One could point to many reasons why the US failed in Afghanistan, but to my mind, the reason is simple, and is the same reason they failed in Iraq. The powers that be in the West consistently fail to recognize that any effort that has a chance of success in a Muslim-majority state would need to wholly embrace Islam as the central driving force of their strategy.

What most non-Muslims don’t realize is how fundamental politics and matters of the state are within the religion of Islam, and how deep seated this belief is within the hearts and minds of Muslims, including what some would classify as secular or non-religious Muslims. What’s more, most Muslims are actually very uninformed about their own religion, making their affiliation more emotional than intellectual. This mix unfortunately leads many good people down a dark path.

It is not uncommon for people to draw parallels between the Christian and Islamic worlds, which is certainly warranted as both are great Abrahamic religions that share a common past. And seeing how much of the progress in the Christian West was tied to the separation of church and state, it is often surmised that a similar separation would be a key factor in the forward evolution of any Muslim-majority state. But herein lies the problem, because unlike Christianity where Jesus never ran a state nor made Christianity’s role in the operations of the state clear, Islam is quite the opposite. Not only did Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, lead an Islamic community in his time, but he also left many clear directives on very intricate matters of the state, directives that influence commerce, politics, and war. This is hard for Westerners to understand since being a faithful Christian does not require, as a matter of faith, that Christianity drive the state. But for Muslims the case is the opposite…Islam has to be the primary driver of the state. That being the case, to ask the Afghanis to excise or diminish Islam’s role within the state would be to ask them to fundamentally change the way they view their religion…it would be like asking them to leave the faith!

But that is what the US set out to do. It wanted to divorce Islam from the state and rebuild Afghanistan in the image of a Western democracy. What the US should have done is put Islam front and center in their strategy, communicating to Afghanis that their progress was not tied to their having to diminish the role of Islam in the state, but quite to the contrary was tied to an elevation of Islam’s role within the state. To that end, the US would have had the words of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad himself to counter the extremist and backward elements that needed to be weeded out. And not only would they have the example and words of the Prophet Muhammad to inspire people, they would also have countless beloved Muslim thinkers from the past and present to draw from, many of whom have struggled mightily against those very same extremist voices that have been existing in the Islamic world for centuries. In short, the message wouldn’t be to, in effect, leave Islam, but to instead become a better Muslim and let Islam guide your nation to a better place. And the Muslim masses can go there, because that vision would be one of triumph where Islam, albeit with the help of the West, was the driving force.

In closing, the vast majority of Afghanis don’t subscribe to the extremist Islamic interpretation of the Taliban. So had the US given the people a more authentic interpretation of Islam to fight for, one that respected the rights of women and minorities, one that emphasized the kind and soft nature of the Prophet Muhammad, and one that in fact better aligned with their own natural inclinations (for the Afghan people are a naturally humble and generous people), that would have been a strategy that the Afghan people could have embraced and been willing to fight and die for.