The insanity of expecting the same

How are you supposed to feel when the person you’ve pledged to lay down your life for turns his machine gun on you?

We’ll never know how U.S. Army sergeants Javier Gutierrez and Antonio Rodriguez would have answered, killed as they were by an Afghan National Army soldier in February while their joint commando force huddled by a concrete wall at a small base in Nangarhar province. One minute they were waiting for an airlift, the next a six-year Afghan veteran named Sergeant Jawed was pumping rounds from his American-made M249 Squad Automatic Weapon into their bodies. They were both 28 years old.

Their murder was a tragically appropriate coda to America’s longest war, coming as it did while the people in charge of the whole fiasco were in Doha negotiating our withdrawal.

More than 200 coalition troops have died this way, sometimes on patrol, sometimes inside the wire, sometimes at the training facilities we built for the very Afghan army and police who do the killing. Eleven percent of all Americans killed in hostile action in Afghanistan died at the hands of an ally in a green uniform. In 2012, these “green-on-blue” murders comprised 15 percent of coalition KIA, and the Americans were forced to embed “guardian angels” in all joint NATO-Afghan units — coalition soldiers specifically assigned to guard western personnel from the betrayal of their Afghan comrades. How bitter and justified the resentments must be when the person you traveled halfway around the world to help shoots your buddy in the back on his way to the DFAC. You can begin to understand Orwell’s dissonant feelings about his imperial police service in 1920s Burma: one part of him was racked with sympathy for the poor and oppressed of Moulmein, “with another part I thought the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.”

Sergeants Gutierrez and Rodriguez were the 1,832nd and 1,833rd Americans killed in action in the graveyard of empires. They join another 20,092 Americans wounded by gunfire, IEDs and suicide bombers. The chairman of the joint chiefs was asked in December if this high price in blood was worth it, and the banality of his answer reflected his unhappy duty to command an imperial army in retreat. “I don’t think anyone has died in vain, per se,” General Mark Milley said. “For years” — for years! — “we have clearly stated that there is not going to be a rational, reasonable chance of a military victory against the Taliban or the insurgency.” No Appomattox, no Tokyo Bay (he really said Tokyo Bay). “Militarily,” Gen. Milley went on, “this has been at a state of strategic stalemate, if you will.”

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, Afghanistan was the insanity of doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same.

I don’t know exactly when American leaders in and out of uniform came to accept this kind of thinking and say it publicly. It’s shocking to me today even though it shouldn’t be. While it was going on, Americans heard nothing about the war but hopeful Afghano-jargon from government spokesmen. Everywhere there were new strategies and encouraging signs and progress amid the setbacks and jirgas with tribal elders who only wanted to live in peace and serve visitors tea. But when young lieutenants and their platoons left the villages of the Hindu Kush and returned to their outposts at day’s end, the Taliban took their place and learned all the goings-on from the same villagers.

The enemy has a vote in war, and defeat is sometimes out of our control, but defeatism is a choice. When The Washington Post published The Afghanistan Papers, hundreds of interviews given to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) on the assumption they’d remain confidential, we learned that on the inside our leaders knew it was a mess from the get-go, and defeatism was chosen early on.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” said Army Lt. General Douglas Lute, who served as a senior adviser on the war during both the Bush and Obama administrations. “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” said Army Colonel Bob Crowley, a senior Pentagon Afghan counterinsurgency adviser. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

The enemy has a vote in war, and defeat is sometimes out of our control, but defeatism is a choice.

This is presumably what military leaders said to each other over coffee and cake in Kabul while nothing changed. The only thing that did was the personnel. Leaders all along the chain of command would come and go each year, and everyone succeeded at their mission and got promoted but nothing improved, and more blood and treasure was expended by the new people to get identical results. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, Afghanistan was the insanity of doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same.

And so we spent three quarters of a trillion dollars to fight the war, $137 billion to build the nation. The depth of the reconstruction graft and waste wouldn’t be believed if it wasn’t real life. A Niagara of western money showered down on a Bronze Age society that had no capacity for it. One unnamed official told SIGAR that the current Afghan president complained back in 2002 that America was sending two-and-a-half times more money to Afghanistan than it literally knew what to do with.

But spent it was, on electrification, roads, bridges, dams, schools, hospitals, and military and police bases. Substandard was the standard in public works. Americans built a $3.1 million compound in Herat meant to train Afghan women to be police officers. There’s no electricity and it’s never been occupied. The emergency closure valves within an irrigation tunnel at Helmand’s Kajaki Dam, recently renovated for $27 million, are held in place by large lumber planks. The valves are useless in an emergency. The U.S. Agency for International Development built or rehabbed 566 schools across Afghanistan before 2013, and many of them suffer from serious structural deficiencies: cracked foundations, missing windows and doors, holes in their roofs, and “significant deterioration” from weather and war. Maybe it’s a blessing that 36 percent of the schools built by USAID don’t have the “paid for by” signs required by American law.

Waste wasn’t limited to brick-and-mortar aid. In 2019, SIGAR couldn’t determine the effectiveness of 41 Afghan drug treatment programs the State Department ran at a cost of $50 million because the State Department had no idea what was happening with the programs either (the Bureau in charge of the effort didn’t implement a plan to track its progress or keep records). SIGAR reports that every single counter-narcotics effort to stop the opium trade — every single one, from eradication to helping farmers plant other crops — failed. In 2018 the Pentagon tried to bomb the drug trade out of Afghanistan with a year-long campaign of F-22 and B-52 air strikes, but it was scrapped early last year as a failure. The U.S. spent nearly $9 billion to stop Afghan’s drug economy since Sept. 11, and for that low price Afghan farmers have consistently produced 85 percent of the world’s opium supply.

In this context, you could call America Afghanistan’s chief enabler. If you’ve ever been an enabler to someone you love, you know that the best thing you can do for them is to cut them off and walk away. It’s enormously painful. Sometimes the enabled gets better, sometimes they die. But it’s the only chance for both.

You could call America Afghanistan’s chief enabler. If you’ve ever been an enabler to someone you love, you know that the best thing you can do for them is to cut them off and walk away.

We’ll never know exactly how many fake soldiers existed only on paper, whose funding really went to dishonest Afghan politicians, police and military officers. The computer system used to track criminal cases and asset seizures was rife with missing records, a judicial petri dish for corruption and theft. Last year SIGAR examined 87 closed cases involving more than $1.75 million in forfeited cash, drugs, and weapons, and found the system contained “no information … on the location or disposition of those assets.” Child sex abuse by Afghan police and military commanders was endemic, particularly with young boys. American troops could hear the screams of children being raped by Afghan police inside U.S. bases. SIGAR found more than 5,700 cases of “gross human rights abuses” by Afghan commanders were reported to U.S. officials between 2010 and 2016, many involving children. Not once was American aid cut off from guilty units, as U.S. law required. When one Afghan police official admitted to U.S. Army Special Forces Captain Dan Quinn that he had, in fact, kept a child sex slave chained to his bed, the Green Beret “picked him up and threw him to the ground.” Capt. Quinn was relieved of his command; the Afghan official went free. That SIGAR felt the forced retirement of the first generation of post-Sept. 11 Afghan generals and colonels was a cause for optimism shows you how far the termites had spread.

What wasn’t skimmed off the top by Afghans illegally was siphoned off legally by foreigners. Big projects meant big overhead, with contract funding parceled out among various consultants, surplus subcontractors, business development activities (read, fun), first-class travel, security teams, and the rest of the government-contracting detritus you see especially in the third world before the first spade ever turned Afghan soil. The way the Afghans saw it, a U.S. official told SIGAR, “So you tell us that you just spent a billion dollars and we see $50 million worth of roads.”

The first article of American government faith in Afghanistan is that “it’s complicated.” Look on the inside of the foreheads of every international aid worker, State Department technocrat and CENTCOM staff officer, you’ll find “it’s complicated” stamped there. (“So this is a very difficult, complicated situation.” — Gen. Milley in December.)

This is the sine qua non of bureaucratic ass-covering, used to explain away every failure and deflect every responsibility. It reminds me of the scene from “Syriana” (2005) where the diligence attorney explains how everyone who should have known better did nothing to stop the company’s fraud:

Lawyers are saying, ‘Hey, if you can’t trust a Big 5 accounting firm.’ And the accountants are saying, ‘Hey, we aren’t lawyers.’ Legal didn’t understand. Accounting didn’t understand. And nobody understood anything.

If everyone’s responsible for the outcome in Afghanistan, then no one’s responsible. And that’s convenient for a lot of people.

The Council on Foreign Relations-types sniff at the Afghan withdrawal agreement: legitimacy for the Taliban and prisoner release in exchange for security guarantees. It’s the same playbook in all divided societies where the Goliath loses his will to fight. Nonetheless, Ambassador John Bolton says it poses “an unacceptable risk to America’s civilian population.” (Everything does, in diplo-speak.) Former presidential envoy to Iraq Brett McGurk suggests it will “likely produce a gradual collapse of the state, civil war, and the Taliban back in Kabul … [T]he agreement does not seem to end a war so much as plant the seeds for a new one.”

This is probably right. It’s also a tautology. In any case I am happy to leave these troubles to the Chinese and the Russians. Keeping them occupied with the mess over there is good for our interests, which is something we should try once in a while. If a terrorist safe-haven in Afghanistan really poses the risk Bolton says it does, after all the anti-terrorism defenses we’ve constructed since Sept. 11 that Bolton says we can’t live without, then there are existential risks everywhere and nowhere. Bolton’s approach isn’t a foreign policy, it’s a hall of mirrors.

That’s nothing new for America in Afghanistan, and it’s why our experience there has been so maddening. Our departure will not be satisfying, but all things end badly, or else they wouldn’t end. It’s better than the alternative. Forever countries cannot fight forever wars, and a future of great power competition against western and pseudo-western nation-states will be a welcome relief. It’s more our speed. At least the Chinese and Russians will shoot you in the front.

As for the tribes of Afghanistan, they have been throwing rocks at each other for centuries. Whatever war comes after we leave, it will have been going on for a long time.