Withdrawal

Relooking the collapse of Afghanistan

This newsletter was, essentially, launched in August 2021 when I published my essay on the collapse of Afghanistan. The essay went fairly viral, even reaching my future instructors at the Command and General Staff Officer Course before I arrived. Although much of what I wrote was controversial, it has been almost entirely validated by those investigating the collapse of Afghanistan.

In February of this year (2023) the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) released their report about why Afghanistan collapsed as quickly as it did. The report does an excellent job going into detail about the flaws in the US approach to Afghanistan, although I am not optimistic that many in the military or in the government will learn much, at least not for a few decades.

The rest of this newsletter is nothing less than me spiking the football. I will present something I wrote in that essay, and then tie it directly to something from one of two SIGAR reports. If you’re not one for “I-told-you-so” expository writing, you can stop here.

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1. “Here is a key question to ask. Whose fault is it that we lost in Afghanistan? Forget the bullshit partisan answers like, “it was Bush for putting us there! It was Obama for showing signs of weakness! It was Trump’s fault because oRaNgE mAn BaD! It’s Biden’s fault for pulling us out!” This is a critically important question because the answer is that it is no one person’s fault. And that, in and of itself, is a problem.

From SIGAR:

No Single Country or Agency Had Complete Ownership of the ANDSF Development Mission, Leading to a Piecemeal and Uncoordinated Approach. A lack of coordination between the U.S. and NATO, among U.S. government agencies, and among service branches in DOD impeded security assistance efforts by creating convoluted command structures and confusion among the multitude of actors involved. In Afghanistan, no single person, agency, military service, or country had ultimate responsibility for all U.S. and international activities to develop the ANDSF or the ministries of defense and interior. On paper, the U.S.- NATO commander oversaw this task—but he had no authority over civilians operating within embassies, the European Union, or other international organizations that were involved in training and advising the ANDSF. The commander also lacked absolute command over all NATO military forces training, advising, and assisting the ANDSF.

Yes, Dear Read, no one was in charge. And because no one was in charge, no one person or entity can be blamed. And because no one bore ultimate responsibility for the outcome, no one really tried at the strategic level. At the tactical level, we tried, and tried, and tried, but to no avail. The unit that preceded my unit in 2012 had fought and lost a lot of good men to win back territory from the Taliban. My unit and fought and lost a lot of good men trying to keep it.

The ones from 1-36IN I remember are:

1LT Brandon Landrum

SSG Francis Phillips

SPC Thomas Murach

SPC Kevin Cardoza

SPC Brandon Prescott

SPC Kyle Stoekli (A soldier from the platoon I had led).¹

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2. With most deployments lasting between nine and twelve months (some deployments were as long as eighteen months), no commander had an incentive to think more than a year ahead.

From SIGAR:

Due to the short deployment lengths of military and civilian units, Afghans regularly had to adjust to a new unit’s expectations and training program. From 2003 to 2009, eight different Army National Guard units assumed responsibility for the training of the ANA. With few standard operating procedures or consistent staffing policies in place, incoming units were unable to build upon previously established relationships or take advantage of lessons learned. One U.S. military officer who served in Afghanistan recalled that new units arriving in theater often made “quick adjustments in operations” and new leaders implemented changes “before they fully [understood] all the implications of their actions.”

This focuses on the difficulty from the Afghan perspective, but you can see here that new commanders made quick decisions that had huge implications that, in many cases, they would not be around to see. The short deployment cycles were absolutely horrendous on the effort to win the war. But what were we supposed to do? Keep Soldiers there for 20+ years? The point here is that when you send the Big Army to do something, it has to do it fast, win, and come home. We never should have played this losing game for so long, and if we had to, we clearly should have taken a completely different approach. Much of the SIGAR report emphasizes that we built Afghan dependence on the US military for so long, that they were completely incapable of surviving without us. This was why the collapse was so rapid after we left.

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For these next sections, you have to understand the metaphor of the Fishing Czar from the original essay. So if you’ve not read it, please do.

3. Halfway through his one-year term, the czar’s staff comes to him and says, “look, the fish population is dropping too fast, we need to place restrictions on fishing immediately!” But the czar can’t be wrong because he is the czar, so the staff must be wrong. He tells the staff, “No, no, you miscounted. You aren’t counting close enough to the shore, you’re missing at least half the fish. If you don’t know how to count in such a way that demonstrates that the fish population is as strong as I know it is, then I guess I’ll have to find a staff that can. And that means that none of you will ever be the fish czar.” The staff very quickly learns to count the correct way, which is the czar’s way. At the end of his term, the czar, with the help of his cowed staff, demonstrates to the town council that the fish population is as healthy as ever.

From SIGAR:

By October 2010, the lowest level of performance was changed from “ineffective” to “established,” removing any metric that would reflect a negative performance. M&E (measurement and evaluation) systems in Afghanistan became a tool that the military used to create the illusion of progress over time…These systems were vulnerable to confirmation bias, since they required personnel to assess their own performance or write subjective narratives….the U.S. military worked to create the appearance of success by performing the tasks it was supposed to be training the Afghan military to do: supply, logistics, evacuation, intelligence, maintenance, and procurement activities.

Wow, this is pretty damning. It also justifies my entire thesis about the military’s role in creating this disaster. Rather than go to Congress and say, “Hi, we’re f*#ked and we don’t know what to do,” Generals went to Congress and said, “I got this.” They were probably being honest. They probably thought they could actually do it. But after a decade of doing the same thing over and over, maybe one of them should have publicly said, “Hey, I don’t think we should keep doing this.” After 15 years, maybe? Reality came crashing down 20 years after we invaded.

The SIGAR report routinely pointed to lack of oversight of everything having to do with aiding the Afghans as one of the crucial mistakes of the US military’s involvement. I once attended a panel discussion on Afghanistan with senior US civilians and high-ranking officers who had been there at various times during the war. Their position, in spite of everything that SIGAR had been saying for years, was that they had done well and they thought everything was going fine. Fortunately, I was watching the panel discussion remotely in a classroom, not in the main auditorium (COVID), because I don’t think I would have been able to contain my rage. I was shouting at the TV in the classroom, “You thought everything was going fine because there was no oversight, idiot!” There are none so blind as those who will not to see.

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4. In the case of Afghanistan, we have had ten fishing czars commanders since 2007. Only two of them, Nicholson and Miller, served for longer than two years. Just like the fishing czars, each commander in Afghanistan wanted to make the situation look bad but manageable if more money and resources were allocated. Once they got the resources allocated, they would talk about how good everything was going. Just like the czars, they each were fulfilling a tour of duty as the commander, not as someone who was there until they achieved victory. They knew they were simply playing with a clock that would run out before the war could be won.

From SIGAR’s “WHAT WE NEED TO LEARN: LESSONS FROM TWENTY YEARS OF AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION:”

…with a particular focus on the ends and means, U.S. officials paid little attention to the ways—whether the U.S. government was even equipped to undertake something this ambitious in such an uncompromising environment, no matter how well funded. The money spent was far more than Afghanistan could absorb. It also grew to levels far beyond what U.S. agencies themselves could effectively absorb, disburse, and oversee. As a result, U.S. officials could no longer claim the war was failing for lack of investment; instead, they were forced to reckon with the mission’s severe structural flaws. In other words, the ways were so problematic that ramping up the means proved almost inconsequential—or even counterproductive—to the overall strategy. Senior U.S. officials overseeing the war especially struggled to recognize this, and usually claimed they were right on the cusp of progress. In 2011, British analyst Rory Stewart documented how “Each new general in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2011 suggested that the situation he had inherited was dismal; implied that this was because his predecessor had had the wrong resources or strategy; and asserted that he now had the resources, strategy, and leadership to deliver a decisive year.” SIGAR likewise reviewed the public statements of senior State and DOD officials in Washington and Kabul from 2011 to 2021 and found many similar claims.

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5. When I was a platoon leader in 2013, I had the feeling that there wasn’t really a master plan for Afghanistan…But there must have been a plan, right? We had thousands of people working at the Pentagon, and a NATO headquarters with thousands of people. We had planners and strategists in headquarters all over the United States. Someone must have thought to make a long-term master plan. But no one did…While I was serving at Resolute Support Headquarters, a Colonel sat me down and…very smugly told me, “you see, Captain Caroe, because we rotate units and commanders so often, we’ve only ever had plans that lasted a year or two. But now we’ve figured out that what we really need is a five-to-ten-year plan for Afghanistan….”I thought to myself, “Are you effing kidding me, dude!? This whole time there was no plan!? No one thought it might be a good idea to make a plan!? Is this a joke?” But it wasn’t a joke. We spent a decade and a half fighting a war with no master plan.

From SIGAR’s “WHAT WE NEED TO LEARN: LESSONS FROM TWENTY YEARS OF AFGHANISTAN RECONSTRUCTION”

The U.S. government continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve…The bureaucratic disarray over who should and would ultimately own the strategy made it more likely that senior U.S. officials would struggle to address basic challenges in that strategy. The most fundamental of questions were continuously revisited, including who America’s enemies and allies were, and exactly what the U.S. government should try to accomplish…

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Despite how badly we handled the war, I still don’t think we should have pulled out. It sent a horrible message to our allies and severely damaged the prestige of the United States. We only needed about 10,000 soldiers there to keep things under control. We would have needed to stay another 20 years or so, and we could have gradually decreased our commitment.

One extremely unconventional thing we could have done was allow US officers and senior NCOs to, essentially, join the Afghan Army. I know this sounds crazy, but it is not without precedent. If we could have gotten 500-1000 volunteers to commission in the Afghan Army, we could have fixed a lot of problems from within. They would have to have been the right people for the job, they would have learned Dari, and they would have to have volunteered to stay in Afghanistan for 5-10 years at a time. If you could have installed 30-50 US officers per Afghan brigade, they could have implemented systems and processes for logistics and personnel management, held subordinate Afghans accountable, and led from the front in several tactical units. Oversight would have been necessary and severe penalties implemented for becoming too acculturated to Afghan culture (read: for becoming corrupt).

Little things like that would, in my judgement, have had a huge impact. And if we have to go and do another one of these two-decade excursions again, this is one of the first things we should implement.

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In summary, the main points of my argument have been validated by SIGAR reports. You didn’t have to be a genius to know what was going wrong in Afghanistan, you just had to know what you were looking at.

1. I wasn’t the Platoon Leader when he was killed. I had moved to a platoon in another battalion. That’s a story for another time.