Somewhere out there, there’s footage of a young Lieutenant Hughes giving an interview to a local San Diego news affiliate on the one year anniversary of the air strikes that started the war in Afghanistan. I remember saying something about learning that we were going to launch in the afternoon. And then watching the sun go down from the fantail of the destroyer. And then knowing that when it came up again, we’d be at war.
It was the sort of dramatic thing a young naval officer says when he thinks he’s saying something that matters enough to be written down somewhere and read by students of history a hundred years later. In retrospect, it didn’t matter much at all. I don’t even know what targets we hit. And I couldn’t tell you anything at all about the impact it had on the war. Because I spent most of the rest of my military career staring at the desert in Iraq’s al Anbar province.
I never participated directly in a military action in Afghanistan again. I’d never put boots on the ground there. Neither did the most of people I served with. I sent parts of my teams there. They were always a small contingent. There was a dot on a map somewhere that wouldn’t be full mission capable without a squad of this or a detachment of that. They were an afterthought in our post deployment after action reports though. They were the smaller part of my overseas contingency operations budget (the infamous OCO budget that funded the war for 20 years).
For those engaged there, I know it didn’t feel that way. But the reality of the first ten years of Operation Enduring Freedom was that in most years we had more troops in South Korea than we did in Afghanistan. And that’s how the war in Afghanistan went from 2001 until 2010.
As early as the fall of 2002, the focus shifted to Iraq. The prioritization of the war in Afghanistan lasted about a year. It would be a decade before we cared much about it again.
I don’t know nearly enough about the tactical situation on the ground to have an opinion about what’s happened over the last 96 hours in Kabul. It doesn’t look good. And it doesn’t look like American military or civilian leadership handled it correctly. As a result, there’s likely to be more human suffering than there could have been. The gunfighters I served with that came face to face with the Taliban said it was like getting in a fight with a platoon of their own. It sounds like we greatly overestimated the 300k troop Afghan military’s capacity to stand and fight after we left. And maybe that’s something we should have known all along.
For that we should hold our leaders accountable. Maybe that’s the thing we can do right in Afghanistan. But we need to be honest about what it is that went on there over the last 20 years. Deeply, and painfully honest. We owe that to the men and women who served and sacrificed.
From 2003 to 2010, the years we consider Operation Iraqi Freedom to be in active combat, the U.S. never went below 120K troops on the ground. When I started preparing for my last deployment to Iraq, a full seven years into the war in Afghanistan, the troop comparison was 160k in Iraq, 25K in Afghanistan; six to one. Every winter we stopped fighting and the Taliban regrouped. Every Spring there was an offensive. Every year we had a new strategy.
We killed Bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. We got interested after that in putting troops on the ground. There was never as many as the lowest amount we had in Iraq though. The peak was 2014, thirteen years into the war. We’ve been drawing down ever since.
It’s been ten years since I put on a uniform every day and went to work; five since I’ve worn one at all. As far back as that, and before, the people that I knew that we sent to Afghanistan came back with the same story. They didn’t really know exactly what it was that they were doing over there. And they were all pretty sure that if we left tomorrow, the Taliban would be in charge of the place faster than anyone was willing to say out loud.
If the reality they feared is realized today, than the failure started earlier than Biden. Earlier than Trump. Earlier still than Obama. It started when we decided to stop fighting a war in Afghanistan, without stopping the war. That was at least sometime in the fall of 2002.
No one cared for 20 years if we were winning or losing. Stanley McChrystal got fired and then started a consulting company that corporate America pays top dollar to learn leadership lessons from. The tech firm I joined when I left the military that has a decades long history of actually winning, paid to hear what it took to win from him.
Win what?
This isn’t a criticism of General McChrystal. I have immense respect for as a senior officer. It’s an illustration that America didn’t care that we were winning or losing anything at all. Only that warriors existed and they were off fighting for us. But war isn’t like politics. Eventually it actually matters if you get it wrong.
We called it a war because we don’t know what else to call it. Twenty thousand American service members were wounded. Over 2,200 were killed. In 20 years. It’s disrespectful to dishonor their sacrifice. But we do so by being dishonest about what we asked them to do. And the truth is, I don’t really know what that was. I’ve never known. Until today.
We were in Afghanistan because if we weren’t, the Taliban would take back over the country from the Afghan government America put in place. It wasn’t a war in the classic sense. It was an occupation; one we could have continued at such low recent cost only as long as the Taliban knew we were already on our way out. We suspected it. And we know it now because the President of Afghanistan sent out a Facebook message telling us he fled this morning. And there’s helicopters on the roof of the embassy. And it’s Saigon all over again.
How often since those troubling images of Saigon 50 years ago have we wished we stayed longer in Vietnam? That’s a hell of a question. The answer is not very often and not by serious people at all. Because the lesson learned was that the true tragedy of Saigon was the decade we spent before it. As it is in Afghanistan twice over.
You lose a 20 year war the way you go broke. Slowly and then all at once.
What did we do over the last 20 years to ensure the people of Afghanistan were free from Taliban rule? Were we committed to the extent that we truly believed it would work? And who is left to take up that task after we’re gone?
These questions haven’t been asked seriously for some time. And it’s a poor time to start caring about their answers now. I pray for those left behind. I think of the Iraqis and other host nation members I served with over the years and I can feel my heart breaking for the Afghans that did the same and now are left on their own. There’s no “but”. Only a sadness and suffering that’s inevitable arrival was brought on too long ago.
Thanks, Sean. The following is from Representative Seth Moulton, “ To say that today is anything short of a disaster would be dishonest. Worse, it was avoidable. The time to debate whether we stay in Afghanistan has passed, but there is still time to debate how we manage our retreat. For months, I have been calling on the Administration to evacuate our allies immediately—not to wait for paperwork, for shaky agreements with third countries, or for time to make it look more “orderly.”
While I am proud that a strong, bipartisan majority in Congress voted to expand the Special Immigrant Visa program in support of our Afghan friends, my worst fear has become realized: That ultimately this effort would distract from what is truly needed, an immediate evacuation. The fact that, at this hour, we have not even secured the civilian half of Kabul Airport is testament to our moral and operational failure. We need to rectify this immediately. America and our allies must drop the onerous visa requirements where a typo can condemn an ally to torture and death, and the military must continue the evacuation for as long as it takes.
We should also not forget that the tragedy that unfolds before us today was set in motion by Secretary Pompeo and President Trump, who negotiated in secret with the Taliban terrorists last year in order to meet a campaign promise.
Today’s tragedy must also serve as a wakeup call to Congress, who holds ultimate, Constitutional responsibility for sending our best and brightest to war on the nation’s behalf. Successive leaders of both parties have failed to hold the votes for re-authorizing this conflict for the last two decades since we invaded to find Osama bin Laden. For that, all of us in Congress should be ashamed.
Finally, to our Afghanistan veterans and their families, I am too honest to stand here today and try to convince you that your sacrifice was worth it. Some will find solace in the millions of Afghans, especially women and girls, to whom we gave two decades of a taste of freedom—more hope, liberty, and opportunity than they would have ever had without the tireless work and irreparable sacrifices of our troops. We accomplished our initial mission: Osama Bin Laden is dead and the threat of terrorist attacks against Americans originating from Afghanistan is diminished. We also provided the security needed to accomplish a peace process that, unfortunately, was never realized.
Others will forever ask that haunting question I heard too often from my own Marines in Iraq: “Why are we here?” The best answer I could ever come up with was simply, “So nobody has to be here in our place,” and while that was never an adequate answer, it is true. And I remain proud to be from a nation whose brave young men and women stand on the ramparts of freedom around the globe, as they do at Kabul Airport tonight.”