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.

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.

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.

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.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States further propelled the global focus on terrorism. Despite international efforts, the threat of terrorism remains throughout the world. In this chapter, the challenges in defining and analyzing terrorism are established by articulating the characteristics, structures, and motivations of groups that terrorize others. These definitions of terrorism, and the features of relevant groups, are then placed within the wider context of intrastate conflict. Key questions addressed include: Why does terrorism more frequently occur in war-torn countries? And how does its occurrence lower prospects for sustainable peace? This analysis is then used to inform modern counterterrorism methods, and how their evolution is critical for future international and national security along with peace mediation studies.

Americans invaded Afghanistan and Iraq during the “War on Terror” following 9/11. Because the Taliban gave sanctuary to al Qaeda, the United States attacked Afghanistan in October 2001. Within months, Osama bin Laden had fled, and the Taliban took refuge in Pakistan. However, the Taliban launched an offensive in 2006. Despite Allied efforts, the Taliban gained control of Afghanistan. In 2020, Trump agreed to a peace plan that would remove all Allied troops from Afghanistan in 2021. Biden carried out Trump’s capitulation. Like Vietnam, the fighting ended in American surrender by withdrawal in a chaotic evacuation. Justified by faulty rationale, Americans invaded Iraq in 2003. After a quick victory in the conventional attack, Iraqi resistance transformed into an insurgency that brought the Americans to the brink of defeat. In December 2006, Bush authorized the Surge, increasing the number of troops and instituting a new counterinsurgency strategy. The Surge proved successful, and Obama reasonably extracted all American combat troops by December 2011. The treatment of detainees during the War on Terror began with Bush abandoning humane guidelines. Abu Ghraib strikingly revealed American abuses. But with the Surge, detainee operations emphasized rehabilitation and release to increase trust among the Iraqi population.

This chapter examines the 9/11 terrorist attack, invasion, regime change in Afghanistan, and the start of the Global War on Terrorism. To secure America from further terrorism, the George W. Bush government invaded the Taliban-ruled mountainous country to destroy Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network. US and NATO forces quickly toppled the Taliban and put al Qaeda to flight by using innovative tactics, anti-Taliban militias, and Special Operations Forces (SOF) The United States and its allies tried to create a democracy where chaos, decentralism, tribal rule, polarization, sectarianism, and a shattered state existed. They installed a democratic government with the help of the United Nations. Many Afghans joyously greeted the new tolerant order. By 2005, Taliban insurgents drifted back from their sanctuaries in Pakistan to raise havoc in rural Afghanistan. From the start, the Pentagon lacked adequate numbers of “boots on the ground” to carry out an effective occupation to ensure stability and security. Other problems plagued the pacification effort, including an ineffective overall nation-building blueprint. Decisively, the Bush administration took its eye off Afghanistan and reduced military and civilian resources for its nation-building endeavors, while it prepared for invasion of Iraq. By the time, George Bush left office in 2009, Afghan counterinsurgency was floundering.

Air power played a central, if uneven, role in the US military response to the September 11 attacks during Operation Enduring Freedom. For many, the successes of the air campaign in Afghanistan heralded a “New American Way of War” – a strategy characterized by the precise application of long-range air power, ISR support, and special forces coordinating with local allies against the enemy. However, air operations over Afghanistan generated mixed levels of effectiveness against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, with success often tempered by the degree and quality of teaming between air and ground components. This chapter explores the legacy of air power during Operation Enduring Freedom, carefully examining the origins and context of the air campaign, key characteristics and events of air operations throughout the conflict, whether air power in Afghanistan ultimately proved effective, and finally how applicable the experiences of the air campaign might be for future conflicts.

None of the rulers from the time of Abdur Rahman’s death until the communists seized power in 1978 had his reputation for violence, and the country enjoyed a long peace from the 1930s through the early 1970s. Our theory can explain why despite substantial political order, property rights did not develop much: the rulers who made minor progress in establishing legal property rights had very little state capacity and could not maintain political control, and there was never much progress in establishing political constraints. The communist governments faced even fewer constraints and were largely insulated from local institutions, which contributed to a massively unsuccessful effort to redistribute land, while the Taliban, despite providing some semblance of order and recognizing the importance of customary and traditional institutions, were largely unconstrained and without much administrative capacity to implement any sort of reform. Together, these developments illustrate a key implication of the theory: meaningful progress in establishing property rights requires a monopoly on coercion, high state capacity, strong political constraints on rulers, and inclusive political and legal institutions. Weakness of any of these elements can prevent the emergence of private property rights.

Detailing the US intervention in Afghanistan this chapter provides a list of policy requests from the USA to Afghan partners and the rate of Afghan compliance from 2001 to 2011. Providing a summary of the US-Afghan counterinsurgency partnership from the start of the US intervention to 2011, this chapter discusses several distinctive components of the Afghan-US alliance, namely the tension between US and Afghan officials, and an unusual pattern of free riding in Afghanistan not observed in other interventions examined in the book. Afghan compliance was affected by the convergence or divergence of US and Afghan interests, interacting with US dependency on Kabul to implement particular reforms. There are 148 US policy requests identified and detailed including working against corruption, expanding governance capacity, addressing counternarcotics, and aiding in development programs.

Jihad, a heavily loaded word in the post-9/11 discourse, has in fact many layers, in theological and historical terms. This chapter investigates how the anti-Soviet resistance to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s turned this Central Asian country into a receptacle of religiously oriented ideologues and militants from all over the world. The social and political transformations of the 1960s and 70s, the conflation of local self-determination, radicalization of refugees, absorption of foreign militants, the charisma of a Palestinian Muslim Brother, and the wealth of a well-connected Saudi man all come together in shaping the Afghan jihad as a symbolic and imagined site of resistance to outside forces for the global umma. If in the 1980s jihad had carried a positive connotation of liberation, in the aftermath to the 9/11 attacks labeling a movement as “jihadist” has become a convenient way for governments to tackle unrest in Muslim areas, even where struggles had been taking place for decades without much connection to Islamist aspirations, as seen in the cases of Southern Philippines, Indonesia, Southern Thailand, Kashmir, and Western China.

Recent decades have seen the rise of violence related to Hindu nationalist movements in India, the Muslim Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the militant Khalistan movement of Sikhs in India’s Punjab, and Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the region. These movements have competed in the context of a secular political order that was the legacy of British colonial rule, once embraced by founding leaders such as Pakistan’s Muhammad Ali Jinnah and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, who advocated the nationalism of ‘secularism and socialism’. Though each of these political ideologies has its own history and internal dynamics, each is also related to the others. They have arisen as mutual responses to one another and to the global influences of colonialism, transnational religion, and globalization that have buffeted South Asian politics in recent years.

This chapter argues that what appears to be a break in the US policy towards its GC III obligations is really a change in emphasis from positive reciprocity to negative reciprocity. The multi-actor setting of US policy decision making made such a change possible. The chapter begins by examining the period from the end of the Vietnam War through to the USA-led NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. It demonstrates how a split emerged, one that had not existed previously, between US policy makers and the military in attitudes towards reciprocity and IHL obligations. It then analyzes three key decisions: (i) to use military commissions to try detainees for IHL violations, (ii) to deny POW status to detainees, and (iii) to use “enhanced interrogations techniques” when questioning detainees. It argues that logic of appropriateness explanations cannot fully explain US policy decisions towards the treatment of detainees in the GWOT. In each of the three policy decisions examined, concerns with specific negative reciprocity are necessary to understand fully the US decision not to apply GC III.

Learning how to think about limited war is a critical skill for American political and military leaders. Currently, the US is failing to win its war in Afghanistan, a war now being fought to preserve the Afghan government. The US has been fighting for seventeen years, and there is no indication that victory is at hand. One of the biggest rèasons for this is the Taliban’s possession of sanctuary in Pakistan. As long the Taliban has this, and is willing to keep fighting, the US cannot guarantee the survival of Afghanistan’s government. Additionally, the most likely type of war in the immediate future – and the most likely one that the US will face – is a war fought for limited aims. India and Pakistan have bitter, unresolved border issues, and China is a revisionist regional power determined to become a global one. The US cannot afford to continue making the same mistakes in regard to so-called limited wars that it has made for the last seventy years.