Four years ago this month, the US ended its longest war in a most embarrassing fashion. The Taliban efficiently retook the entire country in a matter of months, culminating in the surrender of Kabul. The world watched as Afghans chose to fall to their deaths from departing aircraft than to become captives of the Taliban. Newly released terrorists killed even more Americans at the airport gate and the US amateurishly responded by bombing an innocent contractor’s water truck. Amidst all of this, CNN reporter Clarissa Ward famously proclaimed:

“If this isn’t failure, what does failure look like exactly.”

In August 2021, SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) released a report called “What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction.” While focused on the reconstruction debacle, the beginning of the report makes a troubling point that can be generalized to other parts of America’s failure.

“What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction is the 11th lessons learned report issued by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The report examines the past two decades of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. It details how the U.S. government struggled to develop a coherent strategy, understand how long the reconstruction mission would take, ensure its projects were sustainable, staff the mission with trained professionals, account for the challenges posed by insecurity, tailor efforts to the Afghan context, and understand the impact of programs. There have been bright spots—such as lower child mortality rates, increases in per capita GDP, and increased literacy rates. But after spending 20 years and $145 billion trying to rebuild Afghanistan, the U.S. government has many lessons it needs to learn. Implementing these critical lessons will save lives and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse in Afghanistan, and in future reconstruction missions elsewhere around the world.”¹

The truly shocking part of the SIGAR report and the seemingly for show bipartisan government testimonies after the war was that the knowledge of why the US failed in 2021 had been there for over a decade. For just shy of two decades, the US military and political leadership had at best a flat learning curve and no real desire to win. Analyses of failure written before 2010 were extremely similar to the ‘smart’ generals and politicians’ admissions after the last US troops had left the country. So, what has the US military and government done about it?

The failure in Afghanistan spanned 20 years and almost an equal number of red and blue presidents. No one side can take the blame. Both parties failed America.

CONTINUED IGNORANCE OF FOREIGN CULTURES

For over two thousand years, Afghanistan has been largely unconquerable. Invaders struggled against unforgiving terrain and a fanatical culture that plays the ‘long game’ to outlast its opponents. One of the final blows to the USSR was its failed decade in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The US invaded in 2001 in response to 9/11 but lacked an understanding of the culture and how to defeat the Taliban and the other enemies on the battlefield and paid the price – 20 years of a losing war. American missteps during the disastrous Arab Spring unleashed instability across the region that we are still grappling with today as American politicians continue to believe that regime change is both easy and desirable. As recently as June 2025, senior US Senators who were caught during interviews knowing nothing about Iran and had never served in the military were nonchalantly calling for Iranian regime change like it was no big deal.

HYPERFOCUS ON THE DEI PENDULUM

Instead of focusing on the why and how of the Afghanistan failure, President Biden spent four years pushing his DEI agenda on the department of defense that further weakened national security. For his part, President Trump immediately used executive orders to get rid of DEI officially in the military, but has done almost nothing else to fix the decaying ethos of general officers that failed America in Afghanistan.

GENERALS REWARDED FOR FAILURE

For the past 20+ years, nearly 80% of retired senior generals continue to go to work for the military industrial complex. There have been no calls for sweeping changes of the military’s war colleges, for banning the general officer revolving door, for punishing the generals that as a group failed America and compromised their integrity in the process. Perhaps money is a more powerful motivator than patriotism.

ONGOING FISCAL FRAUD, WASTE, AND ABUSE

USAID, defense contractors, the US military, and many others were guilty of shocking fraud and fiscal abuse in Afghanistan. The Pentagon hasn’t passed an audit in years. President Biden did little to examine the issue. President Trump, after what may have been a charade with DOGE, has given the Pentagon $157B MORE in its newest budget. The new administration is aggressively discouraging military and civilian criticism from within the ranks of the DoD, making the groupthink problem that was largely responsible for the Afghanistan failure that much worse.

20 years

2,461 US servicemember deaths

$2.3 trillion in taxpayer dollars

None of these numbers seem important to American politicians or generals. After pointing fingers at each other and letting the generals off the hook it is tragically back to business as usual. It is only a matter of time before the perennial US habit of eagerly using military force around the world puts the US into another long, expensive, unwinnable conflict.

US military and civilian leaders have learned nothing from Afghanistan. It is almost guaranteed the US will lose its next long war. This egregious failure disrespects the sacrifice of those that served and their families.

1. https://www.sigar.mil/Portals/147/Files/Reports/Lessons-Learned/SIGAR-21-46-LL.pdf