Why Study War?
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The "War" parts of Afghanistan and Iraq were a resounding victory for the USA. We basically won every fight.
Or do we need to study governance and nation building? The part that comes after a war? I can't help but think about the Philippine–American War / Insurrection (after the USA gained the Philippines from the Spanish in the late 1800s), and compare it against the Afghanistan mission.
In both cases, the USA wished to nation-build (the Philippines as a colony, but build it up nonetheless was a goal). It took many decades and the Philippines was given independence due to WW2 later on.
I think of heroic figures like Jose Rizal (author of many books in many dialects in the Philippines) who helped build the identity of the Philippines as a country. (Remember: there are 7000+ islands, and hundreds of languages/dialects, along with many subcultures. The idea of unifying them all under one banner must have been exhausting).
I see similarities and differences (most noticeably, the Spanish spread Catholicism across the nation ahead of time. Sharing a religion probably made the job easier. It was also the 1900s, so American-atrocities were more accepted back then compared to today's media heavy environment).
But we're talking about a nation that was basically undergoing a civil war in 1890s vs the Spanish. The USA took over a few years, and then the civil war continued into a Philippine-USA war/insurrection. The myriad of languages/cultures of the Philippines from island-to-island cannot be denied (much like how Afghanistan is a collection of tribes scattered throughout the region).
The Taliban similarly were waging a civil war / transforming the Afghanistan before the USA took it over in early 2000. The Taliban continued to fight, much as the Katipunan continued to fight / beat up Americans for years after the takeover.
There's even an element of Islamic rule in the Philippine history: the Moro (the Islamic islands) in the south were particularly difficult for the Americans to control after the Spanish-American War.
What went wrong? What went right? In both the Philippine Revolution as well as the Afghanistan one? If more people studied the Philippine-American history, could the Afghanistan occupation gone better?
I strongly recommend Earl "Pete" Ellis' article "The Bush Wars" which basically details the US Marine's counterinsurgency strategy in the Philippines; it's very similar to modern COIN doctrine, I'm told.
The article can be found in 21st Century Ellis, which also has his "Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia"---the Marine's part of the plan for WWII in the Pacific.
Here's parts:
https://warontherocks.com/2015/03/the-bush-wars-ellis-on-ame...
https://warontherocks.com/2015/03/the-bush-wars-ellis-on-pop...
https://warontherocks.com/2015/04/the-bush-wars-ellis-on-int...
But I still don't know what happened in Afghanistan. I have heard the complaint, "How can we plan for Phase IV when we're still trying to figure out Phase I-III?" but it was 20 years....
To be clear, Afghanistan was also missing a few other factors. A common dictum of war is Clausewitz's statement that war is the continuation of politics by other means. James Mattis has commented that one of the problems with Afghanistan is that the political goals of the war were not explicitly decided upon or communicated to the military. The US military is decently competent at winning battles, but they can't achieve a strategic goal that doesn't exist.
We went in. We displaced the Taliban (temporarily). We destroyed Al Qaeda training sites. We built universities (that remain operational, for now). Etc. etc.
Any form of "leaving" is going to feel like a loss. But the big question is: why were we still in there to begin with? At least in the Philippines, the USA was sending governors over to... you know... govern.
We never even got that far in Afghanistan. We went in, killed a bunch of people/destroyed some sites, and then sat around for 10 years wondering what else we should do. Then we killed Bin Laden in Pakistan, and then still didn't know what to do about Afghanistan (and at this point: President Obama was constantly running / promising that we'd leave). We did build up a large chunk of Afghanistan: improving the airport, building universities, educating their population, hoping to win the local support of the people. But the local support never happened on a scale large enough for lasting change. Furthermore, it seems like large segments of their population didn't want to change, so we were making enemies while doing these actions.
Our next use of military needs to have clear and defined goals: something more than "lets hope those guys over there become our friends". If we focused on purely "destroy all of the Al Qaeda training grounds", that was mostly over in the first 6 months of conflict.
Or, if we are going to try and befriend the population / change it within, we need to be ready for a 40-year occupation, similar to the Philippines (WW2 was in the middle, but it was going to take at least 30 years). These things take time. It was a known fact that Filipino stick-fighters (Kali / Escrima / Arnis) would assassinate US soldiers during the occupation... it wasn't hunkey dory, nor was it a "clean" occupation: atrocities were committed on both sides on the regular.
And the Philippines had the benefit of the Katipunan (largest revolutionary force) basically accepting a peace in 1902. (Other groups, such as the Moros continued to fight until 1913). Imagine if the Taliban signed a peace treaty in 2006 or so and started working with us. So even in the early occupation, the Philippines was going more smoothly than Afghanistan.
Maybe a peace with the largest national identity (ex: Taliban) was necessary for any lasting change in Afghanistan? Was it necessary for us to fight with them for so long? I know they were begging for peace in December 2001. Why didn't we accept those terms back then? Was there any plausible path to peace with the Taliban that could have occurred earlier?
No, I think it's worse than that. We straight up didn't even have a goal.
The most cynical and self-interested goal might have been, "set up a sustainable Afghan government that is no worse than the Taliban in terms of human rights, but not necessarily any better, as long as they don't harbor terrorists who attack America and our allies". The problem is that, as a goal, that's far too brutal and realistic for a Western country to explicitly get on board with in the 21st century. So we had to lie about maybe setting up a liberal democracy in Afghanistan even though everyone knew that was a stupid goal that would never actually work. In fact, it was such a stupid and unrealistic goal that we didn't even really fully commit to that goal out loud either.
The study of war is not only about the tactics, how to win fights. It's also about what causes war, why conflicts arise, what the potential sources of instability are, what the alternatives to war are, etc.
Occupation is certainly part of the study of war. America was very good at that after WW2. Both the occupation of Germany and of Japan were extraordinarily successful. They could not have been so successful just by random chance.
I continue to assert that the Philippines was the better example to Afghanistan. It was a bloody, multi-decade long insurrection in a much less developed nation (that was interrupted by WW2).