Daniel Rix, Doug Livermore
The United States fought a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, resulting in the loss of 2,448 U.S. military, 3,846 U.S. contractor, and over 100,000 Afghan lives and costing trillions of dollars. Bookended by al-Qaeda’s attacks on the U.S. homeland and Afghans clinging desperately to the tires of an Air Force C-17 during the evacuation of Kabul while Marines were slaughtered at Abbey Gate, the war in Afghanistan will be remembered as one of the greatest strategic losses in American history. Worse than the collapse of the South Vietnamese government, which persisted for two years after U.S. troop withdrawals, Ashraf Ghani’s Afghan government fell even before the U.S. military frantically departed the Hamid Karzai International Airport. Even the Soviet-backed Afghan government remained in power for three years after the Red Army left, highlighting the ineptitude of U.S. conduct in this conflict. This article identifies clear strategic failures throughout this counterinsurgency that the United States must learn from and endeavor never to repeat. An inability for U.S. senior military leaders to understand them and effectively apply appropriate lessons in a future counterinsurgency or
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