The Ledger

Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan

By David Kilcullen and Greg Mills, and Reviewed by Dr. Wm. Shane Story

Article published on: March 1, 2025 in the Spring 2025 edition of Army History

Read Time: < 7 mins

Hurst Publishers, 2021 Pp. xxxi, 352. $19.95

For the United States, the collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021 was a foreign policy debacle. Two decades of support for Afghan democracy and fighting to stave off a Taliban return had gone for naught. To top it all off, the desperate evacuation of Kabul airport looked like a shameful replay of the fall of Saigon in 1975. In The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan, David Kilcullen and Greg Mills argue that Presidents George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, Donald J. Trump, and Joseph R. Biden—especially Biden—are most to blame for what went wrong. The Ledger, however, needs an outside auditor because the numbers do not add up.

Kilcullen and Mills, from Australia and South Africa, respectively, have built lucrative careers as international security and development experts. Kilcullen has written extensively on counterinsurgency doctrine and touts his experience advising commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mills has advised African governments on development projects and counseled civilian leaders and commanders in Afghanistan. When Kabul fell, Kilcullen and Mills helped coordinate the evacuation of an Afghan acquaintance and his family to the United States as refugees. Weeks later, in October 2021, they holed up in a Moroccan mountain resort to write The Ledger in just one month. How does one write a book in just one month? First, rehash and knit together a bunch of old material and checklists on how one should conduct counterinsurgency. Throw in well-known and long-standing criticisms of the operation. Finally, write with the boundless energy and fury of full-blown righteous indignation, repeatedly blasting a carefully chosen target (President Biden) for his treachery.

The structure of The Ledger reflects a thirty-day writing effort. Kilcullen and Mills use lists to organize the text: “five common lessons;” “assessing four failures;” eleven things “that could have been done differently” (109, 125, 225). Vietnam makes multiple appearances. Kilcullen and Mills twice evoke the “lessons of Vietnam” (59, 168) without specifying what they are except for the observation that the United States “could do everything in its power to assist the South Vietnamese [but] it could not win the conflict for them” (2). In an unseemly detour, Chapter 5 shifts the focus from Afghanistan to Africa to imply that future interventions on that continent will be more effective if the proper lessons are drawn from Afghanistan. An incongruous shout-out to Somaliland reads like a bid for the next international consulting contract (274).

Their indignation about Afghanistan is all the greater because of their conviction that it did not have to end as it did. The war was “eminently winnable” (37) and “winning tactical engagements was never a problem in Afghanistan, especially when airpower could be bought to bear” (83). That it was not won was due primarily to terrible policy decisions by the American presidents. First was the Bush administration’s failure in late 2001, after ousting the Taliban from power, to include that group in the negotiations to establish a new government of Afghanistan. This becomes the original sin that begets all others in the long war. Next was the eighteen-month time limit that President Obama put on the surge of forces into Afghanistan from 2009 through 2011, which The Ledger dismisses as “too small . . . too brief . . . and too compromised,” because the Taliban had only to wait out the Americans (228). Finally, there was the disastrous departure. President Biden should have ignored the withdrawal agreement negotiated by President Trump in 2020. Strategically, “there was no reason to remove the 2,500 NATO troops that remained in the country” in 2021 (38). Moreover, “just as the decision to invade Iraq was never supported by the actual evidence, the same was true for the decision to leave Afghanistan” (43).

The Ledger belies its own criticisms of the American presidents by depicting an Afghanistan that no outside power could ever hope to stabilize. Elections, they explain, did not lead Afghanistan toward any semblance of representative democracy. Then there is Afghanistan’s eastern neighbor, Pakistan, with its own geostrategic and demographic concerns for shaping Afghanistan’s future. It was Pakistan’s interests that led it to support the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in the 1980s and to play both sides of the Taliban-American war from 2001 through 2021. America’s objectives in Afghanistan depended heavily on Pakistani support, but Pakistan opposed American objectives in the region. Additionally, endless corruption consumed most of the aid and construction funds spent during the war.

Even the authors’ assertions about the coalition’s military indomitability do not hold up to scrutiny. Improvised explosive devices took a steady toll on coalition and Afghan forces and the coalition abandoned combat outposts because they were impossible to defend. Moreover, insider attacks defeated coalition efforts to partner with and build up Afghan security forces, which themselves were going to have to win the war if it was ever going to be won. “Military force,” they note, “in this context often proves to be counterproductive beyond a certain, fairly low, threshold of violence” (93). Kilcullen and Mills laud coalition soldiers but make their efforts seem pointless: “The war was not inherently unwinnable, perhaps, but the missions these mostly very capable, brave and selfless men and women were sent on, within the resource and timeframe parameters they were given, were often unachievable” (58). In retrospect, any president reading The Ledger could only regret not having with-drawn from that intractable conflict even sooner.

War begets bitterness. It is to be expected, and Kilcullen and Mills convey bitterness in spades, but their fundamental interest in Afghanistan was not selfless service. Rather, they both fit their own definition of “conflict entrepreneurs”: “actors who benefit from the continuation of a war and therefore seek to prolong it rather than win it . . . [including] the enormous buzzing swarm of contractors, consultants and implementing partners [who] were feeding at the same trough” (163). There is much to learn about the war from The Ledger, but readers should take the authors’ judgments with a grain of salt.