The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the unlearned lessons of history

In the autumn of 2001, as American forces moved into Afghanistan, Jon Lee Anderson believed the mission would resemble a swift police operation. The objective, as it was widely framed, was narrow and urgent: dismantle Al Qaeda, remove its protectors, and leave. What followed instead was a nearly 20-year military occupation, a nation-building project without a coherent strategy, and a war that cost the lives of tens of thousands of Afghan civilians, while ultimately returning the country to the very movement the invasion had sought to eliminate. 

Anderson, author of To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, recently spoke at The Conduit, alongside Tamana Ayazi, an Emmy award winning Afghan filmmaker who grew up under Taliban rule. Their conversation traced how an intervention that once inspired optimism devolved into a familiar pattern of strategic blindness, political shortcuts and historical amnesia. It was, Anderson suggested, not simply a failure of execution, but a failure of memory. The United States had been here before in Vietnam — and had learned little. 

Anderson began covering Afghanistan in the 1980s during the U.S.-backed Mujahideen insurrection in Kabul against the Soviets. He was on the ground again when American forces invaded in the autumn of 2001. The early months after the invasion were chaotic but euphoric, fuelled by money and mania rather than knowledge. “The Americans did not know the terrain,” Anderson recalled. Billions of dollars poured into the country almost immediately, attracting aid organizations, private contractors, entrepreneurs and opportunists of every kind. Afghanistan became a frontier economy, a modern version of a 19th century boomtown, where fortunes were made in weeks. 

He described how his friend Hassan, an ordinary Afghan, became wealthy almost overnight. U.S. special forces wanted his cousin’s mud house for a base. Hassan persuaded his family to leave for a few dollars, then sold the property to the Americans for $150,000. He repeated the process again and again, becoming a local power broker. “Within weeks of the Americans arriving, warlords were being created,” Anderson said. The old power structures had vanished, and in the vacuum, a new class of profiteers emerged. 

For many Afghans, those early days felt like liberation. Ayazi was a child when the U.S. invasion began. Under the Taliban, girls had been barred from school, forcing her to attend secret classes in basements. After the invasion, aid groups reopened schools. “When I went to school, the books and pencils were distributed by UNICEF,” she said. “We were excited to get educated without the threat of being tortured or publicly humiliated.” 

But that hope was quickly undermined by the way power and money were distributed. Much of the aid, Ayazi said, flowed not to ordinary citizens but to a small elite of warlord families. “They did not have good intentions,” she said. “We need to understand this, because if we don’t, we will repeat the same mistakes elsewhere.” 

The Taliban, Anderson argued, were not decisively defeated. They simply withdrew. “They disappeared,” he said, slipping into the shadows. By the time Hamid Karzai became president in 2004, he was celebrated internationally as the face of a new Afghanistan, even profiled for his fashion sense by The Washington Post. But in a 2005 profile written for The New Yorker titled, The Man in the Palace, Lee Anderson depicted a man tainted by the corruption of his government who was caught between placating the West and serving the demands of his people. Promises to provincial leaders went unfulfilled and American credibility eroded. Soldiers spoke of women’s rights and development projects, but failed to deliver visible change. “They didn’t build things,” Anderson said. “They didn’t show the West was here.” 

At the same time, money was spent on spectacularly wasteful projects. A $36 million Marine headquarters that was never used. An $85 million hotel next to the U.S. embassy in Kabul that never opened. Counter-narcotics programmes costing $1.5 million a day, even as opium production quadrupled between 2002 and 2017. By the time the United States withdrew in 2021, it had spent an estimated $2.2 trillion, with little durable infrastructure or political stability to show for it. 

By 2005, the Taliban were visibly reemerging. A highway built by U.S. contractors at a cost of billions was soon controlled by insurgents who decapitated engineers along its length. What began as a limited operation had mutated into counterinsurgency warfare, poorly designed and poorly understood. NATO allies rotated through provinces, a consequence of which was that sustained local knowledge never developed. Soldiers conducted raids based on clothing and appearance, unaware that regional customs differed. Misidentifications led to deadly mistakes, including massacres at wedding parties. 

Anderson recalled speaking in 2010 with a young American captain, educated at West Point, who confirmed that officers were not required to learn Afghanistan’s main languages. They had recently been asked to memorize 60 words in one language. “That was nine years into the war,” Anderson said. “By then, things were lost.” 

Ayazi agreed that this failure to understand Afghan society defined the occupation. Some Taliban members, she noted, had sought amnesty after the invasion, but those efforts were ignored. Instead, raids and village operations hardened resentment. “We had a great opportunity to make Afghanistan safe and secure for everybody,” she said. “I don’t want to say we failed, because that would ignore the efforts of my generation. But the warlords failed. They had bad intentions.” 

Toward the end of the discussion, the focus shifted from Afghanistan to history, and the pattern that haunted Anderson most. The lessons of Afghanistan, he argued, should have been learned decades earlier in the Vietnam War. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, America’s global standing weakened, emboldening rivals. The Soviets began pressing the advantage in a handful of countries. Ironically, as Lee Anderson pointed out, one of those countries was Afghanistan. Flashforward forty years later, and Russia, he noted, drew conclusions from the U.S. withdrawal in 2021. He believes that Moscow’s actions in Ukraine were shaped in part by what it perceived as American retreat. 

“I feel incredibly critical of the U.S. government,” Anderson said, “for once again, as in Vietnam, not truly engaging with the country where they committed the gravest policy act a nation can make, which is to wage war and then fail. To win would have meant raising everyone up and ending oppression. But they didn’t do that.” 

For Anderson, who has reported from Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in the 1980s through the U.S. withdrawal in 2021, the tragedy is not only what was lost in Afghanistan, but what was ignored in Washington. The policy makers, politicians, and generals should have known by way of their own history that invading a country without any understanding of its people leads to epic failure. Instead, they were driven by the illusion that power alone can substitute for wisdom.