Miller’s syllogism is a fundamental tenet of his analysis. He adds to it the equally dubious axiom that “the only two laws of history are that nothing is impossible, and nothing is inevitable.” These assertions do not rest, however, on any new historical revelation or penetrating analysis, so much as on Miller’s ability to imagine an alternative history of the war, one in which US policymakers exercise just the right judgments at just the right time—deploy the right number of forces here, provide just the right amount of aid there—to overthrow the Taliban and establish the rule-of-law in a representative system of governance, in Afghanistan.

Miller’s confidence notwithstanding, his syllogism does not work: “get[ting] some things right, some of the time” only “proves” that given enough time, blood, and treasure, the US government can get some things right, some of the time, in Afghanistan. Miller might well argue that American leaders could have gotten more things right, more of the time; still, “more right, more of the time” is a far cry from proving that American leaders “chose defeat” where they might have chosen victory. Miller does expressly acknowledge that his own indictment of bureaucratic incompetence provides the strongest argument against his own judgments. But when he confronts this idea, he retreats, once again, to the safe haven of unhistorical dogma: “There was no realistic option other than to try. … If rebuilding Afghanistan seemed impossible, it should have called forth the best of American can-do optimism.” Fifty pages later, he blames that same American spirit for the failure: “Public opinion and Americans’ traditional can-do optimism were not prepared for the massive challenges of operating in Afghanistan with almost universal illiteracy, no infrastructure, and a legacy of war.”

Even Miller’s preferred examples of successful nation-building initiatives—the Kajaki Dam and the Afghan Local Police—point to a more pessimistic conclusion than the one he draws. In Miller’s telling, this public works project partially validates the fundamental logic of counterinsurgency—the idea that “if we can provide the Afghan people with economic opportunities … and some form of security … then the Afghan people will choose to side with the new government.” To vindicate the thought, he cites former Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s claim that Pashtuns in Helmand “remember” the project “with great affection and nostalgia.”

From another perspective, though, the Kajaki Dam illustrates the flawed logic of central planning, which lies at the heart of the nation-building theory. According to Miller, military leaders viewed the dam as a central component of their counterinsurgency effort in Helmand. During the war, however, Helmand’s primary cash crop was opium poppy, which “provided 93% of the global opiate market” for drugs consumed primarily by Americans. Profits from American drug abuse, in turn, funded the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

In other words, to protect Americans, the US government’s nation-building effort provided critical infrastructure that enriched the same insurgents and drug traffickers that US military personnel fought on the battlefield. Miller knows this, of course, but repeats the same justification given back then: there was nothing else to do, since restricting the water or eradicating poppy would undermine the Afghan “nostalgia” that American nation-building efforts fought to cultivate. This was the paradox: by replacing definite military objectives with the nebulous aim of favorable popular sentiment, counterinsurgency strategy could justify any failure and identify no particular success; victory and defeat became interchangeable terms.

Miller’s account of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) suggests his confidence results, in part, from a vision of the war developed entirely at the strategic level. By 2010, Miller reports, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was “particularly enthusiastic about the ALP initiative.” Likewise, General Stanley McChrystal believed that, by 2011, “We halted the momentum of the Taliban and retook control of the vast majority of Helmand and Kandahar.” But reality on the ground was far different in those years. In 2012, the ALP program in Helmand and Kandahar yielded a major uptick in Green-on-Blue attacks, in which newly trained Afghan police used their US-supplied weapons to murder their American counterparts. All the while, a pervasive threat of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) limited US movements to planned operations in up-armored tactical vehicles. Miller passes over these events, even as he sees the statistical reduction in violence as evidence that nation-building could eventually deliver a strategic resolution in the war. Sergeants and captains might have left Miller with a very different vision of American progress in those troubled regions.

The strength of Miller’s account is its careful reconstruction of American policy over the entirety of the war. In that effort, Choosing Defeat exposes deep failures in American strategic culture, and frankly, in America’s broader civil society. Despite the valuable historical work, Miller’s real dispute with the critics of nation-building arises from crucial disagreements about the first principles of politics. For him, the fundamental dilemma that confronted American policy was how to avoid the pitfalls of underinvestment without falling into the moral hazard of “imperialism.”

Miller embraces nation-building as the golden mean between these two avoidable wrongs. In his telling, from the beginning, some argued that Afghanistan lacked the political culture necessary to sustain the constitutional rule of law in a system of representative institutions. He rejects that position out of hand, since “arguments that start from the premise that nation building … is intrinsically impossible” are “not very insightful.” Nonetheless, others will argue that the ever-elusive character of even small successes in nation building validates their prudential judgment that representative self-government cannot be exported through federal central planning to any country, much less one so troubled as Afghanistan. Miller chastises that view for its latent racism and ignorance. He insists that a more efficient, more determined, morally improved administration could theoretically nourish the education, social cohesion, and economic prosperity necessary for civic order in Afghanistan. Choosing Defeat thus exemplifies, but does not resolve, the fundamental dispute over the policy implications of America’s recent loss. Nonetheless, Miller’s narration of the policy history will improve serious arguments on both sides of the question.

Choosing Defeat embodies the fundamental divisions of contemporary American politics. Miller censures the pervasive incompetence of American bureaucracy and its cowardly administrative class. By nature, accident, and occasionally by intent, the administrative state reshapes, resists, and simply fails to implement executive policy. Many would cheer his honest criticism. Miller offers a deeper moral reflection. Animating that bureaucracy is a “generation of policymakers” steeped in the cynical doctrine of “realism,” the kind of people who learned to incant “graveyard of empires” by hastily “skim[ming] one or two books and a clutch of articles on the internet.” He is right to denounce those habits as incapable of producing the virtues necessary “to take the long view” of grave matters. Miller thus calls for fundamental reform of our leaders’ moral and intellectual formation—and who could object to the necessity? And yet, he rejects the idea that a political order in such desperate need to reform its own character might be incapable of engineering the civic order of others. America “can be an exemplar of freedom and equality; it can put its enormous power in the service of justice and peace; it can align its national interest with the international common good,” he urges.

That may all be possible, more of the time; it does not prove that US leaders could have chosen victory in Afghanistan. As a veteran, a public servant, and scholar, Miller has put in the hard work and earned the right to be heard; his own scholarship provides the best evidence against his major judgment. Miller is aware of the possibility and disagrees. To his credit, Choosing Defeat will remain an essential guide to the argument for years to come.