What Recent War Making Decision History Tells Us About Power And The Price We Pay

"THE ATLANTIC"  From "The Iraq War and the Inevitability of Ignorance" By  James Fallows

“The U.S. is destined to keep over-learning the lessons of the last conflict; leaders considering war or peace, media stoking or questioning pro-war fever, and 99 percent of the public in considering the causes for which the military 1 percent will be asked to kill, and die.”

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"There’s a specific reason it is so hard to be president—in normal circumstances—and why most incumbents look decades older when they leave the job than when they began. The reason is that the only choices normal presidents get to make are the impossible ones—decisions that are not simply very close calls on the merits, but that are guaranteed to lead to tragedy and bitterness whichever way they go.

Take Barack Obama’s famed choice not to back up his “red line” promise in Syria, which was a focus of Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Obama Doctrine” Atlantic cover story two years ago. The option Obama chose—not intervening in Syria—meant death and suffering for countless thousands of people. The option he rejected—intervening—would have meant death and suffering for countless thousands of the same people or others. Agree or disagree on the outcome, any such decision is intellectually demanding and morally draining. Normal presidents have to make them, one after another, all day long. (Why don’t they get any easier choices? Because someone else has made all of those before they get to the president.) Obama’s decision to approve the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound turned out to be a tactical and political success. When he made it, he had to weigh the possibility that it could end in world-publicized failure—like Jimmy Carter’s decision to attempt a rescue of American hostages in Iran, which ended in chaos, and which Carter later contended was what sealed his fate in his re-election run.
A special category of impossible decision, which I was introduced to in the two years I worked for Jimmy Carter in the White House and have borne in mind ever since, turns on the inevitability of ignorance. To be clear, I don’t mean “stupidity.” People in the government and military are overall smarter than press portrayals might suggest. Instead I mean really registering the uncomfortable fact that you cannot know enough about the big choices you are going to make, before you have to make them.

Sometimes that is because of deadline rush: The clock is ticking, and you have to act now. (To give a famous example: In 1980 U.S. radar erroneously indicated that the Soviets had launched a nuclear-missile attack, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, had to decide at 3 a.m. whether to wake the president to consider retaliation. Before the world was rushed toward possible nuclear obliteration, the warning was revealed as a false alarm before Brzezinski could place the call.) Most of the time it is because the important variables are simply unknowable, and a president or other decision-maker has to go on judgment, experience, hunch.

This point sounds obvious, because we deal with its analogues in daily-life decisions big and small. No one who decides to get married can know what his or her spouse will be like 20 years in the future, or whether the partners will grow closer together or further apart. Taking a job—or offering one—is based at least as much on hope as on firm knowledge. You make an investment, you buy a house, you plan a vacation knowing that you can’t possibly foresee all the pitfalls or opportunities.

But this routine truism takes on life-or-death consequences in the choices that presidents must make, as commander in chief and as head of U.S. diplomatic and strategic efforts. The question of deciding about the unknowable looms large in my mind, as I think back 15 years to the run-up to the Iraq war, and think ahead to future such choices future presidents will weigh.

There’s a long list of books I wish presidents would have read before coming to office—before, because normal presidents barely have time to think once they get there. To give one example from my imagined list: the late David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace is for me a useful starting point for thinking about strains within the modern Middle East. The book argues, in essence, that the way the Ottoman Empire was carved up at the end of World War I essentially set the stage for conflicts in the region ever since. In that way it is a strategic counterpart to John Maynard Keynes’s famous The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written just after the conclusion of the Versailles agreements, which argues that the brutal economic terms dealt out to the defeated Germans practically guaranteed future trouble there.

Also high up on my “wish they’d read” list is Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, by two Harvard professors (and one-time mentors of mine), Ernest May and Richard Neustadt. In this book, May and Neustadt reverse the chestnut attributed to an earlier Harvard professor, George Santayana, that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Instead they caution against over-remembering, or imagining that a choice faced now can ever be exactly like one faced before.

The most famous and frightening example is Lyndon Johnson’s, involving Vietnam. Johnson “learned” so thoroughly the error of Neville Chamberlain, and others who tried to appease (rather than confront) the Nazis, that he thought the only risk in Vietnam was in delaying before confronting communists there. A complication in Johnson’s case, as this book and all other accounts of Vietnam make clear, is that he was worried both about the reality of waiting too long to draw a line against Communist expansion, and perhaps even more about appearing to be weak and Chamberlain-like.

Because of the disaster Johnson’s decisions caused—the disaster for Vietnam, for its neighbors, for tens of thousands of Americans, all as vividly depicted in last year’s Ken Burns / Lynn Novick documentary—most American politicians, regardless of party, “learned” to avoid entanglement in Asian-jungle guerrilla wars. Thus in the late 1970s, as the post-Vietnam war Khmer Rouge genocide slaughtered millions of people in Cambodia, the U.S. kept its distance. It had given up the international moral standing, and had nothing like the internal political stomach, to go right back into another war in the neighborhood where it had so recently met defeat.

From its Vietnam trauma, the United States also codified a crass political lesson that Richard Nixon had applied during the war. Just before Nixon took office, American troop levels in Vietnam were steadily on the way up, as were weekly death tolls, and monthly draft calls. The death-and-draft combination was the trigger for domestic protests. Callously but accurately, Nixon believed that he could drain the will to the protest if he ended the draft calls. Thus began the shift to the volunteer army—and what I called, in an Atlantic cover story three years ago, the “Chickenhawk Nation” phenomenon, in which the country is always at war but the vast majority of Americans are spared direct cost or exposure. (From the invasion of Iraq 15 years ago until now, the total number of Americans who served at any point in Iraq or Afghanistan comes to just 1 percent of the U.S. population.)

May and Neustadt had a modest, practical ambition for their advice to study history, but to study it cautiously. “Marginal improvement in performance is worth seeking,” they wrote. “Indeed, we doubt that there is any other kind. Decisions come one at a time, and we would be satisfied to see a slight upturn in the average. This might produce much more improvement [than big dramatic changes] measured by results.”

My expectation is more modest still: I fear but expect that the U.S. is fated to lurch from one over-“learning” to its opposite, and continue making a steadily shifting range of errors.

The decision to invade Iraq was itself clearly one of those. The elder George Bush fought a quick and victorious war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991. But he stopped short of continuing the war into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power—and so his son learned from that “failure” that he had to finish the job of eliminating Saddam. (As did a group of the younger George Bush’s most influential advisors: Dick Cheney, who had been secretary of defense during the original Gulf war, and returned as George W. Bush’s vice president. Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the first time around, and secretary of state the second. Paul Wolfowitz was undersecretary of defense during the first war, and deputy secretary of defense during the second. And so on.)

Two of the writers who were most eloquent in making their case for the war—Christopher Hitchens, who then wrote for the Atlantic among other places, and Michael Kelly, who was then our editor-in-chief—based much of their case on the evils Saddam Hussein had gotten away with after the original Gulf War. (Hitchens died of cancer in 2011; Kelly was killed in Iraq, as an embedded reporter in the war’s early stage.) Then Barack Obama, who had become president in large part because he opposed the Iraq war — which gave him his opening against the vastly better known and more experienced Hillary Clinton—  learned from Iraq about the dangers of intervention in Syria. And on through whatever cycles the future holds.

Is there escape from the cycles? In a fundamental sense, of course not, no. But I’ll offer the “lesson” I learned—50 years ago, in a classroom with Professor May; 40 years ago, when I watched Jimmy Carter weigh his choices; 15 years ago, in warning about the risks of invading Iraq. It involves a cast of mind, and a type of imagination.

As the Bush administration moved onto a war footing soon after the 9/11 attacks, no one could know the future risks and opportunities. But, at the suggestion of my friend and then-editor Cullen Murphy, I began reporting on what the range of possibilities might be. Starting in the spring of 2002, when the Bush team was supposedly still months away from a decision about the war, it was clear to us that the choice had been made. I interviewed dozens of historians, military planners, specialists in post-war occupations, and people from the region to try to foresee the likely pitfalls.

The result, which was in our November, 2002 issue (and which we put online three months earlier, in hopes of affecting the debate) was called “The Fifty-First State?” Its central argument was: The “war” part of the undertaking would be the easy part, and deceptively so. The hard part would begin when U.S. troops had reached Baghdad and the statues of Saddam Hussein were pulled down—and would last for months, and years, and decades, all of which should be taken into consideration in weighing the choice for war.

It conceivably might have gone better in Iraq, and very well could have, if not for a series of disastrously arrogant and incompetent mistakes by members of the Bush team. I won’t go into details here: I laid them out in several articles, including this, this, and this, and eventually a book. But the premise of most people I interviewed before the war, who mostly had either a military background or extensive experience in the Middle East, was that this would be very hard, and would hold a myriad of bad surprises, and was almost certain to go worse than its proponents were saying. Therefore, they said, the United States should do everything possible to avoid invading unless it had absolutely no choice. Wars should be only of necessity. This would be folly, they said, and a war of choice.

The way I thought of the difference between those confidently urging on the war, and those carefully cautioning against it, was: cast of mind. The majority of people I spoke with expressed a bias against military actions that could never be undone, and whose consequences could last for generations. I also thought of it as a capacity for tragic imagination, of envisioning what could go wrong as vividly as one might dream of what could go right. (“Mission Accomplished!”)

Any cast of mind has its biases and blind spots. But I’m impressed, in thinking about the history I have lived through and the histories I have read, by how frequently people with personal experience of war have been cautious about launching future wars. This does not make them pacifists: Harry Truman, infantry veteran of World War I, decided to drop the atomic bomb. But Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, Colin Powell (in most of his career other than the Iraq-war salesmanship at the United Nations)—these were former commanding generals, cautious about committing troops to war. They had a tragic imagination of where that could lead and what it might mean.

What lesson do we end with? Inevitably any of them from the past will mismatch our future choices. The reasons not to invade Iraq 15 years ago are different from the risks to consider in launching a strike on North Korea or on Iran, or provoking China in some dispute in the East China Sea."

The Iraq War and the Inevitability of Ignorance

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. Fallows has won the National Magazine Award for his 2002 story “Iraq: The Fifty-First State?” warning about the consequences of invading Iraq; he has been a finalist four other times. He has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction for his book National Defense and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His recent books Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009) are based on his writings for The Atlantic. His latest book is China Airborne (2012). 

 

Pentagon Fails Sixth Straight Audit, With Number Of Passing Grades Stagnant

 

Glad I Did Not Take The Job - The Destroyer Without A Round For Its Gun

DEFENSE NEWS By Noah Robertson

The Pentagon resolved around 500 Notifications of Findings and Recommendations, [NFR's] or specific problems found in last year’s audit. 2,500 more NFRs were identified this year, a total that includes new and recurring issues.

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"For the sixth year in a row, the Pentagon failed its annual audit.

The result is not a surprise. The Department of Defense’s assets are vast and decentralized, amounting to $3.8 trillion alongside $4 trillion in liabilities. These are located in all 50 states and more than 4,500 sites around the world.

Since the Pentagon began auditing itself in 2018 — the last department to do so after Congress required the practice across the government in 1990 — it’s solved some of its easiest accounting problems. Now change each year is more incremental.

If there’s change at all, that is — last year, auditors only ratedseven of the nearly 30 sub-audits as clean. This year too there were seven.

One other was rated as “qualified,” the next step down in accounting jargon. Three more audits are still ongoing. The remaining 18 were given failing grades.

Pentagon officials have tried to reassure the public there is progress, despite the same topline rating. Speaking to reporters this week, ComptrollerMike McCord pointed to three areas.

The first is movement toward a resolved fund balance with the Treasury Department, meaning the two departments are getting closer to matching their ledgers. This consistency helps prevent fraud.

The second is the increasing use of automated programs, or bots, for rote tasks, freeing up accountants’ time for more important work. McCord said that in the Navy and Air Force alone, the use of bots saved around 600,000 hours.

The last is more relevant to the battlefield. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, the U.S. Defense Department has put a magnifying glass to its stockpiles while offering support. That effort proved useful when war began between Israel and Hamas this October. When Israel asked the U.S. for aid, McCord said, the U.S. knew what it had, where the capabilities were and what condition they were in.

“The Ukraine experience informed the Israeli one because there was already a lot of good practice built up,” he said.

Smaller successes aside, audits are still pass-fail tests and the Pentagon continues to fail, McCord acknowledged.

“It’s not enough,” McCord said. “The secretary [of defense] feels that we need to be doing better at this and moving faster.”

There is just under $5 billion worth of U.S. stockpiles that can still be sent to assist Kyiv, McCord said. At a Pentagon briefing last week, spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said there was $1 billion remaining to replenish those stocks.

The drawdown money leftover is itself the product of an accounting error. Earlier this year, Pentagon officials realized they had often been valuing the aid sent to Ukraine at its sticker cost rather than factoring in age — the equivalent of an insurance company reimbursing a totaled car at its original purchase price rather than its value at the time of a crash.

The funding vehicles being used to aid Israel in its war against Hamas are far different, in part because Israel has a large defense-industrial base and decades-long relationships with American arms manufacturers. But the road to keep funding them without more money approved by Congress is narrow, McCord said

“The running room we have to actually help Israel is much more constrained [than it is for Ukraine] because we don’t have any action by Congress yet,” he said.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon’s inability to get a passing grade continues to draw lawmakers’ ire. This summer, House Republicans held a hearing focused on the auditing failures.

This week, the House passed a continuing resolution to keep the government funded through early next year. The Pentagon has said such temporary spending bills make its accounting process more difficult."

https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2023/11/16/pentagon-fails-sixth-audit-with-number-of-passing-grades-stagnant/

About Noah Robertson

Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.

Candid Reflections On Afghanistan From Those Whose Lives Were Changed Forever By The War

"MILITARY TIMES"  By Howard Altman 

"They fought. They led. They planned. They bled. They lost a loved one to combat.  As the U.S. pulled its troops out of Afghanistan, those with a direct stake in 20 years of warfare reflect on service and sacrifice in Afghanistan."

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Goodbye Afghanistan. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Joseph Votel

63. Twin Cities, Minnesota

Now-retired Army Gen. Joseph Votel (left), at the time CENTCOM commander, talks with now-retired Army Gen. John Nicholson, at the time commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, at FOB Fenty in Jalalabad. (Howard Altman/Tampa Bay Times)

A retired Army general and former commander of U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, Votel was one of the first troops on the ground in Afghanistan in 2001 as commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment.

“I certainly wish this had ended differently,” Votel told Military Times recently, adding about Biden’s decision to withdrawal: “I lack insight into everything that is taking place — so I don’t want to make judgements about things I don’t know about.”

An ideal ending, said Votel, “would have been compelling the Taliban to enter into serious discussions with the Government of Afghanistan over political reconciliation.”

Leaving Afghanistan “is a very difficult decision,” said Votel, who oversaw various levels of operations there since shortly after the invasion — first as the 75th Ranger Regiment Commander, then as commander of Joint Special Operations Command, SOCOM and then at CENTCOM, where he oversaw the war efforts there from March 2016 to March 2019.

“I was always in favor of a conditions-based approach in Afghanistan — but those conditions cannot be achieved solely by military force. We were unfortunately never able to get the Taliban, and the Afghan government to an extent, to constructively and seriously enter into a diplomatic process. I believe our withdrawal will certainly have an impact on the Afghan people — they deserve an opportunity for peace and stability and I fear that they may not see it soon.”

Votel said that he is “hopeful that our military leaders and policy makers are looking at all options to address our interests in this area in accordance with the president’s apparent decision.”

“I think one thing we should agree upon with respect to Afghanistan is to honor our commitment made under the Special Immigrant Visa programs that have been put in place and long supported by Congress,” said Votel. “I think this is a moral imperative for us. Those (and their immediate family members) who served our Government or military forces deserve the opportunity for this VISA to come to the United States. They have absorbed a level of risk which we will be unable to mitigate after our departure.”

It’s not a new concept, said Votel.

“We have done this in the past and it has been successful,” he said. “I grew up in Saint Paul [Minnesota], where our nation absorbed a large number of Hmongs. They too were very vulnerable after the Vietnam War ended and have assimilated quite well into our community. This should be a national priority now.”

More than 2,400 U.S. troops died supporting efforts in Afghanistan, something not lost on Votel.

“ We must be very careful to ensure that these sacrifices are not viewed as being made in vain,” he said. “They were not.”

Carlos del Castillo

61. Tampa, Florida

From left to right Catherine, Andres, Dimitri Carlos and Anna del Castillo at Dimitri's 2009 West Point graduation. (photo courtesy Carlos del Castillo).

A business executive in Tampa, del Castillo became a Gold Star father on June 25, 2011, when his son, Lt. Dimitri del Castillo, an Army Ranger, died in Watahpur district, Kunar province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with small-arms fire.

Carlos del Castillo said that the announcement that Biden is bringing troops home from Afghanistan raises a lot of questions.

“You know, I am the last person that would want to see another soldier lost,” he said. “I have many friends in the military and I know they have endured much. I have more questions than comments.

“Is this a strategic decision or a political one?” he asked. “It may feel like a good decision today but will that still be the feeling five or 10 years from now? What do we gain by staying? Because in reality, we are so hog tied, we aren’t in it to win it? It’s either a war that we should win flat out or a social engagement dictated by people who want to play nice with people that want to end our way of life.”

And that raises another question, said del Castillo.

“So will we have to return?” he asked. “Should we even consider ever returning? How costly would reengagement be for us in terms of lives and treasure? Do ISIS and the Taliban also go home now?

“I realize we have had a tough slog over 20 years,” del Castillo said. “At least military families have. I wish for peace just like all U.S. citizens. I wonder if this action truly brings peace? And if so for whom? We know it won’t bring peace to the Afghan people under Taliban rule. I am no bleeding heart. But I do remember my son told me he felt sorry for the locals that just wanted to live in peace without having us or the Taliban around.”

Unlike most Americans, del Castillo doesn’t have the luxury of ignoring Afghanistan.

“We will go about our lives in our country as if all is well. But it is a hard pill to swallow, knowing what lies ahead for the people of that country,” he said. “This hits home as you would expect. I think of my son every day. I would give everything I own for five minutes with my son.”

Scott Neil

53. St. Petersburgh, Florida

Now retired Army Green Beret Master Sgt. Scott Neil standing at Tarnac Farms, Osama Bin Laden's Afghan training camp, in November, 2001. (Photo courtesy of Scott Neil).

Neil is a retired Army master sergeant who was one of the first troops on the ground in Afghanistan after 9/11.

“We spend too much time asking what went wrong in Afghanistan instead of reflecting what went right,” he said. “Small teams, specially trained and regionally aligned who focused on by, with, and through. Captains and sergeants focused on making local solutions happen and the weight of the U.S. military supported their efforts. In the beginning we were successful as we freed the oppressed and together we came down from the mountains and attacked a common enemy who were in mechanized formations. "

Now a partner in the American Freedom Distillery, makers of Horse Soldier Bourbon, Neil said “it seems like things are now switched 20 years later. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put Afghanistan back together again.”

Looking back, Neil said one lesson of the war is “fight the war you are in and not the war you want. How could such a small interagency multinational team defeat a standing army as well as their frantically motivated cohorts in such a small amount of time with limited resources? It is an open question.

“It’s ok to come home,” he said. “Sometimes America has a hard time leaving.”

During another deployment at what would become the halfway mark of the U.S. military’s involvement in Afghanistan in 2011, Neil said he was astonished by the changes he observed.

“I returned to Afghanistan exactly 10 years later in 2011,” he said. “It was the height of the surge. The attitude of the population, the investment in blood and treasure, the lack of real understanding of Afghan culture was astonishing. Some of this country’s brightest at the time created a simple set of programs such as the Village Stability Operations which were having effects. Today it is all gone.”

With a son now in uniform, Neil said he hopes the military is ready for the next 20 years.

“My son loves serving his country today as much as I had,” he said. “I hope the American population admired his service as much as they did for us. And I hope he and the rest of our military is prepared for the next 20 years to fight and most importantly win. I’m not sure if we know what winning really looks like anymore.”

One of the first troops to fight the Taliban, Neil said that the Taliban and its cultural support cannot be ignored moving forward.

“The people of Afghanistan are both beautiful and simple,” he said. “They want to live a life like any other family anywhere in the world. They are brave and loyal to a fault at times. It is their solution for themselves that will ultimately win.

“You cannot have Afghanistan without the Taliban. It is like taking the Southern Baptist out of a small southern town.”

Scott Mann

52. Riverview, Florida

Retired Army Green Beret Lt. Col. Scott Mann, in Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan during Operation NAM DONG Spring 2005 (Shawn Tenace photo).

A retired Army Green Beret lieutenant colonel who served three tours in Afghanistan, Mann was one of the architects and implementers of the Village Stability Program, which focused on mobilizing local Afghans to fight back against Taliban insurgents through community engagement and capacity building.

“I have mixed feelings about the departure from Afghanistan,” said Mann. “On one hand, I glad we’re leaving because we’ve become an ‘occupier’ in the eyes of many Afghans because of failed U.S. policies and strategies by senior leaders who never took the time to really understand the land known as the ‘Graveyard of Empires.’ On the other hand, I’m saddened by the departure because I lost a lot of friends over there.”

Mann, who has written a play — Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret — based on his experiences in Afghanistan, said there were positive moments during his time there.

“I also know that there was good work done there as well, mostly at local levels by warriors, diplomats, and development experts whose names we’ll forget over time,” he said. “In fact, I believe there were periods of time during the long war that we were on the right track of working with local Afghans to stand up on their own and to build capacity in that country over a long-term Foreign Internal Defense mission.”

But that effort in Afghanistan went off the rails, said Mann, so packing up and leaving is the right move.

“Until we gain the collective patience for that kind of work, similar to what we’ve done in Colombia, leaving is bittersweet, but necessary.”

And for Mann, it’s not just an academic discussion.

He has a son who followed his footsteps and is a platoon leader in the Army.

“I fully understand that my son will deploy into harm’s way,” said Mann. “But I make the assumption on good faith that he will deploy in missions that are well-defined, and strategically relevant to the nation. Afghanistan in its current form could not be further away from that.

“That said, I feel good that we won’t deploy him (or any other U.S. warriors) into a mission that is ill-defined and only focused on the short-sighted whims of politicians who are nowhere deep enough on the Afghan problem set.”

Lori Larsen

44. Tampa, Florida

Lori Larsen (center), at the time an Army captain, in Kabul, Afghanistan, during the fall of 2004. (Photo courtesy of Lori Larsen).

Larsen, who served in the Army for eight years, leaving as a captain, was an intelligence officer serving as an intel liaison in Afghanistan between conventional and SOF forces. She was deployed there in 2004 and 2005.

“I remember fondly my time in Afghanistan,” said Larsen, who now serves as the chief strategy officer for Celestar, a Tampa-based contracting firm. “If you remember, 2004 to 2005 was the year when they held the first Afghanistan elections. So I think it was probably what I’ll call the most peaceful time over the last 20 years. I think it was a time of anticipation and, and excitement because it was an opportunity to really move Afghanistan in a positive direction. I left there with an admiration and appreciation for the people of Afghanistan, all the people that I met were unbelievable, and just good-hearted people who deserve some peace and stability after generations of war and instability.”

Looking back, Larsen said that while she was in Afghanistan, she could not have imagined that nearly 16 years later, U.S. troops would still be there.

“No way,” she said. “Again, when I was there, it was sort of a very positive time of positive change. I knew it wasn’t going to be over within the next year or two years, but certainly I never imagined that it would be another 15 years and we’d still be in Afghanistan.”

Larsen said one mistake the U.S. made was “trying to perhaps set up a government, like we have here in the United States. That may not have been appropriate for the culture of the people of Afghanistan. And I think there’s also too many people within Afghanistan that have different ideas of what they wanted their future to be.”

The last two decades were not all about mistakes, Larsen said.

“There are good things that came out of our time in Afghanistan,” she said. “I think we were able to progress. I say we, but: There was some progress made in terms of freedoms for women and young girls able to go to school and perhaps some, some improvements in availability of health care, and that sort of stuff.

“I do think that there were some good steps made,” she said. “Our withdrawal marks the end of the United States’ longest war. And there’s certainly a lot of fatigue on the part of our service members and their families and also the American people. So I, I think the time is right. This provides an opportunity for the United States to invest time, energy and resources and some potentially more imminent threats to our national security.”

China and Russia, she said, are “more pressing threats to our national security than what’s happening in Afghanistan.

The outcome of the withdrawal, she said, “remains to be seen.

The recent Cost of War Report states that the Afghanistan conflict cost more than $2 trillion, and more than 240,000 lives, including about 2,400 U.S. troop deaths and another 20,000 injuries.

Was the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan worth it?

“If you ask somebody who’s lost a loved one, they will say it was not worth it,” said Larsen. “I think it remains to be seen what becomes of Afghanistan. Only then will we be able to reflect back and determine whether it was worth the sacrifices and the money spent.”

Ty Edwards

51. Tampa Palms, Florida

Afghan interpreter Hakimi Quadratullah (left) and then-Marine Lt. Col. Ty Edwards in Afghanistan. (Photo courtesy of Ty Edwards).

Edwards is a medically retired Marine lieutenant colonel who was severely wounded in October, 2008 during a firefight in Kunar province. He is now confined to a wheelchair as the result of his injuries.

“I have mixed emotions,” he said of the Biden announcement. “While I recognize that we can’t stay in Afghanistan forever, I would have liked to see some forces remaining to provide drone support to Afghan security forces and counter terrorism vice a total withdrawal of forces. We will lose a whole lot of intel resources in the region, I would guess.”

Edwards, whose life was saved by Afghan interpreter named Quadratullah Hakimi, worries about those left behind.

“I empathize with those loyal Afghans, partners who stood beside us through thick and thin,” he said. “I hope that some kind of power-sharing agreement can be reached on the part of Afghan government and the Taliban and that Afghanistan can find a peaceful resolution.”

One of more than 20,000 U.S. troops wounded during nearly 20 years of conflict in Afghanistan, Edwards said his sacrifice “was worth it.

“It was challenging but rewarding,” he said. “It was rewarding seeing our embedded training team work alongside the Afghan army. We had 18 Marines and three Navy Corpsman. Gunnery Sgt. Ron Stevens and myself were the only infantry Marines on the team. To a man, they all exceeded every expectation. We did not have any KIA but several were wounded.”

Edwards said he thought his team was making a difference.

“I also thought that we were making progress in our battle space, thanks in large part to 1/91 cavalry who had been in the area for over a year when we arrived,” he said.

Jason Criss Howk

48. Raleigh, North Carolina.

Retired Army Maj. Jason Criss Howk (short haircut, gray Dickies) plays the traditional Afghan sport buzkashi in February, 2003. (Photo courtesy Jason Criss Howk).

A retired Army major, Howk worked in several capacities with Afghan forces.

“I am not surprised by the Biden decision to withdraw all military forces, or to again unwisely announce a date for withdrawal,” he said. “This was his hope in 2009 and now he can carry it out. It is clumsy foreign policy, but the decision has been made. What matters is what happens next.”

Despite that, Howk said he is confident that Afghans can defend themselves.

“I’ve advised the Afghan government leadership (friends for over 15 years) and the ANDSF (who I have mentored and aided since 2002) that they needed to prepare for a full withdrawal since 2016.

“They have listened,” said Howk. “The ANDSF has been in the lead of combat operations since 2015 and they have professionalized way beyond any previous Afghan military. Afghans understand their security sector weaknesses and are addressing them. The ANDSF is confident they can win any future battle as long as Air Support and funding continues. With NATO and US promises that support for Afghan SOF, Air Force, and ANDSF salaries — the ANDSF are in a solid place.”

The Taliban, meanwhile, are merely pretending to have success, he said.

“The Taliban have used propaganda successfully to fool the world and especially the press into thinking they have increased their strength, ability to govern, and support from Afghans. The opposite is true,” said Howk. “The ANDSF will hold the line in battle and the Afghan people will rally behind the ANDSF as the Taliban likely use our clumsy withdrawal to ramp up their violence.”

The Taliban’s continued belligerence will backfire on them with regard to Pakistan, said Howk.

“An ISI general admitted to me at CENTCOM just before the Doha agreement that Pakistan would eventually have to jettison the Taliban to focus on their own existential threat—the failing Pakistan economy,” he said. “I predict after a few more years of Taliban failures to take and govern any large population center, the Pakistanis will lose interest in their proxy and find a better way to come to terms with a stable Afghanistan—or interfere in a new way. "

The same is true for the Afghan people, he said.

“I predict a bloody insurgency will continue until the Taliban are convinced to get serious in peace talks,” said Howk. “Every day the Taliban fight the Afghan people, the Afghans get more unified behind their republic and the Taliban lose more future leverage in peace talks. This is the best Taliban window to safely exit the war they started against the Afghan people on behalf of Pakistan. Afghans are unphased by our withdrawal because they knew it was coming. Now they will be free to act on their own to finish the war.”

Any suggestion of Taliban supremacy is smoke and mirrors, said Howk.

“I think the big story is how the world was duped by the Pakistan/Taliban team to think the Taliban are some unstoppable force that can take and govern territory at will,” he said. “They have not done so during a continuous withdrawal of international forces since 2014.”

"Military Times" - Candid reflections on Afghanistan from those whose lives were changed forever by the war

About Howard Altman

Howard Altman is an award-winning editor and reporter who was previously the military reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and before that the Tampa Tribune, where he covered USCENTCOM, USSOCOM and SOF writ large among many other topics.