17 Years in Afghanistan....What Have We Accomplished?

Next month we mark 17 years since the US invasion of Afghanistan, certainly the longest single military effort in US history.

Our original goal was to destroy Al-Qaeda and oust the Taliban that were protecting them. Since that time, a great deal has happened, and mostly the law of unintended consequences has been the victor. Security and political stability still seem elusive. US government understanding of the country and the region still seems sketchy at best, and corruption still seems rampant. And even with all of that, some think real peace is still possible. Where we are today and what’s really happening on the ground, and what the US can do, even if it had the will and competence to do it, are subjects that I talk about with RAND senior foreign policy expert Laurel Miller.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Laurel Miller:

The Afgan war is far from over

It's been sixteen years since the beginning of the post 9/11 US war in Afghanistan. A nation that has often been referred to as the "graveyard of empires" has been no kinder to the might and prowess of the United States. Again an American Defense Secretary is visiting the country amid chaos and war.

While our initial efforts there were seen as “the good war,” we’ve paid the price of knowing so little about the culture, the history and politics of the area.  What we didn’t know would fill a book. Former Washington Post Kabul bureau chief, Joshua Partlow, has written that book Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster

My conversation with Joshua Partlow:

From Kabul to the Oval Office

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is often quoted as saying that “you can have your own opinion, but not your own facts.” This is as true in looking at the world, as it is here at home. There are lots of opinions about the US role and US actions in the world, specifically the Middle East. However, facts come first. And part of those facts include an understanding of the people, the history and the nuance of the region. Our domestic politics has debates every day about who best understand the American people...why should we conduct our global affairs without a similar understanding of others?

When it comes to the Middle East in general, or to Afghanistan, to Iraq and even our international policy architecture in the post war era, few understand the people, the history and the nuance better than Zalmay Khalilzad. He’s served four Presidents and has traveled from a small village in Afghanistan to the pinacle of the Oval Office. He tells that story in The Envoy: From Kabul to the White House, My Journey Through a Turbulent World

My conversation with Zalmay Khalilzad:

Why do we always get it wrong?

Forty plus years ago, in Vietnam, we saw how the best and the brightest could ignore history, ignore truths and facts and conduct one of our nation's most disastrous wars.

Ten years ago this month, we saw how lies, inept personnel and poor and corrupt execution destroyed any hope of success in Iraq. These decisions still plague us today.

Four years ago, back into 2009, we thought that the Obama administration was fighting "The Good War," when it decided to surge US troops and civilians in Afghanistan. Yet again, we ignored history, didn’t send the best personnel, engaged in bureaucratic infighting and thought money could buy our way out. It did not.

Why do we keep making these same mistakes? Is it that the fault is not in stars, but in ourselves? These are some of the issues examined by esteemed and award winning journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran in his book Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan.


My conversation with Rajiv Chandrasekaran:

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The Fog of 10 Years of War

All the talk about drones lately seems to miss the larger point. What compels us, what disturbs us, is the sanitized way in which we conduct warfare today. The disconnect from death, violence and the human suffering that is war.

Kurtz understood war by journeying into its Heart of Darkness. Today, it’s from 30,000 feet. It’s a different view of war. It’s also a metaphor for how we as Americans have witnessed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In neat, pre-packaged sound bites. Disconnected from combat, body counts and the horror.

Now, ten years after the start of these wars, were beginning to hear the real stories of what went on, from the men and women who were there.

Matt Gallagher and Roy Scranton, two veterans of the wars, have written for and edited a new collection of stories entitled Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War.

My conversation with Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher:

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The war within the war for Afghanistan

There is an old saying that goes, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." When we look at US foreign and military policy since Vietnam, it's shame on us. Buy why? In Vietnam, the best and the brightest lead us into disaster. In Iraq, the mistakes of the last administration cost us dearly in lives and treasure. In the early days of the Obama administration, the decision to surge troops into Afghanistan was equally ill timed, ill conceived and once again showed how intelligent people and politics, even when linked with good intentions, can lead us into a disasters situation.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, senior correspondent and Associate Editor of the Washington Post, brilliantly showed us how this happened in Iraq, in his award winning Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Now, in his new work Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, he takes us deep inside the military and civilian decisions and actions that negatively impacted our Afghan policy.

My conversation with Rajiv Chandrasekaran:

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Understanding Afghanistan & why it matters

It has been said that Afghanistan has been the graveyard of empires. Certainly, in modern times, the Soviet Union paid a heavy price for it’s adventurism in Afghanistan. More recently American lives and billions dollars have been shed in the service of what may really be local, provincial political interests, inside that country.

Today, ten years after 9/11, what do we really know about this country, its real link to international terror, and its role in the larger regional and geopolitical issues shaping this volatile region. For thirty years few have know this place better than journalist Edward Girardet. Now he has distilled and shared much of that knowledge into his new work Killing the Cranes: A Reporter's Journey Through Three Decades of War in Afghanistan.


My conversation with Edward Girardet:

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The Wrong War

The war in Afghanistan is now America's longest war. The 2014 completion of mission still remains years into the future. Yet after all of this, there still seems to be a lack of clarity about our objectives and and about how we might achieve them. We seemed to have broken the momentum of the Taliban. The people don’t seem to want to live under Taliban rule, but neither do they want American rule. There seems to be no "what’s next." We say we don’t want to “nation build”, bet we’re supporting and helping to build up a corrupt and irrelevant central government. Like Vietnam, we say we want to win the hearts and minds of the people, yet what price does this objective have on the warrior ethos we expect of our military?  In short, how do we exit Afghanistan, with clear goals, honestly obtained and most of all what can we learn that really can help us fight the next war?

Bing West, a former Marine combat veteran, a former assistant Secretary of Defense and brilliant chronicler of war, shares his insights into Afghanistan in The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan.

My conversation with Bing West:

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