Brian L. Steed
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We Have the War We Deserve

17/8/2021

20 Comments

 
When I teach military officers, I lay all of the blame for the conduct of the Global War on Terrorism at their feet.  They do not like this.  We often agree that we didn’t win in Iraq or Afghanistan, but when I ask why, the answer usually includes accusations of blame leveled against politicians, the White House, the Pentagon, or the US Department of State.  I tell them, that they are responsible for everything.

I also take my share of the blame.  The failures in Iraq and Afghanistan are my fault.  I trained and taught many officers who have led from the platoon to the battalion level, over the last 20 years, in either Afghanistan or Iraq.  I spent more than a year in Iraq and more than eight and a half years in the Middle East.  It is my fault.

I also tell the officers that they are right in that there is blame enough to go around.  Everyone that they list is also to blame, but because I am not talking to those audiences, my focus is on the audience to whom I am speaking.  I quote a line from one of my favorite movies – Miracle (2004) – “You worry about your own game. Plenty there to keep you busy.”

I am writing this post in a state of disgusted anger and frustration.  The events of the weekend of 14 and 15 August 2021 in Afghanistan have been the reason for anger at the waste and failure and disgust at the mismanagement and misrepresentation of the facts on the ground.  In part, this post is part of my personal emotional therapy.  Thank you for indulging me.

On Friday, 13 August 2021, my wife and I interviewed an Afghan military officer as part of a reference book we are writing/editing on the war in Afghanistan.  This officer is an ethnic Tajik and he gave tremendous insight into the challenges associated with present Afghanistan.  In our discussion, I asked him about his family and their safety as they reside in Kabul.  He said that he was not concerned as Kabul was secure.  That was 24-36 hours before news of the resignation and flight of the Afghan president and images of Taliban commanders walking into the presidential palace and Afghan civilians clinging helplessly onto the outside of U.S. Air Force cargo aircraft as they taxied and took off from the airport outside Kabul.

Throughout the images and news of this sad weekend I thought of the line from Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book Being and Nothingness (page 555): “we have the war we deserve.”  The depressing and disgusting images and news reports combined with a set of statements make true this assertion.
  • 25 days before the collapse – GEN Mark Milley (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff): “The Afghan Security Forces have the capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country…” (made during a press conference on 21 July 2021).
  • 38 days before the collapse – President Joseph Biden: “The Afghan government and leadership has to come together.  They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.  The question is: Will they generate the kind of cohesion to do it?  It’s not a question of whether they have the capacity.  They have the capacity.  They have the forces.  They have the equipment.  The question is: Will they do it? … the only way there’s ultimately going to be peace and security in Afghanistan is that they work out a modus vivendi with the Taliban and they make a judgment as to how they can make peace. ... And the likelihood there’s going to be one unified government in Afghanistan controlling the whole country is highly unlikely.” (These remarks came from a press conference on 8 July 2021).
I want to point out that Afghanistan has one unified government as of 16 August 2021.  It is the Taliban government.

Both of these senior U.S. government leaders express either ignorance or a lack of truth telling or some combination regarding Afghanistan that bring to mind the words of John Sopko (the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction or SIGAR) from a 28 July 2021 Defense Writers Group as he explained his summary of the U.S. struggles in Afghanistan: hubris and mendacity.  If by hubris one means ignorant arrogance then I am 100% behind the use of that word.

Sartre’s point of having the war we deserve has been painfully demonstrated by the Global War on Terrorism.  Meaning that the choices made by the United States government, by those responsible for directing action, for committing resources, and for establishing strategy have resulted in exactly the sort of mess that anyone could have predicted knowing the lack of skills, abilities, and knowledge on the part of those responsible.  Indifference to the environment, to the suffering, and to the conduct of the war has led to this foolish expression of will.  We have wasted tens of thousands of lives (not just those killed, but those wounded and debilitated by mental and physical injury) and trillions of dollars in a form of spasmodic expression of ignorant savagery.  Such behavior deserves inconclusive, wasteful, and ignominious defeat.  We have had the war that we deserved.

I want to do that which I deny my students.  I want to blame someone for what happened in Afghanistan.  The problem is that everyone is at fault.  I mean everyone.  I divide everyone into four categories in order of deserved blame:
  1. The generals who led, conceptualized, and reported on this war
  2. The politically appointed civilians who were supposed to oversee, direct, and challenge the generals in their leading, conceptualization, and reporting
  3. The media who were supposed to hold the political appointees and generals to account for their ability to properly execute their assigned responsibilities
  4. The citizens of the United States of America who should have paid attention to the war enough to make the politicians care about what was happening

One of my colleagues has stated that the problem in Afghanistan is that not enough American people died there.  By that he means that not enough people died to generate the attention necessary for citizens to demand accountability.  This is sadly true.  While we had military personnel in Afghanistan for nearly twenty years, the American populace probably only paid attention to the war for less than one year spread out over that twenty years in the form of a few weeks here and a few days there.  We cared about special forces riding with Northern Alliance fighters on horses, we cared about the toppling of the Taliban, the fighting around Tora Bora, the friendly fire that killed former NFL player and US Army Ranger Pat Tillman, we cared about the story of Marcus Luttrell especially when the movie Lone Survivor was released in theaters, we cared about the killing of Osama bin Laden, and we cared about the collapse of the Afghan national government in July and early August of 2021.  That was it.  Thus, we deserve the war we have.

Remember, that I blame myself.  I advised generals, I briefed political appointees, I spoke with and wrote to media, and I am a citizen.  This is my fault.

As much as I am mad at these four groups for their individual and collective dereliction of duty, I am more disgusted at the current military, political, and media organizations and institutions that are failing to learn from what is happening.  We are failing to try to know why the most powerful military force spent twenty years in a country to have that country’s military – that we built – apparently collapse in six weeks.  I say apparently because the Afghan National Army has been fighting, bleeding, and dying with little support for months before the seemingly rapid disintegration of will that so many are pointing to.  We are almost racistly blaming the Afghan people themselves for our ignorance, arrogance, and mendacity as I read or hear the phrase “graveyard of empires” expressed over and over again.  As if to say it is the fault of the Afghan people that they couldn’t or wouldn’t conform to our demands, dance to our tune, or play the roles that we prescribed.

It was our ignorant arrogance that allowed us to roll in without studying the country.  We continued to fight in Afghanistan without thinking that we needed to change our professional military education system to teach and train our leaders to understand the environment in which we were operating.  Even in the last couple of years, we had our eyes on some magical Large Scale Combat Operation like some sports car that we hoped to buy while ignoring the rusted and broken down heap in our front yard.  Maybe Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires because every empire has been hubristically ignorant enough to believe that it did not need to change to understand and work with Afghanistan rather than against it.  Maybe every empire has believed that it could be mendacious with itself that success was happening or just around a corner or that the corner had just been turned.

Afghanistan should be teaching us.  We need to humbly start from the beginning with everything.  We need to change our professional military education, our political science and international relations curricula, and we need to change our economic development paradigms based on what we learn from Afghanistan.  We are wrong when we think that money buys better governance.  We are wrong when we act as if equipment and training equal capability.  We are wrong when we ignore our own history and act as if the American Founding Fathers did not understand about governance and that their model isn’t worth seeking to pattern.  We are wrong when we think that working from the top down builds a country.  We need to start with an honest, rather than mendacious, appreciation of what happened and try to appreciate why it happened so that we can promise ourselves, our citizens, and our children that this will never happen again.

Lots of people know this and knew this.  I have read and listened articles, blogs, texts, posts, podcasts, and comments from very smart and experienced people who have been saying this for years.  We need to listen to these men and women and stop listening to those who have failed us for twenty years.  Here is the litmus test for who to listen to or read: if they fail to take ownership for this failure then don’t listen to them.  The group that we should avoid must include military leaders, political leaders, reporters, and common citizens so long as they cannot be honest about their culpability in the failure.

We need to hold accountable those who have failed.  I include myself.  I am studying, interviewing, writing, and teaching to try to understand this environment as it is, as it was, and I am trying to understand what it will become.

Until we do this the war that we deserve will never be a war that we want.
 
My recommendations for where to start to understand what happened:
Podcast: Generation Jihad by The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Long War Journal.
Website/Blog:
  • Long War Journal.  Especially, anything written by Bill Roggio or Tom Joscelyn.
  • Tribal Analysis Center
Books:
  • Malkasian, Carter. The American War in Afghanistan: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
  • Malkasian, Carter. War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
20 Comments
Evan Williams
17/8/2021 22:50:55

I appreciate you writing this. Although you gave me less than stellar grades in class, your message resonates with people who have spent time overseas and I will always remember lessons you taught our group. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria..... we (DOD) continue repeating the past and leaving behind the relationships we all built with the local populace. I pray for the Middle East and the rest of the world and hope they find a way to survive and succeed while we as an American society do the same.

Reply
Brian Steed link
19/8/2021 18:51:15

Less than stellar? You were a joy to have as a student.
it is up to great leaders like you to be great thinkers and courageous in pointing out the mistaken framing of senior leaders. God bless you in this work.

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Patrick Sullivan
18/8/2021 21:03:00

I am not a politician, a member of the media, or a veteran of any war, but I accept blame for our tragic failure. As we learned in grade school, if you give a man a fish - he will eat for one day; but if you teach him how to fish, he will eat for a lifetime. We cannot simply throw money at something and hope that fixes it. We must pay attention, ask questions, and learn what the issues are before we can hope to make anything “better”. I have spent most of my career in corporate America bringing people together to improve processes, to be more efficient and productive. It is not easy, but success is life-changing. I have faith that your students and readers will strive for change, improve the processes that determine how we address conflict, and … eventually, give us not the war we deserve but the peace that is every human’s right. Thank you.

Reply
Brian L. Steed link
19/8/2021 18:52:54

Thank you for taking ownership and for your kind words. The more people who admit their responsibility the greater the chance that we can prevent any similar tragedies in the future.

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Martin Car
20/8/2021 09:10:42

Spot on! I agree 100% with your assessment!

Reply
Brian L. Steed link
22/8/2021 20:11:17

Thank you for the praise.

Reply
Jeff Crawford
26/8/2021 13:32:52

Normally, I stay clear of articles and media reports concerning the Middle Eastern. As a veteran, it helps me stay balanced, and focused on today, and tomorrow. However, I was intrigued by your articles approach and its broad range of collective fault scope; including self.
The further leaders are removed from the Squad and Platoon level, the more they become uninformed of raw facts.
Thank you for a great article.

Reply
Brian L. Steed
29/8/2021 08:02:02

Thank you for the comment.
I think that it is impossible to be connected with people beyond four or five levels of separation. As such, it becomes very difficult for a battalion commander and effectively impossible for a brigade commander to understand what is actually happening with their people.

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Rick Steiner
31/8/2021 08:39:39

Nicely written. I was the Deputy Commander of CJOTF-AP in Iraq 2004-2006 (two tours). It was the culmination of my 19 years as an SF officer.
In Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan, my experience was that US senior leaders consistently fought a war based on how they wanted to operate and based on the tools they were experienced with, regardless of the actual war that they had on their hands. It was bizarre and maddening. They also wanted to believe we could achieve “victory” (which was never actually very well defined), without doing what was actually going to be required to thoroughly defeat the enemy (in other words, we didn’t have the stomach for the fight).
The problem is so pervasive that I elected to retire as an O-5 rather than continue to play losing ball.

Reply
Brian L. Steed
1/9/2021 15:25:52

I am sad to read of your frustrations, but I can empathize all too well. The US military often confuses action with progress and we don't want to criticize results as we often confuse them with sacrifices.

Reply
Art Jacobs link
31/8/2023 08:03:35

Deja vu all over again - March / April, 1975. George’s Santayana: Those who do not understand their history are condemned to repeat it. Read Barbara Tuchman’s book, “The March of Folly.” All about hubris.

Reply
Brian L. Steed
31/8/2023 13:31:45

Thank you for commenting.
You are correct. I have a quote that I love from Williamson Murray that goes like this:
“One of the most frequently quoted axioms of historians is that generals prepare for the last war and that is why military organizations have a difficult time in the next conflict. In fact, most armies do nothing of the kind, and because they have not distilled the lessons of the last war, they end up repeating most of the same mistakes.”
The reason we don't learn is that we don't study.

Reply
Art Jacobs link
31/8/2023 10:16:37

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I offerr a quote from Thucydides, Greek (Athenian) Historian & Philosopher (460-395 BC): There wee a great number of young men who had never been in a war, and consequently wee far from unwilling to join in this one." The problem with democracy is that it can never be a "gift." It can never be presented to a people "free of charge." Unless it is devised, earned, sweated for, fought for, nurtured, and most importantly, preserved and protected from within, it will not last. It will quickly falter and crumble. Corruption, cronyism, and selfishness are more decisive and deadly than bullets. Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, and Zimbabwe are just a few examples from the last 50 years. When will we learn that cultures are rarely changed from the outside. Whether you are talking about individuals, orr societies, true and lasting change only occurs from within.

Reply
Brian L. Steed
31/8/2023 13:33:49

Amen!
You are absolutely correct.
All foreign policy is also derived from domestic policy. It is crucial to have the house in order if one is to go abroad seeking monsters to slay.

Reply
David Holden
5/9/2023 09:38:19

Brian,

This is excellently written and concise (totally not like you). At 24 I vividly remember standing on a hill that overlooked Kabul. I turned to a fellow LT, as we looked at the graveyard of Russian vehicles below us, and I asked “what the f*ck are we doing here?” It was a rhetorical question. It was obvious to me as a LT that we were clueless even then.

Reply
Brian L. Steed
6/9/2023 06:44:42

I miss our interactions and I would love to speak with you about what is happening in the country and the world. I hope that all is well for you.

I find it interesting just how much our failure to acknowledge our problems with Afghanistan bothers me. The college has done nothing to try to figure out its role and whether or not it could have done more to help the effort be more successful.

Reply
Smith link
6/9/2023 11:27:02

If regime change was the objective of offensive action in Iraq, then we did not lose there. It wasn't perfect, we made plenty of mistakes and there were a lot of things we could and should have done better.
However, as was said to me by a number of Iraqis, Iraqis now have the opportunity to determine their own fate, to govern themselves. What they do with that opportunity is up to them, not us.
The Iraqi military faced ISIS. They stumbled initially but to the surprise of many of us who helped train that military, with a little help from some friends, they regrouped and fought off the threat.
I agree with your points as relates to Afghanistan. My only question is, where was the disconnect? Company level NCOs and Officers were pushing up accurate reports of the situation on the ground. At what level did those reports take on a rosy glow such that anyone higher believed that the Afghan military and government was not going to collapse to the Taliban the minute US forces and influence evacuated the region?
What happened after 11 Sep 2021 was not a surprise to anyone with relevant experience that I know.

Reply
Brian L. Steed
6/9/2023 18:11:17

Thank you for your reply.
I strongly disagree regarding Iraq. Winning or success in war is not about objectives. It is about enhancing and improving interests and influence. The war in Iraq did neither. In fact, it did the exact opposite.
As far as the disconnect, I can't say exactly. The sad reality is that we teach officers to lie from the most junior ranks. They will never call it lying. It is coloring the truth or shading the facts or providing spin. Regardless, it is something varnished rather than raw and the more coats of varnish the less and less things look like they really are. Thus, by the time a general briefs a senator or congressperson what is said is not reflective of what is really happening.

Reply
Troy Albuck
9/9/2023 21:41:31

I strongly disagree with the way our time in Afghanistan and Iraq, this time, are categorized. Precise terms must be employed precisely. Neither, this time, was a war. Both are Counterinsurgency Operations and as such are generational and can take twenty to fifty years to successfully prosecute. The problem clearly is that the majority of the U.S. Army is not configured or trained for that. The part that is only did very brief deployments. An ODA shows upfor a few months looking to go kinetic a few times and leave. Us lowly conventional units stay for a year or two but aren't actually trained for that environment. Strategic level leadership is only in place for four to eight years and is voted out in some cases by citing lack of success in an artificially short time as the reason. So, clearly America isn't cut out for that type of work. Sub contract that out to someone with more guts and staying power than America or don't get involved in the first place. This shouldn't even be handled by folks who dress like a tree. It must instead be the purview of the State Dept. They need to get a lot better at this and I suggest giving them the budget and people to do so. What's missing is a way for State to generate greater numbers and higher quality folks, like an ROTC for the State Dept. The ground forces can focus on winning wars and State can handle diplomacy to head off insurgencies. A little refocusing to the correct in boxes as it were.

Reply
Brian L. Steed
11/9/2023 15:43:53

I disagree Troy. You are making distinctions where no differences are present. You can call what happened in Afghanistan or Iraq wars or not, but the world knew what they were. They were wars.
It should not matter why, specifically, we lost the war, whose fault it was, or how certain organizations did or did not deploy to the theater. Those were choices made by the United States and executed by the United States. If they were bad choices, then this only adds fuel to the fire regarding government incompetence in fighting or managing a war. Everyone is to blame. Some are more to blame than others and I am happy for the groups that you identify to shoulder their share of that blame.

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    Brian L. Steed is an applied historian,
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