U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan: The 'best' & the 'brightest' strike again By James Bruno
I just finished plowing through the Washington Post’s outstanding compilation of documents and interviews they call “The Afghanistan Papers.” Much of it draws from insightful interviews with hundreds of current and former officials done by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a kind of confessional where policy-makers of conscience could repent and bare their souls - though there is a large amount of spin and blame-gaming as well.
As national retrospection into our two-decade-long Afghanistan debacle (actually longer than that; and, full disclosure, I played a small part early on) begins, it is the special task of historians to sort out who did what, when and why so that we may draw lessons learned as we march nimbly on toward potential future quagmires and, one hopes, avoid them.
Journalist David Halberstam did this for us with the Vietnam War (also full disclosure: I served there as well, though post-war). His The Best and the Brightest, published in 1972, remains the seminal opus explaining how we stumbled into our Southeast Asia morass, and those who got us there.
I met Halberstam twice - first as a student at the Columbia Journalism School and twenty-five years later when serving as a diplomat at the newly established U.S. embassy in Hanoi. At our first encounter, I asked him, what stood out most in his mind about the men who were the policy architects on Vietnam - McNamara, Acheson, Rusk, Bundy, Rostow, et al.
He repeated what he had written in the media about his book, “They had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look and learn from the past.”
And boom! Here we are again, having learned nothing from our past.
During our second meeting, in Hanoi, over dinner, I repeated my question, asking if he had any further reflections to add since his book was published. He replied that what drove him to sacrifice five years of his life researching and writing it was to answer a question that gnawed at him during his years of covering the war: “Why men who were regarded as the smartest and most talented to serve in government ended up being architects of the nation’s worst tragedy since the Civil War.” How could such intelligent and successful men, he asked, design “brilliant policies that defied common sense?”
And he held special animus for Robert McNamara: “I hate that man. I hate that man. I hate that man,” he said with eyes shut and fists clenched. He went on to explain that his hatred of the former defense secretary was due to the tens of thousands of lives needlessly lost over what amounted to official lies and the man’s arrogance.
Photo from wikipedia
So, are there people we need to hate for getting us into Afghanistan? Or, more appropriately, whom do we hold accountable? Who are the “whiz kids,” as Halberstam called them, responsible for our Afghanistan debacle, the Acheson’s, McNamara’s, Rostow’s and Bundy’s? Kissinger’s? Who, in the words of writer Victor Navasky, led us to where the political brink ends and the moral morass begins? After hours of scouring the documentation and interviews, I don’t clearly find any outright villains. At this point, with so many players, it’s rather a blur.
First, the process was mainly one of mission creep over concrete policy goals. SIGAR describes U.S. Afghanistan policy over the past two decades as one of pursuing “impractical or conceptually incoherent goals.”
“We were trying to get a single coherent long-term approach — a proper strategy — but instead we got a lot of tactics,” one official told government interviewers. “There was no coherent long-term strategy.”
“Tactics without strategy is a good way to fail,” said a German official.
Even the boots-on-the-ground people were unclear as to their overall mission. One Special Ops member told SIGAR, “We were given no documents that instructed us how to do our job. We were given the commander’s vague strategic priorities but [that] generally amounted to ‘go do good things.’ Both at the strategic and operational level, doing it right took a back seat to doing it fast.”
George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld distilled it accordingly: “The only thing you can do is to bomb them and try to kill them. And that’s what we did, and it worked. They’re gone.”
Well, they weren’t gone. An actual policy formulation needed to be made. So, President Obama’s team came up with this policy platypus:
Reduce the capability and will of the insurgency, support the growth in capacity and capability of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and facilitate improvements in governance and socio-economic development, in order to provide a secure environment for sustainable stability that is observable to the population.
Earlier, the president repeatedly declared the goal was to “disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al-Qaeda.” But, since al-Qaeda had all but disappeared from Afghanistan, it was excised from official statements and replaced with “Taliban.”
Who’s on first? Mission creep.
So, again, where does the buck pass just short of reaching presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden? Who were the Best and the Brightest on Afghanistan? In no particular order nor completion :
Donald Rumsfeld: Princeton ‘54; Naval aviator; congressman; U.S. ambassador to the UN; White House chief of staff; defense secretary.
Robert Gates: William & Mary and Georgetown Law; deputy national security advisor; CIA director; president Texas A&M; defense secretary.
Hillary Clinton: Wellesley & Yale Law; FLOTUS; senator from NY; Secretary of State.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal: son of an Army general, and a West Point graduate, McChrystal rose fast in the Special Forces ranks. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates described McChrystal as “perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I ever met.”
Richard Holbrooke: Brown U; Foreign Service officer; ambassador to Germany and the UN; Balkan envoy; special rep for Afghanistan & Pakistan.
And on it goes - Ivy League, military academies, prestigious offices. Our “whiz kids” of the 2000s. Were Halberstam alive today, he would be nodding his head, telling us, “I told you so,” and outlining his next book on Vietnam 2.0, i.e. the United States in Afghanistan.
Word Trade Center attack 9/11 (Photo from FBI)
As the historians spend years scrutinizing the needed who did what, the interplay between personalities and policies, and who is most to blame — as we continue our disorderly bug-out of Kabul — we can start with identifying the moral error of our ways.
First, it strikes this writer (and early veteran of Afghan policy), that bureaucratic considerations triumphed over ideological or even common-sense ones. Second, as David Ignatius aptly notes, policymakers and military commanders “let occasional tactical successes in a counterterrorism mission become a proxy for a strategy that never was.” Shifting mission creep with no coherent overriding strategy.
“Why do we find it so hard to accept this elementary lesson of history, that some wars are so deeply immoral that they must be lost?” asked historian Henry Steele Commager shortly after our Vietnam debacle.
Halberstam said that his favorite passage in The Best and the Brightest was when LBJ raved to Sam Rayburn about all the president’s brilliant men. “You may be right, and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” Rayburn replied, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”
Halberstam treasured that story because it highlighted the weakness of the Kennedy Camelot team: “The difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience,” he wrote.
For some of JFK’s best and brightest, he added, wisdom came “after Vietnam.”
I believe we will find the same verities regarding Afghanistan in due course.
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.
James Bruno (@JamesLBruno) served as a diplomat with the U.S. State Department for 23 years and is currently a member of the Diplomatic Readiness Reserve. An author and journalist, Bruno has been featured on CNN, NBC’s Today Show, Fox News, Sirius XM Radio, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Huffington Post, and other national and international media.
