In Leon Tolstoy’s War and Peace, General Michael Kutuzov talks to a young officer about their campaign against Napoleon. “Believe me, my boy,” Kutuzov says, “there is nothing stronger than these: patience and time” (italics Tolstoy’s). That statement is especially apt in wars of insurgency/counterinsurgency where the thoughtful insurgent realizes he has plenty of both and the only question is whether his opponents can match him in either. The insurgent is at war with his own government because he feels desperately wronged; insurgents don’t go to war over trivia. The fact that men in the villages have picked up arms means they are deadly serious. 

That means that both the government resisting the insurgency and its helping allies must be deadly serious, as well; but being deadly serious in counterinsurgency is more complex than simply killing the enemy. The core value in counterinsurgency is winning the loyalty of the people. That’s a job done by providing security, implementing justice, and helping daily life. All of that must fit within strong threads of cultural compatibility. Governments that achieve those things do not have insurgencies, which is a problem for a helper nation like the United States. We say we want to support freedom, democracy, and just government, yet we often find ourselves with friends who have less attachment to those values than they do to their usual way of doing things. So it was in Afghanistan, a place practically designed for western efforts to fail. 

Afghanistan is a country whose antipathy to foreigners has been known for generations. Its mullahs have been decrying outside influences since the British arrived almost two centuries ago. They teach an intolerance and xenophobia that blocks the very western values we support. The more educated people of the cities are likely the ones most dealt with by American soldiers, contractors, and diplomats, but those are not the people of the countryside where prejudice, provincialism, and a desire for cultural isolation are barely hidden. Democracy, freedom of expression, the rights of women, to name a few, have no cultural authenticity there; thus, when it came time for the Afghan army to defend those values on their own, they simply walked away. The U. S. and her allies did not abandon Afghanistan, the Afghan army abandoned Afghanistan. 

Were there western-oriented Afghans who wanted their country to be modernized? Yes, of course there were; but even after twenty years of our training their government and army, of our funding them and fighting along-side them they were still too few. Their government never lost its corruption; it never won the loyalty of its people; and its cultural relation with western values never lost its dissonance. It was already clear a decade ago that these factors were in play and unlikely to change; but recommendations for withdrawal at that time only drew a Kutuzov-like insistence that we have more time and and patience. 

Twenty years, a trillion dollars, and over 7,000 American lives represents a lot of time and patience. The problem is that the fundamentalist insurgent dreaming his own dreams on his own soil and in his own culture found it easy to have even more. 

That is a lesson we should have learned fifty years ago. 

Terry Turner, a resident of Colquitt County, conducted counterguerrilla operations in Vietnam as a U.S. Army infantry officer then went on to write “Once a Warrior King” and “Counterinsurgency: What the United States Learned in Vietnam, Chose to Forget, and Needs to Know Today” under the pen name David Donovan.