Afghanistan, A History Already Forgotten: Counterinsurgency Lessons U.S. Senior Military Leaders Must Not Ignore
by Daniel Rix, by Doug Livermore
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12.31.2025 at 06:00am
Afghanistan, A History Already Forgotten: Counterinsurgency Lessons U.S. Senior Military Leaders Must Not Ignore Image
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The United States fought a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, resulting in the loss of 2,448 U.S. military, 3,846 U.S. contractor, and over 100,000 Afghan lives and costing trillions of dollars. Bookended by al-Qaeda’s attacks on the U.S. homeland and Afghans clinging desperately to the tires of an Air Force C-17 during the evacuation of Kabul while Marines were slaughtered at Abbey Gate, the war in Afghanistan will be remembered as one of the greatest strategic losses in American history. Worse than the collapse of the South Vietnamese government, which persisted for two years after U.S. troop withdrawals, Ashraf Ghani’s Afghan government fell even before the U.S. military frantically departed the Hamid Karzai International Airport. Even the Soviet-backed Afghan government remained in power for three years after the Red Army left, highlighting the ineptitude of U.S. conduct in this conflict. This article identifies clear strategic failures throughout this counterinsurgency that the United States must learn from and endeavor never to repeat. An inability for U.S. senior military leaders to understand them and effectively apply appropriate lessons in a future counterinsurgency or hybrid war, in which counterinsurgent and irregular warfare tactics will indeed manifest, will result in more lives lost unnecessarily and another U.S. strategic failure.
Scope
The task of postmortem on America’s longest war is, no doubt, a massive undertaking. One that scholars, politicians, and military experts will debate for years to come. Many intellectuals will delve deeply into the failures in Afghanistan, such as the congressionally mandated Afghanistan War Commission. There will be no shortage of analyses and opinions on why the most powerful nation in the world lost a counterinsurgency war against a financially, technologically, and tactically inferior group of insurgents. This article seeks to add to the body of knowledge in a small way by identifying clear counterinsurgency failures in the campaign to root out the Taliban. It focuses on the counterinsurgency against the Taliban, not on counterterrorism targeting al-Qaeda, though the latter is used to explain failures of the former. It also does not attempt to address the counterinsurgency in Iraq, which no doubt limited resources into Afghanistan. Finally, it will not describe the interplay between other sources of instability, such as the Haqqani Network in eastern Afghanistan. Though not comprehensive, this article identifies six strategic failures largely based on David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, recognizing that there are other counterinsurgency frameworks with which to conduct analysis. David Galula, a veteran of World War II and the Algerian War, observed and experienced several insurgencies before codifying a simple framework of complex principles to counter seditious activities.
Failure 1: Counterterrorism vs. Counterinsurgency, Lacking an Enduring Cause
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/12/31/afghanistan-a-history-already-forgotten-counterinsurgency-lessons-u-s-senior-military-leaders-must-not-ignore/
