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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After The Taliban (New York: Penguin Press 2008); Seth G. Jones, Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: W.W. Norton 2009); Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2012); Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, The Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes (New York, Henry Holt 2014).
2 Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, ed. & trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1976).
3 Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: Free Press 1990).
4 For example, Abdul Salam Zaeef, My Life with the Taliban (New York: Columbia University Press 2010), 142–43.
5 Robert Grenier, 88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (New York: Simon & Schuster 2015); Amb. James F. Dobbins, After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: Potomac Books 2008), 163–65.
6 Dobbins, After the Taliban, 16–17.
7 Johnathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan (eds), British Generals in Blair’s Wars (Farnham, UK: Ashgate 2013), 337.
8 Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York: Penguin Press 2018); also, Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2014).
9 Military Misfortunes, 26.
10 Arthur Wellesley, The Speeches of the Duke of Wellington in Parliament, Vol. II (London: J. Murray 1854), 259; Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Young British Soldier’, Scots Observer, 28 June 1890.
11 Lt Gen. G.N. Molesworth, Afghanistan 1919: An Account of Operations in the Third Afghan War (New York: Asia Publishing House 1962).
12 Col. Sir Robert Warburton, Eighteen Years in The Khyber 1879 to 1898 (London: J. Murray 1900).
13 Bailey, Iron and Hew Strachan, British Generals in Blair’s Wars; also Christopher Elliot, High Command: British Military Leadership in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016).
14 Jack Fairweather, The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan (New York: Basic Books 2014), 88–9.
15 Clausewitz, On War, p. 80; Fred C. Iklé, Every War Must End (New York: Columbia University Press 1991).
16 David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009), xiv, 34–8.
17 Fairweather, The Good War, 82; Gall, The Wrong War, 33; Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living.
18 FM 3–24, The U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2007).
19 Anthony King, ‘Operation Moshtarak: Counter-insurgency command in Kandahar 2009–10’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 16 October 2019, https://doi.10.1080/01402390.2019.1672160.
20 Gen. Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Penguin Books 2005), 5–6, 20–8, 409–15.
21 T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (London: Johnathon Cape 1935); United States Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office 1940).
22 Leo Docherty, Desert of Death: A Soldier’s Journey from Iraq to Afghanistan (London: Faber & Faber 2007); Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics (London: Hurst & Company 2012). (Simpson read History at Oxford with Professor Sir Hew Strachan.)
23 Lt Col John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002).
24 Robert W. Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S.-GVN Performance (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 1972).
25 Hew Strachan, The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2013), 87.
26 David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare (New York: Praeger 1964), ix.
27 Bailey, Iron, and Strachan, British Generals in Blair’s Wars, 225–32, 339–40.
28 For example, Chandrasekaran, Little America, 184–8.
29 Carter Malkasian, War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier (London: Hurst 2013), xiii; Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley: University of California Press 1972).
30 Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1987).
31 Dobbins, After the Taliban, 161–4.
32 Fairweather, The Good War, 58–60.
33 Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers (New York: Public Affairs 2011), 343.
34 Hew Strachan, ‘Learning Lessons from Afghanistan: Two Imperatives’, Parameters, 49:3, Autumn 2019, 5–10.
35 Robert Johnson, The Afghan Way of War: How and Why They Fight (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012); Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2010).
36 Christopher D. Kolenda, ‘Slow failure: Understanding America’s quagmire in Afghanistan,’ Journal of Strategic Studies, 42/7, pp. 992–1014.
37 T. E. Lawrence, ‘Twenty-seven Articles’, Arab Bulletin, 20 August 1917.
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Todd Greentree
Todd Greentree is a member of the Oxford University Changing Character of War Centre. A former U.S. Foreign Service Officer with experience in five wars, he served in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2012 as political advisor to Task Force Warrior and 5/2 Stryker Brigade, and was director of the Strategic Initiatives Group with 10th Mountain Division in Regional Command – South. He has taught Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College, was a visiting scholar in the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of International Studies, and teaches with the Global and National Security Program at the University of New Mexico. His article ‘Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: US Performance and the Institutional Dimension of Strategy in Afghanistan,’ appeared in the June 2013 issue of this journal