Don’t expect too much from the Afghanistan War Commission
Last week the bipartisan Afghanistan War Commission held its first public hearing since it was established in 2021, with members of the foreign policy great-and-good offering testimony on the origins of the conflict and why re-examining it is important. It is a solemn and noble exercise, founded on George Santayana’s famous aphorism that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If we review the West’s 20-year deployment in Afghanistan, the logic goes, we will understand what we did wrong and we will not make the same mistakes in the future.
The commission was created by Congress with two purposes: first, to examine, in detail, with the calming distance of time, exactly what happened; secondly, more importantly, “to develop a series of lessons learned and recommendations for the way forward that will inform future decisions by Congress and policymakers throughout the United States Government.” It comprises 16 commissioners, eight appointed by the Democratic Party and eight by Republicans, and its co-chairs are Shamila N. Chaudary, a foreign policy academic who worked in the State Department and the National Security Council under President Barack Obama; and Colin Jackson, a Department of Defense official under President Donald Trump who served in Afghanistan.
This process of historical analysis and learning is scheduled to take four years. To put that in perspective, a newly commissioned infantry officer who was deployed to Afghanistan at the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001 could be a general by the time the commission publishes its conclusions. NATO combat operations ended with the transfer of responsibility to the Afghan national security forces a decade ago, at the end of 2014, and it is already nearly three years since U.S. combat forces left the country.
The obvious model for this is the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, the so-called 9/11 Commission, which was created to establish “a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11 attacks.” But that body moved at a wholly different pace, being set up only 13 months after the events it examined, and reporting in July 2004, less than three years after 9/11.
Its 585-page report was weighty and detailed, but manageable, and was addressing a dramatis personae many of whom—President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the secretary of State, secretary of Defense, national security advisor, director of the FBI—were still in post. The director of central intelligence, George Tenet, had only stepped down weeks before.
A more helpful comparison might be found in our experience in the United Kingdom. Although Lord Butler of Brockwell, former head of the civil service, had conducted a short review of the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the first half of 2004, a year after the coalition invasion, it was regarded by many as an establishment whitewash. In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown set up a full public inquiry into every aspect of the UK’s involvement in Iraq between 2001 and 2009. It was chaired by Sir John Chilcot, a former civil servant with long experience of intelligence and security derived from seven years as official head of the Northern Ireland Office.
The Iraq Inquiry conducted hearings for 18 months, and eventually published its conclusions in 2016, seven years after it was first established. They were undeniably exhaustive: the report consisted of 12 volumes and an executive summary, a total of 2.6 million words, and it was extensively and harshly critical of the conduct of British foreign policy. “The government failed to achieve its stated objectives,” it decided, “the consequences of the invasion were underestimated” and the “planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate.”
These findings were extensively reported at the time and the prime minister, David Cameron, made a statement to the House of Commons on the report’s publication. In truth, though, the repercussions were muted. Sir Tony Blair had stepped down as prime minister nine years before; his first foreign secretary, Robin Cook, was dead, while his second, Jack Straw, was no longer in Parliament; Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, had disappeared into the private sector; and the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, was a largely forgotten footnote. Politics, bluntly, had moved on.
If a lesson was learned by the institutions of government, it was that major land commitments in the Middle East were financially and reputationally ruinous. British combat troops had left Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan in 2015. A hope nurtured by some that there would be a reckoning for “guilty men” is only sustained if you think Sir Tony Blair is now in public disgrace and penury; and Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, and Alastair Campbell, Blair’s pugilistic director of communications, are not respected consultants and broadcasters.
It may well be that the Afghanistan War Commission produces an impeccable, insightful and indispensable analysis of the United States’s deployment in the region when it reports towards the end of the 2020s. There may be some lessons which foreign policy experts absorb and implement. But, given the experience in Britain with the Iraq Inquiry, I can only advise management of expectations if anyone thinks Washington’s global stance will alter radically or that individuals will be held to account. It is simply too long ago.
Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the UK House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the UK delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.