In early December 2001, just nine weeks after invading Afghanistan, the US military overthrew the Taliban government, accomplishing what it is most apt at doing: winning conventional military battles. In the following days, the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, made it clear that “the war in Afghanistan is not won… We may be hunting Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan for months from now.”
Wolfowitz’s statement acknowledged the transition from conventional warfare aimed at overthrowing the Taliban regime to a concerted campaign of unconventional, irregular, and special operations warfare known as counterinsurgency. Over the next 19 years and eight months, the US and its allies’ counterinsurgency campaign terrorised and alienated the Afghan population, leading to the resuscitation of a defeated and unpopular Taliban – and, ultimately, the inevitable but potentially infinitely prolonged withdrawal of coalition forces.
It would be incorrect to say that counterinsurgency went awry in Afghanistan, because it did what it has always done: wage war on people and their livelihoods; treat politics as a zero-sum game; and use the guise of new technology and professionalism to inflict brutality upon civilian populations. The modern iteration of counterinsurgency doctrine implemented in Afghanistan mirrors four centuries of irregular, population-centred warfare carried out by the US, revealing the patterns of violence and the outcome in Afghanistan as not only likely, but logical.
