Recently, we asked Dr. John Ballard, Dean of the National Defense College in the United Arab Emirates, to host a Q&A with Ambassador Jonathan Addleton, author of The Dust of Kandahar: A Diplomat Among Warriors in Afghanistan. Their exchange follows.
Professor Ballard: Ambassador, your book really helps readers understand the Afghan conflict from the perspective of a diplomat and development expert. How did you view your mission or main objective(s) when you arrived in Afghanistan in 2008?
Ambassador Addleton: I expected to engage in three very different worlds, one involving responsibility for 140 Embassy officers assigned to fourteen locations across southern Afghanistan; a second related to the ISAF military presence in Kandahar and beyond; and a third focused on Afghans from various walks of life including government official, tribal leaders and religious figures. At some level I wanted to connect to all three worlds, where possible attempting to explain them to each other. From the beginning, I consciously worked to “humanize” each encounter, looking beyond our mutual stereotypes while also trying to help move Afghanistan toward a better and less violent place.
Professor Ballard: Thank you. That is very interesting. What kind of preparation did you receive before arriving in Afghanistan Ambassador?
Ambassador Addleton: I enrolled in a couple of required short courses on Afghanistan offered by the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in Washington, D.C. I attended the “crash and bang” course in West Virginia, learning how to drive a Humvee, break a road block and tie a tourniquet. And I participated in the pre-deployment Third Infantry Division planning exercise at Fort Stewart, GA. I was already familiar with some aspects of Afghanistan, having visited the country several times over the years and served in neighboring Pakistan as well as in Central Asia. I also read and talked to people who had served in Afghanistan beforehand.
Professor Ballard: Still, for someone going to war for the first time at age 55, what you saw in and around Kandahar must have been shocking. Ambassador, in your book you seem to be quite impressed with some of the aspects of military customs and culture that you saw, as “a diplomat among warriors” what impressed you most about the young men and women of today’s military?
Ambassador Addleton: My oldest son was serving in the U.S. Air Force during my time in Kandahar and my second son plans to enlist during the coming months. However, the military culture and traditions that I witnessed in Afghanistan were indeed entirely new to me. More than anything, I was struck by the sacrifice as well as the cost of war, having attended dozens of Purple Heart pinnings, ramp ceremonies and memorial services across southern Afghan during my deployment there. I was impressed with the efforts made to honor that sacrifice, despite the ambiguous nature of the war in Afghanistan. And I was struck by the youth of many of those around me.
Professor Ballard: Ambassador, you write quite movingly about the service and supreme sacrifice paid by the five colleagues who walked with you outside the Zabul PRT on 6 April 2013, how did their loss affect your approach to your work?
Afghan children surrounding an MRAP as it prepares to depart Alexander’s Castle in Qalat, Zabul (Photo by Jonathan Addleton)
Ambassador Addleton: The attack in Zabul occurred eight months into my twelve-month assignment in southern Afghanistan. I accompanied the remains of my colleagues on the long flight to Dover and then returned to Kandahar Air Field two days later to complete the remaining twenty weeks of my allotted time. I continued to engage in outreach and meet Afghans. But the drawdown in civilians serving in southern Afghanistan gathered pace and my own movements were in some instances further restricted. My biggest concern during those remaining months was the safety of my colleagues – I lived in dread that something might happen to one of them.
Professor Ballard: That is absolutely understandable, many of us underwent changed attitudes when we experienced the loss of those working closely with us in war. You noted at one point that the battleplans you saw developed seemed impressive, but that notable portions of Afghan reality were missing. How could we have improved our civ-mil coordination in Afghanistan?
Ambassador Addleton: ISAF was the dominant foreign presence during the year that I spent in southern Afghanistan. The number of civilians was miniscule by comparison. Yet they did play an important role in engaging with Afghans, both politically and with respect to development. At Kandahar Air Field, Embassy staff were closely integrated with the military’s civil affairs structure; they were similarly integrated with military counterparts at the provincial and district level, even as the number of locations where expatriate civilians deployed outside of Kandahar went into steep decline. Having traveled in Afghanistan during the 1970s as a teenager, I was astonished at the remoteness of some of the places where we had attempted to establish a military as well as a civilian presence. It seemed incredibly ambitious and even audacious to me. But increasingly (and appropriately) it was the Afghans that were taking the lead – guided to some extent and in mostly positive ways by the example set by the ISAF forces that preceded them.
Professor Ballard: Your view that the approach was extremely ambitious is a very insightful perspective. You address issues of poor governance frequently in your book, but also of meeting several capable Afghan leaders, do you think Afghanistan can develop leaders who will confront the corruption that you encountered so frequently?
Ambassador Addleton: I tried to place myself into the shoes of those Afghans with whom I interacted – what was their personal history, what was their life experience, what motivated them, what were their hopes and fears about the future? At times, I thought of ISAF as yet another tribe, imposing themselves on the political, economic and social landscape of Afghanistan even while having to adapt and change because of it. Competition is a reality among male Afghans, worked out first within the family and then at the level of clan, tribe and country. Leaders inevitably emerge within that context, based on long-held precepts of courage, honor and respect that would be regarded as hallmarks of effective leadership anywhere, not just in Afghanistan. At the same time, there is a fierce and never-ending competition for scarce resources that undoubtedly drives corruption in Afghanistan. The magnitude of resources deployed by ISAF as well as the perception that its presence would be fleeting drove many Afghans to look for ways to benefit from it before it became too late.
Professor Ballard: That is certainly understandable; as you know the issue of stating an end date was very controversial. In 2013, you agreed that the number of ISAF soldiers should be greatly reduced, but felt the slope for our departure was too steep—becoming an unseemly “rush for the exit.” How might we have gotten it right?
Ambassador Addleton: By 2013 the Afghan military was already increasingly in the lead and accounted for at least 80 percent of the casualty figures from southern Afghanistan. At the same time, a continued ISAF presence provided training to Afghan security forces while sending a message to the Taliban and others that Afghanistan was not on the verge of being “abandoned.” My focus was more on the American civilian presence which, while already small, was being drawn down at a much faster pace than our own military. The issue of the appropriate “balance” between “planning” and “implementation” is a permanent fixture in any bureaucracy. However, at times it seemed that the parameters within which we were asked to operate were always subject to change – to such an extent that our latest “plan” was already obsolete, even before it reached Kabul for further review. My concern was that the combination of uncertainty and constantly shifting timelines would damage our credibility, strengthening the hand of those Taliban seeking total victory.
Professor Ballard: You wrote that “even now you cannot leave Afghanistan behind,” what do you see in the future for Afghanistan? You write of tactical successes but a murky strategic future, do you think America’s efforts have helped it?
Jonathan Addleton at Kandahar Air Field in early 2013, standing in front of a wall of sand bags. (Photo by Staff Sergeant Ashley Bell, 102nd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment, Mississippi National Guard)
Ambassador Addleton: During my last months in Afghanistan I often told local counterparts that the ISAF chapter of their history was coming to a close and it would now be up to them to write the next one. Some embraced this idea while others were skeptical about it, asserting that “it is our neighbors who will write the next chapter for us”. Now a new chapter is indeed being written, albeit with a continued though modest ISAF presence in several parts of the country outside of Kabul including Kandahar. Whatever else might be said, Afghanistan has changed dramatically and irrevocably over the last fifteen years, not only in Kabul but also elsewhere. The most obvious signs include the cell phone revolution and unheralded yet significant improvements in health and education. Although the security that Afghans long for has yet to be established, the Afghan military appears to be more resilient than perhaps some expected. Afghanistan’s narrative is still being written. But, at the very least, efforts by the United States and its allies have given Afghans a chance for a different kind future, one not dominated entirely by the Taliban.
Professor Ballard: Thank you for your book and for sharing more of your insights in this discussion Ambassador. For my part, those of us who served in Iraq and Afghanistan will always be thankful for the committed service of men and women such as yourself from other departments of the U.S. government. If nothing else these conflicts have taught us that modern war has to be a whole-of-government endeavor engaging the minds of professionals from a variety of perspectives. The Dust of Kandahar is an important contribution to our understanding of this least-well-understood of our recent conflicts.
