I served in both Iraq (2007-8) and Afghanistan (2017-18). My position in the latter was as a strategic-level position, so I had a view of every aspect of the country, from the fight against narcotics to training of the Afghan National Army (ANA) to Taliban and ISIS-Khorasan tactics, techniques and procedures, to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, basically everything.
Let me provide some context and thoughts about what I'm seeing today. First of all, as someone who gave a lot of my time, blood, sweat and tears to that country and its people, and served alongside a lot of other people like me, it sickens my stomach to see what we have done. I have never been more angry with my government in my life.
What it means:
The collapse of the Afghan government is a direct result of US policy. We betrayed them, and pulled the rug out from under them. We told them for years we had their back and we pulled out so fast they couldn't even shift their troops to cover their flanks.
The current president's action is the most incompetent military disaster in U.S. history since James Buchanan abandoned military supplies to the confederacy, thus ensuring the Civil War would break out several months later.
Trump vs. Biden
Trump, of course, made the decision, so he absolutely shares some of the blame. But there's a huge caveat to that. Trump set forth a conditions-based withdrawal with a timeline that could shift based on those conditions. After negotiations with the Taliban, who promised to stop attacking the Afghan government, we started to implement that. The Taliban began violating that agreement. When Biden took over, he did not embrace the Trump policy of conditions-testing, but kept to the timeline even advanced it blindly.
Biden spent the first days in office overturning every single policy of Trump EXCEPT THIS ONE. He had eight months to review the plans, change them, put in carrots and sticks, call the ****ing Pakistanis who fund the Taliban and hold their ****ing feet to the fire, all that ****, and he did nothing except speed up the timeline, and deceive the Afghans about the timetable so they got caught flat footed. He can't say that he inherited this and had no choice but to act like a robot and implement it when he literally undid every single other policy of Trump. Now, if he cares more about promoting transgender access to high school girl's showers than the lives of millions of people and saving the world from terrorism, THAT IS ON HIM.
Why the ANA collapsed.
A lot of pundits are saying that the Afghan military should have put up a fight. We pulled out from covering their backs so fast, they haven't even been able to train to fight without our intelligence or airpower. They literally picked up a phone one day and could get a bomb on the enemy and picked it up the next day and it rang and was never answered.
THAT is what a unilateral, non conditions-based withdrawal, advanced timeline looks like on the ground.
The Afghan fight is a tough one, and training an Afghan army that can successfully defend its country is not as easy as you think. First of all, you're dealing with a population that is 70 percent illiterate. How many Afghans can truly understand the GPS coordinates they call in for an airstrike if they don't even understand how the solar system works. Or that there IS a solar system. That's a bit of a trite answer but therein lies the truth.
My buddy who tried to teach them to shoot said they would miss and then say, "If Allah had wanted me to hit, I would have hit."
You couldn't REALLY train them until you could at least bring them into the 19th Century at least, if not the 20th or 21st. But you could train them enough to pick up a phone and say, "Commander, tell the American bird in the sky to drop a bomb on this or that hill."
And of course, the only reason they knew it was that hill or that road, or that village, is because we gave them the intelligence they needed. This is an intelligence architecture that is 100 years in the making, with traditions that go back to the Battle of Midway. You certainly couldn't just teach that to an illiterate peasant and let him take over that role.
But, you might say, the Taliban fights fine without technology and intel, etc. First of all, bull***** There is this little country with a green flag and a crescent on it that hates India that is providing them all the intelligence and logisitical support they need. Get over this myth that the Taliban is just a bunch of rednecks on motorcycles. At the end of the day, they're backed by a nuclear-weapon-owning country.
Secondly, there is a huge difference between offense and defense. If you defend a checkpoint, you have to be at the checkpoint. If you're attacking, you can pick any one of 10 checkpoints to hit. Also, if you're the Taliban, you can get the countryside to "support" you by all sorts of murder, intimidation, brutality, torture, etc. that the government cannot do. Keep in mind that the 1997-2003 Taliban burned the opium crops and cut the hands off opium farmers. They were defeated. The 2012-2021 Taliban allows, encourages, participates in and profits from opium production. That is also a HUGE reason why they are more able to move around the countryside. Having that mobility gives them great advantages over the ANA.
You sit in your comfy chair and say, well, if the Afghan Army were real men, they'd stand and fight. Bull***** When you have the power of American intel and American airstrikes, and you can wipe out any Taliban attack, you stand and fight. When that is pulled out from under you, not just over time, but in a heartbeat, you don't stand and fight.
When the Taliban calls on the radio, reads off your roster from a captured document and talks about how they're going to kill your son and rape your daughter in X village, you don't stand and fight. When they cut the road and the ANA doesn't have food or medivac, they can't stand and fight. Wars are won by logistics, not bullets.
The army can't stand in little Alamos all over the country. Without airstrikes, ambulances, or even resupply of food, that all breaks down. Ghani's government was weak and even if he wanted to stand, they simply didn't have the capacity to respond quickly enough to this.
It's really complex, and of course there's so much **** I know and can't tell you, but suffice it to say, with us having their backs, the ANA would do it. Without us, they couldn't.
Policy has consequences.
There are people who are my friends, who have been condemned, possibly to death, by Joe Biden and his reckless pullout of Afghanistan. Just to give you one example: Mohammed, a rug merchant who sold his wares on our base. I became good friends with him after I bought a rug or two. I only paid $20 for the first one, but that was enough to send his daughter to school for a year. I bought a few more. He used to light up when I walked in. "You are my special friend." Yeah, all the guys say that, but Mohammed was sincere. We talked about our families and after I told him I had a young son, he said, "a son is the greatest gift a man can ever have." He gave me an elaborate, hand-sewn Afghan tribal hat with geometric patterns, etc. for my son. I tried to pay him and he refused. I said, well, can I get your son a cowboy hat when I'm back in Texas? He said no, he couldn't wear it, the Taliban would kill him. So I gave him a package of pecans from our family farm instead. He could eat those in secret.
The media frames this as just a few translators or specialists. No, the Taliban historically could kill ANYBODY who worked with the United States in any capacity, whether they swept the floors of my barracks, cooked the meals I ate, worked on a US base as a barber or a rug merchant, it doesn't matter.
The Taliban have been taking their names down for years, and no doubt these people are all on lists already. Ignore the Taliban spokesmen who say that they will not conduct reprisals. His statements are as false as the Iraqi information minister. A wave of slaughter will engulf the nation. These good people, their families, and thousands of others across that nation, will be endangered.
"But we couldn't stay there forever"
For all of the isolationists, who were repeating the endless trope that Afghanistan was horribly bloody and expensive for America, and we couldn't sustain it forever...
We were successfully holding back the best-funded insurgency in the history of the world with 10,000 American and 10,000 NATO troops who weren't even doing actual fighting, they were just backing up the Afghans. 20,000 troops. That is it. That is 1/5 the seating capacity of Kyle Field.
In 2020, the US military lost a grand total of just 9 soldiers for the entire year, since our role was overwhelmingly support of the Afghan National Army. We lose more soldiers than that a month due to drunk driving. In terms of cost, it was less ($45 billion) than the budget of the US federal Department of Education, which doesn't have a single school or directly educate a single child.
$45 billion and 20,000 troops was a damn small price to pay to keep our boot on the neck of the snake. Keep in mind, that's FEWER than the 28,000 troops we keep in South Korea SEVENTY YEARS after that war ended.
Broader implications.
If anyone who thinks this is just about Afghanistan, think again. NO NATION IN THE WORLD would consider allying with the United States now after we betrayed the Afghan people. So you can put the Philippines in the Chinese orbit already, ditto Indonesia. Putin can probably absorb more former Soviet states into his.
Terrorism
THERE WILL BE ANOTHER 9/11.
Resign yourself to it. Afghanistan was home to 29 of the 32 Violent Extremist Organizations worldwide. There are thousands of Muslim refugees all throughout Europe, all of whom have families back in the old country who are subject to manipulation. Don't buy this "oh well, they're isolated" bull****, because as long as the Pakistani string pullers care, they will not be.
So just accept the fact that Americans will die as a result. And when it comes down to it, it will be a hell of a lot more than 9 per year.
