In Deconstructing Afghanistan: How Does America’s Past Inform Afghanistan’s Future?, Lt Col Marc Greene uses analogy to examine the US intervention in the South Asian nation. Analogy is thought’s constant handmaiden. It shapes decisions at every turn, individually and collectively, from crossing the street to going to war. Some analogies have attained legendary status in national security decision making: Western acquiescence to Adolf Hitler’s demands in Czechoslovakia instructs policy makers to engage early in budding international disputes, and American experience in Vietnam has taught three generations of military officers to conduct military campaigns aggressively. Not all smaller problems become larger...

On 7 October 2001, Pres. George W. Bush addressed the nation from the White House Treaty Room less than four weeks after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks that shook the United States from its hegemonic malaise. Since 1996, the international community had excoriated Mullah Omar’s Taliban for arcane social policies and human rights atrocities against Afghanistan’s minority populations, but failed to intervene in any meaningful way. However, 19 al-Qaeda militants prompted the United States to intercede militarily in Afghanistan’s latest civil war on behalf of the Northern Alliance—to retaliate against al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies. The Bush administration’s...

A comparison of seemingly disparate histories of the pre–Civil War American South and Afghanistan prior to 2001 reveals three traits, or norms, common to both societies. First, vertically oriented class structures dominate both societies. The family unit is the building block of order and governance; ethnicity, gender, and wealth delineate individual status. Second, both societies are complex mosaics that display a capacity for strong cohesion and equally intense division despite extreme disparities in economic and social status. Third, both populations value peripheral and societal autonomy, to the point of war when faced with external interference. In the South, these...

Afghanistan’s path to reconstruction has been tread by “conflict between those [intent on] the reimplementation of a centralized, top-down, king-like authority, and those [seeking] a new model of political organization derived from the cooperation and consent of the governed.”¹ Reconstruction of the South followed a similar course. A comparison of the South and Afghanistan based on the three common societal traits—intertwined class structures, a complex social mosaic, and the desire for autonomy—reveals extensive sociopolitical symmetry. First, a clash between old and new societal structures defined reconstruction’s political progression in the South and Afghanistan. Second, both societies’ mosaic landscape...

Gen Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in April 1865 and the expulsion of Taliban forces in early 2002 ushered in similar periods of comparative peace until vanquished foes renewed hostilities through unconventional means in 1867 and 2005, respectively. According to Foner, “violence [in the South] raised in its starkest form the question of legitimacy that haunted the Reconstruction state.”¹ Foner’s diagnosis of the South applies equally to Afghanistan.

A comparison of both security situations based on three common societal traits reveals important symmetries during respective reconstruction periods. Rural lawlessness progressed to insurgency across the South and Afghanistan, and both...

Southern and Afghan societies emerged from civil war in bankruptcy. The Confederate states were $700 million in debt when the southern government collapsed in April 1865.¹ By comparison, when Karzai’s interim administration assumed control in late December 2001, the government treasury included a paltry $9 million in cash, provided by the UN start-up fund.² The physical destruction and psychological exhaustion of war proved far more devastating for both societies than anticipated by external observers.

As we saw when we analyzed sociopolitical and security factors, examining the three societal traits common to the South and Afghanistan reveals tremendous economic symmetry during...

Symmetry exists between reconstruction of the South and Afghanistan despite the separation of time and geography. Both societies shared three common traits that withstood the trials of war and external impulses for change: highly differentiated class structures, ethnically and economically diverse societal mosaics, and a nearly universal belief in peripheral and societal autonomy. The legitimacy afforded by external and indigenous security forces enabled reconstruction governments in both cases to subdue these three traits artificially. Yet the South’s suppression did not yield permanent social change. Instead, a New South resembling its former antebellum image emerged with Redemption and the election of...