The Train Has Wrecked. A Veteran's Thoughts on Afghanistan
A train wreck it is. Like many veterans and Americans, I watch the unraveling of Afghanistan with horror, disappointment, anger, and several other emotions from a man and his family who poured their heart and soul into a country, a mission, and the soldiers and families with whom we served. I’ve turned to the pen to help me process this and to do what I believe to be my civic duty; share insight from our failures so that we may never repeat them. There is more for me to do, I’m certain, but I’ll start here.
These are my opinions, informed by a military career spanning 27 years including two tours as a commander in Afghanistan, one in Iraq and my post-graduate strategic studies. I aim not to offend, especially my veteran brothers and sisters, but only the best leaders, organizations and nations admit their failures and work to never repeat them. I do not claim to have this all right. It was and still is a wicked and complex problem. And I will not submit a paper full of problems without offering alternative solutions. I offer this writing for mature debate so that we as a nation and military can learn and grow from this. We owe at least that to those who paid the ultimate sacrifice.
While I use ‘we’ and ‘they’ in this writing, I take ownership in this failure. I gave orders, developed campaigns, and even informed and shaped strategy. My men and women simply did what I directed them to do. They committed fully to our mission and fought for each other. They were magnificent. I remain proud of my service and the service of the soldiers and civilians I trained and deployed with. Nothing will change that. We deployed into harm’s way, to the sound of the guns to create a better peace, the ultimate objective of waging war. Our steadfast commitment to the mission, the Afghan people, and its military and to each other can never be repudiated. I love and remain proud of my country, the military and what we stand for. I’m sorely disappointed but not without faith.
While shocked I’m not totally surprised. The nature of our withdrawal aligned with some arbitrary timeline and decades of missteps are delivering the results we should have expected. It hurts to write this, but we failed. We were defeated. I cannot find any place to use victory or won as I unpack America’s longest war. It is woefully inadequate to rest on statements like, “we won every battle,” or “we did our jobs.” We lost the war and at the end of the day, that matters. We failed both politically and militarily.
We sent the military, not the country, to war. I visited the United Nations while studying at the U.S. Army War College in 2013. There I met the Ambassador of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Nguyen Quoc Cuong. He was welcoming, well-spoken, and remarkably steeped in American history. When I asked about the tension between Vietnam and China and the potential for conflict, he said something that stuck. “When you go to war with Vietnam, you go to war with an entire nation.” Following 9/11 the military was sent to the battlefield (again and again) while the nation returned to life as normal, save for some inconvenience at the airport. I don’t believe a draft would have been feasible but there were other ways to involve the citizenry, to pull power away from the executive and place it back with the legislative branch. A declaration of war instead of a series of ‘acts’ and ‘authorizations’ by a president may have provided the rigor required for the use of military force. A war tax levied on the American people could have given them some skin in the game.
We were right to invade Afghanistan in 2001 to destroy the base of Al Qaeda and kill or capture its members but that is where it should have transitioned, not ended. A small military and government element should have remained to give us regional access and a counter-terrorism focus. Heeding the lessons of those who went before us, we should have known better than to think we could install a Jeffersonian democracy, a military, and a government (in short order) where one never existed. Fooled by our wealth and power, driven by our ‘can do’ attitude, but hampered by our cultural ignorance and our ‘drive-thru window’ mentality, we believed, with a small force in a short amount of time, we could turn the tide and create lasting impact. Nobody wants the troops home more than this troop, but it is the unfortunate reality of our time that we must have America’s sons and daughters forward, in small, manageable numbers in dangerous places under the auspices of a focused and enduring strategy. We cannot return to our own shores believing another 9/11 has been prevented. This threat cannot be addressed remotely, at 20,000 feet or over the horizon. We must be on the ground where threats emanate to deal with them there instead of New York City.
We failed to have a focused, realistic, and enduring strategy. If asked, “what was our end goal?” or “what were our strategic aims?”, I submit one would hear different answers from any government official or military leader. That underscores the problem. We were a ship without a rudder. Political administrations attempted to reinvent Afghanistan strategy blaming previous administrations. This prevented the continuity and focus this endeavor required. The enemy was watching. Each summer was the decisive summer, each year the decisive year. Akin to the cold war strategy of containment, which endured through numerous presidents, there should have been one for the war on terrorism. For Afghanistan continuity, there should have been a team of enduring stakeholders covering each area and institution with authority and direct access to senior leadership to ensure every person and organization would abide by a campaign designed to achieve strategic ends. This team, not annual rotational units with ‘new plans’ should have steered the effort.
We failed to leverage all the elements of American national power; Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic (DIME). The military bore the brunt of the effort, even diplomatic as an underfunded and understaffed State Department tried to deliver governance. Afghanistan was always a political problem requiring a political solution, the military being one piece of that, but politics arrived late to the game, ignorant of local customs and Afghan culture and lackluster in their performance. In a counterinsurgency (COIN), information is decisive. The first with the truth, no matter what it is, wins the day. We were dominated by the Taliban who immersed into the population spreading their rhetoric while we attempted to broadcast messages through our Afghan government and military counterparts and other technologies. One could argue that the economic element of national power was in full force as we built schools, roads, clinics and funded a military. The issue was the speed and application of that money. I had a massive road project in my area of operations called the Khowst-Gardez Road which traversed mountainous terrain connecting population centers. This road, created to counter the insurgency only fueled it. It further destabilized the area pitting tribes against tribes and fostering corruption. The total amount of construction projects in Afghanistan quickly exceeded our ability to apply quality assurance and control. Much of this construction money was siphoned to corrupt military and government officials and some of it to the very enemy we were fighting. If we seriously wanted to have impact, each of the DIME elements under a whole-of-government approach, should have received appropriate funding and people on par with the Department of Defense. Briefings on the war came from behind a narrow podium given by the Secretary of Defense or, at times, the Secretary of State. The podium should have been widened to accommodate the rest of the DIME team.
We fought the war we wanted, not the one we got. General John R. Gavin, known as one of the ‘brainiest generals’ ever to don the uniform stated, “…we tend to invent for ourselves a comfortable vision of war…one that fits our plans, our assumptions, our hopes, and our preconceived ideas. We arrange in our minds a war we can comprehend on our own terms, usually with an enemy who looks like us and acts like us.” We, the military, were a football team at a baseball game. We showed up with our helmets and pads ready to block and tackle and penetrate the enemy’s linear defenses under a tight timeline as the play clock ticked away. We were at a baseball game, this one requiring us to come out from behind our armor and drink chai with tribal elders to determine local grievances and how they (assisted by us) could address them. This game was anything but linear. The other team didn’t wear uniforms or a watch. The game could go extra innings (and did) if needed. To be fair, there were pockets of tactical success; units that understood and prepared for the game we would play but they were few and far between and, moreover, short-lived and spoiled by yearly rotations of units and lack of a strategy.
Home station training focused on fighting and surviving; on becoming experts with our lethal weaponry and survival against an evolving IED threat. This was all very relevant and important combat training, and it still is, but our almost exclusive focus on placing bullets in the center of the target (kill) and protecting the force (survive), took our eye off essential population-centric COIN preparation such as language, customs and cultural awareness, and stability operations (win). We did as the Taliban wished; “keep punching until the bell rings” (an actual approach directed by a commander of soldiers in Afghanistan). Again, in fairness, the military took great strides to replicate the Afghan population, its culture, and its military on its training ranges but the kill and survive magnet was too strong.
COIN history is replete with examples of failed campaigns by external forces. It requires the host nation to immerse in the population and turn the tide. In war you attack or strip away that which allows the enemy to operate, his center of gravity. In conventional war this could be his airpower, large weapons, or supply lines. In COIN it is quite simply the population. You (meaning the Afghans) protect the people, counter the insurgent’s narrative, and render them irrelevant. You turn the people toward some other governing and military or police body. You don’t kill your way out of a counterinsurgency. There is no white flag surrender or ticker-tape victory parade. Arbitrary timelines are the last thing you announce. Victory comes years, even decades down the road when one afternoon you realize you haven’t seen or heard from the insurgency in some time.
Some argue that the military should only be used to close with and destroy our enemies. That would be convenient, but the enemy gets a vote. The Taliban knew they could not face the U.S. conventionally. Future enemies will model their approach; bleed into the population, spill American blood and wait us out. I argue warfare is harder today than it has ever been. A servicemember must kill with cold detachment in one moment then sit, peacefully and drink chai with village elder in the next. We are talented enough to meet this broad challenge if we can overcome our “don’t do windows” mentality. Sometimes, especially in COIN the best option is to withdraw from a fire fight and avoid the enemy’s trap of luring you into a population center. My successes in Afghanistan were not the result of a dropped bomb or fired bullet. They were a result of my time in conversation with village leaders and from training the Afghan Army to be counterinsurgents. We did our share of killing and capturing and we were good at it, but it was incomplete. Lethal training will always remain a focus for the military. It will dominate training schedules and budgets, but more must be done on the stability phase of war, where we stabilize (or help others stabilize) a once unstable environment achieving a greater peace, again, the true objective of going to war. No longer is it sufficient to ‘take the hill.’ We must know why the enemy was on the hill in the first place and address that. The end solution will not come from a rifle, artillery round or airstrike. If we fight the next war like we did this one, we will get the same results, the ones we are witnessing today. Today’s military has turned its focus to near-peer conventional threats like Russia and China. This is proper but it must keep alive the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan and balance its spending, equipping, and training so it can deal with threats that are not peer level yet seem to defeat us every time.
It is no surprise to me why the Afghan military dissolved upon ours and their own government’s departure. It should not have been a surprise to our national leadership. National identity, a functioning government, and funding are the very foundation a military requires for survival. National identity never materialized, and the government vanished overnight with its checkbook leading to the Afghan military’s predictable demise. Furthermore, we built and trained the wrong military for this fight. Modeled in our own image, the Afghan National Security Forces were given state of the art equipment (much of it without a maintenance program) and housed on newly constructed military bases where they would remain while the Taliban won the war immersed in the population. In my last tour in 2015 I was astounded by the technology we were handing this newly formed military, by their lack of an enduring presence in the villages and by a police force which remained far behind their military counterparts in terms of size, training, and effectiveness. We never should have built the bases we did. We could have equipped the Afghan military with small arms, mortars, some artillery and supported them with air power but we should have made them counterinsurgents and steered them to the villages. The Taliban had none of the bases, equipment and funding the Afghan military did yet they came out on top. That begs some serious examination. The Afghan military fought bravely, and they died by the thousands. I saw this up close and I’m proud of what they did. They deserve great credit for this, and their demise is not their fault.
So now what? 20 years with no result? Did the fallen die in vain? Is there any hope that our efforts had some impact? Is there any hope for Afghanistan? The fallen have not died in vain. Each of them volunteered and gave their nation a blank check, payable with their lives. Their volunteer service in a time of war, knowing the hazards of their chosen profession will forever serve as in inspiration to future generations. They are our country’s true heroes. They served honorably and put their heart and soul into the mission. They fought for and loved their battle buddies. Most importantly, they gave Afghan citizens, especially women a chance to flourish and experience a freedom, education, and life they had not previously. They left behind better infrastructure than they found. 20 years of this experience and learning by the Afghans cannot be erased. It means something. Tough days are ahead under Taliban 2.0, but those who remain under their rule will remember a government (flawed as it was) and military far better than the one which has replaced them. 20 years of our efforts, imperfect as they may have been, did some good in that country and, as they self-actualize, as nations must do and find their own way, they do so with the memory of the greater peace they were given a taste of.
There is more to come I’m sure, but this chapter is now being entered into the history books. It is an ugly chapter, but we must return to it often and heed its lessons, not close it, or attempt to erase it from our memory as we did after Vietnam. Philosopher George Santayana stated wisely, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” No person despises war more than those who have experienced it. We all wish for the end of war but in a world where there exist groups and even nations who want to destroy us, it will remain a wish but not a reality. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in a speech to West Point cadets, stated, "When it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right…” Our goal for the next war ought to be to get it more right than wrong and be able to pivot and adapt when the enemy votes. My thoughts and prayers will be with the Afghan people, a population I came to know and admire, and the interpreters and other Afghans who risked their own lives fighting shoulder to shoulder with us. For their sake, for the sake of our fallen brothers and sisters and for the sake of our own country, we ought to learn from this train wreck.
Rob
Rob Campbell