What key mistakes by successive American administrations led to the US defeat in Afghanistan? Contrary to conventional wisdom, was the Afghanistan War actually winnable? In Choosing Defeat: The Twenty-Year Saga of How America Lost Afghanistan, Paul D. Miller makes the case that the war in Afghanistan was both worthy of being waged and winnable. However, consistently poor strategic choices and the lack of political and moral will by US leadership failed to create a secure, stable state in Afghanistan and, in the process, lost the war.
Miller’s more specific, granular thesis is that the war in Afghanistan was lost because of a lack of emphasis on nation-building and good governance and the strategic miscalculation to pursue a strategy of counter-terrorism instead of counter-insurgency. He does include an important caveat: the American intervention—while it lasted—resulted in demonstrable progress in economic growth, development, and education while a generation of Afghans (notably women and girls) grew up with certain freedoms and opportunities that they would never have otherwise had. Tragically, these gains proved ephemeral because of avoidable strategic errors, short-term thinking, and bureaucratic inertia.
Miller’s stated goal is to provide a history of the development and evolution of American political strategy during the Afghanistan War, and he does so through extensive interviews and an exhaustive review of policymakers’ memoirs, government documents, and existing academic articles and books. Miller uses these interviews and evidence to reassess the conventional wisdom on the Afghanistan War and the prevailing narrative of the inevitability of the US defeat. Miller interviewed an impressive and comprehensive cross-section of civilian and military officials up and down the chain of command, which is a clear strength of the book. It is a notable limitation of the scholarship that only US officials were interviewed and memoirs consulted, which provides an exclusively American perspective. Miller himself addresses this limitation explicitly by saying that this book represents a history of US strategy only, but a more complete assessment of the conflict would benefit from an external assessment of US strategy and the inclusion of different (in particular, Afghan and Pakistani) perspectives.
Miller thoroughly chronicles the various key mistakes that successive American administrations made in Afghanistan that led to “choosing defeat.” He contends that the overarching conceptual error was the consistent belief that Afghanistan represented the “graveyard of empires” and that, like the British and the Soviets, the United States was destined to fail because of inherent conditions and flaws baked into the Afghan context and geopolitics. Miller claims that decision makers and policy analysts learned the wrong lessons from history and that the comparison with these previous imperial powers was inherently flawed because the international presence was actually welcomed by the majority of the local population in the wake of Taliban abuses and mismanagement.
Another broad error that Miller attributes to successive administrations was the strategic choice to wage a counter-terrorism campaign instead of a counter-insurgency operation. After its initial military victory, the Bush Administration focused all of its attention on Al-Qaida while effectively ignoring the Taliban. In doing so, the United States allowed the group that had and would continue to foster future terrorist groups to reconstitute. Miller asserts that the campaign should have been a war against the broader ideology of jihadism (including both Al-Qaida and the Taliban) and not just a narrow War on Terror. US presidents claimed to want a secure, stable, democratic Afghanistan, but there was a “sharp disconnect between the United States’ declared goals and its actual strategic choices” (p. 14).
For Miller, the Afghanistan War was in fact “just and necessary” (p. 18), but the United States and its international partners fought it in a way that guaranteed their defeat. Not only did they focus on counter-terrorism instead of counter-insurgency, but they also failed to frame the war in moral terms. Had the United States used and adhered to the principles of Just War Theory, it could have pursued the conflict as a moral campaign against a repressive foe and effectively reframed the narrative. It would have, Miller claims, also made it easier to justify a more dedicated, longer-term, sustainable approach to the conflict while also abrogating the eventual amoral decision to abandon the Afghan people to the Taliban.
The majority of the chapters focus on the strategic decisions, and in particular the strategic errors, of the four presidents who oversaw the Afghanistan War. In Miller’s opinion, the key mistakes of each president were as follows: “Bush’s light foot-print, Obama’s withdrawal timetable, Trump’s peace deal, and Biden’s withdrawal, each of which made a bad situation worse” (p. 463). The respective leaders elected not to allocate the necessary resources, nor show the necessary resolve and will, to commit to actually winning the war. In its place, Miller would contend, they chose defeat.
Paul D. Miller is uniquely positioned to write this history of American political strategy of the Afghanistan War given his background, experience, and access. Miller served as an intelligence officer in the US Army in Afghanistan, after which he worked as an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, giving him first-hand knowledge of the intricacies and dynamics of the conflict within the theater of operations. Additionally, he served as the Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council, affording him an insider’s view of the policy process that guided strategic thinking and decisions regarding the war.
Miller offers both praise and critique for other notable authors and works in the field, which include Carter Malkasian’s 2021 The American War in Afghanistan, David Kilcullen and Greg Mills’ 2021 The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan, and Steve Coll’s 2018 Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Miller acknowledges the overall contribution of these scholars to our broader understanding of the Afghanistan War. However, he claims that Malkasian is overly sympathetic to the Taliban point of view. In regard to the other authors, he asserts that they both misrepresent and misreport certain key parts of the historical narrative, in particular during the Bush Administration. Miller clearly believes that his insider’s access to the conflict and the policy-making process afforded him insights and access that these other historians did not have, and therefore his account represents the more accurate version of events.
Viewed within the context of the existing literature in the field, this work represents a clear contribution to the canon on the Afghanistan War. Miller’s book offers an insider’s look at the strategic history of the Afghanistan War and a coherent, concise theory as to why and how the United States lost it. With his personal involvement in the war as a military officer and later as a CIA analyst, he had a direct investment in the outcome. The positive aspects of this involvement are the insights gained, the connections developed, and the access he was able to get. Miller also writes with passion and conviction. The negative aspect is the obvious emotional involvement with the subject about which he is writing. Miller is especially critical of the Obama Administration and President Obama in particular, and readers might come away with the sense of a lack of academic objectivity.
Given that it only ended five years ago, Miller wrote this book relatively soon after its end, especially in historical terms. One strength of this recency is the ability to interview key players who are still alive and available. The obvious weakness is the lack of historical perspective and distance from the conflict. Most historical works have the benefit of time and emotional distance—this book has neither, as Miller has a clear personal attachment to and investment in the topic. However, the result is nonetheless a compelling read that represents a substantial contribution to the Afghanistan War literature.
