A Tale of Two Wars

Raoul Heinrichs is Sir Arthur Tange Scholar at the Strategic and Defense Studies Centre, ANU, an Editor at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, and Deputy Editor of Pnyx.

After a decade at war, the United States has almost had enough. The war in Iraq has ended, at least from an American perspective, and the war Afghanistan is lurching toward its conclusion, even as violence in both places persists - and in some cases intensifies.

Both wars have exacted a terrible toll in blood, treasure and prestige. In Afghanistan, where the United States has begun to accept defeat, negotiations are underway with the Taliban in the hope of a face-saving exit. With a date set for US withdrawal and the bar being continually lowered, there should be no doubt about which side is dictating terms.

The situation in Iraq is similarly grim. Eight years after the invasion, the geopolitical consequences of that decision are yet to be fully realised. Saddam Hussein’s regime is gone and the convulsive violence that succeeded it has partially abated. Yet these have been replaced by a fractious political system, the strongest elements of which are more amenable to Tehran than Washington, ongoing bloodshed, and a limited form of Iranian hegemony, now being consolidated in the absence of US forces and set to become further entrenched with an Iranian nuclear capability.

Unsurprisingly, with history still playing out, the full accounts of these conflicts are yet to be written. When they are, disentangling the failures will be an onerous task, as will discerning the deeper causes of such a crippling inability to set prudent or realistic goals or appropriate the means necessary to achieve them.

 Many questions will baffle future historians: why was the US so determined in 2003 to destroy a perfectly operable balance of power in the Persian Gulf? How, only two decades after teaming up with Pakistani military intelligence (and its Afghan proxies) to bleed the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, could the United States fail so spectacularly to reckon with Pakistan’s determination to deny that country to a potential Indian ally. Perhaps most importantly, how were two wars, bereft of compelling strategic logic, allowed to become decade-long quagmires after Vietnam, especially at a time when the balance of power in Asia had begun shifting conspicuously?

Another intriguing, if under-examined, question involves the interaction between the two wars themselves: how did perceptions and decisions in Afghanistan shape those in Iraq and vice-versa?

There is of course the conventional account of the relationship. By 2007, Afghanistan had become the ‘good war’, the ‘war of necessity’, the centre of gravity in the fight against terrorism from which Iraq had distracted attention and diverted resources. However, this narrative was always more about expedience than analysis, propagated as it was by political candidates eager to leave Iraq without conveying weakness or compromising their national security credentials.

It also belies a more intricate account of how the two wars fed off each other, and in particular of how two episodes of premature triumphalism – the first in Afghanistan in 2001, the second in Iraq in 2007 - instilled a false sense of confidence that emboldened the United States in the other theatre at a time when prudence dictated moving in the exact opposite direction.

The opening phase of the war in Afghanistan seemed to herald an emphatic victory. Within weeks of invasion, the Taliban had been overthrown and al Qaeda was being pulverised in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Both would eventually regroup, of course, with varying degrees of success. But for now victory seemed swift and decisive. Having been achieved with a light footprint and relatively minimal effort, moreover, the outcome reinforced a flawed assumption about the applicability of US military power to the challenges Washington confronted. US military supremacy, apparently unassailable in every respect, was now seen as having conferred the ability to transform whole societies according to US preferences – which after September 11 was precisely what was being called for.

Emboldened by what it mistook for military omnipotence, the US consigned Afghanistan to the nation-builders as it dashed headlong into Iraq, either blind or indifferent to the horrific dangers that lay ahead. As King’s College’s Patrick Porter has noted, “[T]he most profound significance of the invasion is that it led to the war in Iraq. Because America quickly overthrew the Taliban in a country infamous for being the ‘graveyard of empires’, this gave false confidence to the Bush II Administration, which concluded that it could do the same thing against the easy target of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”

Amidst the carnage of Iraq, however, that lesson was lost. As a result, at the other end of the decade, the United States made the same mistake again. Once again, the process began with an analytical failure – the inability to properly discern the reasons for the extraordinary diminution of violence in post surge Iraq. The true explanation lay in the ‘Sunni Awakening’, an indigenous process by which the Sunni militias, outnumbered and outgunned and acting in their  own interest, turned on al Qaeda, their erstwhile allies, in the hope of securing themselves a place in post-Saddam Iraq.

For the US, and particularly its military, the explanation was different, self-serving and ultimately incorrect. In this view, improvements in Iraq were directly and wholly attributable to a change in strategy - increased US force levels and, more importantly, the renaissance of a counterinsurgency doctrine that emphasised protecting the population and cultivating economic development and good governance as a means of defeating an insurgency. While generous US inducements did help to facilitate the awakening, this narrative vastly overestimated American agency in pacifying Iraq.

As with the lessons of Afghanistan, then, the US had now drawn the wrong lessons from Iraq. Once again, what was mistaken for victory engendered an unwarranted sense of triumphalism and a feeling, encouraged by Generals Petraeus and McChrystal and their supporters, that the US had found a silver bullet for defeating insurgencies.  Yet again, this gave impetus to an ill-fated shift in focus from one theatre to the other, this time from Iraq back to Afghanistan, with yet more deadly consequences.