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Our Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan
The first rule of warfare is to know one’s enemy. The second is to know thyself. More than fifteen years and three quarters of a trillion dollars after the US invasion of Afghanistan, it’s clear that the United States followed neither rule well.
America’s goals in Afghanistan were lofty to begin dismantle al Qaeda, remove the Taliban from power, remake the country into a democracy. But not only did the mission come completely unmoored from reality, the United States wasted billions of dollars, and thousands of lives were lost. Our Latest Longest War is a chronicle of how, why, and in what ways the war in Afghanistan failed. Edited by historian and Marine lieutenant colonel Aaron B. O’Connell, the essays collected here represent nine different perspectives on the war—all from veterans of the conflict, both American and Afghan. Together, they paint a picture of a war in which problems of culture and an unbridgeable rural-urban divide derailed nearly every field of endeavor. The authors also draw troubling parallels to the Vietnam War, arguing that deep-running ideological currents in American life explain why the US government has repeatedly used armed nation-building to try to transform failing states into modern, liberal democracies. In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, this created a dramatic mismatch of means and ends that neither money, technology, nor the force of arms could overcome.
The war in Afghanistan has been the longest in US history, and in many ways, the most confounding. Few who fought in it think it has been worthwhile. These are difficult topics for any American or Afghan to consider, especially those who lost friends or family in it. This sobering history—written by the very people who have been fighting the war—is impossible to ignore.
America’s goals in Afghanistan were lofty to begin dismantle al Qaeda, remove the Taliban from power, remake the country into a democracy. But not only did the mission come completely unmoored from reality, the United States wasted billions of dollars, and thousands of lives were lost. Our Latest Longest War is a chronicle of how, why, and in what ways the war in Afghanistan failed. Edited by historian and Marine lieutenant colonel Aaron B. O’Connell, the essays collected here represent nine different perspectives on the war—all from veterans of the conflict, both American and Afghan. Together, they paint a picture of a war in which problems of culture and an unbridgeable rural-urban divide derailed nearly every field of endeavor. The authors also draw troubling parallels to the Vietnam War, arguing that deep-running ideological currents in American life explain why the US government has repeatedly used armed nation-building to try to transform failing states into modern, liberal democracies. In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, this created a dramatic mismatch of means and ends that neither money, technology, nor the force of arms could overcome.
The war in Afghanistan has been the longest in US history, and in many ways, the most confounding. Few who fought in it think it has been worthwhile. These are difficult topics for any American or Afghan to consider, especially those who lost friends or family in it. This sobering history—written by the very people who have been fighting the war—is impossible to ignore.
400 pages, Hardcover
Published April 3, 2017
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December 18, 2020I decided to read this after Trump declared he would be proceeding with a troop drawdown in Afghanistan. I sometimes find it sad that it’s a right-wing leader who is claiming a less interventionist position than so many of his Democratic counterparts. Trump is sadly more anti-war than a lot of centrist Democrats. He’s also the one who stopped conducting military exercises on the Korean peninsula simulating the assassination of the leader of the DPRK. Can you even begin to imagine some other country doing that on the shores of the United States? I think Trump is one of the most despicable people on this planet. Yet in many ways George Bush’s foreign policy was actually even more destructive than Trump’s, despite how much Trump gets demonized compared to Bush in the media. Yet even though it was Bush who started this war in Afghanistan, it was Obama who escalated troop levels to their peak.
I found this book through a post Danny Sjursen made on Fortress on a Hill. Sjursen served in Afghanistan, taught at West Point, and is deeply critical of the war in Afghanistan. I only recently encountered Sjursen in an interview he did on Moderate Rebels. He describes Obama’s surge in 2009, which tripled the troop levels from the former Bush administration, as a sobering moment that caused him to drastically change his view of Obama, and pushed him farther left politically. Obama militarized almost every single aspect of America’s presence in Afghanistan. It is truly jarring to see how deeply entangled USAID is with the American military. How fun is it to discover the USAID was involved in smuggling jihadist textbooks published by the University of Nebraska Press into Afghanistan during the Cold War? It was US bankrolling of reactionary extremists during the Cold War that empowered people like bin Ladin (some of this is delved into in this book). Watching a debate Varoufakis did with John Bolton (the hawkish war criminal that seems to be on CNN every other day for some reason), I only just realized Bolton worked for the USAID for a number of years, before entering the national security machinery of American Empire. Anyway, Sjursen recommended this book back in 2018, and so I thought the announcement of the troop drawdown was a good time to check this book out.
This book was written by military insiders. These are high-ranking officers in the American military, some professors or military intellectuals, mostly all of them critical of this war. So many within the military itself believe the US should be out of Afghanistan by now. There is no reason the US should still be meddling with affairs there, as it has not even been able to fulfil its own objectives and interests in the region, not to mention the interests of ordinary people actually living there. At every point, you can see how domineering and controlling US authority is in Afghanistan, sidelining elected officials to marginal positions, and blocking out local input. One cannot help but see the parallels with colonialism, and I'm glad Aaron O'Connell alludes to this in his introduction saying:
"Americans like to believe that their country kicked this habit--that what makes the United States exceptional is its embrace of modernity without the corruption of colonial conquest. But that story does not square with the facts. New England Puritans spoke of an "errand into the wilderness"--a divine mission to establish a "city on a hill," perfect the world, and civilize its inhabitants--and then they massacred the Pequot, Narraganset, Wampanoag tribes for being uncivilized. The Founding Fathers railed against the injustices of colonialism, but then began their century-long colonial project that reframed the conquest of the continent as civilization's blessing. Thomas Jefferson may have spoken of an "empire for liberty," and of governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," but he did so while advocating forced Indian removal and warning that "if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated." This pattern of pairing emancipatory narratives with military domination continued all through the 19th century in the Mexican War, numerous Indian wars, and the Philippine-American War, which President McKinley later explained was done "to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.""
Ironically, some of the essays in this book had sort of patronizing or condescending orientalist tropes throughout, which is expected of military intelligentsia, but even these sorts of people want American troops out, even if their reasons are somewhat racist (basically Pashtun ‘tribal’ culture being essentially at odds with ‘Western liberal’ values).
One of the chapters I found most interesting was actually written by one of the more conservative writers in this book (this guy was a former policy advisor to Tom Cotton, a fellow at the hawkish think-tank CNAS, and edited the Washington Free Beacon; who knew I’d be reading this sort of shit one day). Aaron MacLean, who wrote Chapter 7 “Liberalism Does Its Thing”, traces a rather clear lineage of liberalism and progressivism back to Machiavelli and Hobbes, and emphasizes that early liberal ideas were more open and transparent about the need of violence to enact its ideological goals, whereas over the centuries Western liberal states have successfully hidden that violent dimension of liberalism to such an extent that most people living in ‘Western liberal democracies’ (like Canada) are unaware that it is very central to the successful operation of a Western liberal state. An excerpt that I particularly liked:
“Westerners living in a sovereign liberal-democratic republic today might not recognize much of Hobbes's Leviathan or Machiavelli's princely rule in their own nation-states, but that is precisely the point: the coercive elements in the liberal political system have not disappeared, but they have been obscured through softening--hidden in such a way that later practitioners failed to appreciate just how central they are. Hobbes, in a sense, softened Machiavelli's teaching, and in turn found his own teaching softened by Locke; later revisions and critiques came from Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. Each of these philosophers wrote in a specific time and place, but over time, their ideas have transformed into a hidden assumption--a basic certainty of practical liberalism--that some version of the modern Western state is natural rather than artificial and voluntary rather than coercive.”
It’s interesting, because if one bothers to hear out indigenous voices, this coercive element of so-called ‘liberal democracies’ is made very evident and tangible. If one reads about colonial slave plantations and penal colonies, indigenous genocide, scorched earth military campaigns, residential schools – the coercive dimension of liberalism is obvious. Therefore, the coercive aspect of neoliberalism’s austerity measures are equally obvious. But a lot goes into obscuring all of this, as MacLean points out, and so when you see a coercive imperialist military force like that of the United States trying to install a ‘Western liberal democracy’ in Afghanistan, what you see is endless violence. The militarization of every aspect of statecraft under the Obama administration and soaring troop numbers in Obama’s surge done on behalf of the Beltway Blob. It’s fascinating to hear the billions of dollars many ‘Western liberal democracies’ have dumped into trying to build Afghanistan’s police force to no avail. One gets a sense how deeply entangled the military is with the police. They are both the arms of the Weberian monopoly on violence claimed by the ‘liberal’ state. It is no wonder Obama mocks ‘defund the police’ as a snappy slogan that won’t accomplish anything. The next logical step from defunding the police is defunding the Pentagon, but that would mean the collapse of the project of liberalism, because liberalism relies on coercive violence to accomplish its goals. There’s a reason the ruling classes still are so dismissive to any calls to defund the police. Because state-sanctioned violence or the threat of it is the raison d’etre of a liberal social order.
Obama takes every effort to assume the posture of a level-headed and rational peacemaker, but it’s alarming how many war crimes he will commit for the sake of hollow exercises in optics. You know one of those documents of Western civilization called the Magna Carta? You know ‘habeas corpus’? I’m the next most ignorant person out there when it comes to law, but you don’t need to go to Harvard Law School to find it absurd that Obama has to assassinate Osama bin Laden as an optics setup to justify pulling out troops so as to appease his ‘moderate’ Republican friends. That is the sort of thing people mean when they speak of bipartisanship and working across the aisle in Washington. Assassinating people in other countries without due process to score political points. You can read more about this in Colin Jackson’s chapter. Jackson taught counterinsurgency at Columbia and MIT and has worked in private sector financial trading (don’t you love how neatly capitalism and militarism are joined at the hip).
Anyway, I probably should read more books like this, but it was in all honesty really exhausting reading the prose of military elites. I can only assume how unbearable it is for them to read leftist literature, but you can rest assured they are studying that stuff very diligently. Laleh Khalili mentioned in a tweet that the Hoover Institution actually has the largest and most comprehensive collection of Third World radical and revolutionary literature on the planet. I think people on the left have to be equally diligent about keeping up with what the American military machine is thinking too. Anyway, I did find the Soviet history in this text really fascinating. The Saur Revolution is something I definitely want to read more about. It’s also fascinating to realize how central Afghanistan became to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Either way, not the sort of thing I’d read for pleasure, but this was certainly a sobering account of how to blow a trillion dollars (while leaving thousands to die in your own country because you’re not ready to deal with a pandemic that other countries in the world have managed competently). Three thousand die in a terrorist attack and six trillion dollars can somehow be mobilized for a 'war on terror', but a pandemic that kills three thousand every single day, and you can barely shell out a single $600 payment to people on the brink of eviction with no food to put on their tables.
I found this book through a post Danny Sjursen made on Fortress on a Hill. Sjursen served in Afghanistan, taught at West Point, and is deeply critical of the war in Afghanistan. I only recently encountered Sjursen in an interview he did on Moderate Rebels. He describes Obama’s surge in 2009, which tripled the troop levels from the former Bush administration, as a sobering moment that caused him to drastically change his view of Obama, and pushed him farther left politically. Obama militarized almost every single aspect of America’s presence in Afghanistan. It is truly jarring to see how deeply entangled USAID is with the American military. How fun is it to discover the USAID was involved in smuggling jihadist textbooks published by the University of Nebraska Press into Afghanistan during the Cold War? It was US bankrolling of reactionary extremists during the Cold War that empowered people like bin Ladin (some of this is delved into in this book). Watching a debate Varoufakis did with John Bolton (the hawkish war criminal that seems to be on CNN every other day for some reason), I only just realized Bolton worked for the USAID for a number of years, before entering the national security machinery of American Empire. Anyway, Sjursen recommended this book back in 2018, and so I thought the announcement of the troop drawdown was a good time to check this book out.
This book was written by military insiders. These are high-ranking officers in the American military, some professors or military intellectuals, mostly all of them critical of this war. So many within the military itself believe the US should be out of Afghanistan by now. There is no reason the US should still be meddling with affairs there, as it has not even been able to fulfil its own objectives and interests in the region, not to mention the interests of ordinary people actually living there. At every point, you can see how domineering and controlling US authority is in Afghanistan, sidelining elected officials to marginal positions, and blocking out local input. One cannot help but see the parallels with colonialism, and I'm glad Aaron O'Connell alludes to this in his introduction saying:
"Americans like to believe that their country kicked this habit--that what makes the United States exceptional is its embrace of modernity without the corruption of colonial conquest. But that story does not square with the facts. New England Puritans spoke of an "errand into the wilderness"--a divine mission to establish a "city on a hill," perfect the world, and civilize its inhabitants--and then they massacred the Pequot, Narraganset, Wampanoag tribes for being uncivilized. The Founding Fathers railed against the injustices of colonialism, but then began their century-long colonial project that reframed the conquest of the continent as civilization's blessing. Thomas Jefferson may have spoken of an "empire for liberty," and of governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," but he did so while advocating forced Indian removal and warning that "if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated." This pattern of pairing emancipatory narratives with military domination continued all through the 19th century in the Mexican War, numerous Indian wars, and the Philippine-American War, which President McKinley later explained was done "to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.""
Ironically, some of the essays in this book had sort of patronizing or condescending orientalist tropes throughout, which is expected of military intelligentsia, but even these sorts of people want American troops out, even if their reasons are somewhat racist (basically Pashtun ‘tribal’ culture being essentially at odds with ‘Western liberal’ values).
One of the chapters I found most interesting was actually written by one of the more conservative writers in this book (this guy was a former policy advisor to Tom Cotton, a fellow at the hawkish think-tank CNAS, and edited the Washington Free Beacon; who knew I’d be reading this sort of shit one day). Aaron MacLean, who wrote Chapter 7 “Liberalism Does Its Thing”, traces a rather clear lineage of liberalism and progressivism back to Machiavelli and Hobbes, and emphasizes that early liberal ideas were more open and transparent about the need of violence to enact its ideological goals, whereas over the centuries Western liberal states have successfully hidden that violent dimension of liberalism to such an extent that most people living in ‘Western liberal democracies’ (like Canada) are unaware that it is very central to the successful operation of a Western liberal state. An excerpt that I particularly liked:
“Westerners living in a sovereign liberal-democratic republic today might not recognize much of Hobbes's Leviathan or Machiavelli's princely rule in their own nation-states, but that is precisely the point: the coercive elements in the liberal political system have not disappeared, but they have been obscured through softening--hidden in such a way that later practitioners failed to appreciate just how central they are. Hobbes, in a sense, softened Machiavelli's teaching, and in turn found his own teaching softened by Locke; later revisions and critiques came from Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. Each of these philosophers wrote in a specific time and place, but over time, their ideas have transformed into a hidden assumption--a basic certainty of practical liberalism--that some version of the modern Western state is natural rather than artificial and voluntary rather than coercive.”
It’s interesting, because if one bothers to hear out indigenous voices, this coercive element of so-called ‘liberal democracies’ is made very evident and tangible. If one reads about colonial slave plantations and penal colonies, indigenous genocide, scorched earth military campaigns, residential schools – the coercive dimension of liberalism is obvious. Therefore, the coercive aspect of neoliberalism’s austerity measures are equally obvious. But a lot goes into obscuring all of this, as MacLean points out, and so when you see a coercive imperialist military force like that of the United States trying to install a ‘Western liberal democracy’ in Afghanistan, what you see is endless violence. The militarization of every aspect of statecraft under the Obama administration and soaring troop numbers in Obama’s surge done on behalf of the Beltway Blob. It’s fascinating to hear the billions of dollars many ‘Western liberal democracies’ have dumped into trying to build Afghanistan’s police force to no avail. One gets a sense how deeply entangled the military is with the police. They are both the arms of the Weberian monopoly on violence claimed by the ‘liberal’ state. It is no wonder Obama mocks ‘defund the police’ as a snappy slogan that won’t accomplish anything. The next logical step from defunding the police is defunding the Pentagon, but that would mean the collapse of the project of liberalism, because liberalism relies on coercive violence to accomplish its goals. There’s a reason the ruling classes still are so dismissive to any calls to defund the police. Because state-sanctioned violence or the threat of it is the raison d’etre of a liberal social order.
Obama takes every effort to assume the posture of a level-headed and rational peacemaker, but it’s alarming how many war crimes he will commit for the sake of hollow exercises in optics. You know one of those documents of Western civilization called the Magna Carta? You know ‘habeas corpus’? I’m the next most ignorant person out there when it comes to law, but you don’t need to go to Harvard Law School to find it absurd that Obama has to assassinate Osama bin Laden as an optics setup to justify pulling out troops so as to appease his ‘moderate’ Republican friends. That is the sort of thing people mean when they speak of bipartisanship and working across the aisle in Washington. Assassinating people in other countries without due process to score political points. You can read more about this in Colin Jackson’s chapter. Jackson taught counterinsurgency at Columbia and MIT and has worked in private sector financial trading (don’t you love how neatly capitalism and militarism are joined at the hip).
Anyway, I probably should read more books like this, but it was in all honesty really exhausting reading the prose of military elites. I can only assume how unbearable it is for them to read leftist literature, but you can rest assured they are studying that stuff very diligently. Laleh Khalili mentioned in a tweet that the Hoover Institution actually has the largest and most comprehensive collection of Third World radical and revolutionary literature on the planet. I think people on the left have to be equally diligent about keeping up with what the American military machine is thinking too. Anyway, I did find the Soviet history in this text really fascinating. The Saur Revolution is something I definitely want to read more about. It’s also fascinating to realize how central Afghanistan became to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Either way, not the sort of thing I’d read for pleasure, but this was certainly a sobering account of how to blow a trillion dollars (while leaving thousands to die in your own country because you’re not ready to deal with a pandemic that other countries in the world have managed competently). Three thousand die in a terrorist attack and six trillion dollars can somehow be mobilized for a 'war on terror', but a pandemic that kills three thousand every single day, and you can barely shell out a single $600 payment to people on the brink of eviction with no food to put on their tables.
June 2, 2024
This was not a particularly easy read, both in terms of style, and in terms of reckoning with recent American history. Stylistically, it reads somewhat like an academic work and narrative nonfiction for a broader audience. I imagine a lot of people won't find the intellectual slog particularly satisfying. (Actually the chapters were each a little different in their style as it's technically a co-authored compilation.)
Yet, it's got fascinating insights for those interested in scratching the surface of tired, parroted commentary and who seek something more measured than hot personal and politicized takes on what went wrong in America's disastrous second post-WW II attempt at nation-building. Turns out knowing the mistakes of history (the Vietnam War), and attempting to avoid re-creating the same mistakes wasn't quite enough to prevent new, different mistakes. Ultimately, this book will appeal to Americans curious as to why a different set of international relations and military approaches still ended in an embarrassing withdrawal despite using careful interventions based on mostly good intentions.
I'm not sure the book has all the answers, and I think that's what I appreciate most. Just because we have an incomplete understanding, doesn't mean we shouldn't take a long, hard look at what we can learn from this long war, a tragic but not ill-intentioned attempt at nation building.
My takeaway: while war is politics by other means, international wars and domestic politics can make for very bad outcomes when voters lose interest in the facts.
Yet, it's got fascinating insights for those interested in scratching the surface of tired, parroted commentary and who seek something more measured than hot personal and politicized takes on what went wrong in America's disastrous second post-WW II attempt at nation-building. Turns out knowing the mistakes of history (the Vietnam War), and attempting to avoid re-creating the same mistakes wasn't quite enough to prevent new, different mistakes. Ultimately, this book will appeal to Americans curious as to why a different set of international relations and military approaches still ended in an embarrassing withdrawal despite using careful interventions based on mostly good intentions.
I'm not sure the book has all the answers, and I think that's what I appreciate most. Just because we have an incomplete understanding, doesn't mean we shouldn't take a long, hard look at what we can learn from this long war, a tragic but not ill-intentioned attempt at nation building.
My takeaway: while war is politics by other means, international wars and domestic politics can make for very bad outcomes when voters lose interest in the facts.
April 8, 2018
This book is written more like a collection of essays on a central theme than a "book". Doesn't distract from the overall read other than a few instances of redundancy in content as authors build context but should be kept in mind as the tone and perspective of the authors is very different in some sections.
While I overall agree with much the authors make cases for I think some time still needs to pas and see how things play out. With that aside the books does a very good job of short focused histories for someone looking for a condensed understanding of events. The book does focus on the limited operation enduring freedom portion of the war which lends its self to the idea that the "war is over" despite continued troop presence and rotations.
While I overall agree with much the authors make cases for I think some time still needs to pas and see how things play out. With that aside the books does a very good job of short focused histories for someone looking for a condensed understanding of events. The book does focus on the limited operation enduring freedom portion of the war which lends its self to the idea that the "war is over" despite continued troop presence and rotations.
February 15, 2020
Our latest longest war is a book which discusses minute issues which led US to loose the Afghan war despite spending rather waisting trillion of tax payers money. In this book writer clear defines the complex cultural afghan terrain and US desire of modernisation afghanistan people through west principle .... this resulted in cultural friction... turfs b/w US mil and Afghanistan govt... similarly militarising every thing from training to humanitarian projects and not involving civilian in loop... dragged US in a situation from where coming out was impossible. over all a good book which gives a fair picture how super power was unable to bring peace in Afghanistan.
February 23, 2018
This was a bit of a slog for me. It's a strong critique of the Afghanistan War, but it's strength (being that its contributors are almost all military veterans of the Afghan war) eventually becomes its weakness. This is not Lawrence Wright, Joby Warrick, or Steve Coll. Much of this book, though full of valuable information, and critical analysis, comes off as bland, and becomes increasingly repetitious. This book has a textbook feel, and that's not entirely a bad thing. If I were to take a class on the Afghan War this book would serve its purpose just fine.
October 30, 2020
If you want to know what happened in Afghanistan over the last few decades, this is a terrific start. It is a long read, but broken up into sections which were written by different authors, each speaking from a level of expertise, specific to their background and experience on the ground. I highly recommend this book.
December 6, 2017
Timely and relevant. Good policy insight, but wasn’t great. I was particularly impressed by the author’s introduction, along with the essays by Colin Jackson (US Strategy in Afghanistan) and Aaron MacLean (Liberalism Does its Thing). MacLean’s essay on liberalism was my favorite.
July 2, 2018
Fairly interesting look at various morasses involving the US in Afghanistan, and some background on Afghanistan pre-2001 as well, but nothing particularly scintillating.
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April 28, 2019Loved the book!
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