A Career Trying to Help Get Afghanistan Right. How Did We Get It So Wrong?
By Andy Keiser, NSI Fellow
After failing to “connect the dots” as the 9/11 Commission concluded, the Intelligence Community was hellbent on avoiding a repeat of the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. They took it very personally, and their persistence, dedication, and heroism led al-Qaida to be decimated.
On 9/11, I was a young staffer for former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (MI-8). As a former FBI agent and Army officer, he was an early leader on national security issues in D.C. For the 13 years that followed from our little perch in Congress, security-minded offices like ours worked to improve intelligence collection and sharing via enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act. We worked to reform the Intelligence Community and created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is charged with improving intelligence sharing and tearing down stovepipes. We worked to ensure the United States military had every resource it could possibly need to be successful in its mission to destroy our enemies and prevent any future attack. Domestically, Congress created the cobbled-together Department of Homeland Security in an attempt to shore up domestic defenses.
Along the way, there was so much we got right with our response to the terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan globally. The military and intelligence operation was extraordinary: a relatively small contingent of U.S. intelligence and special operations personnel teamed up with the Northern Alliance — a Taliban resistance movement in the Panjshir Valley — and backed by heavy American airpower, took control of Afghanistan and devastated Taliban leadership in a matter of months with relatively few American casualties. Women in Afghanistan were finally allowed to be part of society; listening to music, exercising your religion, and teaching girls how to read were no longer against the law. Intelligence-based operations killed innumerable al-Qaida, Taliban, and other high-value terrorist leaders. The infrastructure put in place to execute on these missions is enduring though it requires intelligence collection platforms to be successful.
Yet, we certainly got things wrong in Afghanistan as well. We insisted on a strong central government, which Kabul has had not had for millennia; we allowed mass corruption and the drug trade to flourish on our watch; we never fundamentally addressed the Taliban safe-haven in bordering Pakistan; and, most importantly, in my view, we failed to communicate the importance of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan to preventing the country from again becoming a terrorist safe-haven. That last failure allowed it to be politicized by multiple administrations, which led to the despicable and incompetent withdrawal of the U.S. military and diplomatic presence in Afghanistan ahead of an arbitrary and unnecessary deadline of August 31.
The United States now finds itself essentially back where we started in 2001 — likely to oppose the Taliban rule, while offering overt or covert support for whatever remains of the Northern Alliance. In my view, a sacrifice of 2,500 U.S. forces was not too big a price to pay to keep a lid on the boiling pot that has just exploded over.
Afghanistan is personal for so many who sacrificed so much for so long. They now feel shame for how we left, guilt for not doing more, and fear for what’s next, including the very real possibility that in the near future, more Americans will be killed. As it grows confident in its power, the new Taliban looks an awfully lot like the old Taliban.
It’s hard to see how this surrender of Afghanistan to our sworn enemies is anything but a foreign policy calamity for the United States and one that won’t end with the departure of the last American C-17 from Kabul.
Andy Keiser is a Fellow at the National Security Institute at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and previously served among other positions, as a Senior Advisor to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Mr. Keiser also conducts cybersecurity consulting and federal lobbying for several companies, including in the telecommunications and technology sectors.
