The Day After: Why America Wins the War but Loses the Peace

By Brendan R. Gallagher

Since 9/11, why have we won smashing battlefield victories only to botch nearly everything that comes next? In the opening phases of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, we mopped the floor with our enemies. But in short order, things went horribly wrong.

We soon discovered we had no coherent plan to manage the "day after." The ensuing debacles had truly staggering consequences—many thousands of lives lost, trillions of dollars squandered, and the apparent discrediting of our foreign policy establishment. This helped set the stage for an extraordinary historical moment in which America's role in the world, along with our commitment to democracy at home and abroad, have become subject to growing doubt. With the benefit of hindsight, can we discern what went wrong? Why have we had such great difficulty planning for the aftermath of war?

In The Day After, Brendan Gallagher—an Army lieutenant colonel with multiple combat tours to Iraq and Afghanistan, and a Princeton Ph.D.—seeks to tackle this vital question. Gallagher argues there is a tension between our desire to create a new democracy and our competing desire to pull out as soon as possible. Our leaders often strive to accomplish both to keep everyone happy. But by avoiding the tough underlying decisions, it fosters an incoherent strategy. This makes chaos more likely.

The Day After draws on new interviews with dozens of civilian and military officials, ranging from US cabinet secretaries to four-star generals. It also sheds light on how, in Kosovo, we lowered our postwar aims to quietly achieve a surprising partial success. Striking at the heart of what went wrong in our recent wars, and what we should do about it, Gallagher asks whether we will learn from our mistakes, or provoke even more disasters? Human lives, money, elections, and America's place in the world may hinge on the answer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501739644

Brendan R. Gallagher

Brendan R. Gallagher is a US Army lieutenant colonel in the infantry who has completed seven tours to Iraq and Afghanistan, including multiple deployments with the 75th Ranger Regiment. He received the General George C. Marshall award as the top US graduate at the Army Command and General Staff College, and is currently a battalion commander. He holds a PhD in public and international affairs from Princeton.

Book preview

THE DAY AFTER

Why America Wins the War but Loses the Peace

BRENDAN R. GALLAGHER

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

For Elizabeth and our four terrific kids

"Would you tell me, please, which way

I ought to go from here?"

That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,

said the Cat.

I don’t care much where— said Alice.

Then it doesn’t matter which way you go, said the Cat.

"—so long as I get somewhere,"

Alice added as an explanation.

Oh, you’re sure to do that, said the Cat,

if you only walk long enough.

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

LEWIS CARROLL

Just when I thought I was out ... they pull me back in.

THE GODFATHER: PART III

MICHAEL CORLEONE

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Troubling Pattern

1. Kosovo: Not Perfect, but Tolerable

2. Afghanistan: A Road to Incoherence

3. Iraq: The Worst of All Worlds

4. Libya: A Slippery Slope

Conclusion: To Learn or Not to Learn

Note on Sources

Further Reading

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without extensive help and support. First, a wide range of interviews unearthed new knowledge that significantly influenced the trajectory of this book. I am grateful to dozens of civilian and military officials who provided personal recollections, candid insights, and other forms of crucial assistance. I would particularly like to thank General (retired) John Abizaid, Colonel (retired) Kevin Benson, General (retired) George Casey, Christopher Chivvis, Derek Chollet, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Collins, Ambassador James Dobbins, Colonel (retired) Michael Dziedzic, Peter Feaver, Colonel (retired) Thomas Fisher, Ben Fishman, Colonel (retired) Michael Fitzgerald, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Ambassador Marc Grossman, General (retired) Carter Ham, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Leonard Hawley, Colonel (retired) Michael Hess, Colonel (retired) Paul Hughes, Michael Hurley, Lieutenant General (retired) Ralph Jodice, Erica Kaster, Admiral (retired) Samuel Locklear, Lieutenant General (retired) H. R. McMaster, former Special Assistant to the President Franklin Miller, Admiral (retired) Michael Mullen, Lieutenant Colonel (retired) John Nagl, General (retired) David Petraeus, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, General (retired) Joseph Ralston, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense James Schear, Ambassador Gregory Schulte, Admiral (retired) James Stavridis, Ambassador William Taylor, Andrew Wilder, General (retired) Anthony Zinni, and others who took the time to share valuable insights.

At Princeton, I was grateful for invaluable feedback and advice from Aaron Friedberg, Gary Bass, Keren Yarhi-Milo, and Michael O’Hanlon. I also thank the broader Princeton Woodrow Wilson School community for many helpful suggestions, including those provided by John-Michael Arnold, Thomas Christensen, Mindy Haas, Doyle Hodges, Jeongseok Lee, Colonel John Schutte, Jacob Shapiro, Travis Sharp, and Aaron Taylor, among many others. I owe a particular debt to Jacob Shapiro for allowing me to present my working concept to his graduate course on terrorism and civil war. Additionally, I am grateful to the Bradley Foundation for its support of my research.

The team at Cornell University Press has been top-notch in every way. My editor, Emily Andrew, believed in this project from the beginning. Her sound advice and the support of the entire team at Cornell University Press truly made this book possible. The constructive feedback of Dominic Tierney, James Dobbins, and other readers also helped improve the manuscript in countless ways. I am further indebted to Gary Bass, Greg Behrman, and former Acting Secretary of the Army Patrick Murphy for their efforts in helping me locate a publisher.

I thank Army University Public Affairs for reviewing the manuscript and clearing its release to the public, as well as the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review for reviewing and clearing vignettes related to my military service.

More broadly, I am grateful that the U.S. Army has allowed me to serve as an infantry officer for eighteen years and counting, and for providing me an opportunity to think deeply about an important strategic puzzle. Throughout my military career I’ve had unparalleled opportunities to work, eat, sleep, and live alongside some of the most inspiring, devoted people one could imagine. It has truly been an incredible honor to lead and command infantry soldiers in combat. Serving more than three years in various parts of Iraq and Afghanistan, ranging from the often unforgiving streets of Baghdad and Fallujah to sprawling mountains and towns near the Afghan-Pakistan border, gave me a firsthand perspective on the evolution of these wars, along with their lasting consequences. Tragically, I lost young soldiers under my command and lost one my closest friends, Army Captain Jon Grassbaugh, to a roadside bomb in Iraq. I am forever indebted to every one of them for their service and sacrifice. The lessons we extract from these conflicts could hardly be of greater importance.

My deepest thanks go to my wife, Elizabeth, and our four amazing kids for their love and support throughout this entire process, especially during years of deployments to faraway lands.

The views reflected in this book are my own and should not be construed as reflecting the views of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

INTRODUCTION

A Troubling Pattern

Then it’s the day after Qaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying, Thank you, America. At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions. . . . So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, Should we intervene, militarily? Do we have an answer [for] the day after?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

NEW YORK TIMES INTERVIEW, AUGUST 2014

Afghanistan. March 18, 2002. Immediately after the devastating 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush had decided, We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass.¹ For the moment, it seems we have done exactly that. Operation Anaconda has just ended. The remnants of Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership are currently on the run. U.S. power has reached a new zenith. The Bush administration now has extraordinary domestic and international support that it can use to try to reorient Afghanistan and prevent its future use as a terrorist sanctuary. Under the watchful eye of the world’s superpower, the interim Afghan leadership appears to have a chance to chart a new course. Afghanistan’s future seems bright.

Iraq. May 1, 2003. We have just decimated Iraq’s military with breathtaking speed and efficiency. After Saddam’s statue tumbles down in Firdos Square, President Bush, while aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, triumphantly announces the end of major combat operations. The prominent Mission Accomplished banner behind the president suggests that we did precisely what we came to do. After decades of dictatorship, could we now seize this moment, alter Iraq’s trajectory, and create a beachhead of democracy in the Middle East? To many, particularly those who pushed strongly for the invasion, it seems that we could hardly have asked for a more promising occasion to pursue this vision.

Libya. October 31, 2011. The seven-month-long coalition air campaign comes to a successful end with the potential humanitarian disaster averted and Qaddafi dead. Encouragingly, these milestones were achieved at only a fraction of the cost of other unpopular wars. The Obama administration has seemingly engineered a new model of intervention, and Libya appears likely to be a notable feather in the president’s cap. For now, a widespread sense of optimism is infectious. The wind is at our backs, and there seems to be a singular path to shape Libya’s way forward. Could the Libyan people have a real shot at a more tranquil, prosperous, and perhaps even democratic future?

At each moment highlighted above, the situation seemed highly favorable. Our military achieved what it set out to do. We mopped the floor with our enemies. We accomplished virtually all the battlefield objectives. We had a unique moment to build on success and try to foster a new political order. In short, the United States was now in a dominant position to try to impose its will, alongside its wartime partners.

But as we know today, none of these stories ended particularly well. Instead of a new dawn of peace, we surrendered the initiative, and vacuums spawned in these places that ushered in violence, insurgencies, and chaos. Worsening conditions created the ominous prospect of renewed U.S. military action in some of the same areas we had already spilled blood and spent treasure. This contributed to deep disillusionment regarding the use of U.S. military power and a growing sense by the public that the United States should mind its own business internationally, as a Pew Research Center poll found.² Many Americans would soon lose confidence in their government’s ability to devise and execute sound policy, as the establishment became discredited in their eyes. These developments, combined with other factors, helped usher in a tidal wave of change in the United States that has implicitly embodied an assault on the post-1945 international order. Even previously unthinkable questions would soon rise to the surface, such as whether America would continue to lead on the global stage and whether we would continue to strive to uphold democracy in any meaningful way.

As these wars were unfolding at the time, I personally witnessed and felt many of the immediate consequences firsthand. From as early as I can remember, I felt driven to serve my country. My paternal grandfather served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division during World War II, jumped into Sainte-Mère-Église on D-Day, and received the Purple Heart. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was a combat medic at the Battle of the Bulge, earning three Bronze Stars. Hence, I volunteered to enter the U.S. Army and have had the great honor and privilege of serving as an active-duty infantry officer since 2001 and commanding at multiple levels. Upon joining the ranks as a new lieutenant, I absorbed a key lesson: move to the sound of the guns. Go where the action is. So that’s what I did. After September 11, 2001, I completed seven deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, including multiple tours as a leader in the elite Army Rangers. This afforded an opportunity to serve alongside countless exceedingly brave, selfless, and inspiring people from all walks of life. But on occasion when our combat operations would briefly quiet down and I had a moment to gather my thoughts, I recall wondering, How did we get here? In other words, what was the initial plan that got us into some truly chaotic situations? Why didn’t our nation anticipate the obvious challenges before they struck us squarely in the face?

A few years after the Iraq invasion, I was on my third combat tour, having recently taken command of a mechanized infantry company in western Baghdad. It was an extremely violent month: IEDs (improvised explosive devices) contributed to fourteen American deaths in our battalion’s area of operations, three from my company. Each patrol sent outside the wire seemed to be a horrible roll of the dice, with no rhyme or reason regarding who might be blown up, maimed, or killed. At nearly the same time, we were informed our tour in Iraq would be extended from twelve to fifteen months. Trying to do the mental math of how many more memorial services we might conduct by the time our unit redeployed was deeply disconcerting, not to mention anticipating how many more soldiers would suffer broken bones, disfigurements, amputated limbs, or other life-changing injuries.

During this time, I recall a particularly emotional memorial service for a soldier in a sister company within our battalion. As the collective stress level seemed to reach a boiling point, a palpable sense of frustration hung in the air. We loitered outside the makeshift chapel at our forward operating base after the service ended, and I talked with a fellow captain out of earshot of other soldiers. I recall asking him (paraphrasing now from memory): What if we’d never come here? What if we’d taken all this energy we put into Iraq and just focused on Afghanistan from the start, and actually tried to get Afghanistan right after 9/11? He sighed in response. Yeah, man, you’re probably right. In between combat patrols and a seemingly endless string of enemy engagements, I started thinking more about these sorts of counterfactuals. How did we mess up these wars so badly? What were our plans going in from the beginning? Couldn’t we have made better choices and perhaps fostered different outcomes? And what should we ultimately learn from all of this to help us make smarter decisions down the road?

Several years (and several more deployments) later, I monitored unfolding events in Libya with a familiar sense of disbelief. How did a new administration mess things up again, particularly an administration that had seemed so determined to avoid the mistakes of its predecessor? We’d initiated military action in a foreign land (again) and helped topple an odious regime (again), only to essentially replace the regime with nothing (again), thereby allowing disaster and chaos to unfold (again). Stunningly, we had lurched into another conflict with no coherent plan for what to do the day after military victory. Once again, we became the dog chasing the car, and, upon catching it, we had no idea what to do next.

The idea for this book developed in my mind over more than a decade, spanning these overseas tours. The more time I spent in war zones, the more it became clear that there had been little if any coherent plan to win the peace. Eventually, when I was presented an opportunity to pursue a doctoral degree, I seized it, with the hope that it might provide a chance to reflect on all that I had experienced and ideally make a contribution to help preclude future disasters. The book you are holding is the product of that effort.

Are all these debacles just an embarrassing footnote in the history books that we’d be better off simply forgetting and moving on? Although that might be tempting, I’d strongly recommend against it. In assessing their collective legacy, we should acknowledge the staggering costs of losing the peace in political, economic, diplomatic, reputational, moral, and human terms. Across these interventions, we have spent trillions of dollars.³ Multiple U.S. presidents mobilized—and squandered—significant political capital. There was lasting damage done to America’s reputation and credibility. Terrorist threats often intensified, and local populations felt let down by U.S. assurances of a better future. Further, many Americans soon believed that they’d been hoodwinked by their own government.

Then there is the enormous human cost of these debacles. The U.S. military alone has lost nearly 7,000 lives across these war zones, with more than 52,000 wounded, many of whom suffered debilitating injuries that they will continue to cope with for decades.⁴ When I think about the human cost, I recall the faces of soldiers I lost. I have permanently etched in my mind the visual imprint of brave fallen warriors under my command. I recall visiting wounded subordinates in the combat support hospital after they had endured multiple amputations, courageously struggling to maintain hold on life, until in some cases they eventually succumbed to their injuries. And I recall the many times we conducted a slow, final salute at a framed photo of a valiant comrade next to a pair of empty desert boots and an inverted M-4 rifle with a helmet on the buttstock and dog tags dangling from the pistol grip.

All too often, our tally of the human costs ends here. But that would be woefully incomplete. Whereas eventually Washington may decide to withdraw and go home, for the local population, this is their home. They may have few options but to stay and suffer the consequences. I still recall the assurances I personally gave countless Iraqis on their doorsteps, in their kitchens, and in their living rooms that we would continue to help them as best we could. But ultimately, we have sometimes turned our back, and many perished in the chaos that followed under the brutality of groups such as ISIS. Inexcusably, we even sometimes abandoned the extraordinary local interpreters who had risked everything to help us.

This all connects to a difficult moral dilemma regarding what we should do about war-ravaged populations still struggling to survive, many years after we first intervened. When we topple a foreign government, do we incur a moral obligation to foster a better, more democratic government that improves the quality of life for the people? Or is it sometimes OK to risk American blood and treasure, anoint a friendly strongman, and leave? Some might rationalize what happens next by expressing some variant of Hey, we gave the locals a chance, but they blew it. However, such an attitude can understate our own moral culpability. In line with Colin Powell’s so-called Pottery Barn rule, when we topple a tyrant, the world will usually be looking squarely at the United States to take charge of the day after, whether we want that mantle or not. How we respond will shape America’s moral authority and leadership on the global stage.

I frequently recall the plight of Hanan, a good-natured teenage girl in Baghdad. Long after the 2003 invasion, Hanan was severely injured by an IED blast that caused substantial nerve damage to her face. A local doctor performed a shoddy skin graft, leaving half of her face badly disfigured. My subordinates and I repeatedly interacted with Hanan, her family, medical professionals, and others to try to find a way to fix the damage that had been done, and nearly succeeded, only to redeploy with her situation frustratingly unresolved.⁵ Hence, when I think of the human costs of losing the peace, I also remember innocents like Hanan, who suffer for years through no fault of their own, well after these wars are supposedly over. So overall, I would suggest the costs of losing the peace have been quite high indeed.

This is a book about an uncomfortable subject: why does the most powerful nation in the world achieve triumphant military victories but botch nearly everything that comes next? In each case our military achieved smashing success on the battlefield, and there was a short period of self-congratulation. But not long after we popped the champagne, things went horribly wrong.

As we explore this central puzzle, we will delve into fascinating sub-puzzles that emerge. For example, after the unprecedented shock of 9/11, why didn’t the Bush administration leverage this unique moment to develop a holistic strategy for Afghanistan? We likely could have gained overwhelming support for it. Or, given that we had years to prepare for post-Saddam Iraq, why were we caught flat-footed at the moment Baghdad fell? On a related note, why did we fail to learn from the 1990–1991 Gulf War, despite the fact that the 2003 war was waged against basically the same enemy, was overseen by some of the same U.S. officials, and was led by the former president’s son? And years later, with the full knowledge of our earlier blunders in Afghanistan and Iraq, why did the Obama administration make strikingly similar mistakes in Libya with a familiar confluence of wishful thinking, excessive reliance on exiles, and lofty forecasts about oil and democratization?

These sub-puzzles also raise another provocative question: what if we had undertaken serious, robust planning for each of these wars? Might it have altered the lasting outcomes that took shape?

People naturally want to make sense of unsettling events, and many Americans are still searching for a compelling narrative to explain these fiascos. This book seeks to address this need by filling an important gap in the literature. It should prove useful to anyone thirsting for an explanation of what went wrong and what we should do about it.

To be sure, there have been other books written on postwar issues. In my judgment a few of the strongest books in recent years are those by Gideon Rose and Dominic Tierney. They provide excellent, well-researched accounts with sharp insights. But these books do not specifically focus on postwar planning across our recent wars—that is, what were the original political and military plans crafted, and how precisely did they affect the lasting outcomes? Nadia Schadlow’s recent book examines postwar challenges as well, but it too does not focus mainly on planning, and, I’d argue, her book’s operational-level focus gives an impression that postwar issues are mainly the military’s problem to solve, which I’d suggest is not the full story. Aaron Rapport’s book does address planning, but mainly for twentieth-century conflicts, and its academic tone may limit its accessibility to wider audiences.⁶

I hope that my combination of infantry combat experience and academic qualifications gives me a unique platform to explore this puzzle by bringing a fresh perspective to the topic. Ideally, this book can serve as a single, go-to book that highlights much of what went right and wrong in U.S.-led wars of the last twenty years, written by an Army lieutenant colonel who has witnessed events up close. Because this topic is of immense importance and because we continue to make similar mistakes again and again, a fresh look is warranted from a new vantage point.

Much of the material gathered for this book is brand-new. This book incorporates dozens of new interviews I conducted with civilian and military officials, ranging from mid-level planners to four-star generals and cabinet secretaries who were in charge at the time. Often, these officials were surprisingly blunt in their recollections to me, bringing further richness and new insights to this story. At the outset of his masterful Vietnam War book The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam describes how he could hardly wait to go to work each day as he undertook an array of fascinating interviews that helped him piece together an intricate but truly important puzzle.⁷ Each day that I conducted research and interviews, I came to share a similar passion and sense of motivation. In addition to dozens of new interviews, this book also incorporates fresh analysis of declassified planning documents, National Security Council (NSC) meeting summaries, internal memoranda and correspondence, presidential phone transcripts, after-action reports, memoirs, and other primary and secondary sources, as well as my own personal experiences overseas.

Like Halberstam’s work, a sense of impending doom hangs over the chapters that follow. We all know the outcomes, but how did we get there? Why did things fall apart? As U.S. officials make obvious missteps, parts of this book may almost resemble a horror movie in which you want to yell at the screen, No, don’t go in the basement!⁸ Yet although virtually all of us are aware of the unsettling outcomes in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, we tend to have an incomplete picture of exactly how we got there. Further, the conflicts in Kosovo and Libya are particularly ill-understood by the U.S. public today. This book puts all four of these wars in a broader context by weaving them into a larger story.

Most of my adult life, I have dealt with the unintended consequences of these wars and the life-and-death impacts they generated. I have invested years of my life, led infantry units on the front lines, conducted countless patrols and combat operations, been in multiple convoys hit by roadside bombs, and lost valorous young soldiers under my command. I feel driven to explore this compelling topic and to pursue the answers that have eluded us for too long.

Can America get the postwar phase right? Human lives, politics, money, elections, credibility, and the leadership role of the United States may hinge on the answer.

Clausewitz Revisited

The postwar phase cannot be treated as an afterthought for someone else to worry about: if anything, it is the main event that shapes lasting victory or defeat, and it is inextricably linked to the war itself. As the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz stated, War is merely the continuation of policy by other means. . . . The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.⁹ This suggests that battlefield events that unfold in the short term can be far outweighed by political outcomes that form over the long term. If the U.S. government grasps this symbiotic relationship between war and politics, then our behavior in recent conflicts has not reflected it. In the wake of impressive military victories, we were astonishingly ill-prepared to handle what came next. We quickly committed fumbles that allowed hostile actors to pick up the ball and run with it, as the world watched in disbelief. It seems rather obvious that the military campaign is the easy part, and once it is complete, that is when the truly difficult part begins: securing the peace. But we routinely get it backward by focusing nearly all our attention on the combat phase while neglecting the far more important political endgame.

Without question, planning for a postwar environment is tough. There can be difficulties in terms of limited planning time, bureaucratic challenges, competing priorities, and the occasional need for secrecy. Further, in the war-torn country, there are almost always countercurrents at play. Ultimately, even a good plan may not survive intact because the enemy always gets a vote. However, we should remember that the United States has accomplished some incredibly ambitious and difficult feats over the past century. The United States played a crucial role in the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II (albeit with substantial Soviet help) and, in doing so, helped achieve a historic victory over fascism.¹⁰ In the subsequent period, the United States used its newfound hegemony to establish a new world order of liberal institutions and transformed its former enemies into close partners.¹¹ In 1969 the United States became the first and only country to walk on the Moon, and two decades later we won a multigenerational struggle against a rival superpower. More recently, America’s intellectual capital contributed to a global information revolution that ushered forth Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms that have fundamentally changed the way that people communicate and use information, in ways both good and bad. Even today, the United States is an economic powerhouse, American cultural influence has remarkable sway, and the U.S. military is the best-equipped, best-trained, most-lethal fighting force in the world.

In short, we have pulled off many extremely difficult tasks, some of which probably seemed almost impossible at the time. Given this track record, it probably should not be surprising that we routinely win overwhelming battlefield victories against weaker opponents. But it is more difficult to grasp why we would be so bad at preparing for what comes next. Like the 1993 film Groundhog Day, each postwar failure was depressingly familiar, evoking a sense that we had seen this before. Our decisive victories were seemingly overturned by disenfranchised groups, insurgents, militias, or pockets of dead enders, in Donald Rumsfeld’s words.¹² How could this repeatedly happen?

Many existing accounts treat these wars separately, as if each debacle had a unique logic of its own. We often focus on seemingly discrete errors, such as the gaffes by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq. Did these errors matter? Absolutely. But repeated mistakes across multiple wars and administrations beg the question: What if these were not disconnected, one-off episodes? What if they had similar root causes we have not yet fully grasped? We need a comparative study of postwar planning across multiple wars and administrations to identify recurring themes and lessons.

Interestingly, the postwar challenges that emerged did not come as a complete shock to some people. In each case there were those who saw the approaching storm and strongly recommended we either avoid war altogether or take sensible precautionary steps. Thus, sometimes post-war planning did in fact occur. But these efforts were routinely ignored at higher levels of government. It was like being handed the answers to the test but casually tossing them in the trash.

Were good outcomes simply impossible to attain? It is true that we do not usually invade easy places—such as advanced, industrialized, unified democracies—that have pleasant conditions for postwar tranquility. Instead, we usually invade hard places—fractured, economically underdeveloped autocracies with unfamiliar cultures—where the starting conditions on the ground are grim. It is usually a herculean task to take a divided society that has suffered under repression for decades and transform it into a functioning democracy. Hence, we did not have absolute power to overhaul the social and political fabric of these war-torn lands.

Yet in each instance we did have a substantial degree of leverage and influence, at least for a moment in time. In this book I suggest that there is an interaction between the preconditions in the targeted country and our postwar strategy. If both parts are in total disrepair, the odds of a good outcome are vanishingly small, like a weak swimmer struggling against a fierce current. But if one (or preferably both) are in reasonable shape, then the odds begin to rise for a decent outcome. In our recent history, each smashing military victory created a unique golden hour to try to shape each state’s path, in light of the enormous challenges.¹³ Yet we failed to take advantage of the fleeting opportunities.

As one senior military official told me bluntly in an interview, Post-war planning is annex Z in the war plan. And there’s nothing in it.¹⁴ This neglect has contributed to deeply harmful foreign and domestic consequences that continue to resonate today. All too often, our improvisational approach to postwar planning has been like the Wallace and Gromit sequence in which Gromit hastily puts down each section of train track mere milliseconds before the train barrels over it. We must do better because the negative consequences of these debacles have been truly enormous. To help tackle these issues, this book explains a broader phenomenon that, to this point, we have not fully understood.

The Underlying Tension

We generally do not spend enough time thinking about the endgame of war. But to the extent we do think about it, a fundamental ambivalence characterizes our approach to postwar situations and helps create bad outcomes. The tension consists of two countervailing impulses: our impulse to promote democracy and our competing impulse to get out of the war-torn country as soon as possible. Both impulses practically seem to be embedded in America’s DNA, yet they are inherently at odds with each other. The more aggressively we pursue one, the more it undermines the other. This fosters uncomfortable choices that we usually want to sidestep, so, rather than reconcile the tension, we engage in magical thinking and try to do both. It spawns an incoherent and fatally flawed approach. Subsequent events become far more likely to spin out of control.

Establishing a path to democracy for a fragmented society emerging from decades of repression is almost always a long-term project. Even a remote chance of success requires local understanding, deliberate planning, and substantial resources to establish security and nurture legitimate institutions over an extended period. In contrast, pursuing a rapid withdrawal prioritizes an accelerated drawdown of resources and attention. When we are unable to choose between the two, it fosters a massive gap between ends and means. Such a postwar effort is more likely to fail. A more detailed look at each of these two impulses helps show what is happening.

First, let’s look at the impulse to promote democracy. It reflects ideals that are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The basic premise that people have the right to participate in free and fair elections that produce a representative government is a deeply rooted cornerstone of America’s self-image. Woodrow Wilson was a key advocate of the notion that liberal democratic governments embody the key to peace and security, and he wanted the United States to promote democracy abroad to contribute the betterment of mankind and to improve the chances of world peace.¹⁵ As one study on U.S. political-military coordination put it, Americans believe that their country has a unique mission to champion democracy and to defend human rights . . . they respond strongly to arguments based on America’s fundamental values.¹⁶

But perhaps we should back up for a moment. What exactly does democracy even mean anyway? Tony Smith aptly defines it as follows:

A democracy is a political system institutionalized under the rule of law, wherein an autonomous civil society, whose individuals join together voluntarily into groups with self-designated purposes, collaborate with each other through the mechanisms of political parties and establish through freely contested elections a system of representative government.¹⁷

So democracy is about more than just the physical act of holding elections. It entails the establishment of government institutions that can provide a secure environment to protect an open exchange of ideas, civic discourse, freedom of speech, a free press, rule of law, individual freedoms, and human rights. These cornerstones are often associated with the term liberal democracy. If elections are held without these cornerstones in place, then we can easily end up with a sham process in which a democratic facade shields a thinly veiled autocracy. Indeed, in some countries today, basic democratic underpinnings are being eroded, so a democracy may technically exist on paper, but in truth, creeping authoritarianism is at work behind the scenes.¹⁸ With this in mind, when I use the term promoting democracy in this book, it refers to actions intended to set conditions for free and fair elections, along with the liberal democratic institutions that underpin them. Sometimes when times get tough (or when other priorities are deemed more important), our leaders may settle for the simple act of holding elections, but that is problematic because it may not foster a legitimate democracy in the long run.

Altruism is not the sole motive at work here. Advancing democracy can be a practical way to advance U.S. security and prosperity. As Paul Miller asserts, Rebuilding states can seem to great powers an attractive and plausible way to reorder the postwar political environment to better serve their interests.¹⁹ Creating liberal democracies roughly in our image can foster a landscape more conducive to expanding U.S. political, economic, military, and cultural power. Hence, there are self-interested as well as altruistic reasons for us to promote democracy in the aftermath of war.

By the end of World War II, the United States reached a new pinnacle of power, and in this capacity we sought to expand democracy’s reach. The formative experiences in post-1945 Germany and Japan embodied the American drive to promote democracy as we transformed our two authoritarian enemies into the closest of democratic allies over time. In the case of West Germany, the United States spearheaded denazification and demilitarization, furnished significant economic assistance, deployed an occupation force, and encouraged binding to international institutions to help pave the way for a step-by-step adoption of democratic practices and norms.²⁰ In the case of Japan, General MacArthur led what amounted to a U.S.-dominated revolution from above to transform Japanese society and induce democratization.²¹ Notably, as President Roosevelt stated in 1942 with regard to Japan, Sure, we are going to rehabilitate them. Why? Not only from the humanitarian point of view . . . but from the point of our own pocket books, and our safety from future war. His thinking coincided with widespread American sentiments that if the international landscape did not fundamentally change, it could spawn another major strategic threat and perhaps even spark a third world war.²² These two cases helped bolster the idealistic notion that the United States has a unique responsibility to promote democracy and act as a force for good in a turbulent world.

Germany and Japan are also sometimes perceived as the gold standard in postwar planning, although the actual historical record is more complex. In the case of Japan, for example, the United States undertook aggressive preparation by establishing government subcommittees to help deal with economic reconstruction, security, and legal challenges while educating U.S. military officers on Japanese history and the nuts and bolts of postwar occupation, with planning efforts getting under way as early as 1942.²³ Yet President Roosevelt personally showed a lack of interest in many details of postwar Japan, and most of the aforementioned military officers trained on postwar duties were not actually assigned to work in MacArthur’s command.²⁴ Although the U.S. planning for postwar Germany also had some positive attributes, Secretary of War Henry Stimson believed that the process exposed a chaotic administration and its utter failure to treat matters in a well organized way.²⁵

One could delve into a far lengthier analysis of these two

Reviews for The Day After

[scottcholstad · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really think this is a book all Americans should read, especially all of our past, present and future leaders. This asks an important, relevant question which poses, frankly, for a thesis that many will find uncomfortable. Frankly, I don't care a damn bit if true blue "patriots" get bent out of shape. They've been too busy drinking the Kool-aid, lacking the necessary critical thinking and analytical skills, as well as any reasonable objectivity to go here. And yet these are issues I've been bringing up for a couple of decades and talking, discussing, debating, educating, recommending, etc. Donald Stoker and one other SME whose name I can't recall at the moment published a couple of books about the same time this past decade in which they posited America hasn't "won" a single "war" (since there have been no actual, technical wars since WW2, they're more appropriately "armed conflicts," with other terms used as well) SINCE WW2 (and the question of the US actually "winning" that war for the Allies is a theme for another time, although I have addressed that topic in previous reviews here). The most recent clusterf**k, of course, has been Afghanistan, where after 20 years of accomplishing little more than killing Obama (though that was in Pakistan, technically), as many are saying we're cutting and running. I disagree with that assertion. Not only did we screw up Iraq, wasting trillions as well as a total number of anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths overall, but we just fought not only our longest war in history, but also in Afghan history, which is a rather hideous statistic since Afghanistan has been largely nothing but one big battleground since the beginning of time. The second longest effort was the Soviet failure. People are wondering if China will join the land of dead empires trying to take a land that's never been beaten by any significant foe, empire or practically anyone. One has go to back to the 1750s to find an instance of anyone besides Afghans winning anything there, and I think back to the 1300s to find a so-called "empire" (though one virtually no one has heard of) who may have actually won in Afghanistan! Which says little, because aside from various Afghans winning civil wars against their countrymen, it's rarely been an actual "Country" and remains so today. People ask why the US sunk $83 Billion into "training" their military only for it to allegedly collapse in days against the Taliban. There are many variables, but one major one is doctrine. The US is STILL having trouble weaning itself from the huge land armies doctrine of Cold War Europe where we would lead NATO in defense against a massed Soviet invasion made up of tens of thousands of tanks and millions of troops. Since we should have learned about UW in Nam -- and claim we did -- and since we had to break that down into IW and AW, we have had a few units, with some of our overused special forces, able to fight small scale brush fires, for all intents and purposes, but for some reason, we persist in wanting to train "new" third world allies in military strategy designed for traditional western liberal democracies. In the case of Afghanistan, while most of our SOF, and others, knew this, it's almost unthinkable the brass couldn't get it, and that was reflected in our failed training, but Afghanistan never has been and is not a "country" in the formal sense, as I wrote earlier. It's a series of tribes sharing the same large geographical space -- no more, no less. Their allegiance is to their tribes, thus the near total inability to recruit them effectively to unite in a war against a battle hardened group of former terrorists, now a true modern army which doesn't have to divide and conquer because the tribes are already divided -- conquering is a breeze. Yet the eggheads in DC, the media and elsewhere wonder what went wrong. Ask a commander in Seal Team Five. Ask one of our British allies embedded with a different tribe. The answers are there, some of the questions are in this book. As I say when recommending this and Stoker's book, as well as discussing the topic, if you're uncomfortable or pissed off hearing we're freaking losers, especially after all of the budget going to defense, tough crap -- grow the hell up! Look at reality and while I normally agree with Admiral Stavris, I actually replied to his recent comment about looking at our mistakes, analyzing and learning from them in the recent screw up with the departure/evacuation. My response was after 70+ years, Admiral, shouldn't we have learned our lessons by now? The fact is we haven't or we wouldn't be repeating the same mistakes over and over. That's not my assertion; the facts bear that out. Again, if you don't like it, tough. Don't kill the messenger -- demand doctrine change and training change, among many other changes we should demand. It's almost unfathomable to me as to how we continue to screw up, repeat, screw up, repeat, but looking back to the 1950s, after supporting France's efforts to regain Indochina as its colony by supporting them financially and to a lesser degree, with some supplies as well, only to see them crash and burn, how in the hell could we have simply replaced them upon their departure and repeat most of the SAME EXACT MISTAKES THEY MADE, leading us to "lose" our own war in Vietnam? Shouldn't we have learned numerous lessons from their failure? Yeah, but we didn't. Why? I'm not in a position to answer that, but obviously something is rotten in Denmark (DC) and no one ever seems willing or able to correct it, the result being the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and millions of others, at a minimum. What's it going to take to end that damn cycle? Well, maybe starting with this book might provide a few good insights. So read it. Not only recommended, but essential!