The United States​ brought the war on terror to practically every part of the world – landing military advisers on the Sulu archipelago in the Philippines, operating black sites in Poland and Romania, filling the cages of Guantánamo Bay. But the challenge to American power presented by the 11 September attacks came from a particular region: what Adam Garfinkle, a future speechwriter for both Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, referred to in 1999 as the Greater Middle East. Iraq would suffer what George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, called the ‘full wrath of the United States of America’. Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia were subjected to a drone assassination programme. Iran was placed ‘right at the top of the list’ of America’s enemies by Cheney – even if it took his successors another two decades to get round to attacking it. But Afghanistan occupied a special place. The US would use the country, as Douglas Feith, who served in Bush’s administration, later put it, to ‘send signals to the Libyas, and the Syrias, and the Sudans, and the Iraqs and the Irans’. Once thought of as ‘the other war’ or the ‘good war’, Afghanistan became the forever war. By the time it ended in 2021 at least 175,000 people had been killed, not counting the far larger number of deaths caused indirectly by disease and malnutrition.

The basic story of the war can be told in relatively simple terms. A complacent empire struck at from its furthest periphery sought brutal retribution and enacted a bloody occupation. Eventually it grew tired and withdrew, leaving behind no great transformation. Many of those who had been involved in the war’s inception saw the chaotic Nato withdrawal in August 2021 as a betrayal both of Afghanistan and of the project of American power in the world. There are still eccentrics who believe the occupation failed because the US and its lieutenants were insufficiently committed to terrorising the locals. As with Iraq, the war in Afghanistan is not yet widely acknowledged to have been a crime rather than just a mistake, but even the political establishment in the West sees it as a cautionary tale.

An effort to rehabilitate the memory of the war may therefore seem to have a certain romantic quality. A former CIA officer enlisted in the war effort, Paul Miller is one of the few US officials of that period who focused his career on Afghanistan. From the CIA he made his way to the staff of Douglas Lute, adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan to both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Between 2007 and 2009 Miller was director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the US National Security Council, and was in the room when many of the major decisions of the war were taken. He has now set out to rescue its reputation from posterity. In his account, it was embarked on with fine intentions, even if it was conducted with carelessness. It dragged on for two decades and ended in a loss, but only because ‘every president who oversaw the war made major strategic errors’: Bush decided to invade Iraq; Obama announced the timeline for withdrawal during the surge; Trump gave the game away to the Taliban by negotiating that withdrawal; and Biden conducted the coup de grâce. If it hadn’t been for all that, the American adventure in Afghanistan could have been won.

Whether or not a war is winnable depends on its objectives. According to Miller, Afghanistan was ‘a clear-cut just war of self-defence’ which ‘just happened to require liberating an oppressed people’. In common with most accounts of the war, his neglects to mention that in September 2001 Afghanistan was in a state of incipient famine. In 1999 and 2000, the country had suffered drought and crop failures. A joint UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Food Programme mission found the ‘almost total failure of the 2001 harvest’, reporting that five million people would require international food shipments to survive. When the bombing campaign began that October the aid agencies were forced to suspend this programme. Médecins sans Frontières warned that ‘the air strikes, lack of aid and onset of winter will only magnify this catastrophe.’ Mass starvation was avoided by the concerted action of relief agencies when the air campaign abated in December 2001. But in September, when the decision was taken to attack, it wasn’t clear that this would be possible. No one seemed to care very much.

Miller argues that carpet-bombing perhaps the poorest country on earth as it faced famine was the only option. The standard argument used to justify the invasion was that the Taliban and al-Qaida were bound together by pact and thus were ‘indistinguishable’. But even if one were to accept that argument, the Taliban had no capacity to resist US action, so America could have ignored it – concentrating instead on trying to capture the al-Qaida leadership. This was never considered. As Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, said in December 2001, ‘If you walked in and said “Here is Mr bin Laden” the problem would not go away.’ The invasion was ineffective in targeting al-Qaida’s leaders, who largely survived it and evaded capture. Some were captured at Tora Bora, but bin Laden lived for another decade, until the raid on Abbottabad. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in 2003, not by American soldiers but by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, in Rawalpindi. Abu Hamza Rabia and Abu Laith al-Libi were assassinated by drone strikes in Waziristan in 2005 and 2008. Ayman al-Zawahiri survived numerous assassination attempts by drone before he was killed in Kabul in 2022.

Defences of the initial invasion often put great emphasis on the fact that the US had offered the Taliban the chance to surrender. Shortly after the 11 September attacks, the CIA’s Islamabad station chief, Bob Grenier, travelled to Quetta to meet the Taliban leaders Abdul Jalil Akhund and Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, who told him that the Taliban ‘would not risk the destruction of their nation for the sake of one man’. The CIA director at the time, George Tenet, is said to have passed a message via the ISI to the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar, to say that the Taliban could avoid war if they gave up bin Laden. Omar refused to do so without proof that he had been responsible for 9/11. In Miller’s version, Bush and Cheney were models of emollience, and the fact that the US began marshalling its proxy forces on 12 September is merely evidence of prudent planning. But the idea that there was a real American attempt to avoid war is challenged by all serious scholarship. The US never entertained any option other than a full attack on Afghanistan. One reason for the Taliban’s obstinacy may have been that they knew what they were dealing with. As Wendy Chamberlin, the US ambassador to Pakistan, put it, ‘there was no inclination in Washington to engage in a dialogue with the Taliban.’ Miller disputes this. But the US certainly knew its demand that the Taliban hand over the al-Qaida leadership would never be accepted. As Bush himself would later write, it was intended to ‘firm up our justification for a military strike’.

The attack on Afghanistan began on 7 October and employed a combination of tactics – aerial bombardment and special forces working with local proxies. The CIA arrived in the Panjshir Valley with guns and cash for the Northern Alliance, a collection of mostly Tajik and Uzbek warlords who had a long history of collaborating with the agency – some of them had been involved in the destruction of Kabul in the 1990s after the fall of the communist regime. CIA officers handed $100,000 in cash to Abdulrab Rasul Sayyaf (who had palled around with bin Laden in the past). The UK Special Boat Service embedded with Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose men would soon herd hundreds of Taliban supporters into shipping containers to be suffocated to death, before bulldozing their bodies into holes in the desert. The notion that the CIA teamed up with Dostum, Fahim Khan and Gul Agha Sherzai to secure the principled liberation of Afghanistan is ludicrous, but Miller never questions it.

The air campaign mirrored the brutality meted out by the US’s local auxiliaries. Miller quotes Ryan Crocker, America’s first chargé d’affaires in Kabul, who described the devastation. ‘Just driving in from Bagram to Kabul, not a building standing ... whole city blocks of Kabul were gone,’ Crocker wrote. ‘It looked like pictures of Berlin in 1945.’ (This description is offered not as a reflection on the attack but to demonstrate the need for reconstruction programmes.) In only two months the US had achieved what it thought was a ‘stunning victory’. As the Taliban leadership withdrew to Pakistan, the CIA rode into Kabul and took over the Ariana Hotel. Tens of thousands of Northern Alliance supporters sought their share of the spoils. The ease of the assault demonstrated the weakness of the Taliban state that was allegedly ‘protecting’ bin Laden, who sought the safety of the Spin Ghar mountains rather than a Taliban bunker.

By early 2002 the US believed it had won the war. Miller thinks in hindsight that the ‘light footprint’ of the early occupation was a mistake. It doesn’t help his argument that the examples he offers of successful state-building by the US and its allies are the Balkans, Sierra Leone and Liberia. The merits and demerits of state-building were much debated. But in 2002 the US wasn’t willing to spend much on Afghanistan (the easy money didn’t start flowing until much later). Miller argues that the US prioritised counterterrorism and set aside ‘virtually no resources’ for roads, schools and hospitals during the first two years of the occupation. Having spent $4.5 billion on three months of war, it set up a paper-thin transitional government on shoestring funds.

The Afghan Interim Administration and the Transitional Administration that succeeded it were dressed up as governments, but in practice they were satrapies dependent on external sponsorship. Hamid Karzai was chosen to lead the administration because of his American connection, his claim to a Pashtun lineage and because unlike Zahir Shah – another possibility – he hadn’t once been king. Days before the invasion the CIA had told Karzai, then in Pakistan, to get on his motorbike and enter the country. With his past support for the Taliban absolved, the Americans gave him a security team. After he was informed by a satellite phone call from Bonn that he would head the new government he started travelling around with American bodyguards. Almost all the political figures in post-invasion Afghanistan had ties of some sort to US intelligence. And as Miller notes, ‘for all intents and purposes, there was no government outside of Kabul and a few provincial capitals well into 2005.’

In a story brimming with failures Miller sees the internationally sponsored government in Kabul as one of the ‘islands of success’, crediting Karzai’s administration with producing ‘a more open society’. Miller praises the new Afghan army and police forces for fighting off the Taliban for more than a decade. But while they were supposed to be building a professional army, US forces were hiring local militia members whenever they needed muscle. America spent billions of dollars on anti-narcotics programmes; the result was a net increase in poppy cultivation. Miller claims to admire the work of the academic Thomas Barfield on the American state-building endeavour. But unlike Miller, Barfield saw that post-invasion Afghanistan was a corrupt paper state dependent on international donations, offering little to the population and subject to the final authority of the US empire. As he put it in 2010, the ‘unexpected measure of goodwill from the Afghan people in 2002 was heedlessly squandered in the coming years by inept policies that failed to bring security to many regions’.

Soon enough the Taliban recovered from its defeat. It started ambushing coalition forces, downing helicopters, attacking the funerals of collaborating clerics and conducting suicide operations at Bagram airbase, withdrawing into tribal Pakistan when necessary. The British army redeployed to Helmand in 2006 in the hope that a reputation destroyed in Iraq might be rescued by fighting the insurgency alongside the reasonable Canadians and Dutch. But in the event they often ended up fuelling the violent conflict they were ostensibly there to prevent. That is, when they weren’t executing farmers in their beds in front of their wives. Somehow this didn’t help eliminate support for the Taliban.

Miller tries to finesse this by arguing that if the occupation forces behaved poorly it is because there were too few of them, and that if there had been more they might have been more professional. But given his claims about the merits of the occupation it’s unclear why he thinks there was an insurgency at all. His view seems to be that the Taliban, by some metaphysical means, conjured up a bitter struggle across the country against an impeccable project. When American planners realised how severe the insurgency was they sent in the marines, who couldn’t speak the local languages, to train Afghan police and soldiers who couldn’t speak English. Young men were plucked from their villages, given a couple of weeks of training and then sent to man rural checkpoints. In the best-case scenario, they answered to the corrupt Ministry of the Interior in Kabul; often they ended up working with the Taliban. Miller says he knew at the time that the situation was ‘dire’. But it’s difficult to square that with his general claim, which is that if the cheques for the phantom Afghan army brigades had arrived a year earlier it would all have been different.

Obama​ entered office in 2009 believing that the situation in Afghanistan could be turned around. The first year of his presidency put paid to that. His two major innovations were the drone campaign in Waziristan and the surge. In February 2009, the US deployed 21,000 more soldiers and another 30,000 arrived in December. At the height of the surge there were 150,000 US and coalition troops in the country. Miller is very critical of Obama’s decision to put a public timetable on the surge (stating that the bulk of US forces would return home in July 2011), which he sees as the hinge point in the whole war. The timetable was intended to send a message to the government in Kabul that it had a limited amount of time to get its act together, but in fact the pre-announcement meant that the Taliban knew when the American push would end. The surge ensured there were plenty of American soldiers around, but it also drew closer attention to the nature of the Afghan government, which was festering in a way that was obvious even to the US officials who visited. When Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative, and Vice President Joe Biden met Karzai they immediately saw the problem. In 2009, Holbrooke and Karzai tried to rig the upcoming elections in different directions. In the resulting mess Karzai remained in place. Miller holds the view that it was a great moral achievement that a certain percentage of women won office in these fraudulent elections – presumably so they could work alongside the CIA assets in the cabinet.

Miller is preoccupied by the reason American officials, and Americans in general, thought of the war in Afghanistan in the way they did. He records that in 2001 the war had near unanimous support in the US, and still had substantial majority support in 2008. But by the end of the surge in 2012 enthusiasm had been replaced by a sense of futility. Miller chalks some of this up to a ‘mood music of pessimism that would swell throughout the war’. But the real reason the Obama administration scaled back its ambitions was the feeling that the whole thing was beyond repair. Though the US is thought to have provided more than $130 billion to the Afghan state between 2002 and 2021, most of it went straight to security forces and much of the rest was siphoned off to accounts in the Gulf and Switzerland. Looked at from this perspective, the war in Afghanistan wasn’t ‘wasteful’ so much as an efficient vehicle for the transfer of public funds to arms companies and contractors.

The American military commanders and political appointees who circled in and out of Afghanistan in those years tended to cling to a common delusion. Miller has interviewed plenty who believe they made great progress when they were there – a sentiment captured in the phrase ‘we were doing well when I left.’ He is kinder to those who opposed withdrawal. Leon Panetta, CIA director and then secretary of defence under Obama, tells Miller it was an achievement that ‘for twenty years we were able to prevent Afghanistan from collapsing and having the Taliban take over.’ Some officials knew how bad the situation was. Miller takes to task Chuck Hagel, Panetta’s successor at the Pentagon, for believing the US was losing while also wanting to withdraw (if the war was being lost, that should have been an argument for persevering). The fate of the surge was another example of a lack of commitment among American political leaders to ‘the moral necessity of victory in a just cause’.

The first time US officials made formal contact with the Taliban was in 2010, when a former aide to Mullah Omar came to Munich. The US insisted the Taliban accept principles (inclusion, pluralism) that it claimed were hallmarks of the administration it had erected in Kabul. The Taliban said it wouldn’t talk to Karzai. It was two years before the talks were picked up again. The second round of negotiations was half-hearted, but it did lead to the establishment of the Taliban office in Doha, which Karzai worried might look like a government in exile. The main problem the US had in dealing with the Taliban was that it had little to offer: its soldiers were already going home in advance of a planned full handover to the Afghan government. But the Kabul administration was already starting to lose territory. Narrow defeats for government forces in 2014 were followed by routs in Kunduz and Helmand in 2015. Obama was soon talking of bringing the war to a ‘responsible conclusion’. Miller credits Peter Lavoy, a veteran of the national security bureaucracy, with persuading Obama not to withdraw in 2016 and to keep 12,000 troops in place.

From then on the occupation was a holding action. Most of the coalition soldiers were doing little fighting, with the exception of American and British special forces death squads, which continued to terrorise the countryside. When Trump entered office it was on a platform that included getting the US out of Afghanistan. But he ended up introducing another 3000 troops and increasing the rate of airstrikes. It wasn’t until September 2018 that he tasked the US special representative Zalmay Khalilzad and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, with reopening negotiations with the Taliban. The Doha Agreement signed by Pompeo and Abdul Ghani Baradar in February 2020 stipulated that the US would leave Afghanistan fourteen months later and that the Taliban would not give safe haven to al-Qaida (in addition to whatever was included in a classified annex about anti-terrorism co-operation). Khalilzad, who had been there from the start, knew the US presence had run its course, but seems to have believed that the government in Kabul would persist in some form for longer than it did.

The Taliban began its offensive just after May 2021, the withdrawal deadline in the agreement. The Afghan army nominally had more than 200,000 men and should have been capable of holding the territory Kabul controlled. But the real function of the Afghan army units wasn’t to fight: it was to reinforce the political balance in Kabul. Miller blames the US for withdrawing military supplies to the Afghan helicopter fleet, which is fair enough. Still, there’s no reason to think this would have changed anything. In August the Taliban captured all the provincial capitals, including Kabul, in a matter of days. Ashraf Ghani, who had become president in 2014, fled to Uzbekistan and then to the UAE.

The debacle of the US withdrawal, being closer to us in time, now looms larger than most of the malfeasances of the war itself. The US had to scramble to evacuate more than 100,000 people in two weeks. A suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul killed 170 Afghans and 13 US troops. In return a US drone strike killed ten Afghan civilians (seven of them children). Miller considers the withdrawal the core defeat of the war and an unnecessary act of abandonment. If the government in Kabul was still unable to govern the country after twenty years, all the more reason to stay. The forever war, he argues, ‘was affordable, sustainable, and successful at the bare minimum goal of keeping the lid on Afghanistan’. He comes down hard on Biden for going through with the withdrawal, and charges him with thinking that the war in Afghanistan was fundamentally similar to the Vietnam War (of which Miller also seems to think Biden was too critical). He makes no mention of the Parthian shot of freezing the assets of Afghanistan’s central bank during yet another humanitarian crisis.

In reality, since the early days of the Obama administration US leaders had often seen Afghanistan as an extravagance they could no longer afford. As early as 2009, the political scientist Robert Jervis argued that the presence of the international coalition was a problem in itself. The Taliban had roots in Afghan society: it was never going to be excluded from the country’s future. ‘Withdrawal without winning’ was the probable result. Jervis argued that if the Taliban simply took over, as was likely, the US would not be threatened to a significant degree. And the supposed reputational damage was exaggerated. Would the US really ‘appear more resolute – and wiser – for fighting in Afghanistan’? If not, why not withdraw?

Despite years of discussion of the prospect, the withdrawal was greeted in much of the American press with hysterical laments over the death of the American empire. Miller is unwilling to reckon with the possibility that the manner of the war’s end revealed something about its nature. He refers to the withdrawal as ‘the Versailles of the war on terror’, a comparison that speaks for itself. But the scarpering retreat can be counted among the war’s less shameful episodes. In April 2023, Biden’s White House published its official version of events, in which it blamed the Trump administration for the loss of territory to the Taliban, and US intelligence agencies for excessively sanguine assessments of the Kabul government. The withdrawal was justified by two conflicting claims. The US ‘had become bogged down in a war in Afghanistan with unclear objectives and no end in sight’, but it had also ‘accomplished its mission in Afghanistan’. The report’s conclusion was more plausible: ‘The speed and ease with which the Taliban took control of Afghanistan suggests that there was no scenario – except a permanent and significantly expanded US military presence – that would have changed the trajectory.’

Because the war dragged on for as long as it did (Afghanistan is officially the longest war in US history), substantial reflections on its legacy appeared quite quickly. In 2021, Carter Malkasian published a major history of the war that made stinging criticisms of practically every facet of the undertaking. His conclusion was that the US had reanimated a brutal civil war and that the international intervention was ‘a blight on the peace and wellbeing of the people of Afghanistan’. Miller is superficially respectful of the breadth of Malkasian’s knowledge and his access to Pashto sources, but still accuses him of adopting the Taliban perspective. Lapsing into the rhetorical style of the early 2000s, he charges Malkasian with believing ‘the United States was an illegitimate, occupying power’ and implying ‘moral equivalence between the mistakes of the American war and the tyranny of Taliban rule’.

Miller himself sees the war in Afghanistan as a classic defeat of the will. If the US and its accomplices had summoned the fortitude, the war could have been won. There is a clear echo here of the idea that the US lost the Vietnam War on the home front – a view popular among former officials involved in its conduct. Perhaps it is more convenient, in both cases, to believe this than to accept that you have helped lead your country into a futile war that killed tens of thousands of people. The US may have ‘fought a selfish war with little regard for the Afghans’. But that was incidental. Another war had been possible. Just think, the US could still be in Afghanistan today.

Miller claims his book is a re-examination of the war and his part in it. But it is closer to an apologia. So much that is relevant to the story is absent. Torture plays little role in his account, despite its centrality to the spirit of those years. The name Salt Pit – a CIA black site near Kabul – does not appear. Neither does the Patriot Act. The only reference to special forces death squads is hidden in brief remarks about green berets ‘kicking down doors and doing night raids and putting bullets into bodies’. As for the role the US played in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s, which created the conditions that attracted al-Qaida, Miller seems to think it better ignored. Only once is some introspection evident, when he admits that, fifteen years into the war, he came to the realisation that the public at home thought of ‘the American war in Afghanistan primarily as a war of retribution’.

American military power coloured by fantasies of retribution is once again being visited on the Greater Middle East. When the US and Israel began their deranged attack on Iran earlier this year, Trump referred to Afghanistan as the kind of debacle typical of his predecessors – one he would avoid. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defence, stressed that Iran would not be ‘endless’ like Afghanistan but ‘realistic’. Holman Jenkins, a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which has strongly supported the war in Iran, noted that even though ‘Afghanistan went on for twenty years’ it did not fatally injure the political prospects of the political leaders who prosecuted it. ‘Trump’s war is looking like a bargain in comparison and, by certain measures, even a victory.’

Who would want to rescue the reputation of the war in Afghanistan? Despite the efforts of some of those involved, its legacy is unlikely to improve with time and scrutiny. But bitter tastes fade. It’s possible to imagine a future in which disaster in Iran flatters by comparison the war in Afghanistan. The war was destructive for Afghanistan, but it wasn’t all that bloody for the home troops. And think of all the civilising we did. The tactics of mass torture and humanitarian bombing campaigns might be needed again. The damage the Afghanistan war did to America’s global position would be insignificant compared with the worst outcomes of the present war in Iran. Perhaps Afghanistan will once again come to be seen as a model rather than a warning.