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99 Foreign Aff. 77 (2020)
How the Good War Went Bad: America's Slow-Motion Failure in Afghanistan

handle is hein.journals/fora99 and id is 287 raw text is: How the Good War Went Bad America's Slow-Motion Failure in Afghanistan Carter Malkasian The United States has been fighting a war in Afghanistan for over 18 years. More than 2,300 U.S. military personnel have lost their lives there; more than 20,000 others have been wounded. At least half a million Afghans-government forces, Taliban fighters, and civil- ians-have been killed or wounded. Washington has spent close to $1 tril- lion on the war. Although the al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is dead and no major attack on the U.S. homeland has been carried out by a ter- rorist group based in Afghanistan since 9/11, the United States has been unable to end the violence or hand off the war to the Afghan authorities, and the Afghan government cannot survive without U.S. military backing. At the end of 2019, The Washington Post published a series titled The Afghanistan Papers, a collection of U.S. government documents that included notes of interviews conducted by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. In those interviews, numer- ous U.S. officials conceded that they had long seen the war as unwin- nable. Polls have found that a majority of Americans now view the war as a failure. Every U.S. president since 2001 has sought to reach a point in Afghanistan when the violence would be sufficiently low or the Afghan government strong enough to allow U.S. military forces to withdraw without significantly increasing the risk of a resurgent ter- rorist threat. That day has not come. In that sense, whatever the future brings, for 18 years the United States has been unable to prevail. CARTER MALKASIAN is the author of War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier. From 2015 to 2019, he was Senior Adviser to U.S. General Joseph Dunford, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. March/April 2020 77

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