The critical quotation from Colonel Cross speaks volumes about our handling of the war in Afghanistan. He said: “Late-19-century warfare never stopped, though it was masked for a time by the Cold War emphasis on atomic bombs. And in this type of warfare that you Americans must master, only two things count: the mystic dimension of service and the sanctity of an oath. It’s about the giving of one’s best when the audience is of the smallest.”
In Afghanistan, we never mastered that type of warfare. Consumed by the supported-supporting paradigm of exotic and expensive weapons systems, our top military and civilian planners neglected to understand the most important element in the fight—the hearts and minds of our enemies. We faced an enemy who unabashedly believes that God is on their side. How else can you explain the reason why a Chechen is fighting barefoot on the freezing snow-covered summit of an 11,000-foot mountain? As a consequence of their beliefs, our enemy’s view of the conflict is as an infinite game—a fight that is literally in the hands of God and has no third out at the bottom of the ninth or a game clock ticking to zero. No rules, no referees. Twenty years is nothing to someone struggling to achieve a victory for their god. Our moral character was challenged and tested. We blinked.
After the spectacular victory in the autumn of 2001, the stupidity began to grow. We forgot the admonition of one of the Special Forces ground commanders working with the Northern Alliance, who said, “Brains before bullets. Outthink ‘em so you don’t have to outshoot ’em.” We tried to turn a successful unconventional fight into a conventional war. We set up FOBs at the bottom of a steep valley with undefended ridgelines above. We tried to get rid of opium production and pissed off all the farmers, turning them into enemies. Normal planning for a successful outcome in any civilian or military operation begins with drawing up the end state. There was none. We were going in two-year election cycle circles. We did things that a 15-year-old playing Call of Duty wouldn’t do. And even worse, the people responsible for our success started not telling the truth. A lack of transparency and truth ends up with a lack of congruence between words and deeds. At that point, the most critical bonds between the people in the Beltway, the warriors in the field, and the American people are cut. It is trust.
I know leadership. It is a field that I have spent decades studying with careful scholarship and practice. In the past decade, we have suffered from a colossal failure of leadership. One of my personal and professional mentors, a championship college and NFL coach, said at a coaching clinic, “We need more thumb-pointers, not finger-pointers.” Our country is being run by finger-pointers. No one takes any personal accountability for any of the events on the ground in Afghanistan. No one is responsible, and no one gets fired. Twenty years ago, Rudy Giuliani triumphantly managed one of the most massive and successful recovery efforts in American history. His mantra was, “Everyone is accountable all of the time.” In the airlift just seen on national television, the opposite seemed to be true.
The most enraging incident occurred over the last weekend in August 2022. Americans with proper credentials and private transport were left outside the gates, and the generals who could have let them in looked the other way. It is the most shameful thing I have ever seen. It rivals, and in some ways surpasses, the nomadic voyage of the MS St. Louis, which carried 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany that was turned away from U.S. seaports in 1939. Former Delta Operator Robert “Rat” Trivino’s general orders for leaders state, “Always choose the hard right over the easy wrong.” The generals chose the easy wrong.
The character and intentions of our enemy, as well as the general Afghan populace, were either misunderstood or arrogantly dismissed. That is a failure of Sun Tzu 101. I have never been to Afghanistan. I don’t speak Pashto, Dari, or Urdu. But just reading a few books provides enough knowledge of Afghanistan’s people and its warriors to see how massive our screw-ups were. The armies of Macedon, Britain, and the Soviet Union were all ultimately impaled by a culture of tribes led by warlords. Anthropologist and professor Lincoln Keiser lived successfully among violent street gangs in U.S. cities. He lasted just seven months in a Pashtun village before he fled for his life with a badal on his head. His book was presciently titled, “Friend by Day, Enemy by Night.”
We operated among a population that in many ways culturally hasn’t altered much since the introduction of Islam. We slipped into Afghanistan like a ghost in the darkness and took down the country with just a few hundred men. Special Operators blended in with the Northern Alliance and took down the Taliban. We didn’t need to subsequently secure the country with thousands of troops. All we needed to accomplish our goals was to prevent the Taliban from harboring terrorist actors and get Osama bin Laden. We did both. We didn’t have to hold territory or pacify the population. A low profile in the region would have been sufficient to support the Northern Alliance and keep the Taliban at bay. No withdrawal, no surrender of territory, and no propping up a corrupt government with astronomical amounts of benjamins. In 1898 in what is now Uganda, two rogue man-eating lions brought a major bridge construction project to a screeching halt. Find your enemy’s fulcrum and it doesn’t take much to cause disruption.
Having seen the mental and physical damage done to our service members, I am angrier today than I was on Sept. 12, 2001. On that day, we were reacting to events of the previous day. In the subsequent two decades, we had the choice of how to respond. We failed at the mystic dimension of service and the sanctity of our oath. There are men and women in our country who can succeed in this. We have to put them in the right position to act on our behalf.
Stephen B. Lewis
5-5-5-5 #343 #neverforget
