After America allowed Afghanistan to fall to the Taliban, we need a post-action review to learn lessons. Is a broader critique appropriate? Let's check the "definitions" section.
America loses wars since after World War II?
Clausewitz tells us to measure society’s strength by whether we achieve victory on the battlefield. Victory entails not just destroying the enemy’s fighting capability or claiming his territory, but achieving certain political objectives. American politicians have shown a willingness to end wars without achieving their objectives. In other words, they have shown a willingness to lose.
Precedent was set with the 1953 ceasefire in Korea and upheld when America withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. It remains unclear whether politicians intended to lose those wars (and others) or merely accepted that the price of victory had become too high, that victory was no longer worth the time or effort required....
No one blames the troops for our failures in Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan. Rather, it is “the political leaders who have forgotten that victory matters,” historian and Clausewitz scholar Donald Stoker told me recently over the phone. And since the politicians do not believe that victory matters, our troops have found themselves trapped in endless wars that lead to defeat or stalemate, a doom loop of poor planning-leads-to-poor results, where the pursuit of war itself becomes more important than defeat or victory.
What of these three American defeats that prove our failure to think victory matters?
I certainly do think our leadership thinks victory has many substitutes. That's a problem. So I want to agree with Stoker. But I think he goes too far after recognizing Afghanistan as a defeat.
I looked at the issue broadly not so long ago. What I said about those three wars that it was alleged America started and lost seems relevant to the latest charge:
Korea: we did not start it, and we and the UN-authorized alliance stopped the North Korean invasion, counter-attacked north, and then coped with Chinese intervention. Today South Korea is a prosperous and powerful ally. Victory.
The Korean War judgment depends on when you judge it, no? Fifty years ago we propped up an authoritarian South Korean government with a poor economy. What was our victory, then? Just a marginal one, at best. Now? Clear victory.
Vietnam: We did not start it, and we and our allies eventually defeated the Viet Cong insurgents, leaving the fight to North Vietnamese regulars and irregulars infiltrated south to AstroTurf an insurgency. South Vietnam fell not to insurgents but to a conventional North Vietnamese invasion after we withdrew and after our Congress cut off support sufficient to sustain the South Vietnamese military we left South Vietnam with to hold. Was that really a defeat by our military? I count that as a military victory.
Further, that narrow military victory judgment that concedes a defeat because we let South Vietnam fall might not even be relevant, depending on whether the Vietnam War was a war in isolation or a campaign in the Cold War. We won the Cold War. Was the duration of the Vietnam campaign enough to win the broader war, with the campaign outcome now clearly irrelevant (to America, although not to South Vietnam)?
The Afghanistan War: We did not start that. Recall 9/11, if you will. We smashed the Taliban regime and while we have not crushed the Taliban for a number of reasons, the enemy has not managed to defeat our allies and Afghanistan is not a sanctuary for terrorists who plot against us. At worst it is an incomplete victory.
Afghanistan turned into a defeat since I wrote that. But I'll admit that maybe if you consider Afghanistan a campaign in the War on Terror rather than a war in isolation, that in a decade or two our judgment may look different. Maybe we find the campaign was critical to breaking the back of jihadi appeal and recruitment. Maybe we'll find that our two decades in Afghanistan changed its society enough to reject and defeat the Taliban over time--and provide a more enduring victory for our sacrifice there. The passage of time changes perspectives. But for now Afghanistan feels like defeat. And it could become a bigger defeat if jihadis reconstitute inside Afghanistan with the support of the Taliban government.
Iraq is interesting. The author calls it a victory based on our objectives. I'm on board that. I reject the complaint that destroying Saddam gave Iran more influence. Saddam was no bulwark against Iran that we removed. If he was a strong bulwark, Saddam and his minority Sunni Arab government (15-20% of the people) wouldn't have invaded Iran in 1980, in part due to the heavy Iranian influence among Iraq's poor and oppressed Shia Arabs (60%) with the Kurds (20%) opposing the Sunni Arab government on the side. And I'll even concede that the cost of the result makes the war debatable in retrospect. But I don't really question the cost because we cannot know the cost of the alternative of not fighting the war.
There is also the issue of when you judge the outcome of the Iraq War. In 2011, it looked like victory. Obama and Biden said so. By 2014, the victory was looking like a potential defeat. A few years later after Iraq War 2.0, a victory again--with needless additional deaths. But victory.
And do you call Iraq a campaign in the War on Terror or a discreet war
on Saddam? In 1990-1991 and in 2003, it was a war against Saddam's
threat to the region. After al Qaeda invaded Iraq in 2004 to fight the West
there, the jihadis made it a campaign in the broader war. So it is
probably both. And probably a victory from both angles.
And my goodness, if World War II--which so many think was our last good and competent war--is an example of waging war through to planned political outcomes, it took a long time--heck, we might still be working through that, given Putin's Winter War of 2022--to get to that point. Let's not forget the mistakes that time has softened. Let's not air brush the chaos of post-war Europe.
Also, in my post looking broadly at the issue of winning or losing noted earlier, I looked at the record of American wars prior to Korea through the lens that judges our current wars as defeats. With our current eagerness to define our wars as defeats, many of those earlier wars would be called defeats.
Still, this advice from that initial article is sound:
If you’re not trying to win the war, how will you ever get to peace? Fighting the war becomes an end. There’s a phenomenon where the war becomes more tactical the longer it goes on, and planners and decision-makers lose sight of the strategic picture.
I just don't know if we recognize victory when we achieve it. As I quoted in this post:
A victory described in detail is indistinguishable from defeat.
In America, we describe our victories in great detail.
NOTE: Winter War of 2022 updates continue here.
