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ABSTRACT
Decades of scholarship have warned against using historical analogies for policymaking. But the Taliban insurgency appears, on the surface, to confirm the usefulness of historical analogies to the British and Soviet wars in Afghanistan. I review the use of analogies for the war in Afghanistan and argue the analogies were historically unsound and strategically unhelpful. In fact, their effect on policy helped create the conditions for the very insurgency policymakers most hoped to avoid. The Taliban insurgency did not occur because of the presence of too many foreign troops and aid workers, but because there were too few.
Notes
1 Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Knopf 2014), 336, 355.
2 Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster 2002), 82.
3 George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Broadway Books 2010), 194.
4 Richard B. Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster 2012), 346.
5 Woodward, Bush at War, 182, 193.
6 Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: W.W. Norton 2009), 132.
7 Astri Suhrke, When More Is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan (New York: Columbia University Press 2011), 37.
8 Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House. (New York: Knopf Doubleday 2013), Chapter 8.
9 Richard B. Andres, Craig Wills, and Thomas E. Griffith, Jr, ‘Winning with Allies: The Strategic Value of the Afghan Model’, International Security 30/3 (2005–06), 131.
10 Milton Beardon, “Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires,” Foreign Affairs 80/6 (2001), 17–30.
11 Craig Whitlock, “National security team delivers grim appraisal of Afghanistan War,” Washington Post, 9 February 2009.
12 Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires, xxv, 324.
13 David Isby, Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires: A New History of the Borderland (New York: Pegasus 2010).
14 Woodward, Bush at War, 175.
15 James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin 2004), 54.
16 Woodward, Bush at War, 257.
17 Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Random House 2011), 96.
18 R.W. Apple, “Afghanistan as Vietnam,” New York Times, 31 October 2001.
19 Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster 2011), 250, 353.
20 Woodward, Obama’s Wars, 97.
21 Peter Baker and Elisabeth Bumiller, “Obama considers strategy shift in Afghan War,” New York Times, 23 September 2009.
22 William Inboden, ‘Statecraft, Decision-Making, and the Varieties of Historical Experience: A Taxonomy’, Journal of Strategic Studies 37/2 (2014), 13–14.
23 Andrew J. Bacevich, “Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 2009, http://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/BacevichTestimony090423a1.pdf.
24 Jeffrey Record and W. Andrew Terrill, Iraq and Vietnam: Differences, Similarities, and Insights (Carlisle PA: US Army War College 2004), 3.
25 Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1992), 10. See also Inboden, ‘Statecraft, Decision-Making, and the Varieties of Historical Experience’.
26 Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (New York: Random House 2009), 53.
27 Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1976), 217.
28 MacMillan, Dangerous Games, 95ff.
29 Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, 217.
30 Ernest R. May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press 1973), xi.
31 Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, 229, 281–82.
32 Khong, Analogies at War, 12.
33 Ibid., 13.
34 MacMillan, Dangerous Games, 16.
35 Khong, Analogies at War, 14.
36 Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, 230.
37 Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: Free Press 1986), 89.
38 Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton NJ: University Press 2010), 66.
39 Ibid., 70.
40 Isby, Afghanistan, 11, 395.
41 Joseph J. Collins, Understanding War in Afghanistan (Washington: National Defense University Press 2014), 32.
42 Tarzi’s grandson denied that Tarzi coined the phrase in an email to me. Bearden confirmed in an email to me that he was not knowingly following an older tradition of calling Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires,” and that, for all he knew, he invented it: “I think I just came up with the name for my piece for Foreign Affairs in 2001.”
43 Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002), 389.
44 Ibid., 395.
45 Ibid., 410–13.
46 Ibid., 442–43.
47 Record and Terrill, Iraq and Vietnam, 157.
48 In 2005 four Navy SEALs were overrun and three killed in an incident made famous by the book Lone Survivor, by Marcus Luttrell, and the 2013 film of the same name.
49 James F. Dobbins, ‘America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq’, Survival 45/4 (2003), 87–110.
50 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin 2004), 21–170.
51 John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with A Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2005); Brian Christopher Darling, ‘Counterinsurgency in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq: A Critical Analysis’, doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University-Camden Graduate School, 2014. This also seems to be the animating purpose behind General David Petraeus’ (US Department of the Army and US Marine Corps) 2006 Field Manual No. 3-24: Counterinsurgency (Washington: 2006).
52 MacMillan, Dangerous Games,113ff.
53 Bush, Decision Points, 200.
54 Record and Terrill, Iraq and Vietnam, vii.
55 Daniel Kaufman and Aart Kraay, “Worldwide Governance Indicators,” World Bank, 2015, http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#home.
56 David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009).
57 Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books 2014).
58 Stephenm Biddle, ‘Afghanistan’s Legacy: Emerging Lessons of an Ongoing War’, Washington Quarterly 37/2 (2014), 75–76.
59 Jeffrey Record, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis MD: Naval Institute Press 2014), 130.
60 Ibid., 146.
61 James Dobbins, Seth Jones, Keith Crane, Andrew Rathmell, Brett Steele, Richard Teltschik, and Anga Timilsina, The UN’s Role in Nation-Building: From the Congo to Iraq (Santa Monica CA: Rand Corporation 2001).
62 Tim Kane, “Global US Troop Deployment, 1950–2005,” Heritage Foundation, 2006, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2006/05/global-us-troop-deployment-1950-2005.
63 Dov Zakheim, A Vulcan’s Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (Washington: Brookings Institution Press 2011), 181.
64 Peter Baker and Helen Cooper, “All Afghan war options by Obama aids said to call for more troops,” New York Times, 7 November 2009.
65 Inboden, ‘Statecraft, Decision-Making, and the Varieties of Historical Experience’.
66 Suhrke, When More Is Less, 16, 58, 229.
67 For statistics on the incidence of violence and fatalities in Afghanistan, see Government Accountability Office, “Afghanistan’s Security Environment,” 2009; Uppsala Conflict Data Program. UCDP Conflict Encyclopedia (Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University 2015). www.ucdp.uu.se/database; United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), “Reports on the Protection of Civilians,” http://unama.unmissions.org/Default.aspx?tabid=13941&language=en-US; Brookings Institution, “Afghanistan Index,” http://www.brookings.edu/about/programs/foreign-policy/afghanistan-index. It is notable that the UN and Brookings do not even record numbers prior to 2007.
68 Department of Defense, Progress toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan (Washington: 2014).
69 Theo Farrell and Antonio Giustozzi, ‘The Taliban at War: Inside the Helmand Insurgency, 2004–2012’, International Affairs 89/4 (2013), 867.
70 Craig Charney, Radhika Nanda, and Nicole Yakatan, Survey of the Afghan Electorate (Washington: Asia Foundation 2004), 8ff.
71 Paul D. Miller, ‘Finish the Job – How the War in Afghanistan Can Be Won’, Foreign Affairs 90 (May/June 2011), 52ff.
72 US Department of the Army and US Marine Corps, Field Manual No. 3-24 .
73 Milan Vaishnav, Afghanistan: The Chimera of the “Light Footprint” (Washington: Center for Strategic and International Studies 2004), 244–62.
74 Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: W.W. Norton 2009), 7–40.
75 Gates, Duty, 355–56.
76 Frederick W. Kagan, Max Boot, and Kimberly Kagan, “Yes, we can: in the ‘graveyard of empires,’ we are fighting a war we can win,” Weekly Standard, 23 March 2009.
77 Eliot A. Cohen, ‘The Historical Mind and Military Strategy’, Orbis 49/4 (2005), 582. Cohen is a brilliant historian, but there is no small irony in a historian making an error of historical fact in an argument about the importance of historical mindedness.
78 Record and Terrill, Iraq and Vietnam, 156.
79 Cohen, “The Historical Mind and Military Strategy,” 579, 581.
80 Ernest R. May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press 1973).
81 Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, Appendix A.
82 Francis J. Gavin, ‘History and Policy’, International Journal 63/1 (2007), 162–77.
83 Philip E. Tetlock, ‘Good Judgment in International Politics: Three Psychological Perspectives’, Political Psychology 13/3 (1992), 517–39.
84 Cohen, “The Historical Mind and Military Strategy,” 579.
85 MacMillan, Dangerous Games, 141.
86 Cohen, “The Historical Mind and Military Strategy,” 583.
87 May, “Lessons” of the Past, 179.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Paul D. Miller
Paul D. Miller is the Associate Director of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. He previously served as director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council staff.
