Guest columnist Keith Peterson: Lessons to be learned from America's longest war
Just before the Easter weekend, the Biden administration provided a 12-page report on the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, which ended America's longest war.
Such timing suggested the administration wanted to largely bury this report, though it is a fairly robust defense of its actions and a condemnation of the situation it was left with by the Trump administration when Biden assumed office.
The reality is that to the extent that Americans think about the withdrawal at all - for most it is now old news - they will only recall the chaotic images of desperate Afghans trying to cling to airplanes; of infants being handed over walls to Marines; and of the 13 flag-draped caskets of the Marines who were killed by an ISIS-K suicide bomber.
Both Presidents Trump and Biden had the same goal - to withdraw from Afghanistan, but for different reasons. Trump's foreign policy was always isolationist and transactional. And he saw no value in the idea of giving Afghans a chance to create a democratic future.
Biden, too, doubted that investments by the U.S. and its NATO allies could turn things around and once al-Qaida was ousted in Afghanistan, American interests, in his mind, were few. We stayed 20 years and the price in blood and treasure - nearly 2,500 American lives, a quarter of a million Afghan dead, and $2 trillion - failed to create a sustainable Afghan society that could withstand the Taliban onslaught.
Once both presidents decided the U.S. wanted out, we lost most of our leverage to persuade the Taliban to accept some sort of power-sharing arrangement, though many doubt that was ever a real possibility.
The Trump administration's deal with the Taliban, which lacked a de-escalatory ladder - we do this and you do that - as well as its withdrawal of U.S. forces (down to just 2,500 before Biden's inauguration) and its failure to accelerate the process for getting Afghans who had worked for the Americans out of the country - all meant that the situation was ripe for chaos.
Still, American military commanders believed right up until the moment the Taliban literally walked into Kabul that the Afghan security forces they had trained and equipped would, at the very least, hold Kabul for the remainder of 2021 and perhaps beyond, providing enough time for an orderly withdrawal and, perhaps, a stalemate that would lead to a political
solution. After all, there were - on paper - 300,000 Afghan soldiers vs. about 80,000 Taliban.
Unlike the war in Ukraine, however, the Afghan conflict was a civil war between Afghans of differing philosophies with tribal crosscurrents, the overlay of Islam, and the very plain fact that the Americans and their European allies would always - always - be seen as outsiders that many Afghans wanted to see leave as soon as possible.
In the end, Americans tired of the war, but the Afghans - who had paid a greater price - were more tired than we were. They just wanted it to stop.
The corruption and the incompetence of successive Afghan governments did not help, and neither did some 70,000 civilian casualties.
The Biden administration's report was a bare bones recitation of the situation as it existed on Jan. 20, 2021, the measures it took, and what worked and what didn't. Congress will investigate - as much for political fodder as for trying to glean lessons - and, it is hoped, the Congress will soon do right by the Afghans who served along side American personnel.
However, even as it all fades from Americans' memories, historians will stay busy for decades, rushing to record the thoughts and memories of those who lived it all before they pass from the scene. That's where the real lessons will be found.
• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86.