America Deserves Answers. The Afghanistan War Commission Has a Chance to Give Them.
But telling the truth will require naming names.
WHEN I WENT TO AFGHANISTAN for the first time in 2008, I never thought that sixteen years later I would be sitting in the back row of a meeting of a commission designed to study the war that forever scarred me. Yet that’s where I found myself in July, eighteen days after my official retirement from the Air Force.
Congress created the Afghanistan War Commission to “conduct a comprehensive review of key decisions related to U.S. military, intelligence, foreign assistance, and diplomatic involvement in Afghanistan from June 2001 to August 2021.” When I entered the conference room at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national headquarters for the commission’s first public meeting, I was ushered into the back row with the press. I had never sat with the press before, so I didn’t know if there was a secret handshake or something. When I introduced myself to a “fellow” reporter and gave her my background, she looked a bit puzzled and said, “Wow, so you’re like watching your life’s work get dissected in front of your eyes?”
“I sure hope so,” I replied, with the even balance of cynicism and positivity every veteran eventually masters. “We deserve the truth.”
Combat veterans and their families deserve real accountability. Over twenty years, the United States government spent more than $2.3 trillion in Afghanistan, but the net result was that the Taliban and al Qaeda survived, and the relations between terrorist groups with Pakistan and Iran has only strengthened. In total, the Taliban killed and wounded more than twenty thousand American soldiers and killed over a thousand allied troops (French, Brits, Poles, Mongolians, etc.). But the price paid by the United States and other members of NATO and the International Security Assistance Force pales in comparison to that paid by the Afghan people.
The numbers in Afghanistan are hard to stomach, which is why nobody wants to talk about it. The Taliban, al Qaeda, Pakistan, and Iran killed 70,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers. Despite progress made during the twenty-year war, food insecurity and poverty levels are higher now than they were before the U.S. invasion in 2001. Progress on women’s rights—bought with twenty years of blood, sweat, and tears—was abandoned. The stories of Afghan girls are heart-wrenching.
All of that waste and heartache and shame swirled through my mind as I took my seat. The commission’s co-chair, Shamila Chaudhary, began the autopsy of a lost war with a round of applause.
For the next two hours, I listened to some of America’s best and brightest talk about a subject on which I have intimate expertise: America’s war in Afghanistan. Every now and again, one of the commissioners or witnesses would say something that triggered a flood of emotions and memories for me.
“In Afghanistan, the short tours of senior officers and generals were devastating. I have referred to it elsewhere as the institutional equivalent of a frontal lobotomy.”
—Amb. Ronald NeumannWE SANG A DIFFERENT SONG EVERY TIME I went to Afghanistan. In 2008, we were pushing good governance and development by flooding an impoverished nation with hundreds of millions of dollars in reconstruction projects. This, of course, fueled immense graft. The United States government didn’t have the dexterity to track corruption, and by the time they figured out how pervasive it was, nobody had the willpower to fix it.
Then, in 2012, the slogan was Afghans in the lead! Most coalition units didn’t have the institutional knowledge to operate in Afghanistan, especially at the tactical level where insurgencies thrive. Counterinsurgency is damn hard. It takes patience, guile, audacity, and understanding of the human terrain. That’s not what the Department of Defense excels at.
Two years later, I returned, and yesterday’s allies had been discarded. We didn’t like Hamid Karzai anymore because he didn’t support our night raids. So we went all in with Ashraf Ghani, who wrote the book on third-world development. He had all the proper connections with prestigious Western academics.
By the time I returned again in 2020, everyone had turned on Ghani. The Trump administration had decided to negotiate with the Taliban—without any representatives of the Afghan government—so while they were betraying Ghani, they also pressured him to make ever more painful and dangerous concessions to terrorists, without asking the terrorists to concede anything to the Afghan government.
There’s nothing wrong with fresh ideas—but the United States tried to win the Afghan war with only fresh ideas. We never succeeded in building any deep expertise. How can you help rebuild a country and empower its people when you don’t bother to learn deeply? In 2009, the DoD tried reluctantly to build an “Afghanistan-Pakistan Hands” program. But the “individuals who knew the culture, language, history, politics, and other aspects of the Afghanistan and Pakistan region” were most often used as free labor for overextended commanders and their staffs. Instead of using American officers with Pashto and Dari skills to help work with our partners on the ground, they were stuffed into operations centers, told to make PowerPoint slides, and warned about complaining.
As Afghan expert Antonio Giustozzi astutely observed a decade and a half ago about America’s war in Afghanistan, “Every age has its follies; perhaps the folly of our age could be defined as an unmatched ambition to change the world, without even bothering to study it in detail and understand it first.”
“The Taliban’s campaign of fear, violence, and disregard for the lives of Afghans is well documented. This, combined with the proxy wars conducted by regional actors like Pakistan and others, must be an inseparable part of the assessment of the context in which Afghans and our allies were operating at the time. The failure to prevent or mitigate their double standards and deception was likely one of the most significant diplomatic failures of the last two decades, warranting further study.”
—Afghan diplomat Nader NaderyTHE PAKISTANIS WERE ALWAYS trying to kill us. This wasn’t a secret. In 2008, Adm. Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the Taliban-allied Haqqani Network a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence.
Throughout my nearly three combined years in Afghanistan, Pakistani duplicity was a constant topic of conversation. From toothless Pashtun elders living in the deserts of northwest Kandahar to the halls of the presidential palace, nearly every Afghan had one question: “Why aren’t you attacking the Pakistanis for killing your soldiers?”
There’s a convoluted answer to that question. The United States wanted other things from Pakistan, in addition to not killing Americans: We wanted access to Pakistan’s nuclear program so we could help ensure no warheads went missing and wound up in the hands of a crazed jihadi, and we wanted to keep Pakistan from slipping too far into the Chinese sphere of influence. We achieved one of our goals at the price of the others: The United States government allowed Pakistan to kill its sons and daughters with little response. The Pakistani ISI murdered my friends. We knew they were doing this and did little to stop it.
If that weren’t bad enough, American, European, and Afghan troops were repeatedly ordered into hostile rural areas, even though America’s foreign policy was implicitly abetting their slaughter. To borrow a line from the law professor and ethicist Michael Josephson, “What you allow, you encourage.” How did we expect to extend the reach of the Afghan government when we were simultaneously providing money to a government funding an insurgent group fighting the Afghan government?
How did we ask America’s parents to send their children into a meat grinder when we were providing material support to our enemies?
“Let me now turn to our nearly twenty-year war with the Taliban and start with the obvious: While we won our wars with al Qaeda and its offshoots, we lost our war with the Taliban.”
—Michael VickersIT TOOK NEARLY HALF A DAY before someone speaking to the commission finally came out and said that the United States lost the war in Afghanistan—and even then, he understated our failure. Al Qaeda isn’t just metastasizing because it’s allied with the Taliban and thus is part of the Afghan terror state. It’s because it never went away. We didn’t defeat it; we didn’t destroy it.
The United States could never quite get its collective head around the fact that the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the Haqqani Network were all part of the same team. Sure, they had different leaders, but they all pledged bay’ah (allegiance) to Mullah Omar and his successors. The internal, factional politics inside the Taliban and other groups never trumps their desire to kill Americans and create an Islamic caliphate.
Mike Vickers is rightly considered one of America’s chief defense intellectuals—and he has good company in being wrong about al Qaeda. Many “experts” believed that the Taliban would be an effective counterterrorism partner against the Islamic State in Khorasan Province. That preposterous idea stands in the face of overwhelming evidence that the Islamic State is filled with disaffected Taliban, al Qaeda, Haqqani, and other fighters. While they may have disputes, they’ll gladly put those aside to kill Americans, as they have repeatedly done on battlefields in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
Al Qaeda hasn’t been defeated. It’s on the march. They’re expanding their base of operations throughout Afghanistan. They not only have critical allies inside the Afghan government; they are the Afghan government. Just because al Qaeda has not conducted a significant 9/11-style attack in recent years doesn’t mean they’ve been defeated.
We’re still grasping at straws of victory. We need to admit defeat before we can learn, heal, and move on.
“While accountability is centrally important, our focus is less on assigning credit or blame for the war—one that spanned four presidential administrations and eleven Congresses—than on extracting and applying its lessons.”
—Colin JacksonI chuckled at that sentence, and thought back to something Maj. Jeff Hembree, at the time my supervisor, told me in 2008: “Capt. Selber, the most important thing you’ll learn in combat is that you must take accountability for your actions. You’re to blame when things go wrong—not your NCOs, SNCOs, or troops. You.”
It’s been three years since the fall of Kabul, and not a single military officer or government official has been held accountable. The commission should change that.
But will it? The commission is still early in its work, so it remains to be seen what results it will produce. Will the commission prove effective in seeking the truth and reaching conclusions with candor? Or will it instead—perhaps because among its members are several prominent foreign policy “wise men,” some of whom helped shape the war they are now dissecting—fail to be forthright, fail to describe what happened with clarity, fail to name names? “These are the very people who lost the war,” a friend told me. “You think they’re going to accept any responsibility for what happened?”
Don’t get me wrong: Having well-qualified men and women on the panel is important, but the roster of commissioners should have fewer people with professional and personal ties that could make it awkward for them to say what needs to be said, and it should have more people likely to exercise independent judgment. Maybe a former member of Congress with recent experience overseeing an enormous investigation. Maybe more veterans of the war—people who saw it up close and personal, not just in reports. Maybe someone there to represent Gold Star families, too.
It will be tempting for the commission, in trying to extract lessons learned from a war that no one says we lost, to pull its punches. It’s politically uncomfortable to say that the United States and NATO abandoned our Afghan allies, even though that’s precisely what happened. It’s politically uncomfortable to name names.
But naming names isn’t about exacting revenge or vengeance. It’s an unmistakable sign that you’re willing to tell the truth, even when it hurts. Because one person’s career is not more important than learning the truth, and learning from the truth.
General officers (and their civilian equivalents in the senior executive service) should be held accountable for their decisions, even if it ruins their reputations. A four-star general will survive if his reputation is bruised; generals have generous pensions and often sit on the boards of defense contractors and consultancies. They’ll be fine.
The Afghanistan War Commission is just one step in a much-needed examination of why a generation of veterans toiled in a forgotten land only to have their country betray them and their allies. Unless the commission is willing to speak truthfully about what happened, how it happened, why it happened, and who was responsible, it’s just wasting time.
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