In 2008, Senator Barack Obama promised to win the war in Afghanistan.Yet the story of 2009 is the story of his administration losing hope in Afghanistan. While Obama approved a new strategy in the early months of his presidency, over the course of the year it became apparent he was unwilling to pay the price his new strategy required in the face of mounting challenges. Obama then faced the need to develop an Afghanistan strategy he was prepared to execute, which turned out to be different from the vision he initially promised.

The Trump and Biden administrations have spent an enormous amount of energy blaming each other for the final collapse. Pompeo excoriated Biden in his memoir, fully blaming him and claiming the Doha agreement had nothing to do with Afghanistan’s subsequent collapse. In turn, the Biden White House released a twelve-page document in April 2023 with their version of events, placing blame on the Trump administration. In their mutual finger-pointing, they are both right: Trump signed the deal, and Biden implemented it. Trump was determined to withdraw from Afghanistan irrespective of what the Taliban said or did, weakening the United States’ diplomatic and military position to the point of collapse. Biden, despite having campaigned on a promise to undo Trump’s legacy, inexplicably followed Trump’s example and implemented Trump’s strategy. Thanks to Trump, Biden inherited an extremely difficult situation – one he managed to make even worse. He played a bad hand badly. And he did so, in large part, because when he looked at Afghanistan, he saw Vietnam.

The American and allied military presence in Afghanistan peaked between late 2010 and mid 2011. For the next ten years, the major debate in Washington was how many troops to withdraw, how quickly. The announced unilateral American withdrawal was the defining fact of the war for its final decade. Policymakers treated the debate over troop numbers as a proxy for a debate over larger goals. But there are other aspects of strategy, like reconstruction and diplomacy, that simply cannot be subsumed within a debate about troop numbers, aspects that went unaddressed during the US’s gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan. Withdrawing troops without achieving the other objectives is how the United States gradually abandoned the rest of its war aims as slowly and expensively as possible.

President Obama spent almost his entire presidency talking about withdrawing from Afghanistan, which ended up being the one thing he managed not to accomplish. Endless and repetitive strategy reviews had all come to similar conclusions – that the US should stay for the long haul and do more to rebuild Afghanistan – conclusions which Obama resisted until the logic of events forced his hand. The timetable was not the single point of failure of the Afghanistan war, nor the only driver of all the problems with Obama’s handling of it. It is, however, the most potent symbol of Obama’s war. The timetable was the product of the defeatism and cynicism that pervaded every aspect of Obama’s handling of the war even as it undermined the surge, obviated reconstruction, and hamstrung negotiations, worsening the very failures and disappointments that Obama used to justify lowering his ambitions in the first place, made all the worse by how predictable the consequences would be.

Why did the United States lose the war in Afghanistan? Only a repeated habit of decision-making explains consistent strategic miscalculation. Policymakers in every administration prioritized counterterrorism – a comparatively simple, easily defined, “realistic,” concrete mission. They subordinated broader, more ambiguous, harder-to-define, morally aspirational, long-term goals, such as counterinsurgency and nation building. Policymakers did so even though – as repeated strategy reviews showed – the Taliban and al-Qaida were linked; success in the war against either depended on success in both; and counterinsurgency and nation building were necessary, alongside counterterrorism operations, to achieve the larger goal of al-Qaida’s defeat. These policies became embedded in the US bureaucracy, ensuring the bureaucracy kept implementing bad strategy on autopilot even when policymakers and repeated strategy reviews highlighted the problem.

The Taliban insurgency happened because they enjoyed a permissive environment: safe haven in Pakistan, state failure in Afghanistan, and an America increasingly focused on Iraq. In turn, most of those had common roots in the Bush administration’s decisions in 2001: to define the conflict as a “War on Terror” best waged with a light footprint and to conflate the Taliban and al-Qaida. Some of those decisions made sense in 2001, but none of them bore scrutiny as the situation in Afghanistan changed, and the Bush administration failed to adapt quickly enough.

Did the surge work? The surge had a major impact on the military situation, reversing the Taliban’s momentum and rapidly growing the Afghan army. Yet it seems equally clear that, by the beginning of the withdrawal in July 2011 – or even by the transition in 2014 – Afghan governance had not improved enough and there was no self-sustaining psychological dynamic of growing optimism and confidence. Importantly, the military surge cannot be evaluated apart from either the civilian surge or the withdrawal timetable because they were components of a single strategy. The civilian surge largely failed, replicating many of the same problems the Bush administration had seen when it tried to ramp up assistance for governance and reconstruction. But even more consequentially, the timetable – the most distinctive aspect of the Obama administration’s war – drove so much of the implementation and the decision-making as to become the controlling dynamic of the war. Together, the timetable and the civilian failure squandered whatever military gains the surge accomplished. By 2011, the insurgency had lost momentum, but the Afghan government was no closer to victory.

The case for more aid to Afghanistan slowly gained ground from late 2002. The Accelerating Success initiative, coupled with the Bonn Process and a new Afghan Constitution, began to move reconstruction efforts in the right direction. A new reconciliation program recognized the need for a settlement with the Taliban. But enduring challenges from recalcitrant warlords, international donors, inflexible diplomacy, and a sclerotic bureaucracy counteracted whatever progress was achieved from 2003 to 2005.

The 2009 strategy review resulted in the most consequential decisions of the war. While scholars and historians have typically focused on the surge of 30,000 additional troops, the administration’s strategy was not simply to add more troops. Obama rejected the logic that to defeat al-Qaida required defeating the Taliban and made an explicit decision not to seek the Taliban’s defeat – but he also chose to escalate the war against them anyway. Instead, Obama adopted a vague goal of “reversing their momentum,” while training Afghan security forces. That was muddled enough, but he undermined even those goals by adopting a public withdrawal timetable for US troops and failing to coordinate the surge with reconstruction and diplomatic efforts. Coupled with internal miscommunications, tensions with the military, and a growing attitude of pessimism, the changes introduced in the December 2009 strategy hamstrung the surge and set the course for the rest of Obama’s presidency.

As the surge petered out, the Obama administration had to decide what came next. On paper, Afghan security forces were supposed to take the lead for security throughout Afghanistan by 2014. But as the military surged and withdrew, a faction within the administration began to push for another option. Those who doubted that military progress could be sustained argued that the only plausible route to ending the war was through negotiations with the Taliban. Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s negotiations with the Taliban were undermined by battlefield realities, bureaucratic pathologies, and, above all, the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan.

For its first eighteen months, the Trump administration steered a surprisingly defensible course in Afghanistan, thanks to many of Trump’s appointees who worked to preserve something of America’s interests intact within the confines of Trump’s desire to reduce American commitments overseas. They were squeezed from two sides: on the one hand, the frustrating results of the Obama administration’s various strategies – surge, drawdown, and negotiations – seemed (wrongly) to prove their futility. On the other hand, virtually no one was convinced that Trump’s demand to get out fully and immediately was a good idea. They wanted to stay, but it was unclear what kind of posture, mission, or strategy would be more effective than what Obama had tried.

Having accomplished its immediate objectives, the spring of 2002 was an ideal moment for the administration to pause and reassess its strategy, goals, and purpose in Afghanistan. Rather than grapple with the newfound complexity, a sense of inertia, drift, and inattention took over. There was, of course, a sense of urgency and a serious debate starting in the spring of 2002, but it was not about Afghanistan. As the year wore on, the administration became almost wholly consumed with preparations for the war in Iraq. Counterintuitively, the drift and inattention could occasionally work to Afghanistan’s benefit. The Bonn Process unfolded as planned and was widely seen as a success with only loose oversight by policymakers in DC and more leadership from the UN. Unfortunately, Bonn would prove to be the easy part. While the political process unfolded, the international community tried, and, absent American leadership, failed to mount the most ambitious reconstruction and stabilization operation since World War II.

Trump’s newly empowered foreign policy led to the Doha agreement with the Taliban and America’s final defeat in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s principal demand and the central element of the eventual Doha agreement was the full withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. It was hardly something the Taliban needed to demand because Trump was demanding it too. Trump was not inclined to enforce the agreement anyway. Trump campaigned on getting out of Afghanistan and repeatedly and publicly announced his intent to withdraw, which undermined negotiations just as much as Obama’s timetable had done.