So What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? – part 11

Afghan police in training, near Jalalabad, 15 August 2010 (photo by William A. Lawrence II)

Continuing the discussion on Afghanistan drawn from fragments of text from pages 264-266 of America’s Modern Wars. 

 

LESSONS AND OBSERVATIONS

There are five final lessons or observations that we wish to make about this war [Afghanistan]…

Finally, one must ask the question, did the United States almost loose the war in Afghanistan, or at least seriously compromise its position there, with its gross under-commitment in 2001-2004? Did we simply “mis-estimate” the situation and because we were not taking casualties, fail to commit the energy and effort required to secure the area and keep an insurgency from developing? As noted in Chapter Twenty-four on recommendations for the future, we need to understand better the early stages of an insurgency and how they develop, and how to recognize a developing insurgency. Usually by the time we realize we have a problem we have a big problem, not a little one. Did we make the same mistake both in Afghanistan and Iraq? 

 

….

(to be continued) 

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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One comment

  1. Was the mistake one of attempting to conduct nation building?

    How well can a foreign military impose nation building (as opposed to colonization) upon a country.

    How likely is it that a foreign military will be able to pacify a country to the degree necessary for the “political” parties to see no recourse except for peacefully negotiating among themselves in order to establish a government structure?

    What should the military do if the country is pacified by the military and yet the “political” parties aren’t self-motivated to cooperate?

    In such a case of non-cooperation between “political” parties would the foreign military assisting with building of separate regional government structures appropriate to the nature of each region-based political-party and then allowing those regional entities to federate (or not federate) within a broader country that has been pacified by the foreign military be a reasonable long-term strategy?

    Would it be best for the USA to build a metaphorical wall around a country such as Afghanistan and let it build its own national structure (or retain a feudal structure), not engaging with that country until something engageable had emerged?

    Inquiring minds want to know!

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