Iraq and Afghanistan wars: Are we doomed to repeat these debacles?

I cannot separate them. I would also argue if you look at the military socially, they’re not that separate. There are senior officers who served in one but not the other, [but] there was a great body of troops from midoccupation Iraq to, let’s call in shorthand, the Obama surge of 2009 and ’10 and ’11 who served in both. They formed a core of these wartime experiences. The repeat veterans who were in both wars and who showed up in Afghanistan. … In some cases, they showed up in Iraq having experienced Afghanistan, but more commonly they showed up in Afghanistan during the Obama period with a lot of Iraq experience and it affected a lot about that war. The equipment that was used, the tactics that were used, the doctrine and other ideas that were transferred. These wars are deeply intertwined, and I find them impossible to separate except almost as an academic exercise.

What about just in terms of what you think they have or haven’t accomplished?

Why don’t I stop you right there? I mean, what they have or have not accomplished? On whose terms? On the military’s terms? On the military’s terms, they’ve failed. Let’s make a list of things the military said it was going to do or that it predicted would happen. It didn’t accomplish those things. We have had an endless recreation of the security partners, the Iraqi or the Afghan security forces, that we were developing and training, fostering, equipping, mentoring, fighting alongside. These units often were made of sand.

In both wars, these were central, let’s call it, midwar objectives of the military and they were touted repeatedly and sometimes almost triumphantly as things that were progressing well. They did not progress well. They progressed poorly. Let’s talk protecting populations, right? Perhaps the centerpiece of the American counterinsurgency doctrine, the reboot of that counterinsurgency doctrine, as pitched. Did we adequately protect the populations? I mean, you can find cases where of course we did. On balance and on aggregate I think we can point to an enormous amount of social and property destruction on our watch where we were supposed to do those things and they didn’t happen. That’s not even to get into the loss of life, which was many times the order of magnitude of ours.

Let’s talk about fighting corruption. I mean, corruption remains endemic in both countries. Let’s talk about the counter-narcotics piece. We tried a number of other strategies that were intended to wean the local economies and farmers off of poppy production and encourage them to grow other things. Do you think poppies aren’t growing in Afghanistan right now? In places where we and many Afghan security partners lost their lives and limbs?

I mean, we can go on, but you get the point. If we want to use the Pentagon’s own terms we can point to some successes here and there and certainly the killing of Osama Bin Laden is high on that list. If we talk across the wide slate of things that these wars were supposed to accomplish on the Pentagon’s own terms, those things didn’t happen as advertised.

When you read accounts of the Obama and Trump administrations or even maybe the late Bush administration, you get a sense of people pushing policies that they may not totally even believe themselves can work. Obviously we saw this in other wars, like Vietnam, where sometimes policies would be pushed knowing that this was putting a Band-Aid over something and was not actually going to succeed. Is your sense that there was a time that the military collectively stopped believing that these wars could succeed, and do you think that filtered down to the men and women on the ground? And what effect would that have, if it did?

Let me cut it into parts. Using the words the militaryis kind of like using the word music. It’s big. It has too many meanings. The military that I mostly look at and what this book is about is the lower ranks. War history is, in my view, too much general and not enough sergeant. My lenses are down there around the sergeants, above and below. Up to captain typically and down to privates first class. That’s where I physically inhabited these words and observed them most closely.

I worked for a big newspaper, and we had other people who were covering the organizers of the war and its senior commanders. I wasn’t one of them except for occasional glancing interactions with the generals. I just did not look there. Let’s talk about the part I did look at. I think it was quite clear that the rank and file and the midlevel people actually fighting the war day to day understood that the things their campaigns were supposed to achieve were unrealistic and unlikely to happen. That was almost seen among the people I came to know well as not even really their concern. They had daily missions or hourly missions. They had immediate things to do, and they did them.

They worked within their competencies and within the time they had to fight, to help each other. When they encountered resistance to win that fight, the battles were typically brief because the other side would run away before fire support was maxed. They operated there. I had the sense often that they recognized many of the objectives were unobtainable and there was a lot of, on the better days, wry disapproval and, on the worst days, bitter disgust at some of what they heard coming out of the mouths of the higher commanders about what would be accomplished in these countries. I think many of the soldiers knew it wouldn’t work.

I also think, and I mean this sincerely, that that wasn’t in many ways their mandate. Their mission isn’t to turn the country around. Their mission is much narrower than that. They worked on these missions almost invariably in good faith and with great energy. They saw the war as a template upon which a personal account of themselves would be written. They wanted to show up and do well for the people around them.

That’s not a political idea. That’s not even a campaign idea. That’s about personal character. That’s about being a human being. That’s a little bit separate from your question, but it bears mentioning because that was, I think, the engine of a lot of the behaviors I observed.

Do you have any hope or sense that, if the United States was about to engage in another war with lots of ground troops, that we, as a country, or people in the Armed Forces, have learned some of the lessons that hurt us over the past 15 years, and hurt the men and women on the ground over the past 15 years?

Do you have a keyboard and can you type 17 asterisks into this transcript to say there’s a big caveat here? Because I have enough trouble as a journalist and a writer or an analyst, whatever you want to call me, trying to describe what already happened. The future gets tough, right? I can’t see out into the future. I don’t pretend to have the temperature of the mind of the broader military and its decision-makers. I think that among the people I know who are in these wars for any length of time, and that’s a lot of people … I’m not going to call it a consensus because there’s no such thing in something as complicated as the military. I would say that a strong and prevailing view is a certain skepticism about our ability to occupy and project power over time in ground wars, as you described.

I think that’s understood. I think it’s inarguable. I think, yes, at the rank-and-file level and the midcareer level, or even the later-career level, because the wars are long enough that we have veterans who were at a low level before and are colonels or lieutenant colonels now … I think that those people get it, of course. Does that mean that they have any power? I don’t know. Power that projects our military forces ashore derives from the civilian side, right? From our political class. I don’t think that our political class is really connected to these wars in a way that they have a solid understanding of how our forces should be used.

I’m not sure that the future is secure from more bad decisions because the country. … It goes to that separation again, right? The country doesn’t go to war. The military does. The bulk of the military, I think, gets it. I don’t know what the country knows, but I’d be pretty worried.

• Middle East
• Military
• Iraq

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