The most important lesson to be drawn from the experience of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan on this first anniversary of America’s messy withdrawal is to avoid the hubris and ignorance that kept us engaged there for as long as we were. I do not question the original decision by President George W. Bush to hit back at the Taliban after 9/11 for sheltering Al Qaeda. I do not question the long war we have been pursuing against terrorists, wherever they are. I do, however, question the strategic misconception that we can, and should try, to revamp the politics and society of countries that our leaders barely understand.
The 20-year U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan was a significant strategic failure. While the Taliban was driven from power temporarily and Al Qaeda lost leaders and fighters in U.S. counterterrorism operations, neither of these malign forces has disappeared. The Taliban resumed their assault on basic freedoms and rights within the country, especially among women and girls. Even after the recent killing by drone of Ayman Al-Zawahiri in Kabul, Al Qaeda offshoots remain a potent threat against soft targets worldwide.
It is not as though Afghanistan in 2001 was the ideal laboratory for regime change and societal transformation. Quite the opposite. During the 1980s, we watched the Soviets bleed in Afghanistan and had contributed to their defeat by aligning with forces that, in some cases, would later turn against us. Dealing a defeat to our Cold War enemy seemed appropriate at the time. It would also have been useful to understand the underlying factors that led to the Soviet failure.
This general lack of understanding around the limits of what a superpower can accomplish accounts for the significant foreign policy and security failures of the Bush administration. This includes creating the conditions for a long-term effort to reshape the politics of Afghanistan and Iraq and believing that democratic culture and practice could be helicoptered in by U.S. forces.
Three lessons particularly stand out. First, our leaders must avoid becoming persuaded by their own rhetoric and wishful thinking, aided and abetted by local figures with their own agendas. As relieved as many in Afghanistan and Iraq may have been to see their cruel leaders depart, there was always little enthusiasm for an extended U.S. occupation. There is no such thing as a benign occupation, and we proved it in both countries.
Second, in view of the extended history of our own democratic experience, how can we expect others to make this transition in short years or even decades? Even after 200 years of practice, we are experiencing deep rifts and challenges to the very essence of our own democratic culture. We still tend to see the rest of the world through the prism of our own experience — and even then, that prism is often an idealized version of a problematic reality. We need to drop democratic governance from our list of exportable commodities.
A far better alternative is to learn about the societies in which we have a national interest and to invest in indigenous efforts at reform. The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, where I teach about diplomacy and protracted conflicts, launched the Afghanistan Policy Lab under the leadership of Dean Amaney Jamal for such a purpose. Led by Ambassador Adela Raz, the lab provides Afghan civil society activists and academics an opportunity to devise homemade solutions to their country’s problems.
Third, we need to recall the lessons that George Kennan, the father of containment, taught us about how the United States is perceived. No one questions our military might or economic strength, but these do not assure respect. Rather, we are measured globally by how well we live up to our values and how vibrant our institutions are in promoting equality and safeguarding rights.
The past year has not been kind to the Afghan people. Whatever gains they made during the extended U.S. presence — in girls’ education, in the beginning of democratic practices — have largely evaporated. These failures are not attributable to the United States or to the U.S. withdrawal. Whether we stayed another year or five would have made little long-term difference in the deeply rooted cultural norms and practices of Afghanistan.
We withdrew because it was the right decision to end an agonizing two decades of military deployment. Today, we must look back at this experience not to assess blame or wield the withdrawal as a partisan political stick, but rather to draw the right lessons, so as not to repeat this experience in the future. We also need to think about healing our own society and our own democracy before we undertake an effort to heal others.
Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Israel, is a professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.