Why did the United States lose the war in Afghanistan? Only a repeated habit of decision-making explains consistent strategic miscalculation. Policymakers in every administration prioritized counterterrorism – a comparatively simple, easily defined, “realistic,” concrete mission. They subordinated broader, more ambiguous, harder-to-define, morally aspirational, long-term goals, such as counterinsurgency and nation building. Policymakers did so even though – as repeated strategy reviews showed – the Taliban and al-Qaida were linked; success in the war against either depended on success in both; and counterinsurgency and nation building were necessary, alongside counterterrorism operations, to achieve the larger goal of al-Qaida’s defeat. These policies became embedded in the US bureaucracy, ensuring the bureaucracy kept implementing bad strategy on autopilot even when policymakers and repeated strategy reviews highlighted the problem.

Through an analysis of some of the stock tropes (as a pawn in the Great Game, as a space of disease and pathology and as the graveyard of empires) used to describe Afghanistan, and through a close reading of one key text (Afghanistan 101), the first chapter highlights the ways in which a certain essentialised ‘idea’ of Afghanistan has become common-sense and has disguised the need for more serious engagement with the country and its people. The aim of this chapter is to foreground Afghanistan as an object of enquiry and to start questioning some of the strategies that are most commonly used to think about it.