The U.S. Failure in Afghanistan Is Not Pakistan’s Fault

Anatol Lieven Thursday, Oct. 14, 2021

The anger directed by Americans at Pakistan in the wake of the disorderly end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan is understandable. After all, Pakistan really did give shelter to the Afghan Taliban, something that played a vital role in the Taliban’s eventual victory. However, the reaction in Washington is also a way of avoiding an honest analysis of the comprehensive failures of U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Moreover, it misses key aspects of what motivated Pakistan’s behavior, with very important implications for how the United States itself understands and acts in the world.

To begin with, Islamabad’s support for the Afghan Taliban was not just a product of the Pakistani military’s strategic approach to the conflict in Afghanistan. It also reflected the opinion of a large majority of people in northern Pakistan, and among the Pashtun minority in particular. This was combined with a hostility to the U.S. that was among the highest anywhere in the world. The sympathy Pakistanis felt for the Taliban had its roots in the same dynamics that motivated their support for the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. It can also be seen in the context of the historical memory of Afghan resistance to the British Empire in the 19th century. 

But the U.S. refused to learn from the experience of other countries or to draw any parallels between their past roles and that of the U.S. today. When I and other observers suggested to U.S. officials in the early years of the war that they might study the Soviet failure in Afghanistan, they rejected the idea dismissively. That stubborn refusal befuddled the entire U.S. effort in Afghanistan.

As for official Pakistani policy toward the Taliban, it was largely driven by fear of India’s role in Afghanistan, as has been widely noted. But it was also shaped by concerns that the U.S. and the West would leave Afghanistan without creating a successful Afghan state, and that Pakistan, as well as Afghanistan’s other neighbors, would be left to live with the resulting mess. This is what had happened in the 1990s, and Islamabad—rightly, it turned out—feared it would happen again. 

Both a practical and an ethical issue are involved here. In the end, because of its geographic location, the U.S. faces no real existential, territorial threats. All of its foreign military operations are therefore to a greater or lesser degree a matter of choice. The countries located in regions where the U.S. conducts military operations have no such choice. They cannot pack up and go home. 

Every U.S. intervention must therefore be shaped with the wishes of regional countries firmly in mind, while recognizing that, from a practical point of view, the hostility of regional powers to Washington’s objectives will almost certainly doom any counterinsurgency effort to defeat. By the end of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan, its wider policies had meant that this presence was opposed by all Afghanistan’s most important neighbors. Pakistan was infuriated by U.S. drone strikes and what it regarded as bullying, and it feared possible U.S. support for an increased Indian presence in Afghanistan. Iran feared that Washington would use Afghanistan to attack Iran, and Tehran supported the Taliban in order to give itself the ability to strike back in the event such an attack took place. Growing hostility between the U.S. on one hand and Russia and China on the other meant that these countries opposed the presence of U.S. bases in their vicinity.

No counterinsurgency can succeed where the entire region is hostile to it. This is particularly true when neighboring countries provide safe haven to the insurgents. In such cases, great powers fighting counterinsurgencies often consider invading the neighboring countries to eliminate these safe havens. But they almost always reject the option—rightly—on the grounds that far from winning the war, doing so would only vastly expand it. .

The same logic holds true with regard to the argument made repeatedly over the years by many U.S. commentators that Washington should have “done something” about Islamabad’s behavior. What exactly the U.S. should have done, however, is never explicitly described. Invading Pakistan would have only succeeded in colossally widening the scope of the war. 

As for U.S. economic pressure on Pakistan, it was also constrained by a dilemma or ambiguity at the core of U.S. strategy in the region. On one hand, the U.S. wished to defeat or at least contain the Afghan Taliban, though as time went on this was chiefly driven by the desire to maintain U.S. “credibility.” On the other hand, Washington was still concerned with the original purpose of the invasion of Afghanistan, namely to counter Islamist terrorism. 

Any economic pressure sufficient to change its behavior would also have risked the collapse of a state that possesses more than five times Afghanistan’s population, nuclear weapons, and an army of half a million soldiers. That in turn would have created a terrorist threat that would have dwarfed Afghanistan and Syria combined. As a result, U.S. economic pressure on Pakistan was limited to the withholding of U.S. aid, which China soon replaced on a much larger scale. 

Ultimately, the U.S. needed three things from Pakistan: a crackdown on the Afghan Taliban, land routes to supply U.S. forces in Afghanistan and cooperation against international terrorism. Washington never got the first, but it did get the second and most of the third. Pakistan failed to hunt down Osama bin Laden, but it did capture and hand over to the U.S. numerous other al-Qaida leaders and operatives, and cooperated quietly with the CIA and U.K. intelligence to identify plots by Pakistanis against the American and British homelands. 

That illustrates a fundamental lesson of international affairs that the U.S. establishment would do well to study. The U.S. can rarely get everything it wants. It will often have to make compromises and settle for an uncomfortable but tolerable outcome. Living with Saddam Hussein was uncomfortable for America. Invading Iraq to get rid of him led to disaster. Losing in Afghanistan has been acutely uncomfortable for America. Destroying Pakistan for the sake of an illusory Afghan victory would have led to catastrophe on an almost unimaginable scale.

Finally, what has happened in Afghanistan demonstrates the truth of the principle that, in practice, geopolitical and military power is local and relative, not universal and absolute. The outcome of any contest between two countries will depend on the power that one of them is willing and able to bring to bear in a particular place or on a particular issue, relative to the power that another is willing and able to employ to oppose it.

Those decisions, in turn, will be determined by the location of the countries concerned and whether the issue involved is a vital or only a secondary interest for them. By those standards, just as Russia is a great power in eastern Ukraine and the U.S. is not, so Pakistan is a great power in eastern Afghanistan—and the U.S. is not. The U.S. does not have the physical power to dominate everywhere. Equally important, most Americans do not feel that most issues around the world are of vital concern to the United States. This inevitably limits the commitments and sacrifices they are prepared to make in these cases, especially over the long term. 

The lessons from Afghanistan are a case study of these principles. Future U.S. strategy should be shaped with them firmly in mind.