Army Sgt. Maj. Jacob Smith deployed 14 times to Afghanistan during the United States’ 20-year war against the Taliban, including in a Ranger platoon led by the Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) and in the same task force as Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.).
“The conflict in Afghanistan has consumed my entire adult life,” he told the House panel, taking his “first step” as an infantry combat team leader in 2002, returning repeatedly in different capacities until he was the senior non-commissioned officer at Bagram Air Base near Kabul in the fall of 2020.
Bagram Better for Evacuation
As the senior non-commissioned officer with the Area Support Group at Bagram Air Base since October 2020, Sgt. Maj. Smith was responsible for assessing the “life support systems” at Bagram and eight other bases the United States was turning over to the Afghan government in order to meet President Joe Biden’s Sept. 11, 2021, deadline for withdrawing all U.S. troops and government officials from Afghanistan.The guidance, at the time, “was to maintain order, discipline, and dignity as we collapsed. We would not just up and leave. We would hand over exceptionally orderly bases to the Afghan government,” he recalled.
In May 2021, he was assigned to serve as Bagram Senior Enlisted Adviser, which included oversight of “all force protection measures and entry control points on Bagram,” the huge air base that served essentially as command HQ for U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
“It was sometime in the spring that we received the first tentative planning date to work towards finalizing our go-to zero effort, Sept. 11th, 2021,” he recalled, noting the order was to close all but two bases, Bagram and Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA).
At that point, he had met once in March or April with U.S. Embassy staff at HKIA who had come to Bagram to determine if it was “the appropriate spot to conduct a Non-Combatant Evacuation, or NEO.”
In that first conversation, Sgt. Maj. Smith said, “I was told HKIA would be the other option. Prior to this meeting, I had reviewed the contingency plan for a NEO that had already been created years prior. The contingency plan accounted for 45,000–50,000 persons that would need to be evacuated.”
The embassy team said the NEO would be between two to three times that, anywhere from 120,000–140,000, he said.
By May, after assuming security responsibilities at Bagram, Sgt. Maj. Smith recommended to the embassy that the NEO be conducted out of Bagram rather than HKIA. He spelled out four reasons why the air base was a better site than the airport for a massive civilian airlift.
— Bagram could house 35,000 people without overloading the infrastructure, whereas HKIA could hold roughly 3,000, he said.
— HKIA was a civilian airport with an open airfield. “It was not completely controlled by the military. It has significant weak points in security,” Sgt. Maj. Smith said. “Bagram had a completely secure airfield that would require a massive military offensive to overrun or break.”
— HKIA was surrounded by the city of Kabul and its 4.4 million residents. “If there was a fight to be had, it would be in an urban environment and exceptionally difficult to undertake and control,” he said.
Bagram has a small town on its west side and open terrain on the other three sides, Sgt. Maj. Smith said. “Movement of any kind could be detected, controlled, or eliminated very early. The defendability of Bagram was exponentially greater than that of HKIA,” he said.
— Bagram could support 130,000 people. It had 35,000-bed spaces, adequate water, four dining facilities, and had the “food that could have fed those fleeing,” Sgt. Maj. Smith said. “I personally signed for over $2 million worth of food that was turned over to the Afghan government.”
— Bagram had two large and two portable incinerators and “material shredders” that could destroy vehicles and “sensitive equipment” on an industrial scale in a short amount of time, he said, while “HKIA did not.”
Sgt. Maj. Smith “laid out all my points” to the embassy’s site survey team. During May and June meetings, they appeared to agree with his assessment that Bagram was the best place for a NEO, not the airport in Kabul.
On June 14, he was ordered to “close Bagram by July 4th, well short of the originally planned date of Sept. 11th” while HKIA would remain open and house “a quick reactionary force.”
From then on, without any explanation or further discussion, “All talks of conducting a NEO” at all “were ceased. It is my understanding that those in the embassy believed the Taliban would not advance to and take Kabul, and a NEO was unnecessary.”
Sgt. Maj. Smith departed Afghanistan in July. “My thoughts stayed with the forces that would stay on the ground as the Taliban controlled about 50 percent of Afghanistan on the day I departed,” he recalled.
Those forces? “One single U.S. Infantry company” from the 10th Mountain Division—a company is generally 200 soldiers—to protect HKIA, the embassy, and other “Green Zone” assets in Kabul.
“An area once protected by hundreds of soldiers and contractors was now protected by 113 American soldiers and two companies of our Turkish partner forces,” Sgt. Maj. Smith said, noting that approximately 430 other U.S. service members in non-combat arms roles were also sent to HKIA.
“This was the only force left in Afghanistan” on Aug. 26, 2021, when suicide bombings at HKIA killed more than 180 people, including 13 members of the United States military, marking the end of America’s two-decade, generation-spanning war against the Taliban.
Four Decisions Led to Calamity
Testimony during the 200-minute hearing from retired Army Col. Seth Krummrich, U.S. Central Command Special Operations Chief of Staff in 2021, and an account by retired Army Col. Christopher Kolenda, a West Point graduate who led troops in Afghanistan and participated in Doha talks with “the Taliban’s version of diplomats,” described in tortured detail the beginning of the end.“I believe four presidential administrations and the lack of a consistent Afghan strategy share responsibility for this failure, not just the Biden administration,” Mr. Krummrich said. “That said, I believe the majority stakeholder for the failed transition and evacuation crisis is the Biden administration as they set the timetable and operation in motion.”
Mr. Krummrich laid out a sequence of four decisions that led to calamity.
— Failure to follow the Doha agreement. “There were seven conditions the Taliban had to meet to trigger our full withdrawal from Afghanistan. An agreement only works when both parties participate. The Taliban failed six of seven conditions,” he said.
Among those conditions was a reduction of violence by both sides. “We greatly curtailed our support to the Afghan forces, weakening their offensive ability while the Taliban increased their attacks by up to 70 percent,” he said. “Yet we still began our withdrawal, giving no incentive to the Taliban to follow any of the conditions in the Doha agreement.”
— “Selective intelligence blindness,” which Mr. Krummrich said was clearly evident by administration and State Department officials “selectively choosing the intelligence” that confirms their preferred narrative.
“There was very little evidence that the Biden administration’s plan would work and a mountain range of evidence to suggest the plan would fail,” he said, noting all military commanders on the ground and in the Pentagon advised Mr. Biden not to withdraw until all Doha agreement conditions were met.
“These seasoned experts were ignored, and a best-case scenario plan to withdraw immediately started the domino effect to catastrophe,” he said.
— Bad Timing. The withdrawal window for a summer withdrawal ending Sept. 11 was occurring “during the peak of the well-known fighting season, when Taliban are at their strongest, most aggressive, and most logistically capable. Why would we leave the fragile Afghan government vulnerable to the Taliban’s strongest advantage? Why did the tactically meaningless ’20 year anniversary of 9/11’ drive the timeline?” Mr. Krummrich asked.
— Short planning and execution window that provided “limited time for Department of Defense (DOD) and interagency to fully plan and execute the withdrawal,” he said, citing a military “planning maxim—one-third time to plan, two-thirds time to rehearse before we execute the operation.”
As Sgt. Maj. Smith had explained, there was no plan, no discussion of a plan, no “worst-case scenario” after May or June.
“Prudence and patience were replaced with speed of action without the time to study the consequences and mitigate those risks,” Mr. Krummrich said.
As terrible as things turned out, he said the United States actually caught a break in August 2021.
“I hate the Taliban; they are the enemy,” Mr. Krummrich said. “I will give them credit for one thing: they helped us leave. It was the only part of the Doha agreement they honored. If the Taliban chose to, they could’ve shot down our evacuation aircraft and humiliated us even further on the way out.”
‘Never Again’ ... Again
Mr. Kolenda began his testimony by noting the hearing was on the 16th anniversary—June 27, 2007—when his unit “was involved in the biggest firefight we had in a 450-day deployment in Afghanistan.”Hundreds of insurgent fighters tried to trap a platoon in a Nuristan Province valley. Six soldiers under his command were killed that day, including a beloved platoon leader, by an RPG, “a boom I still hear today.”
He founded a nonprofit, the Saber Six Foundation, to honor the six soldiers he lost that day and will forever feel responsible for, a sense that successive administrations and federal agency leaders do not share because there is no accountability for decision-makers on battlefields where few of those decision-makers dare to venture, he said.
When the debacle at HKIA came down, Mr. Kolenda—who had retired by 2021 but was part of the Doha negotiating team—said he was “angry.”
“We’ve been at this for more than 20 years, $2 trillion [spent], more than 2,300 dead and tens of thousands with wounds both seen and unseen, and it all came crashing down like a house of cards,” he said. “I was disgusted—disgusted knowing Afghan military commanders were creating ghost soldiers so they could take their pay, selling their soldiers food, fuel, and ammunition on the black market. Kleptocracy that had become the Afghan government where government officials would just take the money and run.”
“I was disappointed that another war had ended in disaster. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. One disaster is a horrible accident; two disasters is a tragic coincidence; three disasters in these large-scale interventions fighting insurgencies is a disturbing trend that suggests that we are not learning from experience,” he said.
“In each case,” he continued, “our troops fight valiantly. They do exactly what they are told and do it to a very high standard. But too often, the policy and the strategy are not worth their sacrifice, and that has got to change.”
The same mistakes occurred in Kabul that unfolded in Saigon and Baghdad, Mr. Kolenda said, drawing a diagram for the panel to illustrate how, under the current operational chain-of-command, “There is nobody functionally in charge of our wars on the ground in theater.”
Atop the decision-making tree is the White House and the National Security Council. Below are “different bureaucratic silos” of decision-makers. In Afghanistan, it was at least four—DOD, State Department, USAID, and the international community.
All are making independent decisions, he said. Meanwhile, “there’s nobody in charge of this group on the ground. Had there been somebody in charge of this group on the ground, what you would have seen is a plan that not only synchronized the military withdrawal but also the evacuation,” Mr. Kolenda said. “So, until we get this problem fixed where we actually have somebody in charge on the ground, we are going to continue to be at high risk of these kinds of disasters.”
That, agreed lawmakers Mast, Crow, and Michael McCaul (R-Texas)—Foreign Affairs Committee chair who participated in the hearing—is what the succession of hearings this year ferreting through the Afghan withdrawal is all about: So this never happens again.
Sgt. Maj. Smith opened his testimony by noting as an active-duty soldier, it was “not his place” to judge who did or didn’t do the right thing or to blame one set of politicians over another for the catastrophe he and others in uniform endured, not just that day in Kabul but over the course of a long war that most of the decision-makers wanted to ignore.
But he ended his comments with a “final bit of personal opinion” shared by veterans since tribal elders sent young warriors to fight their battles.
“The mission asked of this company, and the subsequent Marines, soldiers, airmen, sailors, and coalition forces called to reinforce this small security contingent was monumental,” he said. “The military executed this mission and the closure of Afghanistan with honor, integrity, and dignity.
“There is no force in the world that could have executed such a chaotic and difficult mission better than our U.S. and coalition forces did under the direst of circumstances. They were asked to control absolute panic and anarchy, and they somehow did it.”
