My youngest daughter is 20. She was just a few months old when the attacks on 911 happened and her father, already deployed to the C5F AOR, found himself again in a spot of bother.
She is now a sophomore in college and has known nothing in her life but the fact we were still engaged in a conflict her father helped start the year she was born. She was in grade school when her father left AFG for the last time eight years later. The war wasn’t halfway over.
She, and the American participation in the conflict, are now two decades old.
I remember distinctly discussions at C5F in the months immediately after 911 about how whatever we were going to do in AFG, it wasn’t going to be like Vietnam.
Really?
All my kids, now moving in to their third decade of their life, have known nothing but these unending low-grade conflicts in the Middle East and Asia. That was not the life experience I was gifted by my parent’s generation, but it sure is the one I’ve gifted to my kids.
Let’s stick with the Vietnam War comparison a bit (though we lost more than 20x the number dead in half the time in Vietnam than we have in Afghanistan).
+/- a year, if you define the start of The Vietnam War as LBJ’s commitment of two-battalion Marine expeditionary brigade to Da Nang, then my daughter’s experience would be as if we still had American forces fighting in Vietnam during Ronald Reagan’s second administration.
I’ve written about the conflict over at my homeblog for over a decade and a half. I won’t rehash those points again here, but we have the fact in front of us that we have one more fighting season left.
When we culminated in December 2009, I made a little remark about The Friendship Bridge, the place the last Soviet soldiers left Afghanistan. It was less ignoble than one of the British Empire’s departures, but not pretty. As we really don’t have a reliable land corridor out of Afghanistan, and helicopters have short legs negating a Vietnam like departure, I guess the odds are we will see the last C-130 out of Bagram as our Tamarian metaphor of failure.
Funny/not-funny that visual is to me because it is the exact scenario we discussed a dozen years ago over coffee in the Destile Gardens in Kabul during in the waning days of the Bush43 administration. As we watched the black SUV come and go, we wondered what the Obama advance team in Kabul – talking to all the wrong people – would do with what most of us had been working on for over a year.
We had put in to place what we called the “uplift of forces” that began in the Bush43 administration – something that is regularly reported wrongly as the “Obama surge” – that was to enable General McKiernan’s concept of “Shape Clear Hold Build” – something that is regularly reported wrongly as being General McChrystal’s idea. (NB: already the history of the Afghan intervention is festooned with lazy and incorrect reporting almost set in stone).
We knew that this district-by-district effort was no guarantee to achieve the Goals/End States/Mission at the end of all our multicolored Lines of Operation, but after the culmination of the NATO effort in the summer of 2007, we had a good feeling it was the best option. What if the new administration threw it all away – as they did at the December 2009 West Point speech – what could be done?
An idea met with nods of heads; retreat to the airfields. Load up all our people in an airbridge home. What we can’t take with us or give to the ANSF to fight with, blow in place. Accept the place is unfixable.
A dozen years later, here we are.
The Taliban fighters who will take pot shots at us as we leave and then will empty magazine after magazine with celebratory fire? Most of them were born after 911. They have known nothing for foreign infidels occupying the land their ancestors have defended since the dawn of time. They were offered modernity on our terms; they have decided to accept reality on their terms.
Can you blame them?
While there will be temptations to point at The Pentagon to wonder why we were there for two decades, that isn’t the right location. From the beginning, the military wanted nothing to do with a long term presence. At least from the 3-star and below conversations those first few months, that was not the plan.
People in civilian suits in Washington DC, Brussels, and Bonn created the higher direction and guidance that started to come down as 2002 grew in to a full year. That is where we decided to build a nation in to something it had too many antibodies against to prosper with the economy of force and delusions we forced on our own plans.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria … there is a long series of compounded errors the last 20 years that our highest decision makers have not yet come to terms with. The habits of both political parties remain a powerful force for those who remember everything but learn nothing.
It is, to them, the effort of accountability must now turn.
