McChrystal's strategy for pacifying the Pashtuns, who are the base of support for the Taliban, relied solely on a troop surge. The campaign was conducted without the precondition of the defection of the major enemy in Afghanistan--the Pashtuns--which was the necessary component of the dual basis for our victory in Iraq.
While that Afghanistan surge was far larger than the Iraq surge, McChrystal seems to have forgotten that Iraq had a concurrent Awakening of Sunni Arabs who switched sides to go after the common al Qaeda enemy:
General McChrystal was the prime leader in the Afghanistan nation-building effort that resulted in America’s catastrophic and total withdrawal. As the commander of more than 100,000 American and NATO troops, he insisted upon a fantastical strategy. American troops would, he wrote in his memoir, “protect the people . . . from insurgent and collateral [U.S.] violence” and “from corruption and predation of the Afghans’ own government.” The “people” consisted of 8 million Pashtun tribesmen scattered in 10,000 remote villages, all hurtling headlong into the ninth century. As an embedded journalist, I found that our grunts on patrol were bewildered by what they were supposed to be accomplishing. General McChrystal, however, was unfazed by that reality. “I was asking soldiers to believe in something their ground-level experience denied them,” he wrote.
I think of nation-building as trying to make the tribal-based people a cohesive "nation" and not state building--which is necessary at some level. Providing potable water or electricity is in no way nation building.
But there was never a Pashtun Awakening in Afghanistan. The campaign in the south did not create such an awakening. I think that is the key mistake rather than attempts to build infrastructure in an effort to at least get some Pashtuns to remain passive or to back us.
I was very worried we could not get such a defection on a large scale, which would cripple our strategy:
I do worry that we can't win the hearts and minds of Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan. I worry that we assume that the people are ready to support us if only we provide security against the Taliban. What if that isn't the case?
If it is the case that the Pashtuns of southern Afghanistan are determined to resist us, then we can't win their hearts and minds. That means that restrictive rules of engagement don't win us friends but let enemies live to fight another day.
I'm not saying that we should go to a scorched Earth policy or go counter-terrorism rather than counter-insurgency. We shouldn't. It didn't work for the Soviets and we simply won't be that ruthless. I do think that there are many in the south whose hearts and minds can be won. But I thought one part of our Afghan surge strategy was to hammer the enemy resistance to convince the practical Pashtuns that there's no money and no future in fighting a US-backed government and backing the Taliban and drug lords. If we're not hammering the enemy, how do we sway the people who rather like [the Taliban and drug lords] to abandon them?
We wasted lives and money in the surges when we'd done well enough already. We clearly set goals far higher than I wanted for the surge.
And the price we paid during the surges may have been key in persuading Americans--until we had our noses rubbed in the defeat--that leaving Afghanistan and abandoning what we achieved was the right thing to do. As the author of the McChrystal piece observed:
By 2017, with only a few thousand U.S. troops in country and scant casualties, the U.S. military had imposed a sustainable stalemate: The Taliban held the countryside, and the government held the cities. However, that sensible small-footprint approach came too late. Two incompatible presidents, Trump and Biden, were stuck in the past, fixated on the gross overreach of the McChrystal strategy.
The McChrystal strategy wasn't risky. It was delusional. And while we overcame that mistake, the price we paid was too much for either Biden or Trump to set aside the past price and look ahead to the small cost of preserving what we had--an Afghanistan government that suffered large casualties while killing jihadis every day.
And here we are. How many Americans and our allies are still stranded in that jihadi Hell Hole?
UPDATE: I will say that in this light President Obama's decision to abandon the offensive in Regional Command East may have been a good--or least bad, at least--decision that avoided wasting more lives and treasure in a futile effort to pacify Pushtuns who showed no signs of wanting to be pacific. I was bitter about that abandonment of the plan but I am probably wrong to have thought that.
