Free Republic

Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. Robert Farley is a Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), and Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020). What if the United States had never invaded Afghanistan? The question is not as absurd as it sounds. Popular support for military retribution against Al Qaeda following the 9/11 attacks was high, but this retribution did...

While US support for the ANA has declined over the past year, the primary issues involved distribution rather than a lack of abundance. The problem of corruption among the Afghan elite turned out to be a bigger problem than a simple siphoning away of vast stores of wealth; it cut at the very sinew of the national government, preventing Kabul from mobilizing military force at a time of critical need. Nor was this purely an Afghan problem; US contractors played a crucial role in facilitating the corruption across the Kabul government. Armies fight for any number of reasons, from the...

The Taliban have captured Kabul and the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks will coincide with their triumphant return to power in Afghanistan. Blame for a defeat in a conflict waged over two decades can be assigned to a multitude of decision-makers; whether they will be held accountable is a separate story. When this war ends, the real fighting will come to the United States — one side will assert America should have withdrawn years ago and one side will argue America’s withdrawal snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

For the United States, however, it represents not only a military failure but also an intelligence one. Not only did the Central Intelligence Agency and other US intelligence agencies wildly underestimate the speed of the Taliban advance, but they also appear to have been blind to the extent of political dealings the Taliban had made as the withdrawal loomed and the military prepositioning the Taliban achieved to begin a near-simultaneous assault on provincial capitals. They appear to have missed the fact that Taliban shadow governors were already in place, alongside their staff, to take over provincial functions.

By December of 2001 it was clear that bin Laden had not been eliminated, and that the Taliban—though kicked out of power—were not extinguished and for the next two decades would continue fighting. During the final days of the Tora Bora battle, the George W. Bush administration made critical misjudgments, especially the decision not to use U.S. military assets to seal the border with Pakistan, relying instead on airstrikes, Afghan militia, and Pakistan’s Frontier Corps forces to block the mountain passes. This decision allowed Bin Laden and his bodyguards to walk unmolested out of Tora Bora into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal...