Trying to Find the Signal in the Noise of Afghanistan
There's lots of bad takes out there. Here's five I hope to be less bad.
I tweeted last night that uniformed military personnel don’t get to pop off about ongoing operations on social media because that’s one of the rights they sacrificed when they raised their hands. But I also said they should leave it up to those of us that served before them to speak for them when we feel like there’s a need. And so here are my takes. I have five.
1-Reasonable, informed people understood what was likely to happen upon our withdrawal. For months my old teammates have been petitioning elected representatives or supporting/starting organizations designed to get the interpreters that worked side by side with their assault teams out of Afghanistan. They knew what was going to happen. And they’ve been literally begging people to listen and help. It’s not political Monday morning quarterbacking. These people had friends that they were deeply worried about.
Two months before the fall of Kabul Democratic Congressmen Seth Moulton launched evacuateourallies.org. His quote: “We have fewer than 80 days until our formal withdrawal, but it takes 800 to process a Special Immigrant Visa. That is why an evacuation is necessary—now.”
As best as I can tell, no policy or strategy change came from any of these efforts. This is hard to swallow if you give a damn about any of this.
2-FID is a lousy way to nation build. More than anything I ever did in the military, I ran Foreign Internal Defense (FID) missions. FID is a core mission of the Special Operations Command that utilizes Special Operations Forces (SOF) to train foreign militaries of American allies to better support themselves and U.S. interests. Training host nation military and law enforcement to be able to keep their backyards clean of terrorists was a core tenant of the Global War on Terrorism. Here’s the main pattern I observed:
The best way these countries could keep themselves safe was to have us there training their people. They understood that as long as we had a presence there, we (the U.S.) would do whatever it took to protect our people and the broader environment we were operating in. And so the goal was to keep us there as long as we could and bleed the foreign military sales initiatives of the DOD of money and platforms. This gave local officials power. And it also kept their people safe. Win/Win for them. They had limited interest in building long term, unilateral capacity.
What did work was substantial long term U.S. presence (75 year presence) in places like Germany and South Korea. We’re still in Germany and South Korea with more people than we usually had in Afghanistan. And we’ve been there since before color TV. Germany is now a dominant economic world power. South Korea is one of the greatest economic growth stories in the history of humankind. Iraq evaporated in months. Afghanistan took a weekend. As best as I can tell, nation building is a fifty year plan. And we don’t agree on anything for 50 years any more.
But let’s be crystal clear here. Afghanistan is not Germany or South Korea. And conditions were never set for reasonably peaceful long term presence in Afghanistan. And so be wary of people saying we should be there for 75 years...it’s a trap.
3-We spend quite a bit of mental energy writing plans that are supposed to make us really good at getting people out of country. Joint Publication 3-68 covers noncombatant evacuation operations (NEO). Department of Defense Directive 3025.14 covers “Evacuation of U.S. Citizens and Designated Aliens from Threatened Areas Abroad”. I didn’t have to Google them because I was a good staff officer once and I knew JP 3-68 by memory 10 years after leaving the Operations shop at the Naval Special Warfare Command.
The point that I’m making here is that the DOD does not take planning lightly. And the idea that one day we were going to have to leave someplace and pull all our people out was not an unplanned for contingency. It really appears we didn’t do the work to plan the exit in Afghanistan. So far the excuse has been we were surprised by the weak response of the Afghan army.
The point of military planning is not to be surprised. And if you are, to have a plan for that surprise not simply throw your hands up and say “Welp…I guess they got us.”
It is entirely fair to praise the secondary effort to surge airlift capacity. But it’s not a win. And thousands of people trying to get into an airport and the chaos that brings was almost certainly going to end up in suicide bombers. I’m surprise it took a week. We’re also at the mercy of the Taliban for execution of U.S. policy. Let that sink in.
4-Counterfactuals aren’t helpful, but neither is pretending this is any sort of success.
Saying we lost 12 people because of the decision misses the point. The “blood on his hands” crew are political partisans. You can’t know what the alternative opportunity would have brought in detail so if someone is saying that this caused X deaths and comparing it to zero, it’s a good bet it’s political. And I won’t dishonor the sacrifice of those we lost with politics. Instead I owe an honest take on things. Which is this:
The end in Afghanistan was a failure because we got caught flatfooted in an environment we had no business ever having both feet flat on the ground in. The result was that we had to rush an emergency evacuation operation. We’ve lost massive international credibility and ALL control over a region we occupied for 20 years over the course of a weekend. What we did succeed in building created a system that has deep reliance on import and movement of people/ideas/technology. And that system is going to starve and die pretty quickly now. There’s either going to be a massive humanitarian crisis or some other global power that doesn’t give a rip about liberal norms is going to float the Taliban. And the “Great Game” may finally be lost. And someone should be held accountable.
If you’re saying the President should resign, you don’t know how America works. But it wouldn’t be out of line to expect the Sec Def resign. It’s also hard to imagine that the sort of DOD leadership turnover we saw in the last six months of the Trump administration aided in the planning of the withdrawal. That’s not passing the blame. It’s the realities that eight months ago the DOD was led by a group of people who had been on the job for two months and were leaving in one. That said, withdrawal on the timeline was a popular strategy. Both parties ran on it. And so it’s not likely it was getting pushed back.
So what should have happened?
Hindsight still isn’t 20/20. But it’s not unreasonable to believe that as soon as the date was set, a large scale, grown up NEO operation should have been planned with the assumption that the Taliban would have immediate freedom of movement after U.S. forces left their forward operating bases. Saying “we told Americans to leave” is insufficient. That’s not why we have a 75 page instruction on the definitions, authorities and framework to begin planning a NEO. We have one because it’s hard. And we knew it. And we still didn’t do it.
5-No one benefits from anti-immigration policies. There’s zero reason we can’t let Afghans who aided the American effort in Afghanistan come on over and be Americans if they want to. I criticized the last admin for anti-immigration policies. And I’ll do it again for this one. Let them in. You can’t un-make the last wrong decision. You can only make the next right one.