Strategic Empathy
The Afghanistan intervention shows why the U.S. must
empathize with its adversaries.
Matt Waldman, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs,
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
April 2014
As the United States withdraws from Afghanistan, it leaves
violence and uncertainty in its wake. The election of a new
Afghan president gives some grounds for optimism and
could improve the fraught relationship between
Afghanistan and the U.S. But no Afghan election since the
2001 intervention has brought about a diminution in
violence – and the conflict shows no signs of abating. The
Taliban is powerful, tenacious and increasingly deadly.
Civilian casualties are rising and the fighting forces some
10,000 Afghans from their homes every month.
The
linchpin of the U.S. exit strategy, Afghan national security
forces, have critical capability gaps and are suffering huge
losses of up to 400 a month due to escalating insurgent
attacks.
The Afghan government is corrupt and anemic,
reconstruction is faltering and the region continues to be
unstable.
Over the past twelve years, the United States has spent
$650 billion dollars in Afghanistan and lost over 2,000
lives.
Close to 20,000 U.S. service members have been
wounded.
Democratic institutions have been established
in Afghanistan, and there has been progress in human
rights, infrastructure and services, such as health and
education. But how did such vast and sustained
investments not deliver a more favorable outcome?
Conditions were undoubtedly challenging, but most
observers – and indeed U.S. officials – agree that major
mistakes were made. To name but a few, the U.S. backed
power-holders widely seen by Afghans as abusive and
unjust, which undermined the Afghan government’s
legitimacy and generated powerful grievances; coalition
forces caused too many civilian casualties; aid was often
wasteful or ineffective, and swung from being insufficient,
in the early 2000s, to excessive, thereby fueling corruption;
and there was no effective U.S. political strategy for
Afghanistan or the region.
But the most egregious error of the United States was to
pursue a strategy founded on a misreading of its enemy. As
former Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledges, the
United States was “profoundly ignorant about our
adversaries and about the situation on the ground…. our
knowledge and our intelligence were woefully inadequate.”
It was assumed the Taliban posed such a threat to the West
that it had to be defeated. This was mistaken on two counts:
the threat posed by the Taliban was minimal and their
defeat was improbable. During the 2000s, from an
operational standpoint, U.S. knowledge of the Taliban
improved. In fact, officials were deluged with information
Matt Waldman is a Research Fellow in the Belfer Center
for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government and an Associate Fellow at Chatham
House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs).
