By Michael C. Davies
For all the promises of victory, justice, and a better peace for Afghanistan in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, it never happened. Worse, the lack of accountability for the defeat is a double wound that will not heal for a long time. It is in this frame that Adam Wunische has written Unwinnable Wars: Afghanistan and the Future of American Armed Statebuilding. He seeks to identify the “structural and preexisting conditions that led to failure…” by mixing his personal experiences of the Afghan war with an analytical view.
Wunische’s central thesis is an attempt to explain why 20 years of statebuilding in Afghanistan collapsed in nine days in August 2021. He contends that these wars cannot be won in the first place, hence the title. “[T]hat the sheer weight of countervailing forces—most of them uncontrollable by the intervening power—negated any policy option or military strategy that could have secured a better outcome” [pg. 7]. To prove his thesis, the book is broken up into six thematic chapters. How preexisting conditions make it impossible for an intervening power to overcome local interests; How ticking clocks creates poorly conceived short-term strategies; How dilemmas put Western militaries into fights they are not trained for; How paradoxes of neoliberal governance programs actively undermine the creation of a self-sustaining state; How avoiding unwinnable wars is preferable over failure; and how it is a superior choice to use indirect and proxy forces to only fight wars worth fighting.
In the book, Wunische weaves these issues, the history of Afghanistan and the war, the narratives that drove it, analytical study, and their relevant assessments around his personal experiences in-country. His profession as an intelligence analyst for both the regular U.S. Army and Special Forces gives him both the bottom-up granular and top-down broad view of the war for nearly the entirety of its duration. The myriad of places that he derives his information from is considerable and shows what having been on the business end of the intelligence spigot can provide.
There is an immediate problem with Wunische’s analysis however, noticeable in the title itself: “unwinnable wars.” Much like other pieces common to this moment, they all speak of the folly of victory. One could offer that it is a form of processing of the defeat; of moving through the elements studied by those like Wolfgang Schivelbusch.[i] The issue with such a consideration is that it smacks head-first with the analysis provided by the author. Yes, the Western forces and the Afghan Government lost, but they lost because the Taliban won. It is not just a category, semantic, or logical error to call a war ‘unwinnable,’ it is analytically impossible. All wars are winnable. Just because you lost does not mean victory is impossible. It just means you lost.
This is where Wunische’s thesis tends towards disproving itself. His statements about the various problems found in the Afghan War are never incorrect. Creating ethnic-based electoral systems [pg. 34], using conventional forces for distributed irregular wars [pg. 76], not scaling governance efforts appropriately [pg. 95], ensuring aid money is not laundered out of the country [pg. 108], and knowing what the end looks like from the start [pg. 132], are all valuable lessons to be learned from that should be institutionalized with radical zeal. Instead of offering ways to ensure these problems never happen again, the solution offered is to walk away. Or more cautiously, to use proxies who are even weaker than the sitting government the US just overthrew.
Furthermore, the reforms recommended also undermine the primary thesis. In order to create the conditions for the better choices made by Washington, DC-based decisionmakers, it would create the very same views, institutions, and capabilities that would make these wars winnable in the first place. Ideas such accepting offers of surrender [p. 138], having a heavy military footprint from the start [p. 139], putting civilians in charge post-conflict operations over the military [p. 141], and wrapping all actions towards statebuilding [p. 142], is what would set the stage for victory, not defeat.
This book should be read by those interested in understanding what happened after 9/11, but not necessarily for the reasons Wunische might agree with. I would offer instead that he, like others, has offered a roadmap of the multitude of issues that must be addressed in US national security thinking when it comes to all forms of post-conflict operations. The very same issues Wunische tackles are all eminently fixable. They are products of decisions, ideas, ideologies, structures, systems, and concepts that abound, meaning they can be changed. So often, while reading I would come across statements that one action caused the failure of some goal. Instead of leading with an understanding of the cause and effect of these things, and reverse-engineering a solution, especially with a local understanding, Wunische just seemingly throws up his hands in frustration.
But there is also the core reason why they must be fixed: you cannot escape a post-conflict operation if you want to win a war in the first place. Running from a war after a battle or two just means losing, losing earlier more specifically. Winning requires statebuilding. You have to rebuild what has been destroyed by the war in order to win it. Contemporary analysis such as Shelley X. Liu’s, Governing After War: Rebel Victories and Post-War Statebuilding,[ii] demonstrate quite clearly that statebuilding is the vital necessity of victory. Until that lesson is deeply embedded, America’s series of cascading strategic failures will never be arrested. After all, it is why the Taliban won in the first place. Unwinnable wars shows us that quite clearly.
About the Author:
Michael C. Davies is a PhD Candidate at King’s College London in Defence Studies. His thesis focuses on the theory and practice of strategic victory.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect any official policy or position of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, of any other U.S. government agency.
Reviewed Book:
Adam Wunische. Unwinnable Wars: Afghanistan and the Future of American Statebuilding. Hoboken, NJ. Polity Press, 2024. ISBN-13: 978-1509554850. pp. 224 pages.
[i] Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery. Trans. by Jefferson Chase (New York: Picador, 2001).
[ii] Shelley X. Liu, Governing After War: Rebel Victories and Post-War Statebuilding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).