America’s Missed Chance in Afghanistan

For many Americans, the dominant image of the United States’ 20-year war in Afghanistan came at the very end: terrified Afghans storming the Kabul airport, clinging to departing planes, some falling to their deaths, desperately trying to flee the country as Taliban insurgents closed in on the capital. Three years ago this month, the longest and most expensive war in U.S. history, a conflict that resulted in 2,459 dead American soldiers and 20,000 more wounded, had ended in spectacular failure.

Although accusations of American incompetence in Afghanistan now focus on those last days in August 2021, the real error had been made long before, at the moment of the United States’ greatest victory there: the fall of the Taliban in December 2001. Flush with success, hungry for vengeance, and confident of the Taliban’s complete defeat, the United States sought neither reconciliation nor compromise with Afghanistan’s former leaders. Instead, it sought to make an example of them. In doing so, the George W. Bush administration planted the seeds for the Taliban insurgency that would emerge and eventually wipe away two decades of sacrifice in Afghanistan.

Understanding what happened in Afghanistan in 2001—and how the United States snatched defeat from the jaws of victory—helps explain why the war lasted so long and ended so badly. But it also offers a broader lesson about war, one that applies universally: total military victory is an illusory, dangerous goal. More often than not, victory in war is achieved at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield—and demonstrating empathy toward a political adversary pays more dividends than recalcitrance.

AN EARLY WIN

Many forget it now, but the initial U.S. victory in Afghanistan was quick and overwhelming. The United States went to war on October 7, 2001, less than a month after al Qaeda terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 people on September 11. By December, the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban militia, had chased al Qaeda from its safe haven and routed the Taliban government, with the essential support of U.S. airpower and a few hundred U.S. special operators.

In the face of this show of force, Taliban militants simply faded away. Many returned to their villages and made peace with the country’s new political reality—and not only the rank-and-file fighters. Apart from the group’s leader, Mullah Omar, who wanted to continue the fight, the Taliban leadership held no illusions about the scope of their defeat. “We all knew time was up,” a military commander later told the journalist Anand Gopal. “Fate laughs at even the best schemes.”

In early December 2001, a conference of Afghan and international officials meeting in Bonn, Germany, created a temporary government helmed by Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun from a well-regarded and politically influential family who at the time was in southern Afghanistan seeking to organize a rebellion against Taliban rule. That same day, a Taliban delegation led by Defense Minister Mullah Obaidullah and Tayeb Agha, a close aide to Mullah Omar, traveled to meet Karzai and work out a surrender agreement. Karzai quickly announced the deal to reporters. The Taliban had agreed to surrender the remaining provinces under their nominal control. “The Taliban would lay down their weapons and go to their homes with honor and dignity,” said Karzai. In extending an olive branch to the country’s now former leaders, Karzai explained, “The Afghan Taliban are our brothers, and there is no cause for them to worry.” He added, “Let there be no revenge and no vendetta.” Karzai even suggested that former Taliban officials could play a role in a future Afghan government.

Karzai promised that “foreign terrorists” would be expelled or tried. He declared a “general amnesty” for ordinary Taliban fighters and demanded that Mullah Omar “distance himself completely from terrorism.” But Karzai also said that the interim government would decide the best course of action for dealing with the group’s former leaders. He insisted that he had not consulted with the United States on the question of whether Mullah Omar would face justice. “This is an Afghan question,” he declared. Karzai’s uncle and confidant Azizullah Karzai echoed his views, telling NPR that tribal elders would decide what to do with the Taliban. But, Karzai added, “until then, they should not be harmed.”

In Islamabad, Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, also announced the surrender and said the Taliban had received assurances that Mullah Omar would be allowed to “live with dignity” while remaining in Afghanistan. “Karzai and the tribal leaders have promised him protection,” Zaeef told reporters.

DRIVING A HARD BARGAIN

None of those things came to pass. Instead, the Taliban leadership remained fully isolated from the new Afghan political system, regrouped, and eventually won back control of Afghanistan. The reason was simple: U.S. officials had no interest in accepting a Taliban surrender—and did everything in their power to scuttle any reconciliation.

There is little public documentary record of the U.S. position regarding the Taliban’s role in post-2001 Afghanistan. National Security Council documents from that period remain classified, and many of those who worked closely with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or who were on the ground with Karzai at the time have declined repeated requests for interviews or comment, including ours. As a result, the role of the United States in the failure of the agreement remains a matter of intense debate. But the Bush administration’s internal deliberations are immaterial; its public statements at the time make clear that the surrender and eventual reintegration of Taliban officials were not only off the table but had barely been discussed.

Both Gopal and the journalist Bette Dam claim that Karzai told them he received a phone call from Rumsfeld demanding that he rescind the surrender offer. In his book The Good War, the journalist Jack Fairweather reported that one of the U.S. special operators with Karzai at the time, David Fox, was “directed” to tell Karzai that “such an arrangement with the Taliban was not in American interests.” And Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2004 to 2005, did not find out about the aborted deal until more than a decade later.

When Khalilzad confronted Karzai about the agreement in 2013 or 2014, Karzai confirmed its broad outlines. Khalilzad was shocked that the subject had never come up in his years of near-daily contact with the then president. “We discussed almost everything and anything,” Khalilzad told Karzai, “and this you forget to mention to me?” Karzai told Khalilzad that he had asked the Taliban delegation to turn over their weapons and their vehicles and to read the letter that they had presented to him on local radio in order to confirm the agreement. When Khalilzad asked Karzai if the Taliban had done as he requested, he said they had.

Karzai’s story, however, didn’t make clear why the proposed deal had not gone through. “What happened?” Khalilzad asked. Karzai had no answer.

Whether American officials directly nixed the deal is still a tantalizing open question, but the U.S. position was hardly a mystery. Bush administration officials publicly and privately denounced overtures to the Taliban, and it is almost certain that they pressured Karzai to rescind his surrender offer.

The United States sought neither reconciliation nor compromise with Afghanistan’s former leaders.

No administration official played a larger role in shaping this hardline approach than Rumsfeld—and his attitude toward reconciliation grew more intractable as the odds of a Taliban surrender began to increase. On November 19, 2001, when asked at a Pentagon press conference about reports that Mullah Omar was trying to negotiate a surrender, Rumsfeld explained that the United States was “not in a position of determining or controlling” events in Afghanistan. A week later, he called the prospect of allowing the Taliban to participate in a new government “ill advised” but stopped short of condemning a deal, declaring at a November 26 Pentagon briefing, “That’s for the people of Afghanistan to decide.”

By November 30, however, Rumsfeld’s tone had hardened. He declared that the United States would “vigorously oppose any idea of providing [Mullah Omar] amnesty or safe passage of any type.” Then, at a December 6 press conference, Rumsfeld went a step further. Citing the emerging reports of a surrender agreement that would allow Mullah Omar to remain in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld made clear that such a deal would be “inconsistent with [U.S.] interests” and thus unacceptable. In reinforcing the point, Rumsfeld issued a veiled threat to the country’s new leaders: “We obviously have a lot of things we have been doing to assist the opposition forces … and to the extent our goals are frustrated and opposed, obviously, we would prefer to work with other people who would not oppose our goals.”

At the White House, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer branded Mullah Omar “a combatant against the United States and other nations,” relaying Bush’s message that those who harbored terrorists, including Mullah Omar, must be brought to justice. According to a December 6, 2001, report from NPR, U.S. officials had been in direct touch with Karzai and were aware of the negotiations with the Taliban leadership. The report stated that the United States had “made very clear throughout these discussions that it would not support any deal” that allowed Mullah Omar to escape justice. Other Afghans claim to have heard similar warnings. The Northern Alliance’s envoy in Washington, Haron Amin, told the Associated Press that it had “been made very clear” that any plan allowing for the release of Mullah Omar would cost Karzai U.S. support.

Karzai was under pressure not just from the United States but also from members of the Northern Alliance; Deputy Security Minister Abdullah Jan Tawhidi complained that he was “taking the side of the enemy of the people of Afghanistan.” So Karzai quickly changed course. In a December 8 interview with Reuters, he called for Mullah Omar and top Taliban leaders to be held accountable. “If he is found, he must face trial,” Karzai said. He went on: “Of course, I want to arrest him. He is a fugitive from justice.” 

Even after the surrender agreement had fallen apart, U.S. officials continued to insist that the Taliban be given no quarter. Rumsfeld traveled to Kabul in mid-December and told reporters, “There still are al Qaeda and Taliban people in the country, in the mountains, hiding in the cities, in the caves and across the borders. There are a lot of fanatical people. And we need to finish the job.” He claimed to have delivered the same message to the new Afghan leadership “to make sure we’re all on the same wavelength as to what’s left to be done.” The message from administration officials was clear: the war against the Taliban would continue, and any talk of political reconciliation was a nonstarter.

It would be understandable to think that the United States had reasons to doubt the sincerity of the Taliban’s offer to surrender. The Taliban had, after all, given shelter to al Qaeda. It had refused repeated U.S. demands before 9/11 to hand over the terrorist group’s leaders and shut down its training camps, and it was notorious for its mistreatment of women and religious and ethnic minorities. Moreover, there was legitimate reason to want to hold Mullah Omar accountable for his actions.

By December 2001, however, there was little love lost between the Taliban and al Qaeda, whose risky assault on the United States had precipitated the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the Taliban’s overthrow. For years before 9/11, many of those closest to Mullah Omar saw Osama bin Laden and his foreign fighters as causing far more trouble than they were worth. Their fears were confirmed after 9/11. Bin Laden allegedly did not inform Mullah Omar in advance about the attacks, just as he had kept him in the dark about strikes on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

The two groups had always had fundamentally different agendas: al Qaeda sought global jihad, whereas the Taliban’s focus was almost exclusively on Afghanistan. And the gap between the two groups became even more pronounced after December 2001 as more and more Taliban came to resent the foreign interlopers for inviting the war that drove them from power. U.S. officials, however, never grasped these complexities and often saw the Islamist Taliban as an irreconcilable foe, basically indistinguishable from the Salafi-jihadis of al Qaeda.

But whatever doubts Washington harbored about the Taliban’s desire to surrender (while remaining a political force) should have been allayed by the way its leaders behaved after December 2001. During that period, many of the group’s top officials repeatedly tried to give themselves up. In January 2002, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, who had served as the foreign minister in the Taliban regime, was convinced by Afghan interlocutors to surrender to CIA officers. But once in custody, his offers to lay down arms and respect the new government’s authority were rejected by the Bush administration, and he was instead sent to a detention facility at Bagram Air Base, where he remained until late 2003.

In the weeks and months that followed, virtually all top Taliban ministers—as well as the whip-wielding religious police, who had enforced harsh religious edicts—either surrendered to local tribal leaders or defected to the Karzai government. Other Taliban officials declared their intention to participate in future Afghan elections, and Karzai consistently sought reconciliation, only to be repeatedly rebuffed by American officials. More important, the Taliban leaders made no concerted effort to take up arms against the Americans or the fledgling Karzai government.

REPEAT OFFENDERS

Counterfactuals, particularly ones concerning war and peace, are always fraught. But looking back at the missed opportunities for peace in late 2001 and early 2002, it is evident that flexibility from U.S. officials regarding the Taliban’s future in Afghanistan could have prevented an insurgency from emerging later. By December 2001, the Taliban were a vanquished political movement with little interest in waging war against the Karzai government. But U.S. leaders understood little about Afghanistan’s complex politics and cared even less. Afghanistan was to them an abstraction, a venue for fighting global terrorism and a place to demonstrate American power to others. As Douglas Feith, U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy at the time, later explained, one of the key U.S. strategic goals in Afghanistan was to “remove the Taliban government as a way of communicating to state sponsors of terrorism that there are very heavy penalties to be paid for being associated with groups that attack the United States.” Putting aside the question of whether others would get the message, the U.S. position ignored the reality that the immediate effect of the war in Afghanistan would be felt by the Afghan people—and that they would determine the conflict’s final act.

In any war, an agreement that allows for the eventual reintegration of former fighters into society is an essential step in moving from a state of conflict to a state of peace. An official Taliban surrender would have been a powerful catalyst: ending the group’s claim that it was the true government of Afghanistan, ensuring that former Taliban fighters had nothing to fear from the Karzai government or the U.S. military, and, above all, giving former Taliban figures and their supporters a political outlet and a voice in Afghanistan’s future.

Leaving the Taliban outside the country’s emerging political tent encouraged the group to become a repository for grievances and frustrations that would build up in the initial postwar years. As Afghanistan’s post-9/11 experiment in self-governance faltered, the Taliban reaped the political rewards. Even worse, by actively targeting the remnants of the Taliban and treating them as little more than a proxy for al Qaeda, Washington created enemies where none had existed, inadvertently helping spawn an insurgency that, if not for U.S. actions, might never have emerged.

Washington’s failure in Afghanistan reflects a deep-seated American pathology: the belief that victory in war is a zero-sum game, in which the United States must score an unambiguous win and its opponent must lose everything. By demanding the total military and political defeat of the Taliban—and pursuing the group long after it posed a threat to U.S. national security—the United States directly undercut its own efforts to help establish a stable and secure Afghanistan. Two years later, the Bush administration would repeat this mistake in Iraq, when it quickly disbanded the Iraqi army and pursued a policy of “de-Baathification” that plunged the country into chaos and, eventually, civil war. In both cases, by offering its enemies no way to surrender, the United States gave them few options other than to fight.

The Bush administration was not alone in this miscalculation. In 2009, President Barack Obama, who had promised a new strategy for the country’s forgotten war, surged 50,000 more troops to Afghanistan, still refusing to offer a political olive branch to the Taliban. Even in the face of a newly confident insurgency steadily making military and political inroads, Washington refused to negotiate with people it cast as terrorists. It would not countenance a political role for the Taliban. The United States, officials believed, would fully prevail in Afghanistan. By the time it finally reversed course under President Donald Trump and began direct talks with the Taliban, the situation bore remarkable similarities to the failed U.S. war in Vietnam. American diplomats were simply negotiating the country’s eventual defeat.

THE ROAD LESS TAKEN

Blustery suggestions that the United States will not negotiate with terrorists, will confront and defeat evil, and will teach adversaries a lesson sound good for public consumption. But the reality of fighting wars—and ending them—is often far messier. Insisting that adversaries must be soundly defeated or must give up the grievances that drove them to take up arms in the first place is neither realistic nor effective. To be sure, there will always be groups that are truly irreconcilable and with whom negotiation or political compromise is impossible. But such examples are the exception, not the rule.

So while it might have been impossible to negotiate with rigid ideologues like bin Laden, the Taliban leadership that negotiated and ultimately surrendered to Karzai in December 2001 was quite evidently more reasonable—and more willing to accept defeat. The same is true of today’s seemingly intractable conflicts. Take the war in Gaza: Hamas might never reconcile itself to a Jewish state, but for 30 years, the Palestinian Authority has done so, and like its Israeli counterparts, it has interests and political objectives that can potentially be satisfied at the negotiating table. The same can be said of illiberal regimes like Vladimir Putin’s in Russia or Xi Jinping’s in China. Moscow will almost certainly not be defeated in Ukraine, and Beijing will not give up its political aspirations in East Asia, but they are probably willing to entertain compromises on their ambitions that leave the world a more stable place, even if it appears that they’ve been given what they want.

And while no democrat would take pleasure in seeing Taliban leaders escape accountability, seeing Russia prosper from its illegitimate invasion of Ukraine, or seeing China expand its influence, the alternatives—letting a vindictive Taliban ride an insurgency back into power, fighting an endless war to a bloody stalemate in Ukraine, and inflaming tensions with China to a point of no return—are far more dire for anyone interested in human rights. Washington must think about the price for peace, with an eye toward stopping fighting once conflict begins. The first step should be to take seriously the lessons of 2001 and 2021: countries that prize total military victory over unsatisfying but necessary political compromises are destined to know nothing but more war.