Thread by @MMazarr

For a depressing forecast of the ultimate outcome in Afghanistan and the problems with US policy, consider the following quotes from a trenchant analytical assessment of a little while back. [A substantial thread but I promise there's a punch line]:

"The US grossly misjudged what it could actually accomplish with the huge effort it eventually made, and thus became more and more wound up in a war it couldn't ‘win’ the way it fought it."

"Perhaps the most important single reason why the US achieved so little for so long in Afghanistan was that it could not sufficiently revamp, or adequately substitute for, an Afghan leadership, administration, and armed forces inadequate to the task. ..."

"... The sheer incapacity of the regimes we backed, which largely frittered away the enormous resources we gave them, may well have been the greatest single constraint on our ability to achieve the aims we set ourselves at acceptable cost.”

"For many reasons we did not use vigorously the leverage over the Afghan leaders that our contributions gave us. We became their prisoners rather than they ours; the Afghan government used its weakness far more effectively as leverage on us then we used our strength to lever it.”

"Molding conventional Afghan armed forces in the ‘mirror image’ of the US forces which were supplying them was a natural institutional reaction. We organized, equipped, and trained the Afghan forces to fight American style, the only way we knew how.”

The enemy’s “ability to control his own losses by such means as evading contact and using sanctuaries frustrated our aims, as did his ability to replace much of his losses by further recruitment and, increasingly, by infiltration from Pakistan.”

The State Department’s “concept of institution building turned largely on encouragement of American democratic forms, a kind of mirror-imaging which proved hard to apply to the conditions of Afghanistan.”

A key problem "has been institutional inertia—the built-in reluctance of organizations to change preferred ways of functioning except slowly and incrementally. Another such factor has been the shocking lack of institutional memory, largely because of short tours for US personnel"

"Nor was there any integrated conflict management to pull together" all the disparate parts of the war effort, which “contributed to the proliferation of overlapping programs—to the point where they competed excessively for scarce resources and even got in each other’s way."

"We only grasped belatedly the significance of the steady attrition of Afghan gov't authority in the countryside, an enfeeblement of political authority which was directly linked to how the Taliban conducted the war," which delayed our "recognition of the extent of the threat."

A sometimes entirely justified "xenophobic nationalism also influenced the policy of Kabul … and often spurred rejection of U.S. proposals.”

"We don't have 20 years of experience in Afghanistan. We have one year's worth of experience, twenty times over."

All of this ought to sound strikingly familiar to those who have followed the challenges to US efforts and maladies of US policies in Afghanistan. But *that is not the war these quotes refer to*

They are all from Robert Komer's 1972 masterpiece, "Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S.-GVN Performance in Vietnam." All I did was trade out every use of "Vietnam" with "Afghanistan." I could have included hundreds of other quotes
rand.org/pubs/reports/R…

The amazing relevance of this Vietnam-era report says harsh things about the US ability to learn--deeply, institutionally--from its mistakes. It speaks to the difficulty of helping a distant, flawed regime secure itself, a task at which we're no better than we were 50 years ago

Komer's focus on bureaucracy also carries a lesson we consciously ignored: We cannot build institutions to do one thing (win wars/conduct diplomacy), then deploy them in unfamiliar contexts to demand that they fulfill vastly different tasks requiring a totally different mindset

Which reinforces the idea that we are not equipped--in practical, institutional terms--for the business of long-term state- and nation-building in conflict. If we don't stop trying, we'll continue to re-discover Komer under the shadow of yet another failed venture