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About two weeks after America\u2019s final withdrawal from Kabul, Al-Qaeda issued an open letter praising \u201cthe Almighty, the Omnipotent,\u201d the one who \u201cbroke America\u2019s back\u201d in Afghanistan \u201cthe graveyard of empires.\u201d Al-Qaeda\u2019s boast transformed a self-fulfilling prophecy into the Taliban\u2019s triumphant honorific, according to Choosing Defeat<\/em><\/a>, a new book by Paul D. Miller, Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University. A former Army intelligence officer and CIA analyst, Miller was on the ground at Bagram in 2002, just three years after graduating college; he eventually rose to serve as NSC Director for Afghanistan from 2007-2009. In his telling, the phrase \u201cgraveyard of empires\u201d haunted U.S. policymaking for twenty years. Every wartime president invoked it, as did American generals, senior civilians, defense intellectuals, and journalists. There\u2019s only one problem: Afghanistan never was known as the graveyard of empires\u2014not until Milt Bearden penned an article in 2001. When asked, Bearden\u00a0said he\u00a0\u201cjust came up with the name for\u00a0[his]\u00a0piece for Foreign Affairs<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n For Miller, American leaders\u2019 perennial incantation of one analyst\u2019s catchy headline typifies a dangerous national security culture in which ahistorical bromides and short-term political calculation ensure Americans learn nothing from their recent humiliation. The phrase has its counterpart in the \u201cshallow, hot-take analysis\u201d that led the Washington Post\u2019s<\/em> 2018 Afghanistan Papers <\/em>to condemn \u201cnation building\u201d as a doomed attempt \u201cat imposing democracy on an ancient, tribal society.\u201d In its combination of \u201covert racism\u201d and \u201cappalling ignorance,\u201d Miller argues, the Post <\/em>blames a winning strategy \u2013 nation building \u2013 rather than the bureaucratic culture that failed to implement it. Choosing Defeat<\/em> documents the failures of that culture in meticulous, yet impassioned detail, but Miller refuses to follow the implications of his own devastating analysis to their evident conclusion. And thus, getting most things right, his central argument goes wrong.<\/p>\n Part research monograph, part memoir, Choosing Defeat <\/em>examines twenty years of misjudgment, bureaucratic ineptitude, and moral weakness, hoping to prove that American policymakers chose defeat by refusing the very kind of long-term nation-building effort, which post-war analyses now scapegoat as doomed from the start. \u201cSimply put, there was no twenty-year nation-building campaign in Afghanistan,\u201d Miller insists. Rather than implement a coherent nation-building effort that could have secured strategic resolution, American leaders \u201cprioritized killing and capturing jihadist militants while investing just enough in \u2026 stability operations to preserve operational freedom for \u2026 counterterrorism forces. This was a clear strategy, and it was not the strategy I recommended,\u201d Miller writes.<\/p>\n Choosing Defeat <\/em>thus expresses the frustration of a man who believes he spent a career watching politicians make bad decisions for stupid reasons. In their preference for quick strikes at the expense of victory, American leaders were like \u201cchildren learning to play chess for the first time, [who] mount a frontal assault on the opponent\u2019s king, over and over \u2026 while ignoring the state of play, the shape of the board, and the future of Afghanistan.\u201d When Miller denies the existence of any twenty-year nation-building campaign, he therefore means that from the first Bush years onward, American efforts were insufficient relative to the problem. He does not refer merely to insufficient financial investments, but also to the policy instability and ineffectiveness that result from political hesitation and bureaucratic incompetence.<\/p>\n In Miller\u2019s telling, the American nation-building effort proceeded in self-defeating fits and starts. His nearly comprehensive narrative of US policy begins in December of 2001, six weeks into the US invasion. Instead of pivoting immediately to stability operations when the Taliban were weakest, Bush\u2019s team outsourced Afghanistan to incompetent international partners and then turned its attention to the invasion of Iraq: \u201cThe Bush administration\u2019s hostility to nation building,\u201d in that early period, Miller claims, \u201cwas small-minded, historically ignorant, and morally callous\u2014an attitude that, to his credit, Bush eventually repudiated.\u201d<\/p>\n Choosing Defeat <\/em>exemplifies, but does not resolve, the fundamental dispute over the policy implications of America\u2019s recent loss.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Nonetheless, President Obama undermined Bush\u2019s belated progress. In the Obama team\u2019s debate over the war\u2019s central issue\u2014counterinsurgency or counterterrorism\u2014\u201cthe short-term goals of counterterrorism won out over the long-term vision of counterinsurgency.\u201d In the 2009 strategy review, Vice President Joe Biden reversed Senator Biden\u2019s former position and led the charge against further investment in Afghanistan. Double-minded, Obama adopted half-measures. He authorized a too-small troop surge, while simultaneously announcing a timetable for their withdrawal. When the surge predictably failed, the administration blamed the convenient boogeyman of nation-building. In fact, Obama\u2019s arbitrary limitations were guaranteed to produce the \u201cforever war\u201d he most feared.<\/p>\n After the long Obama years, Miller argues, the Trump and Biden administrations rejected the nation-building effort peremptorily: \u201cTrump replicated Obama\u2019s error of withdrawing troops and depriving himself of leverage while supposedly trying to negotiate with the enemy.\u201d President Biden doubled down on Trump\u2019s folly. In rare praise of his predecessor, Biden credited an ephemeral reduction in violent events to Trump\u2019s Doha negotiations and later defended his own withdrawal decision by recycling platitudes first heard from Donald Rumsfeld: \u201cIt\u2019s up to the people of Afghanistan to decide on what government they want,\u201d Biden claimed, \u201cnot us to impose the government on them.\u201d Biden thus defended American failure by the same misjudgments that led Bush officials to reject crucial investments at the outset.<\/p>\n Despite its passion and detail, Miller\u2019s account of America\u2019s bad choices also documents very substantial efforts at nation-building over an extended period. He acknowledges, for instance, that already in 2002, Bush recognized a real gap between resources and requirements in Afghanistan, invoked the Marshall Plan, and passed the \u201cAfghanistan Freedom Support Act.\u201d That legislation launched the \u201cAccelerating Success\u201d program, by Miller\u2019s account, the \u201cfirst attempt at a comprehensive plan to invest in Afghan reconstruction.\u201d It doubled US aid to almost $2.6 billion in 2004 and $4.8 billion in 2005\u2014still below the $15 billion required, given Afghanistan\u2019s nearly \u201cbottomless\u201d needs. Even then, Miller explains, the bureaucracy could not implement Bush\u2019s policy skillfully enough to make up for time lost from 2002\u201304. The realities of strategic policy adjustment, congressional appropriation, and program development could not keep pace with real-world conditions. \u201cA lower level of aid started sooner and sustained more consistently would have been easier to administer over the long run, and thus likelier to achieve results,\u201d he explains. \u201cHaving delayed too long, we rushed to catch up and tried to show results too fast, which loosened standards and fueled corruption and waste.\u201d For Miller, the negative consequences show that better planning and execution could have achieved a better outcome.<\/p>\n Miller\u2019s description of US aid efforts under Obama relies on the same sort of reasoning. He argues that the troop surge was too small and the timeline arbitrary, even while conceding that even the little resources provided were poorly administered. Although the troop surge did reduce violent incidents in 2010\u201311, Miller explains, Obama\u2019s \u201cextra bodies and dollars did not add up to a coherent civilian strategy\u201d\u2014the essential component in counterinsurgency. Instead, \u201cthe Obama administration ran into the same buzz saw of bureaucracy, ineptitude, red tape, and infighting that had paralyzed the Bush administration\u2019s reconstruction efforts.\u201d Obama\u2019s half-measures thus recycled infamous New Deal-era absurdities: \u201cThe U.S. would build roads that the Afghan Ministry of Transportation could not maintain or repair, for example.\u201d Nonetheless, Miller calls for more and better versions of those policies, even as he explains that the reconstruction bureaucracy became \u201ca self-licking ice cream cone \u2026 that came to exist for no other purpose than its own perpetuation.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite his careful narration, Miller\u2019s argument rests on moral and prudential judgments that control his analysis of the history. The book opens with an ostensibly historical argument: \u201cIf we are to understand why we lost, we must understand why we were able to get some things right, some of the time, and why we were unable to sustain or expand those successes,\u201d he writes. This apparently historical claim is predicated upon a faulty non-historical axiom: \u201cGetting some things right proves that getting the rest wrong was not inevitable, and policymakers are accountable for their poor choices.\u201d Miller\u2019s syllogism is a fundamental tenet of his analysis. He adds to it the equally dubious axiom that \u201cthe only two laws of history are that nothing is impossible, and nothing is inevitable.\u201d These assertions do not rest, however, on any new historical revelation or penetrating analysis, so much as on Miller\u2019s ability to imagine an alternative history of the war, one in which US policymakers exercise just the right judgments at just the right time\u2014deploy the right number of forces here, provide just the right amount of aid there\u2014to overthrow the Taliban and establish the rule-of-law in a representative system of governance, in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n Miller\u2019s confidence notwithstanding, his syllogism does not work: \u201cget[ting] some things right, some of the time\u201d only \u201cproves\u201d that given enough time, blood, and treasure, the US government can get some things right, some of the time, in Afghanistan. Miller might well argue that American leaders could have gotten more things right, more of the time; still, \u201cmore right, more of the time\u201d is a far cry from proving that American leaders \u201cchose defeat\u201d where they might have chosen victory. Miller does expressly acknowledge that his own indictment of bureaucratic incompetence provides the strongest argument against his own judgments. But when he confronts this idea, he retreats, once again, to the safe haven of unhistorical dogma: \u201cThere was no realistic option other than to try. \u2026 If rebuilding Afghanistan seemed impossible, it should have called forth the best of American can-do optimism.\u201d Fifty pages later, he blames that same American spirit for the failure: \u201cPublic opinion and Americans\u2019 traditional can-do optimism were not prepared for the massive challenges of operating in Afghanistan with almost universal illiteracy, no infrastructure, and a legacy of war.\u201d<\/p>\n Even Miller\u2019s preferred examples of successful nation-building initiatives\u2014the Kajaki Dam and the Afghan Local Police\u2014point to a more pessimistic conclusion than the one he draws. In Miller\u2019s telling, this public works project partially validates the fundamental logic of counterinsurgency\u2014the idea that \u201cif we can provide the Afghan people with economic opportunities \u2026 and some form of security \u2026 then the Afghan people will choose to side with the new government.\u201d To vindicate the thought, he cites former Ambassador Ryan Crocker\u2019s claim that Pashtuns in Helmand \u201cremember\u201d the project \u201cwith great affection and nostalgia.\u201d<\/p>\n From another perspective, though, the Kajaki Dam illustrates the flawed logic of central planning, which lies at the heart of the nation-building theory. According to Miller, military leaders viewed the dam as a central component of their counterinsurgency effort in Helmand. During the war, however, Helmand\u2019s primary cash crop was opium poppy, which \u201cprovided 93% of the global opiate market\u201d for drugs consumed primarily by Americans<\/a>. Profits from American drug abuse, in turn, funded the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.<\/p>\n In other words, to protect Americans, the US government\u2019s nation-building effort provided critical infrastructure that enriched the same insurgents and drug traffickers that US military personnel fought on the battlefield. Miller knows this, of course, but repeats the same justification given back then: there was nothing else to do, since restricting the water or eradicating poppy would undermine the Afghan \u201cnostalgia\u201d that American nation-building efforts fought to cultivate. This was the paradox: by replacing definite military objectives with the nebulous aim of favorable popular sentiment, counterinsurgency strategy could justify any failure and identify no particular success; victory and defeat became interchangeable terms.<\/p>\n By nature, accident, and occasionally by intent, Miller shows how the administrative state reshapes, resists, and simply fails to implement executive policy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Miller\u2019s account of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) suggests his confidence results, in part, from a vision of the war developed entirely at the strategic level. By 2010, Miller reports, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was \u201cparticularly enthusiastic about the ALP initiative.\u201d Likewise, General Stanley McChrystal believed that, by 2011, \u201cWe halted the momentum of the Taliban and retook control of the vast majority of Helmand and Kandahar.\u201d But reality on the ground was far different in those years. In 2012, the ALP program in Helmand<\/a> and Kandahar yielded a major uptick in Green-on-Blue attacks<\/a>, in which newly trained Afghan police used their US-supplied weapons to murder their American counterparts. All the while, a pervasive threat of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) limited US movements to planned operations in up-armored tactical vehicles. Miller passes over these events, even as he sees the statistical reduction in violence as evidence that nation-building could eventually deliver a strategic resolution in the war. Sergeants and captains might have left Miller with a very different vision of American progress in those troubled regions.<\/p>\n The strength of Miller\u2019s account is its careful reconstruction of American policy over the entirety of the war. In that effort, Choosing Defeat<\/em> exposes deep failures in American strategic culture, and frankly, in America\u2019s broader civil society. Despite the valuable historical work, Miller\u2019s real dispute with the critics of nation-building arises from crucial disagreements about the first principles of politics. For him, the fundamental dilemma that confronted American policy was how to avoid the pitfalls of underinvestment without falling into the moral hazard of \u201cimperialism.\u201d<\/p>\n Miller embraces nation-building as the golden mean between these two avoidable wrongs. In his telling, from the beginning, some argued that Afghanistan lacked the political culture necessary to sustain the constitutional rule of law in a system of representative institutions. He rejects that position out of hand, since \u201carguments that start from the premise that nation building \u2026 is intrinsically impossible\u201d are \u201cnot very insightful.\u201d Nonetheless, others will argue that the ever-elusive character of even small successes in nation building validates their prudential judgment that representative self-government cannot be exported through federal central planning to any country, much less one so troubled as Afghanistan. Miller chastises that view for its latent racism and ignorance. He insists that a more efficient, more determined, morally improved administration could theoretically nourish the education, social cohesion, and economic prosperity necessary for civic order in Afghanistan. Choosing Defeat <\/em>thus exemplifies, but does not resolve, the fundamental dispute over the policy implications of America\u2019s recent loss. Nonetheless, Miller\u2019s narration of the policy history will improve serious arguments on both sides of the question.<\/p>\n Choosing Defeat <\/em>embodies the fundamental divisions of contemporary American politics. Miller censures the pervasive incompetence of American bureaucracy and its cowardly administrative class. By nature, accident, and occasionally by intent, the administrative state reshapes, resists, and simply fails to implement executive policy. Many would cheer his honest criticism. Miller offers a deeper moral reflection. Animating that bureaucracy is a \u201cgeneration of policymakers\u201d steeped in the cynical doctrine of \u201crealism,\u201d the kind of people who learned to incant \u201cgraveyard of empires\u201d by hastily \u201cskim[ming] one or two books and a clutch of articles on the internet.\u201d He is right to denounce those habits as incapable of producing the virtues necessary \u201cto take the long view\u201d of grave matters. Miller thus calls for fundamental reform of our leaders\u2019 moral and intellectual formation\u2014and who could object to the necessity? And yet, he rejects the idea that a political order in such desperate need to reform its own character might be incapable of engineering the civic order of others. America \u201ccan be an exemplar of freedom and equality; it can put its enormous power in the service of justice and peace; it can align its national interest with the international common good,\u201d he urges.<\/p>\n That may all be possible, more of the time; it does not prove that US leaders could have chosen victory in Afghanistan. As a veteran, a public servant, and scholar, Miller has put in the hard work and earned the right to be heard; his own scholarship provides the best evidence against his major judgment. Miller is aware of the possibility and disagrees. To his credit, Choosing Defeat<\/em> will remain an essential guide to the argument for years to come.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
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