Will the Biden Administration Be a 'Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone'?
The government knew the Afghanistan War was a failure for years, but concealed that knowledge. Did anyone learn any lessons from that?
Welcome back to What Went Wrong?, a newsletter about the failures, inefficiencies, and screw-ups that define 21st-century American life, written by Harry Cheadle.
Almost exactly a year ago, the Washington Post dropped a journalistic bombshell when it published what it called the Afghanistan Papers. These 2,000 pages of documents represented more than 400 interviews from 2014 and 2015 with generals, diplomats, and other decision-makers in the US government who publicly insisted that the war in Afghanistan was going well but privately admitted the whole thing was a pointless and incompetently executed boondoggle. In these interviews, military officials said things like “we didn’t know what we were doing,” and confessed they painted a rosy picture when talking about the war in public. “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” said one colonel. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
The interviews were conducted by an obscure governmental agency called the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which in 2014 was working on a project called “Lessons Learned,” apparently on the assumption that the war would be winding down soon. But the conflict continued for years, and the US currently still has a few thousand troops in the country, even as peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government progress. American officials not only lied to the public about how well the war was going, the government worked hard to hide their honest assessments from view, resisting the Post’s Freedom of Information Act requests and only releasing the documents after the paper filed two lawsuits and spent three years fighting in court.
In the Post’s coverage, it compared the Afghanistan Papers to the Pentagon Papers, which when they were leaked in 1971 revealed the government’s hypocrisy and incompetence during the Vietnam War. But the Afghanistan Papers didn’t cause the scandal that the Pentagon Papers did—maybe everyone already assumed the government was lying to us about the war in Afghanistan, maybe not many people really cared about the war by December 2019. Or maybe the problem was that the Post published its stories the same month that Donald Trump was getting impeached, and we didn’t have enough room in our heads to think about a scandal that didn’t implicate Trump but instead shone a light on the corruption and incompetence of three presidential administrations and both major parties.
Though it is not discussed much in the media today (and wasn’t a topic during the 2020 elections), the war in Afghanistan has had horrific human consequences. More than 100,000 civilians have died as a result of the conflict just since 2010 and around 2,500 Americans have died in the country; tens of thousands more US soldiers have been seriously wounded or returned home with life-altering PTSD. Many of these casualties were the results of the kind of mundane bureaucratic dysfunction familiar to anyone who’s ever worked for a large organization. Bad ideas become official policy for unclear reasons. Failures are covered up, everyone dodges responsibility, nobody wants to admit that things have gone wrong. Institutions can drift into avoidable catastrophes because no one speaks up, and the US government in particular seems unwilling to ever admit mistakes until it's far too late.
As Joe Biden takes over for Donald Trump, he inherits a legacy of failure on everything from climate change to the Covid vaccine. His administration will have to work to correct those errors, but as they’re “building back better” they should think about how to prevent catastrophic errors of judgement like those that mired us in Afghanistan for two decades. Joe Biden was part of an Obama administration that turned into a “self-licking ice cream cone” when it came to the war. How do you get unlicked?
The art of the fail
To discuss organizational errors you have to turn away from politics—an arena where everyone spends a lot of time avoiding blame—and toward business, where the study of failure is a whole subfield of expertise. Techies and venture capital types have adopted “fail fast” as a mantra—try an idea out, in other words, and move on to the next thing quickly if it doesn’t work out. But you also have to examine failures to learn from them, and business experts have written extensively about how to facilitate this learning process, which starts by encouraging people to speak up when they realize something is wrong, and taking those concerns seriously. Here’s a passage from a 2011 Harvard Business Review article about failure on how the Challenger space shuttle crash could have been avoided:
NASA managers spent some two weeks downplaying the seriousness of a piece of foam’s having broken off the left side of the shuttle at launch. They rejected engineers’ requests to resolve the ambiguity (which could have been done by having a satellite photograph the shuttle or asking the astronauts to conduct a space walk to inspect the area in question), and the major failure went largely undetected until its fatal consequences 16 days later. Ironically, a shared but unsubstantiated belief among program managers that there was little they could do contributed to their inability to detect the failure. Postevent analyses suggested that they might indeed have taken fruitful action. But clearly leaders hadn’t established the necessary culture, systems, and procedures.
When the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction was going around in 2014 talking to government officials about the war, it was supposed to be part of the kind of clearheaded critiques experts generally endorse. But given that the harshest critiques of the war delivered by the most senior officials never saw the light of day until a newspaper sued to get them, and given that the war continued for years afterward, it’s safe to say that no one learned the right lessons.
As it happens, the US government has a logistical challenge on its hands that is as complex as many wars: the distribution of the Covid vaccines, a project that the Trump administration reportedly ignored. As the Biden administration works with the medical industry and state and local governments, subordinates and people dealing with on-the-ground conditions will need to feel empowered to speak up about what problems need to be solved; higher-level staffers should actually listen to those concerns and avoid the kind of blame-shifting and office politics that can paralyze institutions. In other words, it should look nothing like the war in Afghanistan.
Trumpism brought out the worst in government
Presidential candidates rarely talk about the need to build a good workplace culture in the White House and federal agencies. They focus on what they want to do, not how they’ll do it. But one of the lessons of the Trump era is that a president who is a bad manager is going to be a lousy leader.
Trump’s White House was infamously prone to palace intrigues and personal vendettas that often played out in the press. The federal government’s response was undermined by a toxic combination of wishful thinking, bureaucratic infighting, and favoritism. Trump didn’t want to hear any bad news or admit that Covid wouldn’t“just disappear,” and thousands of people died as a result of his denial.
This refusal to admit that you were ever wrong is a defining feature of Trumpism, to the point where many Republicans believe he won the 2020 election. We can’t just dismiss this tendency as a symptom of the far right, however—this sort of never-wrongness is widespread across the political spectrum. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wrote a book offering “leadership lessons” from his response to the pandemic that came out even as cases were spiking once again in the state. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio spent the summer defending his police department’s draconian response to protests and only admitted the obvious truth that NYPD officers routinely used excessive force when a watchdog group came out with a scathing report last month. Nancy Pelosi and other members of the Democratic Party leadership were summarily reelected to their positions even though their party unexpectedly lost congressional seats during the election. As Democrats have rehashed their defeats in 2020, progressives have blamed centrists and centrists have blamed progressives, neither side owning up to any failures on their own part at all. There’s a little more Trump in all our politicians than we would like to admit.
We should welcome mistakes
“Fail fast” can’t work for the US government, which by design moves very, very slowly. It fails at a glacial pace, rarely changing course even when it’s obvious to everyone that something isn’t working. That’s how you get an Afghanistan.
A president could fight this tendency by encouraging their subordinates to admit failure and not be afraid to deliver bad news up the chain of command. They could invest energy in trying to improve the organizational culture of federal agencies and be more transparent—an administration could proactively release reports that make them look bad, rather than hiding them.
But the public and media play a role here too. We demand our presidents be perfect, and pillory any error. If an administration owned up to failure, we wouldn’t treat it as a refreshing bit of honesty but as an admission of incompetence. Our leaders are often unable or unwilling to hear things are going badly, but so are the American people. Optimism can easily turn into denial, and that’s when the bodies start piling up.
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