General David Petraeus (Army, ret.) ON afghanistan

Interview with CSPC Senior Fellow James Kitfield

What we’re witnessing is a catastrophe for the United States, for our Western allies and partners, for the Afghan government and security forces, and for the Afghan people.

 When President Joe Biden announced in April the full withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan after 20 years of war, it was against the advice of his senior U.S. military leaders who argued for conditioning an exit on the Taliban first meeting the commitments it made in the 2020 Doha Agreement. To better understand that military perspective, longtime national security correspondent and Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress Senior Fellow James Kitfield spoke with retired Army General David Petraeus, the architect of the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency strategy who commanded all U.S. and allied forces at the height of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and who also served as Commander of US Central Command and Director of the CIA.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

James Kitfield: When we spoke last April after the Biden administration announced the upcoming withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, you worried that “we will look back on this decision a couple of years from now and regret it,” and “in a worst case scenario it could start to resemble Saigon in 1975.” How would you describe the scenes of chaos the world has witnessed this week from Kabul, with the Taliban capturing the capital and desperate Afghans clinging to the sides of U.S. military transport jets as they lifted off from Kabul international airport?

General David Petraeus: Heart breaking. Tragic. Catastrophic. I actually think we’re in the midst of a “Dunkirk Moment,” because we now need to rescue tens of thousands of Afghans whose lives are in grave jeopardy because of their support for and service with the United States, many of whom are on Taliban assassination lists because they shared the risks and hardships on the battlefield with U.S. soldiers. We have a very substantial moral obligation to help those who put their lives, and the lives of their families, in jeopardy to support us, especially the battlefield interpreters who served two or more years on the ground with our men and women in uniform. And that is an extraordinarily difficult task at this moment.

What are the tactical challenges that on-the-ground officials and leaders of the U.S. evacuation force confront in Kabul at this critical moment?

First they have to maintain a defensible perimeter around the international airfield. I actually don’t think the Taliban will be a major problem, as they’ve essentially achieved all of their major objectives and now control the country. The last thing the Taliban likely wants is to challenge the remaining U.S. forces in a way that brings the full might of our military down on their heads, given their experience in how those fights have gone in the past. Rather, the really wrenching and exceedingly difficult task for U.S. officials and commanders will be trying to figure out who should be allowed inside the airport perimeter and cleared to be put on a commercial or military aircraft. Those decisions cannot be micromanaged from Washington, D.C., and will have to be delegated to officials on the ground who will have to make the toughest calls of their lives -- determining the future of their fellow human beings.

The White House and many U.S. officials have expressed surprise at how quickly Afghan Security Forces melted away in the face of the Taliban offensive of recent weeks. Were you surprised?

Not really. When we talked a few months ago, I told you I feared the psychological impact not only of the announced withdrawal of our forces on the ground, who, after all, weren’t really engaged in frontline fighting, but especially our airpower. That impact was compounded by the withdrawal of some 18,000 Western defense contractors who kept the Afghan Air Force flying. That meant that Afghan Army units in far flung outposts suddenly had no close air support, no medical air evacuation, and no airborne emergency resupply. They had no one to come to their rescue with reinforcements. Realizing that no one had their back, and being survivors like most Afghans are, most local officials and Afghan military commanders either fled or cut deals with the Taliban.

I also think that many Afghans were in a state of disbelief when they first heard about the U.S. troop withdrawal. They thought that the United States would surely look into the abyss of what was likely to come and step back at the last moment. When almost all of the U.S. troops actually departed ahead of schedule, that realization dealt another psychological blow. So the predictable result of these rapid withdrawals of U.S. support was an infectious psychological collapse among Afghan National Security Forces and leaders in local areas.

During a press conference last month, President Biden expressed confidence in Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) that boasted more than 300,000 well-equipped troops and police, against roughly 75,000 Taliban insurgents. Was that confidence misplaced?

Well, it’s technically correct that the Afghan National Security Forces did have more troops and police than the Taliban has fighters, but keep in mind that the ANSF forces had to protect the whole country, while the insurgents are able to mass forces at whatever points of attack they chose. And the Taliban did that very impressively, launching simultaneous attacks around the country that forced the Afghan Special Forces in particular to scramble, overtaxing the Afghan Air Force responsible for transporting reinforcements to them and providing them close air support once they landed. Pretty quickly it became obvious that the Afghan Air Force was unable to accomplish that mission for all the provincial capitals that were under attack, and they started to fall one by one. Then, not surprisingly, the collapse accelerated.

In his speech from the White House this week, President Biden castigated the Afghan forces for lacking the will to fight. How do you respond to those who argue that the U.S. military has consistently oversold the capabilities and progress of Afghan National Security Forces, and hid the fact that they were fundamentally corrupt, incompetent and unmotivated as a fighting force?

I don’t agree, and I absolutely stand by everything I publicly said on the subject as the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, as head of U.S. Central Command and as director of the CIA for that matter. My public comments were also consistent with the private advice I’ve offered to commanders-in-chief, much of which has come out in various memoirs by former presidents and other senior officials. Beyond that it is indisputable that Afghan National Security Forces have fought and died for their country in very substantial numbers when they knew someone had their backs. In fact, the ANSF has suffered well over 25 times the number of killed in action as U.S. losses, so it is simply not historically accurate to say they lacked the will to fight. What is accurate, and should not have been a surprise, is that Afghan troops who become convinced that no one has their back or will reinforce and rescue them when the need arises will refuse to keep fighting.

Do you question the sequencing of the U.S. withdrawal, and how do you respond to the argument that this kind of collapse of the Afghan government and security forces was inevitable whenever the U.S. decided to leave, whether this year or ten years from now?

I think a lot of experts are rightly questioning the timing of the U.S. withdrawal, early on in what was expected to be the fiercest fighting season in Afghanistan since 2001. Beyond that, you know that I have counseled and advocated for years that the United States commit to a level of effort in Afghanistan that is sustainable in terms of blood and treasure, and I think we achieved that. We did not have our troops in actual combat on the ground, and we haven’t suffered a battle loss in Afghanistan since February 2020, some 18 months. In fact, in recent years, the U.S. military has suffered more deaths in training than in all of our active combat operations around the world. But a sustainable commitment required a couple of very important acknowledgements. First, it is accurate that there was no way to “win” the Afghan war in the traditional sense because the Taliban leadership operated beyond our reach from sanctuaries in Pakistan. Second, we had to acknowledge that our partners in the Afghan government are imperfect and have plenty of shortcomings, though they certainly were steadfast partners in ensuring that Al Qaeda could not reestablish a sanctuary in Afghanistan, as they enjoyed under Taliban rule. But surely managing that frustrating relationship and difficult situation on the ground was preferable to the disastrous situation we see unfolding right now. What we’re witnessing is a catastrophe for the United States, for our Western allies and partners, for the Afghan government and security forces, and for the Afghan people. In a few short weeks, 20 years of admittedly uneven progress and achievements, however imperfect, in Afghanistan has been lost.

You mentioned a sense of catastrophe is shared by our NATO allies, who came to Afghanistan at our request and collectively had more than twice as many troops still in country as we had at the end. Do they have a valid complaint that they were hardly consulted on the withdrawal decision?

NATO leaders have made it very clear in their public statements that the lack of consultation was unhelpful. British officials have made no secret of the fact that they would have preferred to continue the mission, and a number of other major European allies felt the same way. I know NATO’s Secretary General would have preferred that we stay. But the reality is that U.S. military leadership was foundational to the effort. We not only spend more than twice as much on defense capabilities as all of our NATO allies combined, we have a particularly disproportionate capability in certain categories like high-end drones, which are crucial to this type of warfare. Indeed, the US military has orders of magnitude more capability than all our allies put together in critical capabilities. So without the U.S. military, our allies couldn’t stay in Afghanistan.

Earlier this year the Congressionally-mandated Afghan Study Group, co-chaired by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford, predicted that a U.S. troop withdrawal will be followed by Al Qaeda reconstituting a base of operations in Afghanistan within 18 to 36 months. Do you share that concern?

I think the world of General Dunford, with whom I was privileged to serve many times, including in combat, and I think very highly of the report by the Afghan Study Group. That said, I now expect it will take even less time for Al Qaeda to reconstitute a base of operations in Afghanistan – though we do need to see whether the Taliban tolerates that or not.

In fact, I think we need to remind ourselves of key lessons that we should have learned from the past 20 years of war with Islamist extremist groups. First and foremost, they will exploit ungoverned spaces or spaces governed by friendly regimes and fellow Islamist fundamentalists like the Taliban. Second, you cannot just study the threat posed by Islamist extremists in hopes that it will go away. It won’t. And in the meantime, such situations tend to spew violence, extremism, instability, and a tsunami of refugees not just into neighboring countries but all the way into our allies in Europe and elsewhere. We made that mistake in Syria for a number of years, and the result was the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). And ultimately, the threat posed by ISIS forced us to return US troops to Iraq by the administration that had removed them just a few years prior.

The Biden administration and the Pentagon have pledged that if Al Qaeda, ISIS or other international terrorist groups that threaten the United States or its allies reconstitute bases of operation in Afghanistan, they will monitor and if necessary eliminate the threat from “over the horizon.” Is that a high-risk proposition?

Well, I think over-the-horizon counterterrorism operations are possible, but they will be much more difficult and costly without U.S. bases in Afghanistan or the immediate region. That means a U.S. drone will have to spend nearly two thirds of its flight time just getting from a base in the Gulf States to Afghanistan, making it less effective in establishing that “unblinking eye” over suspected Al Qaeda or ISIS bases. U.S. warplanes will require a whole fleet of [mid-air refueling] tankers to fly to Afghanistan and strike terrorist targets. And keep in mind that we have not only lost our military bases and Afghan allies, we have also lost the lion’s share of our intelligence gathering capabilities and partners on the ground. It is difficult to keep our intelligence officers on the ground without adequate means to protect them if they get into a tough situation. So conducting counterterrorism operations from a great distance will be a very challenging task, and CIA Director Bill Burns and General Frank McKenzie, Commander of US Central Command, have been forthright in acknowledging that publicly, while noting that they will be riveted on what is going on in Afghanistan with a host of assets, many of which were not available prior to 9/11.

Having said all that, I know the administration will make it job one. In the wake of President Biden’s decision to withdraw, they cannot afford a threat to the homeland materializing from Afghanistan. I’m also fairly confident the U.S. military and intelligence organizations will be able to identify, disrupt and degrade any terrorist groups that establish sanctuaries in Afghanistan. I think we’ll see additional resources committed to that mission. The irony is it may take more assets and cost more to conduct those operations than if we had stayed.

Do you share the concern of a number of prominent counterterrorism experts that the Taliban’s victory and America’s retreat from Afghanistan will prove a propaganda bonanza and rallying cry for Islamist extremist groups worldwide?

What I would say is that another lesson that we have learned the hard way in the long struggle against Islamist extremist groups is that the United States has to lead, for all the reasons I’ve spoken about. The U.S. military is the foundation stone for any serious counterterrorism coalition. It’s interesting as well as instructive that the Biden administration seemed to understand that you do have to keep an eye -- and constant pressure -- on Islamist extremist groups when the administration decided to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria and various places in Africa and elsewhere, and to return a very small number to Somalia that were unwisely withdrawn by the previous administration. In my opinion those decisions were quite sound, and they reflect the lesson we learned when we withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 and then had to return them not quite three years later. We and the Iraqis took our eyes of the threat posed by Al Qaeda in Iraq, which was able to reconstitute as ISIS.

Understanding that lesson, it’s not clear to me why the Biden administration decided to leave Afghanistan. The idea that it was in a straitjacket due to the very flawed Doha Agreement signed by the Trump administration that promised the withdrawal of all U.S. forces, especially given that the Taliban never honored their side of that deal.

Why do you think the Trump and Biden administrations never demanded the Taliban live up to its Doha commitments to lessen violence, engage in good faith peace negotiations over a power sharing agreement with the Afghan government, and break its ties with Al Qaeda?

If you go into negotiations with the Taliban and make it clear that you not only want to leave Afghanistan, but in fact intend to leave, as the Trump administration did – and then the current administration made clear, as well -- what incentive does the enemy have to accede to any of your objectives or demands? And of course, the Taliban never did accede to our objectives as laid out in the Doha agreement. The only approach that would have given us a strong foundation from which to conduct negotiations with the Taliban was making clear that we committed to remain in Afghanistan, albeit with a “sustainable” level of effort in terms of blood and treasure, until the Taliban held up their side of the bargain.

So you think a sustainable U.S. commitment to confront Islamist extremist groups is still required even after two decades of conflict?

Yes, for the reasons I have talked about. But while the United States has to lead that effort, we want local Iraqi, Syrian, Somali and Afghan forces to do the fighting on the front lines. We want the host nations to establish basic governance. The U.S. military is there to train and equip, and to advise and assist, from relatively secure bases. We will also enable local forces with our drones, our unique intelligence fusion capabilities, and our precision close air support. But we will not do the frontline fighting, because that’s not sustainable. And sustainability is crucial. This contest against Islamist extremist groups is a generational fight, maybe even the fight of generations. This is not a fight of a decade or a few years. There’s no hill you can capture, or flag you can plant, that allows you to go home to a victory parade. Bringing Osama bin Laden to justice was a very substantial blow to Al Qaeda; however, it did not put a stake through the heart of Al Qaeda. Interestingly, again, the Biden administration has adopted the concept of a sustainable commitment in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and various other locations. But, obviously, they couldn’t see their way to maintain such a commitment in Afghanistan.