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1 1 (September 27, 2021)

handle is hein.crs/goveeoq0001 and id is 1 raw text is: r~~ssionaI flesearch Service tat rrnin~ the id4nse irtste s~n~ P14 September27, 2021 Twenty Years of Military Operations in Afghanistan: Key Questions After 20 years of operations, training, investment and capacity building, the swift collapseof the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), followed by the Taliban's takeoverofthe country, is prompting debateon how such a significant strategic setbackcould take place. Many observers attribute such failures to the decisions made by the United States and its European and other partners at the time the Taliban was ousted frompower in late 2001, including how to structure post-Taliban governance and Afghan security forces. The outcome of the campaign also provides an opportunity to reflect on how the U.S. military conducted its operations alongside its coalition partners, as well as the overall efficacy of the military as an instrument for achieving strategic goals. Section 1080 of H.R. 4350 (H.Rept. 117-118), the Fiscal Year 2022 NationalDefense Authorization Act, would establish a Commission on Afghanistan that would assess the war in Afghanistan and make recommendations to inform future operations. Senate action is pending. Learning from the Past to Prepare for the Future? Some observers contendthattoo much focus on adopting les sons learned fromthe Afghanistan into extantdoctrine, training, and operational approaches risks the United States adapting to fight previous wars, rather than future ones. Others maintain that such scrutiny is necessary, because capabilities that were utilized during the Afghanistan camp aign, such as foreign military capacity building and whole-of-government operational approaches, can potentially be adapted to better allow the U.S. to contend with great power competition, hybrid and gray zone warfare, and other contingencies. Further, many of the perceived critical deficiencies in the Afghan campaignweire present at levels of decisionmaking in Washington DC, coalition capitals, and Kabul-making it difficult to translate gains on the ground into overall success. Taken together, these choices could indicate broad systemic issues with the mannerby which the United States, alongside its coalition partners, prosecutes its wars. Left unaddressed, such problems might hamper future U.S. war efforts. Campaign (In)Coherence? Unity of command, that is, a clear delineation of who reports to whomin a military hierarchy, is a key principle for military operations. To some observers, the organization of operations in Afghanistan, both geographically and functionally, failed to achieve unity of command or unity of effort, for significant durations ofthe campaign. Geographically, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF, 2003-2014) phase of the campaign was organized by province as well as by region. Different coalition countries led Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and clustered their military forces' presence and activities around their respective PRT's activities. National capitals therefore had de facto decisionmaking input when it came to the conduct of operations in the provinces, which was at times in tension with directives from the Regional Command (RCs) or ISAF Headquarters. Other countries placed de jure limitations on the activities their forces could perform(e.g., restricting night operations), called caveats. Afghanistan-wide, the United States conducted a number of military orparamilitary efforts that were arguably distinct enough to be considered campaigns in their own right: Security operations, largely performed by battalion- sized taskforces, intendedto create the conditions whereby governance building and development activities could take place. Later in the campaign these operations were conductedby partnering with ANDSF. Complicating matters somewhat, theANDSF organized its corps structures along different geographical boundaries than the ISAF/coalition RCs. ANDSF capacity development operations designed to train and equip hundreds of thousands of Afghan forces to be subsequently fielded across Afghanistan. Other nonmilitary U.S. government elements established and trained separate Afghan paramilitary units, primarily used for counter-terrorismpurposes. Counter-terrorismoperations, some of which were conducted by U.S. and coalition Special Operations Forces. The compartmentednature of some of their activities meant that, at times, coalitionpartners did not have visibility into suchactivitieshappeningin their areas ofresponsibility. The organizationof the military campaign arguably caused unhelpful frictions and seams among components. A key question is whether, and to what extent, the manner by which military efforts in Afghanis tan were organized contributed to the overall failure of the campaign. Campaign Continuity? In part due to studies showing that since 1945 successful counterinsurgencies last an average of 14 years (seeJones, Further Reading ), experts and officials argued that succeeding in Afghanistan would likely require a long -term approach. Yet deploymentcy cles (often between six months to a year during the Afghanistan campaign), designed to balance operational needs with the morale and welfare of s ervicemembers and their families, arguably resulted in short-termapproaches to operations. As a result, many observers described campaign continuity as a 0

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