Taking the Gourley challenge: I’ll tell you in one word why we lost in Afghanistan

By Thomas Donnelly
Best Defense guest columnist

That one word: Pakistan.

OK, so maybe that’s an answer that too heavily weighs clarity over complexity, and passes the buck from American hands to someone else’s, but the problems posed by Pakistan have been around since before the creation of the country and have led to other American “defeats” as well.

By providing sanctuary and support to Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and other al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, Pakistan both had a large hand in creating the conditions that led to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and ensured that the very quick and successful initial campaign that came afterward didn’t have a more lasting effect. While it took some time for the Taliban to recover and the AQ “core” has never recovered to become the organization it was on 9/11, their ability to find a home and allies in Pakistan’s border provinces has been the framework for their survival.

The “ungovernability” of these regions is likewise a proposition that lies at the core of the Pakistani state, along with military rule (overt or indirect as circumstances warrant), the primacy of the Punjab, and the ideology of “Islam” as a politically legitimating force. And these are only a few of the factors that have made Pakistan’s history a study in slow-motion state collapse and violence — who can say “East Pakistan?”

Moreover, Pakistan posed an insoluble conundrum for American policy and strategy for decades prior to 9/11 or the invasion of Afghanistan — a classic can’t-live-with-‘em-can’t-live-without-‘em riddle. This, in turn, has made for some of the most hubristic and myopic decision-making in American history. One need only recall Richard Armitage blowing into Lahore to read Pervez Musharraf the riot act after 9/11, or the last, sad-sack days of Mike Mullen’s tenure as JCS chairman, when he began to face up to the many betrayals of by Ashfaq Kayani, or, perhaps most egregious of all, the near homoerotic passages about Musharraf in Gen. Tommy Franks’ autobiography. In sum, there is a long history of big-wig Americans going goo-goo for a guy in a Sam Brown belt.

“Pakistan” is also as good a one-word answer as there is to describe what we’re losing by our withdrawal from Afghanistan. There has been a resolute — even a deepening — “pointillism” to American strategy-making since 9/11. A global power that can’t connect dots either within a theater or across theaters is asking for trouble.

It’s said that recognizing patterns that aren’t really there — apophenia — can be a symptom of combat stress. But the United States suffers from, in regard to Pakistan, a kind of trauma that comes from avoiding a pattern of behavior that’s hard to miss. We’ve made a lot of mistakes in Afghanistan, but repeated our many mistakes in Pakistan many times.

Thomas Donnelly directs the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Noorullah Shirzada/AFP/Getty Images