Lessons Learned from Afghanistan: The First Political Order.

This paper argues that the US failed to implement the WPS Act and offers a practical demonstration of how to analyze Afghanistan's security situation from a WPS lens before making three policy arguments regarding what the United States can learn from this error. This omission from the ongoing political debate demonstrates that - despite the United States in the late 2010s being "the first country in the world with a comprehensive law on WPS, and I de facto i , the first with a whole-of-government strategy that responds to such a domestic law"[1] - its government and security communities have not yet fully integrated critical WPS concepts and theories or understood their practical applicability for US security and policy decisions. The US military withdrawal process from Afghanistan brought politicized accusations of multiple foreign policy - military, intelligence, and diplomatic - miscommunications and misconceptions. WPS analyses are critical to understand why Afghanistan destabilized so quickly WPS analyses are critical if policymakers and security professionals truly wish to understand why Afghanistan destabilized so quickly and what the United States should consider for future drawdowns. [Extracted from the article]