Understanding the U. S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Beth Bailey, Richard H. Immerman

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479836260
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Investigates the causes, conduct, and consequences of the recent American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Understanding the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is essential to understanding the United States in the first decade of the new millennium and beyond. These wars were pivotal to American foreign policy and international relations. They were expensive: in lives, in treasure, and in reputation. They raised critical ethical and legal questions; they provoked debates over policy, strategy, and war-planning; they helped to shape American domestic politics. And they highlighted a profound division among the American people: While more than two million Americans served in Iraq and Afghanistan, many in multiple deployments, the vast majority of Americans and their families remained untouched by and frequently barely aware of the wars conducted in their name, far from American shores, in regions about which they know little. Understanding the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gives us the first book-length expert historical analysis of these wars. It shows us how they began, what they teach us about the limits of the American military and diplomacy, and who fought them. It examines the lessons and legacies of wars whose outcomes may not be clear for decades. In 1945 few Americans could imagine that the country would be locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union for decades; fewer could imagine how history would paint the era. Understanding the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begins to come to grips with the period when America became enmeshed in a succession of “low intensity” conflicts in the Middle East.

Part I

The Wars and Their Origins

1

The Wars’ Entangled Roots

Regional Realities and Washington’s Vision

Michael A. Reynolds

Afghanistan has surpassed Vietnam as America’s longest war. At the time of this writing, the U.S. armed forces are still fighting there, where they have been engaged in combat since 2001. This makes America’s third longest war the one in Iraq, where Americans fought for nearly nine years (2003–12). Despite the exceptional lengths of these two conflicts, most Americans have only a vague understanding of them and of how and why at the beginning of the twenty-first century they found their soldiers fighting in two countries across the globe. The war in Afghanistan has a superficially straightforward explanation: on September 11, 2001, a terrorist organization based in Afghanistan carried out attacks on American soil that resulted in the deaths of over three thousand people. In order to avenge those deaths and protect the American and other populations from further attack, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. Yet the reasons why a non-state organization led by two Arab citizens of nominally pro-American states assaulted the United States and why that organization was based in Afghanistan are anything but straightforward.

If, for most Americans, the origins of the war in Afghanistan are shrouded in some confusion, those of the war in Iraq are impenetrable. America’s leaders had asserted to domestic and international audiences an urgent need for America to invade Iraq, overthrow its ruling government, and preemptively eliminate its weapons of mass destruction and programs to develop them. The failure to uncover any such weapons following the invasion tarnished the reputation and credibility of the United States, as observers were left to conclude that the United States was either colossally inept or brazenly duplicitous. Contrary to assurances, the Iraq War turned out to be costly in lives, treasure, and reputation. The invasion and subsequent occupation cost the United States a staggering estimated one trillion dollars. Nearly forty-five hundred American servicemen and -women lost their lives, while almost thirty-seven thousand were wounded (not to mention over fifteen thousand Iraqi civilians killed by Coalition forces).1 William E. Odom, former U.S. Army lieutenant general and director of the National Security Agency, a soldier and scholar not given to hyperbole, famously opined that the “invasion of Iraq may well turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in American history.”2 Odom issued this assessment in 2005, six years before U.S. forces completed their withdrawal from Iraq. The passage of time has only buttressed his judgment.

The war did remove from power Saddam Hussein, who for more than a decade had menaced the U.S. position in the region and who in that period had deliberately caused the deaths of tens of thousands of his own people. Yet the greatest strategic beneficiary of the Iraq War was not the United States or the Iraqi people, whose liberation became a justification of the war, but an implacable enemy of the United States: Iran. America’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein transformed Iraq from a nasty but effective bulwark blocking Iranian influence into a platform from which Iran projects power into Syria and beyond. Meanwhile, Sunni radicals aligned with another foe of the United States, al Qaeda, found Iraq a useful symbol with which to mobilize anti-American as well as anti-Iranian and anti-Shi’i sentiment in their recruiting and operations inside Iraq and beyond. By 2014, such radicals exploited the erosion of governmental institutions to seize large swaths of territory in both Iraq and Syria and declare the establishment of an Islamic state.

The emergence in the heart of the Middle East of a large, transnational violent challenger to the regional status quo and the global order represents a stark failure of American policy, as it was precisely such a scenario that Washington sought to avert by intervening in Iraq and Afghanistan. Compounding the confusion about the American invasion is its origin. It was not Iraq that forced war upon the United States but the opposite. This, for many, distinguished the war in Iraq from the war in Afghanistan. The masterminds of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had been based in Afghanistan, and a military intervention to destroy them was seen as an exercise of the right, even obligation, to self-defense. The Iraq War, by contrast, was a “preemptive war” or “war of choice.”3 It was a war that Washington sought out and initiated largely on its own terms.

Even if one rejects the characterization of the invasion of Iraq as America’s greatest strategic blunder, it is indisputable that the invasion exacted costs far higher than predicted and delivered benefits far less than its proponents promised. How could the United States have committed such a colossal error? How could it have decided to initiate a war that would squander America’s resources and undermine its position in the Middle East and throughout the world while strengthening America’s enemies? The American decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003 indeed is a puzzle. To explain it, many have pointed to the role of individuals: President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and/or furtive networks of lesser officials in the executive branch. Those explanations cannot be wholly satisfactory. The case for war was not made in the dark or behind the scenes. Iraq and its dictatorial strongman, Saddam Hussein, were not unfamiliar to Americans. They had been continuous subjects of the political conversation in America for well over a decade before 2003, and the decision to invade Iraq had the express backing of a broad spectrum of American elite opinion in both politics and the media.4

In order to begin to understand why America went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, it is necessary first to grasp how in the Middle East internal conflicts over fundamental social changes meshed with the geopolitics of great power and regional rivalries to generate anti-American currents in Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq. During the latter two decades of the Cold War, the United States took on the role of guarantor of security in the Middle East. With the end of the Cold War, key American decision makers aspired for the United States to play a similar role globally. Toward this end they formulated an assertive national security doctrine that tied America’s security to America’s maintenance of order throughout the world. That doctrine had a logic, albeit an aggressive one. But it also had a flaw: the conceptualization of global politics as a realm populated almost exclusively by integral nation-states. It thereby left Washington baffled by the phenomena of al Qaeda and Ba’athist Iraq, and blind to the fragility of the Afghan and Iraqi states and the demands of warfare against non-state actors.

Regional Currents: 1979 as Watershed

Identifying the beginning of a chain of events that culminates in a given historical outcome is always an exercise in conjecture. With that in mind, 1979 does offer a compelling starting point for the exploration of the regional dynamics and global ambitions that led to the American military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In that year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the Islamic Revolution swept Iran. These two events overturned the geopolitical order of the Middle East. Although they occurred amid the Cold War, they were the products more of local processes and factors than of superpower ones, and they created challenges to U.S. foreign policy that have persisted into the twenty-first century. Indeed, the fundamental aim of the American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq was to resolve these challenges in Washington’s favor.

Afghanistan

Despite its remote location in the Eurasian landmass, the mountainous and comparatively poor land of Afghanistan in the late twentieth century was no virgin territory for Great Power conflict. It had been a pivotal site of the so-called Great Game in the nineteenth century, when agents of the British Empire sought to block their Russian competitors from advancing southward from Central Asian Turkestan toward India, the empire’s “jewel in the crown.” During the Cold War Afghanistan again found itself playing the role of buffer state. To the north, it bordered the Soviet Union, the successor to imperial Russia. Afghanistan shared with the peoples of Soviet Central Asia ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural ties, and Soviet authorities accordingly kept a wary eye on the country. Moscow could tolerate the existence inside Afghanistan of comparatively small and innocuous agencies like the American Peace Corps and the American Agency for International Development, but it was allergic to any large-scale American presence on its borders.

In the greater Middle East, the United States in the 1970s emerged as a successor of sorts to imperial Britain. Great Britain’s announcement in 1968 that it was abandoning its role as guarantor of security in the Persian Gulf left the United States as the region’s constabulary. The U.S. interest in Afghanistan was driven by concern for Iran and the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The Arab-led oil boycott of 1973 had caused world oil prices to quadruple in the space of just six months, and had thereby sent the industrialized economies of the West into a tailspin. The boycott made it painfully evident just how vital to the West the free and uninterrupted flow of oil from the Persian Gulf was. Keeping those oil fields free from Soviet hands or influence was essential.

Having just extricated itself from the Vietnam War, however, America in the 1970s had no appetite for new security commitments in Asia. U.S. President Richard Nixon’s solution to this bind, dubbed the “Nixon Doctrine,” was to rely on local allied powers to police their regions. Washington planners identified the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Iran as the two pillars of stability in the Gulf and sought to build them up. The coffers of these two oil-exporting countries were overflowing due to the recent vast increases in oil prices, allowing them to spend lavishly on expanding and equipping their militaries with American-made weapons systems.5 The shah (king) of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was pressing upon his population a program of industrializing modernization and was therefore eager to receive U.S. economic, technological, and military aid.

Afghanistan in the 1950s and 1960s had functioned as a neutral buffer state where Soviets and Americans could operate alongside each other by maintaining low profiles and relatively small numbers. By the 1970s, however, developments inside Afghanistan were making the modus vivendi of the previous decades unsustainable. A rift was emerging among Afghan elites over the future of their country. In particular, a segment of the landlocked and rural country’s educated urban elite had grown impatient with the slow pace of Afghanistan’s economic and technological development. Literacy was low, infant mortality was high, and outside the major cities electricity was absent. Indeed, mud brick remained the dominant construction material in the countryside.6 Thus in 1973, Mohammed Daoud Khan toppled Afghanistan’s monarch. Daoud was a member of the Afghan royal family, but he demonstratively installed himself not as a new monarch but as the country’s first president. The aspirations of Daoud and his followers paralleled those of the shah in neighboring Iran, namely the accelerated economic and technological development of their country. But whereas the shah looked to America, Daoud and his Marxist People’s Democratic Party found inspiration in the Soviet model of modernity.

Still, a radical faction of the new ruling party grew dissatisfied with Daoud’s relative moderation, and in spring 1978 this faction overthrew him. Disregarding the counsel of their Soviet advisers in the country not to push too much reform too quickly, Afghanistan’s new rulers aggressively pursued their vision of socialist progress.7 They imposed revolutionary reforms in the areas of land ownership, education, and family law simultaneously to vanquish “feudalism.”

Socialists, however, were not the only political force inside Afghanistan. There were others who drew political inspiration from Islam, and they, too, had been mobilizing on university campuses and elsewhere. Their vision of Afghanistan’s future departed sharply from that of the socialists, and Afghanistan’s politics began to polarize between advocates of Soviet-style modernization and exponents of revivalist Islam. Already in 1973, tribal leaders under the infl...