Choosing Defeat: The Twenty-Year Saga of How America Lost Afghanistan

by Paul D. Miller

A truly unique all-embracing narrative of the American war in Afghanistan from the own words of its architects. Choosing Defeat takes an unparalleled inside look at America's longest war, pulling back the curtain on the inner deliberations behind the scenes. The author combines his own extensive experience in the Army, the CIA, and the White House, with interviews from policymakers within the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, to produce a groundbreaking study of how American leaders make wartime decisions. Transporting you inside the White House Situation Room, every key strategic debate over twenty years – from the immediate aftermath of 9/11, to Obama's surge and withdrawal, to Trump's negotiations with the Taliban, and Biden's final pullout is carefully reconstructed. Paul D. Miller identifies issues in US leadership, governance, military strategy, and policymaking that extend beyond the war in Afghanistan and highlight the existence of deeper problems in American foreign policy.

545 pages, Hardcover

First published October 7, 2025

About the author

Paul D. Miller writes widely on American foreign policy and international affairs, just war, political theory, theology, culture, and film. He is a senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. You can also find him on LinkedIn, Amazon, Letterboxd, and Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Katie Putz · Rating 4 out of 5]

💫 I have read so very many books about the war in Afghanistan. It's a genre of its own now. This one was a slog, but I don't mean that as an insult: it is a detailed, year by year, administration by administration, chronicle of the 20-year US war in Afghanistan, paying particular attention to strategic decision-making and policy choices. Ultimately, Miller argues, the US chose defeat.

✏️  Failure has many fathers. One of Miller's harshest critiques is for Obama, because he had the highest expectations of him, he writes, but no one comes off painted in a particularly "good" light in this book. Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden all failed.

If anything, Miller is making the case that US bureaucracy was ill-suited to the mission in Afghanistan, what should have been a combination of counterterrorism and nation-building (and which the former was pursued and the latter villanized). Ultimately, a mission to which it never fully committed.

Miller's most poignant critique, in my view, is of "realism" which he writes is "a hopeless, nihilistic vision of the world." This is something I've said, in slightly different words, before and always felt a bit out of step in DC  in saying-- so it was interesting to see Miller make that argument so passionately.

The US government at present will have little interest in this book or its arguments, but history should.

👥 This is an in-the-weeds absolute slog through the bureaucratic processes that result in strategy and policy written by a guy who was part of the machine (in the Bush-Obama years). It's a touch navel-gazy, and leans heavily on interviews with the individuals who make so many of the decisions about the war -- and who I'd argue are trying to paint themselves in the best light and sometimes he lets them (sometimes he doesn't). That said I think it's a valuable contribution to the growing genre of Afghanistan retrospectives.

📍 Read this in DC and across Central Asia.

❗Thank you Cambridge University Press (@cambridgeuniversitypress) for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions mine.

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe that future students of the United States war in Afghanistan will find this book to be their go-to place to start. Dr. Miller put a tremendous amount of research into the who, what, where, and when. His analysis is as even handed as I think someone can be.

It wasn’t a quick read but is anything worth reading ever so?

[Alex Helm · Rating 1 out of 5]

Afghanistan can't be conquered