The old quote, widely attributed to John F. Kennedy, tells us that “success has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan” – a pithy aphorism that captures the innate tendency to utilize whatever rhetorical tricks necessary to distance oneself from responsibility for a negative outcome. As a corollary, the larger the failure, the greater the machinations and maneuvers to avoid culpability, and there are few failures as profound in recent American history as the defeat in our longest war—not at the hands of a peer adversary, but instead a twenty-year loss to a militia which, though equipped only with small arms, ultimately won out by its sustained desire to outlast the greatest military in the world.
Choosing Defeat, by Georgetown professor Paul Miller, traces the history of the war and the lineage between America’s ultimate failure and its thousands of fathers. Despite recriminations between Trump and Biden acolytes trying to toss the historical hot potato, Miller argues that blame is much more widely distributed—across administrations, from junior to senior staff, from inception to conclusion, from the operational to the strategic, and from the decisions made on the ground in Afghanistan to those made for domestic reasons in the U.S.
By tracing the history of America’s longest war and the decisions which shaped it, Miller illuminates an uncomfortable reality: that there is not one singular moment where a key decision lost the war, no single point of failure that, if reversed, would have resulted in a decisive victory. Instead, we have a 20 year history of bad decisions, each building upon the last until the final collapse in a cascade of failure.
The trouble may have begun, counterintuitively, when the initial rapid progress made by intelligence and special operations forces, in conjunction with Northern Alliance formations, created a false sense of security. This early success fostered the misbelief that continued political and security commitments were not needed as the Taliban seemed to be defeated, rather than just temporarily disrupted. Miller argues that the American belief in and desire for a “decisive military victory” may have skewed our understanding of what we realistically could and could not accomplish. This initial miscalculation was compounded by the greater attention paid to the Iraq War shortly after. Continued neglect and failure to address structural difficulties in the American-established Afghan political and military institutions meant that, like an untreated splinter, a manageable wound festered and grew, eventually becoming a widespread infection that went largely ignored.
Other books have attempted to tell the story of America’s War in Afghanistan. Some, like Wes Morgan’s The Hardest Place, tells the story of Afghanistan through the particular locus of the Pesh Valley, chronicling the missteps and mismanagement there as a microcosm of the larger errors. But Miller’s book takes a broader look—examining operational and strategic decisions by both military and political actors that shaped—and misshaped—the war. Most importantly, at a time when multiple presidential administrations and their proxies have attempted to cast blame elsewhere, Miller spares no one, facing the ugly truth head-on that America’s failure in Afghanistan belongs to everyone involved, military and civilian, Republican and Democrat, in country and in Washington. And, as the title of the book makes clear, each of these guilty parties made choices that contributed to the disastrous outcome through a combination of hubris, disinterest, mismanagement, downright stupidity, and a pathological tendency to kick the can down the road. But perhaps most frustrating, Miller points out that the “lessons of Afghanistan” were not new epiphanies only discoverable through trial and error. Rather, they were the result of continuing down well-trodden paths of failure, willfully engaging in misjudgments which we had all the knowledge to understand were fundamentally erroneous.
The impartiality of Miller’s analysis, his laying out the facts without shading the hard truths or casting excess favor or blame, is commendable given his own deep involvement with the conflict. Miller is himself a U.S. Army veteran of the war and later served as the country director for Afghanistan on the NSC during the tail end of the Bush years and beginning of the Obama administration—directly implementing the decisions he turns his magnifying glass on in the book. This is not an effort to place a positive spin on his own work . Miller is just as harsh in his critique of the military campaign when he was in theater and the decisions of government when he was at the White House as he is of events with which he was not involved. It is rare to find this level of honest critique of events in which one participated, and we should be grateful for Miller’s fortitude in confronting these truths.
By excusing no one from rightful critique, Miller helps to disarm the unhelpful fictions that so often creep up in the aftermath of failure. Just as Andrew Krepinovich’s The Army and Vietnam was a necessary text to dispel the belief among many veterans of that conflict that the military had been winning the war only to be betrayed by the politicians, so Miller allows no one the comfortable fiction that another party was responsible, or that the war was lost by the military or the civilian policy makers, or, as so many joked, that “we were winning when I left.” Instead, Miller forces the country to face the grim reality: the United States chose to fight a war badly by hedging, lacking commitment, putting a partial effort towards an endeavor requiring complete dedication and, ultimately, choosing defeat.
No doubt the United States will continue to debate and reflect on the lessons of Afghanistan, with those debates hopefully growing less emotional and more objective as more time passes. As the War in Afghanistan is dissected by historians, Miller’s book will be recognized as an essential part of the understanding of the conflict and a roadmap of errors to avoid in future wars. The dead of Afghanistan and the lives we might spare in the future deserve no less.
