Could America’s Afghanistan war calamity have been avoided?
September 14, 2021 | International
Analysis by Rebekah Koffler. Could we have done something differently that would have saved the $2.2 trillion worth of blood and sweat of hard-working Americans who had little say in Washington? Did the U.S. continue a doomed project in Afghanistan no matter the costs? Could we have prevented the tragic loss of 6,200 American lives and countless other victims who were killed, displaced as refugees, or otherwise harmed by U.S. leaders’ proclivity to get entangled in long wars? The following three approaches to the war could have helped the bureaucracy to define ahead of time achievable goals, identify a winnable warfighting strategy, and conclude America’s military campaign in Afghanistan as soon as victory was achieved back in 2001.
First, instead of obsessing over tactical brilliance — how accurately we can identify a terrorist leader and how precisely we can put “iron on target,” — the Pentagon had a choice to focus on the big picture before plunging into a protracted war. Strategic intelligence provides us with clues — the mindset and thinking of an adversary, how well it is organized, how hard it will fight, what weaponry it might use, and what tactics it might pursue against the superior U.S. armed forces. Regretfully, during my service at the leading agency providing intelligence to our warfighters, I observed that DIA’s primary focus was on collecting tactical intelligence to populate its military intelligence database, called MIDB, which contains data on foreign militaries’ infrastructure — that is, things that are countable and represent targets to be destroyed.
Doctrines, strategies, mindsets and the “otherness” of foreign cultures are not quantifiable. Therefore, intelligence managers, whom we analysts called “bean counters,” not only de-prioritized such intel but sometimes penalized analysts who veered away from collecting and counting the “beans.” But tactical brilliance does not compensate for strategic incompetence. And it doesn’t win wars… (Excerpts from The Hill)
