Why Kabul was a colossal goat screw.
“The military cannot choose which orders to follow and which orders not to follow.”
Welcome to The Experiment, where we’re thinking about giving up hope for Lent and trying not to rush to conclusions because, really, who has the time? This week I ask one of my smartest friends, a former Pentagon official, why Afghanistan ended so chaotically, and Jack Hughes muses on what this political moment means for the Supreme Court’s future.
As always, we offer recommendations on what to do (ignoring online jerks because science), read (Jared Brock’s open letter to Airbnb), watch (Minari, yo), and listen to (Little Simz’s ambitious Sometimes I Might Be Introvert).
But first, have you met my friend Julia?
Julia and I set out along the beach. Her little toy poodle, scampered ahead. Julia had not remembered her dog’s leash, which was unusual for Julia. Julia, not her real name, is a planner. She worked as a civilian in the Pentagon for 15 years, most recently as a deputy director and originally as an analyst on special operations in Afghanistan, which is why I asked her to take a walk with me.
Julia understands the world in terrible ways. The first time we met, I made the distinction between troops serving on the front lines and those back safely out of the way, and she made my head explode when she said, “There are no front lines anymore. We haven’t had war with front lines since World War II.” The second time we met she explained that more men than women are sexually assaulted in the military with the matter-of-fact tone of an oncologist used to delivering bad news. “You frighten me,” I told her.
She was a decade into her career at the Pentagon then, and as a young woman dealing with uniformed, older men, she’d learned what not to share lest it be construed as an invitation. I imagine it became habit not to reveal her emotions, but when I said she scared me, I saw the muscles around her eyes flex, which was as much of a smile as she allowed herself.
My wife and I shared a beach house with her and several others on Long Island Sound this week. As much to get out of the house as anything I asked if she’d be willing to take a walk and explain this whole Afghanistan thing to me. Why, I wondered, did The Good War end up such a colossal goat screw? I figured someone who’s spent a decade and a half behind the scenes at the Pentagon might know a thing or two. Then again, she might not care to turn walking the dog into a TEDTalk. But her eyes flexed when I asked her. She even smiled a little.
Why did The Good War end up such a colossal goat screw?
Wades Beach is nearly deserted except for a woman walking her bulldog which is staring down Julia’s dog who is bouncing around like a small, furry mountain goat. And then, to me, she says, “I think ultimately this will be one of our country’s major failures of civil-military relations. Our founding fathers made a point to make sure that there is civilian oversight of the military, but the military did not follow their orders to plan for evacuation.”
At some point, a president gives the military an order. In February 2020, Donald Trump struck what the Washington Post called a “peace deal” with the Taliban. We close our bases and withdraw our troops in 14 months, and the Taliban ensures that Afghanistan is not a safe haven for terrorists.
“So when President Trump signed the agreement with the Taliban last summer, he then went to his secretary of defense and his military leadership and said you need to start preparing for withdrawal from Afghanistan. He wanted the evacuation complete by the 2020 elections,” said Julia. “The fact that it did not happen during his administration was essentially the military either slow rolling, or failing to prepare for for evacuation and withdrawal.”
She said it matter-of-factly. The military leadership of this country, she surmises, was given a direct order by the Commander-in-Chief and basically said, nah. She listed several reasons, including a failure of imagination. A quarter of the country had never taken a breath when we weren’t at war in Afghanistan. Likewise, many in the military had spent their entire careers in this war. Who could fault them for not imagining their reality ending? Or they assumed that a Biden administration would reverse course, a not-unreasonable scenario after the Obama administration had done the same thing after campaigning on ending the war. What they hadn’t counted on was Biden not only campaigning on ending the war but sticking to it.
Another reason the military leadership would have disregarded, if not outright disobeyed, the order to prepare to adios Afghanistan was more philosophical. “The first is our modern-day military was born out of our complete success during World War 2. The department culturally exists in a world in which only complete success is acceptable,” said Julia.
This is the key that unlocks a horrible door. Our goal in the graveyard of empires was not an honorable peace or an acceptable win in which Al Qaeda was defeated and the Taliban promised never to mess with Texas again, which is essentially what we got. In the Pentagon, the thinking was that we could not leave until the home team, which at this point included not just the Taliban but their violent offspring ISIS, wasn’t just defeated but decimated and completely dismantled and replaced with a western-style representative democracy complete with individual rights and a giant standing army. We defined victory so bigly that nothing less than Afghanistan’s complete submission would do.
“And then on a psychological level, they understand how many lives have been lost in Afghanistan. They want to make that sacrifice worth it by ensuring that there is complete success,” said Julia, before bringing up a more personal point.
A career military officer thinks in terms of what legacy they will leave behind and how they will be received by their retired peers once they join their ranks. The good ol’ boys may not accept you at the Army Navy Country Club if you were on watch when we gave up the fight. To them, shaking hands with the Taliban and leaving without total victory is a black mark. “That takes away acceptance from your peer group and any professional cache that you might have after the military,” said Julia, not unkindly.
We defined victory so bigly that nothing less than Afghanistan’s complete submission would do.
John McCain was always a maverick, but he only succeeded as a truth-telling rebel once he retired from the military and got into politics. The military chain of command is underpinned by following orders, which breeds an emphasis on uniformity in more than just clothes. As a policy wonk for the military, Julia had officers tell her in confidence they wouldn’t be involved in certain policies because of reputational blow back. “You don't want to be seen as being destructive or being too rebellious or coloring outside the lines, because you want to continue to be respected by this community to get promotions when you’re active duty and to continued acceptance when your military career ends,” she said.
Knowing that Afghanistan ended badly partly because General So-And-So was worried about getting teased at the VFW or not getting a regular gig on cable TV is leavened somewhat by recognizing that these are normal psychological reactions. And since we still have military bases in Europe, Japan, and South Korea, it would not be unreasonable for the military to assume that they would have a permanent presence in Afghanistan.
But planning to win doesn’t mean not planning to leave, does it?
“As far as I know, during my time there, there was never a withdraw plan at the ready,” she said. The plan was to support the Afghan National Security Forces and that one day they could operate on their own. We talked ourselves into a situation where we provided everything from bullets, machinery, weapons, food to logistics and infrastructure to give a standing army to a country fighting guerilla warfare. “We were intent on creating a military that works and acts and talks just like ours,” said Julia. “So instead of helping them improve their guerrilla warfare tactics that work in a country that doesn't have electricity and where most people can't read, we tried to train the Afghan army in our own image.” That was where the military was focused—raising a nascent army into self-sufficiency—and not leaving like the president ordered them to.
Then Biden arrived and gave them the same order. The military said they couldn’t possibly actually do this, gosh, who us, I mean… Biden extended the deadline and said, No really, fellas, I mean it.
“As far as I know, there was never a plan to withdraw.”
At this point the military kinda sorta started planning. And that’s when two new problems turned up. The United States immediately started issuing GTFO orders to Americans living in Afghanistan, which included everyone from embassy workers to an idiotic field trip from Sacramento. And don’t forget the military contractors who aren’t part of the chain of command and might have contractual obligations to stay. There was no registry of randos doing God knows what in a war zone. The military, accustomed to other people doing as ordered, did not plan for Americans ignoring evacuation orders.
“Your assumption is, oh, well, it's just military personnel. And the fact is that it's much more complex than that. Many of those people, if they're not there on official business, don't have to comply with those requests from the U.S. government,” said Julia.
That brings us to the Afghans who helped the U.S. military and are now being targeted for death by the Taliban and their rebellious offshoot, ISIS. There were thousands of interpreters and others who had been promised by the military that they would become American citizens and live a better life here. The problem is that while the military made those promises, the State Department had to follow through on them by giving them what are called Special Immigrant Visas, or SIVs.
If there was one thing Trump aide Stephen Miller didn’t like it was the prospect of importing Muslims and handing them American passports. Starting in 2017, Miller led an effort to dismantle the SIV program in the State Department and lower the cap on SIVs who could immigrate every year. So, while our capacity to rescue the SIVs was reduced, the backlog of SIVs grew.
Biden’s State Department had months to rebuild an office that took four years to starve with a decade’s backlog of paperwork.
By the time Biden came along, he inherited a State Department unable to process a growing mountain of SIV applications and not a lot of time left to do it. The bureaucracy imposed a cruel efficiency; if anything was wrong on the application, the State Department employee didn’t pick up the phone and call the interpreter. That would take too long. The application set aside and never processed as the bureaucrat moved onto the next application. Thus, the paperwork was processed, achieving the bureaucratic imperative without addressing the humanitarian imperative, which is saving their lives.
“It's a very lengthy process and you're asking people for whom English is not their first language to fill out very technical, bureaucratic-type paperwork,” said Julia. “If they don't understand the question, they might leave the question blank. They don't have a certified address system the way the U.S. does. So even explaining what their address is in Afghanistan might be challenging. When an application would be filled out, if it was not complete or if the information was not sufficient, then that application would be set aside.”
Lay COVID on top of this mess: Everyone was working remotely on high-security background checks. “A lot of that paperwork, you just can't take it home. Because of security concerns, it's not the kind of paperwork government workers can process in a teleworking environment,” she said.
Biden’s State Department had months to rebuild an office that took four years to starve with a decade’s backlog of paperwork. “It's not a function of those people not able to do their job. I mean…”
We’re sitting at a picnic table on the beach when her dog runs into the tall grass that separates the shore from the parking lot. Julia gets up. “Oh man. I should've put a leash on her.”
Other factors contributed to the harried pullout of Afghanistan: Trump didn’t fill a lot of vacant offices, leaving the government understaffed. He diverted money to pet projects such as the border wall. He burned through secretaries of defense at the end of his term, which added additional friction and drag for each new defense secretary to catch up on the state of play.
“The easiest thing to catalog are the things, but no one had ever cataloged all the people.”
Julia credits Biden with appointing a defense secretary with a background in logistics, because accounting for two decades’ worth of stuff is not easy, which they did: “leave it, destroy it, or bring it back,” she said. You think you don’t like moving houses? Try moving a generation of things. How many pallets do you order to end a 20 years’ war? But it was this focus on the stuff that compounded the problems with California field trips and SIVs. “The easiest thing to catalog are the things,” said Julia, “but no one had ever cataloged all the people.”
Now it’s left to us to use carrots (frozen accounts) and sticks (threats to withhold billions of international humanitarian aid) to compel the Taliban to allow us to get about 200 Americans and thousands more Afghan allies out.
“None of the people in this story are purposefully being a bad actor. They're all caught by the limitations of the bureaucracy and the timing and the crisis on the ground,” said Julia, who later named Miller as the exception to the “no bad actor” rule.
Julia was reluctant to condemn the generals who at best dragged their feet and at worst worked behind the scenes to subvert an order from the commander-in-chief. She worked at the Pentagon for too long and has been a part of the arduous process for arriving at a decision. But if you ask her what it could mean to act in that way, she’ll use phrases like “dereliction of duty” and “refusal to obey a direct order.” Lincoln replaced generals during wartime, as did Eisenhower, as did Obama. “The military cannot choose which orders to take and which orders not to take,” she said.
“Historically, if you look at commanders that Eisenhower relieved or commanders that any of our wartime presidents relieved, it is not ahistorical for general officers to be relieved for lack of performance,” she said before pausing. Her dog was off somewhere sniffing God knows what, but Julia focused on choosing the right words. “There is plenty of precedence for the president to look at their performance and say, this was not an effective way to withdraw. And this planning was not done effectively.”
“The military cannot choose which orders to take and which orders not to take.”
For a Texan, Shelter Island in late August seems nearly cool. By the angle of the sun, I could tell it was time to walk back to the beach house and see if scotch still tasted good. Julia lured her dog out of the tall grass with puppy snacks, and we made the short walk back to the house. The news cycle had already turned from Afghanistan to Hurricane Ida, which was about to flood New York City that night. My wife and I would fly home to the news that Texas had effectively ended legal abortion and outlawed teaching public schoolchildren about racism. We had already moved on from a war that had lasted two decades.
Leaving Afghanistan in the hands of the Taliban feels like a loss because we set it up that way. The Taliban offered to give up Osama bin Laden to a third country, but George W. Bush had decided that if you harbored terrorists even unwillingly, then you were our enemy. “The idea that you could negotiate with the Taliban and not look down at them as a terrorist organization was something that the Bush administration was not willing to tolerate as a potential success,” said Julia, who also faults Obama for not withdrawing after killing bin Laden and defeating Al Qaeda.
Instead, we kept defining success upwards, refusing to take a succession of wins. We won, sort of, but not really, and the military leadership that bungled the exit while the world watched is still responsible for the lives of the men and women who serve under them. Perhaps, after investing so much money and killing so many people, we would do well to claim the only victory left in Afghanistan, which would be not continuing to meander down this decades-long path and take from Afghanistan whatever lessons are left to learn.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
Más
How we’re getting through this
Avoiding jerks online because science
Realizing remote working is exhausting
What I’m reading
Jared Brock: “An Open Letter to Airbnb” - Wait… you mean taking housing stock off the market for speculative ventures hurts the economy?
To be clear, renting out spare rooms, attics, basements, and backyards in owner-occupied properties isn’t the problem. It’s when an investor outbids a family for a second property and turns it into a full-time Airbnb. Or worse, when a holiday rental company does so. Or worse, when a highly-leveraged hedge fund buys a swath of holiday rental companies. Or worse, when a sovereign wealth fund buys a portfolio of hedge funds. It’s why the average house will cost $10+ million within 50 years.
Poetry Society of America: “Stopping by with Maggie Smith” - People, it’s Maggie Smith. Get a beverage, sit yourself down, and read this.
Every year changes me, some more than others. People close to me call me “sensitive,” but I like to think of myself more as “porous.” Or perhaps “susceptible to stimuli.” Haha. This past year or so has been an intense one personally—single parenting through a pandemic, releasing one book and finishing up another. But mostly I’ve been focused on keeping myself and the people I love most as well as possible, mentally and physically. I learned to let a lot of the little things go, and I hope to carry that forward. May I not pick up the little things I set down this past year because they were—are—not worth carrying.
Ben Terris: “George W. Bush’s wars are now over. He retreated a while ago.” - This is both dreamlike and mean and I can’t believe I haven’t read more like it.
“Oh, man,” Bush told the “Today” hosts when they reached him on his birthday. “How lucky am I?”
Vauhini Vara: “I didn’t know how to write about my sister’s death—so I had AI do it for me.” - Artificial intelligence can augment humanity and won’t replace us anymore than clothes replace skin.
I felt acutely that there was something illicit about what I was doing. When I carried my computer to bed, my husband muttered noises of disapproval. We both make our livings as writers, and technological capitalism has been exerting a slow suffocation on our craft. A machine capable of doing what we do, at a fraction of the cost, feels like a threat. Yet I found myself irresistibly attracted to GPT-3—to the way it offered, without judgment, to deliver words to a writer who has found herself at a loss for them. One night, when my husband was asleep, I asked for its help in telling a true story.
What I’m watching
Not even Adam Scott and Dominic West could save The Pursuit of Love on Amazon Prime.
The Good Place II should have been called The Not As Good Place. Or, The Not Bad Place. Would have also accepted The Fine Place. It’s Fine, Really. But instead, they went with The Good Place II, and the world is poorer for it.
I did, however, find something I can safely say is worth your time. Ladies and gentlemen, I finally got around to seeing Minari.
What I’m listening to
There are some weeks where I have to search to find new music for you. This is not one of those weeks. Buckle up:
Little Simz, a British rapper, has followed up her 2019 GREY Area with a stunningly ambitious album, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. I mean, damn. The title track, “Introvert,” starts with a GD overture, for crying out loud. Give this album a listen this weekend.
Gilles Peterson of BBC Radio 6 calls Lady Blackbird the “Grace Jones of Jazz.” If that’s what it takes to get you to listen to Black Acid Soul, then fine. After Little Simz bowls you over with her ambition, Lady Blackbird throws you in the backseat and hits the accelerator. Black Acid Soul is a trip.
Baby Queen is thinking some grown-up thoughts about growing up, and The Yearbook is full of bops and hooks a’plenty. But you know how I love wordplay that solves a riddle I never knew existed. “You Shaped Hole” scratches that itch.
Injury Reserve, an experimental hip-hop troupe, might interest you. If you like “What’s Goodie (feat Cakes da Killa)” they might be your thing.
Finally, going to give the final word to my younger son, who recommended Hobo Johnson’s “I want you Back.”
What do you think of today's email? I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback. I might even put ‘em in the newsletter if I don’t steal it outright.
Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Unless of course you were forwarded this email, in which case you should…
Thanks to Noom, I lost 40 pounds and have kept it off for more than a year. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works.
We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment.
We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some
Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House.