Taking the Gourley challenge (II): We lost in A’stan because we had the wrong goal
America should have aimed at restoring Afghan Good Enough rather than transforming Afghanistan into something that almost no Afghans wanted.
By ‘Kriegsakademie’
Best Defense guest respondent
By ‘Kriegsakademie’
Best Defense guest respondent
We framed our Afghan strategy and tactics around the wrong objective. America sought transformation of Afghanistan when we should have sought restoration.
I was an active part of the policy debate at the time and I was, at the time, an old Afghan hand who had lived and worked with the Afghanistan of (once) Prime Minister and (later) dictator Mohammed Daoud Khan.
Daoud oversaw a level of Afghan governance that could best be characterized as low-level equilibrium. Enough justice, but not a lot. A minimum of basic services, but not a lot. A small military, but not too large. Most things handled locally and tribally, but the Hobbesian minimum handled by Kabul.
Fifty-two percent of the government civil servants under Daoud were female. Fifty five percent of students at Kabul university were female. Afghans set gender standards that Afghans could accept.
Daoud’s Afghanistan functioned at a level that American soldiers years later came to call “Afghan-Good-Enough.”
Our very productive first six months in Afghanistan should have segued into a longer-term strategy and programs aimed at restoring Afghan Good Enough rather than transforming Afghanistan into something that almost no Afghans wanted.
The great virtue of restoration as an end-point is that we know for a fact that it is potentially sustainable.
‘Kriegsakademie’ is known to Tom. He knows his stuff.
James A. Cudney/Wikimedia Commons
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