“Après Nous, le Déluge”​

August 31, 2021 | Dr. Chris M. Mason

The Taliban have retaken control of Afghanistan. The quixotic, United States-led, 20-year nation-building project in Afghanistan is over. “I . . . don’t think anyone thought Afghanistan would turn so badly so quick,” a US official is quoted as saying recently.1 If that is true, then no one read my book, The Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold, which in fact predicted these events in detail six years ago.2 As I watched yet another foreign country imagined by the United States collapse and another foreign military built by the US Army disintegrate, I often thought of Paul Kattenberg, the State Department officer who tried unsuccessfully to alter the trajectory of American policy in Vietnam.3 By the early 1960s, Kattenberg had worked in and on Vietnam for more than a decade and knew the country better than anyone else in the United States.4 His expert advice was spurned by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and  Ambassador Frederick Nolting, none of whom had spent more than a few days in Vietnam and knew virtually nothing about the country. Kattenberg was marginalized for his efforts.

In the summer of 2001, Afghanistan was part of my portfolio in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department. That summer, it was the last place on Earth anyone thought the United States would ever send combat troops. The September 11 attacks changed all that. For the next 20 years, I tried to prevent many of the mistakes that characterized the US political and military involvement in Afghanistan. As a State Department officer on the Afghanistan policy team, I wrote an official memorandum to Ambassador James Dobbins before the Bonn meetings in December 2001, urging that King Mohammad Zahir Shah and the Afghan monarchy be retained in a ceremonial role as a symbol of national unity and a source of legitimacy of government similar to that held by the emperor of Japan or the queen of England.6 Together with civilian American experts on Afghanistan with decades of experience dating back to the Soviet invasion, I also advocated against the creation of a strong, central government model for the country, a model that had no basis in Afghan history and culture. The US government delegation took the opposite path. The leader of the US delegation to the emergency Loya Jirga almost single-handedly dismantled the Afghan monarchy. According to eminent Afghan political historian Dr. Thomas Barfield, the leader of the US delegation at the emergency Loya Jirga “strong-armed the king” into recusing himself from Afghan public life.Afghan political historian Dr. Thomas Barfield, the leader of the US delegation at the emergency Loya Jirga “strong-armed the king” into recusing himself from Afghan public life.7 As long-time Afghan scholars S. Frederick Starr and Marin Strmecki noted at the time, this effectively delegitimized the Afghan government.

 America’s envoys pressed the king to withdraw himself from consideration, in effect pre-empting the loya jirga from selecting the nation’s leader. The leading American envoy . . . then called a press conference to announce that the king would not accept appointment, thereby tainting the new government as a creation of foreign powers and causing delegates to lose face. Each would now return home without having had meaningful input into the crucial question facing the nation.8