Afghanistan: Strategy and War Termination

W has ending the war in Afghanistan proved to be so problematic? In theory, the decision to end a war should be relatively straightforward. One or more of the belligerents determine whether or not it is worth continuing the conflict and, as long as at least one of them decides that continuing to fight is not worth the investment, peace is offered and the conflict terminates. Clausewitz encapsulates this rational, commonsense approach to the ending of war when he asserts: “Once the expenditure of effort exceeds the value of the political object, the object must be renounced and peace must follow.”1 By this logic, and in the context of Afghanistan, the strategic dilemma associated with how and when to end the war could have been avoided by engaging in a rational cost-benefit analysis: how much has the war cost and what is the value of the objectives we were pursuing? Once the former exceeded the latter, then the Coalition should have struck a deal with the Taliban and left Afghanistan. Instinctively, of course, we know that the decisions involved in ending a war cannot be as simple as this rational cost-benefit analysis. But, why is that so? One powerful argument blamed the ambiguous protraction of the Afghanistan war on the West’s failure to comprehend and apply the principles of classical strategic theory. Since in principle it should be no more difficult to end a war than it is to start one, theoretically one need only adhere to the precepts of an effective strategy to bring about the rational and purposeful end to an armed conflict. The “bad strategy” argument views the difficulty associated with ending the war in Afghanistan as a failure to understand, or apply, the principles of effective strategy—such as a clear and attainable end state, adequate means or unity of effort—as a consequence of an emerging “strategic illiteracy.” The argument presented is the West has been “out-strategized” by its opponents.2 This article argues a different thesis: that, notwithstanding some of the evident difficulties associated with the strategy adopted in Afghanistan, the war there is a reflection of a much longer standing phenomenon— it is easier to start conflicts than it is to end them.3 The fact that Afghanistan is one of many such examples of problematic, protracted conflicts suggests that, in addition to a range of specific difficulties associated with the peculiarities of the nation,