Lessons Learned… and Forgotten

 

In the year since the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan, books have been published, articles written, which rely on a variety of military and civilian sources to list lessons learned from our twenty year engagement.

For an American who served as a military and civil advisor in Vietnam fifty years ago, their assessments are déjà vu. 

So many of the mistakes in our conduct in Afghanistan were of the same sort committed in Vietnam.  That is simply tragic – and unforgivable.  Lessons learned have been forgotten.

Why?  Is it simply incompetence attributable to ignorance?  Is it hubris in the Greek tragedy sense?

Sure, you can, with resignation, rely on the cliché that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. But that attitude relegates the ignorance/hubris to human nature; it’s an unavoidable fact without remedy.

I deny that the sacrifices of Americans in Afghanistan (2400+ died and more than 20,000 were wounded) were unavoidable.

We entered that country as a result of the 9/11 attacks spawned there.  Our military handled the task of hunting down Al Queda quite effectively and efficiently.  But then, despite promises not to, we stayed to do “nation building”.  We’ve rarely been competent at the latter.

We Americans are generally a parochial and conceited people.   We have the best of everything in the world and do not understand why outsiders do not embrace our example in all ways.  Democracy, human rights?  Of course, we believe all people want them too, but so many are thwarted by their societies and authoritarian governments.  So we are surprised when, given the opportunity, that others take a different path.

An example, history shows that a liberal democracy cannot be grafted onto a society like a rose bush onto disease resistant roots.  It must be able to grow at the pace the society accepts.

We forget that our respect - as part of the Western democratic tradition - for human rights and self-government began in England with the Magna Carta and evolved over the next 1000 years.

And we expected positive results in nation building as we rolled into Afghanistan in 2001, a country with NO history of self-government?  We are disappointed that in 20 years no lasting progress resulted?

Did anyone remember what happened in the tribal nations of Africa which were freed from colonial rule in the 1960s?  The result was summed up by the biting ditty “one man, one vote, one time”.  The flowering of democracy does not thrive in barren soil.

Why can’t other people be like us?  Because they have different cultures and often different beliefs and values.  Yet that simple observation – and it seems so plainly obvious – was given little, if any, weight by the American policymakers.  We know best, don’t we?  So, of course, with the opportunity we’re offering, they’ll enthusiastically adopt our better ways.

History’s answer and lesson was clear – they will not… and they did not.

That makes America a fool.  We tried again what had failed before and, with no justification whatsoever, expected a different result. 

The cost of “relearning” that lesson is unforgivable.