(Written 8/24/21)
People are curious what veterans think about the pullout of Afghanistan. It’s easy for me to forget that for the majority of Americans, this war was an abstraction- watched on television or followed online. This is a good post by an old Teammate of mine- Jack Carr. He lays out the background and context pretty well here, and I need not reiterate it. This one is from a prior enlisted Marine Lieutenant Colonel Russell Worth Parker, and I think it’s worth the read if you have time.
A human or a nation must make choices with the imperfect view it has of a messy reality, at the time of decision. We invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after the Taliban refused to give up Osama Bin Ladin. Would we have proceeded in the same manner had we known the outcome of the next 20 years? Maybe, maybe not. It’s easy to armchair quarterback from the future with the benefit of hindsight. It’s hard to counter-factually analyze events, with so many variables in play. The challenge of navigating the complexity of the international environment is that there are no sure things- no one course that is easily apparent. There are hard choices, and harder ones. You have to pick your poison. “You pays your money and you take your chance,” as the old saying goes. In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11th, 2001, it made sense to the nation, and most of the world, to move heaven and earth to bring the perpetrator of such a monstrous act to justice. So that’s how we got in. Humans make the best decisions they can with the best information available at the time. We can do nothing else.
Afghanistan, 2005
The cost in lives, injuries, and money is probably the first thing I think of when I reflect on this conflict. Although the Afghan state that we attempted to cultivate collapsed as soon as we weren’t there to hold it up, it’s important to remember that tens of thousands of Afghans fought and died in support of the goal of a democratic Afghanistan, it wasn’t just the US and our western allies. There were many who came with us on this journey to modernize the nation.
The next thing I think about is the difficult environment/conditions that existed in which to attempt to plant a new nation. The terrain lends itself naturally to local and regional, vice national governance. One of the problems with counterinsurgency is that it’s nearly impossible to prevail when the enemy has a cross-border region in which to rest and refit, as the Taliban did in Pakistan and the Vietcong did in Laos. The region has a long history of invasions by different groups, from the Persians, Alexander the Great, Arabs, Mongols, Mughals, Sikhs, British, Russians, and finally the Americans. “Graveyard of Empires” is a nickname bestowed upon the region in the recent past, but as with all cliches, there is something driving the title.
Complexity science provides some interesting insights when it comes to understanding such an environment. Things can get “non-linear” pretty quickly- meaning exponential growth rather than a measured linear progression. Chocolate and peanut butter can combine into something greater than the sum of their parts. The inputs and variables are so numerous that navigating complexity must be more akin to surfing or white-water rafting- there’s no time to wait for perfect information.
Your approach must be more of the Probe-Sense-Respond mold of the Cynefin model. As any of you who have faced a hostile crowd or toxic work environment, it makes doing a good job, even an adequate job immeasurably more difficult. The context and timing of a thing matter much more than any of us like to admit- we want to believe that we have the agency, that we can just do it more prudently/effectively or find a better method. That goes for individuals, and nations as well.
I spent some time in Afghanistan. Not as much as most of my peers, but again, it’s a timing thing. It’s painful to examine the work of the preponderance of your 20s and 30s- productive decades of life, and to contemplate that most of what you did came to nothing. Not nothing perhaps, but no concrete result that could be called a shining success. No greatest generation saving the world from tyranny. But when I do examine it, I see a military that never lost tactically. It answered the bell- it took the fight to the enemy every time. This in turn invites the comparisons to Vietnam, and the (in)famous exchange between Colonels on either side of the war:
US COL Summers: "You know you never defeated us on the battlefield.”
North Vietnamese COL Lu: "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."
-- Exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers and Colonel Tu, April 25, 1975
What this alludes to is all of the other “stuff” that goes into a conflict, besides actual force involved on the ground, and the limits of that force to effect desired change. There are parallels with policing and community development in that root causes of disorder, crime, and chaos must be addressed in order to “stabilize” a given location. If the underlying conditions aren’t changeable, force alone will not achieve the desired end. Not with the very targeted, discriminate use of force the West has come to employ since World War II.
Maybe the right metaphor is a garden. You can plant things in the middle of a Death Valley-like desert- you can put in topsoil and fancy irrigation. But you’re still hostage to the conditions there- the blaring sun, the dust storms, predators that consume the plants. So, you’d have to maintain that garden every day constantly, vigilantly in order to keep it safe, there in the desert. Not cheap.
Like most of those who serve, I’ve been to a large number of memorials and funerals over the last two decades. We lose people every year just training to deploy overseas- in live-fire events, vehicle accidents, parachuting, diving. Most of those men were acquaintances- guys I’d crossed paths with briefly, said a word of greeting to in the hall at the Team. Two in particular, I was pretty close to. Their names are Adam Lee Brown and Collin Trent Thomas.
Adam in Afghanistan, and on the Arkansas River.
Collin in Afghanistan, and stitching me up in a Bolivian jungle
I’m not going to say too much here, except that they were both exceptional human beings. One of the best parts about serving in Naval Special Warfare is the caliber of men you get to work with on a daily basis. Adam was born in 1974, Collin in 1977. Adam was a father of two, and I’m sure Collin would have had kids shortly. Adam was in the BUD/S class before mine, and we went SEAL Tactical Training (STT) together, before two platoons and three deployments worth of training and operations. Collin and I lived together before I met my wife, in addition to training and deploying together for years. We got “fake arrested” by the cops in the Shenandoahs when our local civilian extraction was stopped by a Sheriff in cahoots with our training cadre.
There’s a passage from the first page of Mark Bowden’s classic “Blackhawk Down” where he talks about the closeness experienced after years of training together. I think he captures it very well:
“He knew their faces so well they were like brothers. The older guys on this crew, like Eversmann, a staff sergeant with five years in at age twenty-six, had lived and trained together for years. Some had come up together through basic training, jump school, and Ranger school. They had traveled the world, to Korea, Thailand, Central America…. They knew each other better than most brothers did. They’d been drunk together, gotten into fights, slept on forest floors, jumped out of airplanes, climbed mountains, shot down foaming rivers with their hearts in their throats, baked and frozen and starved together, passed countless bored hours, teased one another endlessly about girlfriends or lack of same, driven out in the middle of the night from Fort Benning to retrieve each other from some diner or strip club out on Victory Drive after getting drunk and falling asleep or pissing off some barkeep. Through all those things, they had been training for a moment like this
I think about them often, more and more often as I get older and I’m not in a combat maneuver element anymore. I think about them when I get to play with my kids, have family dinner, celebrate holidays and birthdays. I hope that I’m living my life in a way that honors their sacrifice. I get to be here and they don’t, and it doesn’t seem very fair.
Aftermath- What Now?
I think you can be both critical of the way we are leaving, now in this moment, and also what the previous administration set up as the pathway to our departure. Opening the aperture, four presidents in two parties, congress, and the entire national security establishment have
responsibility for the outcome. Leaving was going to be ugly no matter how you sliced it- if we pulled all Afghan nationals/interpreters out prior to our troops, it would have signaled a blatant lack of confidence in the Afghan government- lack of confidence which would have been well-founded. I do think that President Biden (and Trump before him) acted decisively to end a conflict which has shown little signs of improving over the last decade. It’s what the American people have wanted for a long time if you examine public polling on the issues. Majorities of citizens of both parties favored this course of action, although you would not come to that conclusion by watching/listening to most of the national media.
The chaos of the initial days of the Taliban taking Kabul seem to be stabilizing, and we are evacuating Afghan refugees. Efforts are underway now, both officially and unofficially to recover those who aided us. And this should be the most important focus now. It is an opportunity to show the world that America is who we say we are- that our actions match our rhetoric.
None of this happens in a vacuum, devoid of history, culture, backstory. The genesis of the Taliban as a movement was in the ashes of the failed Sepoy Rebellion against the British in the 1800s- the survivors settled in Deoband to teach and spread their strain of Islam. History keeps moving right along- allies become enemies, and vice versa. This is one of my favorite Zen stories- packaged in the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” about the Russian experience in Afghanistan. “Just wait….”
Finally, I’ll leave you with a poem by Kipling. Written about the British experience in the 1800s in Afghanistan, but it could just as easily have been composed about the current intervention. There are links at the end to explain some of the references, but the essentials of the situation have not changed in two hundred years.
Arithmetic on the Frontier- Kipling
A GREAT and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so, T
he Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe - T
he flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear:
"All flesh is grass."
Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villainous saltpetre".
And after? -
Ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.
A scrimmage in a Border Station-
A canter down some dark defile T
wo thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
No proposition Euclid wrote
No formulae the textbooks know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow.
Strike hard who cares - shoot straight who can
The odds are on the cheaper man.
One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.
With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem.
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.