A Road to Emmaeus

As I reflect on the war and our nation’s defeat, I remember my first and last days in Afghanistan.

In the first, I am a wide-eyed first lieutenant stepping out of a C-17 onto the sunbaked tarmac of Bagram Air Base. Blackhawk helicopters circle the perimeter, cutting across the backdrop of the Hindu Kush rising in the distance. It’s unbearably hot, and I feel an air of anticipation as I cross the threshold from peace to war. I am taking a right of passage, one that I view as essential to having a true military experience. I am following in the shadow of my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather, all of whom put on the uniform to fight our nation’s enemies far from our borders. Going to war is honor, duty, and perhaps even glory. 

In the last, I am flat on my back on the floor of the departure terminal, awaiting my flight out. Six months have passed. Snow and fog blanket the base, giving a placid, almost ghostly atmosphere to the night. I think of the quixotic moments beyond the edge of reason. I meditate on futility, the war having lost its luster in the crucible of personal experience. My mind, like a prisoner on the verge of parole, leans forward into the coming return: the safety and sunshine of the outside world. 

These are the bookends. In between, there is a stream of memories that stitch together my six months of war. A caveat: while my service records indicate that I have a wartime campaign medal, I do not consider myself a combat veteran. To claim that I “fought” in the war would devalue the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who regularly faced an array of terrors: a hail of bullets from a smoke-choked hillside, molten shrapnel from an improvised explosive device ripping through a vehicle, an Afghan soldier turning his gun on you in the far too numerous “green on blue” incidents. There is no comparison between my half a year of posh living on Bagram Air Base and the gritty, blood-soaked counterinsurgency that coalition forces waged in death traps like Marjah or the Korengal Valley. I spent most of my time sorting through esoteric spreadsheets, phoning remote outposts for their supply requests, and drafting long-winded emails. I was essentially a white-collar middle manager, far removed from the chaos “outside the wire.” I never needed my weapon, though on one occasion I found myself fervently gripping my rifle while convoying through Kabul in the back of a humvee. We were held up for about fifteen minutes by a roadblock, anxiety rippling through my skin as we idled in the middle of a marketplace, an easy target for an ambush. I wondered then how good I would be in a firefight, how much courage I could muster if forced to defend myself and others. Fortunately, I did not have to answer those questions that day or any other, and our convoy advanced without incident.

Although I didn’t “fight,” still I found myself at the apex of the war in Afghanistan in the summer of 2011, that inscrutable place forever linked to the fall of the twin towers a decade earlier. What, then, was my experience with war? To start with, I lived in relative security most of the time. Bagram was like an international metropolis, teeming with Afghans, Kiwis, French, South Koreans, Poles, Egyptians, Brits, Emirates, and many others. The base was the nerve center of our military campaign, stamped with the imprimatur of NATO and the UN, and conditions were luxurious: flushing toilets, reliable hot-water showers, gyms, and no less than four dining facilities. I lived in a plywood structure dubbed a “bee hut,” which was divided into tiny cells, each equipped with a foldout bed and a metal locker. This was my refuge after twelve hour shifts, where I retreated to watch DVDs on my tiny laptop screen and wolf down a midnight snack after an intense crossfit workout. I resolved to get in the best shape of my life, and probably did. There was going to work and working out, and not much else. It was, moreover, a mostly solitary endeavor, with little true camaraderie. I had little in common with the soldiers and airmen in my unit, and even had hostile encounters with a few of them. I disdained the office dynamics so much that I relished the opportunity to eat meals alone, whenever possible. 

There were exceptions: those whose company was not only tolerable, but enjoyable. My boss was an Air Force missile officer on a one-year stint in the sandbox, a rarity for his career field. We got along well enough, and often poked fun at the absurdity of what we were being asked to do. Once, I recall accessing a classified network for intelligence reports on the provinces within our area of operations. In a color-coded map that graded each province for levels of corruption, I noted that ours were highlighted in bright red. “Sir,” I reported, “our provinces are by far the most corrupt in the country.” “Nice, nice!” he replied, with a kind of jocular resignation. Even as we threw our lives into the job, we reserved space for a certain amount of “gallows humor” to maintain our sanity.

While I struggled to identify with my American comrades, I felt a special affinity for the French legionnaires, never missing an opportunity to practice my French language skills with their ranks. Once, while dining with a group of them, I listened to a graying French colonel wax poetic about the futility of our enterprise. “Counterinsurgency is a failure,” he declared. “We go from village to village trying to win hearts and minds, but these people live like ancient tribes in the Bible.” This colonel was prophetic in his speech, as I can now see. France was a major contributor to NATO’s training mission and had primary responsibility for Kapisa Province, which I supported by answering supply requisitions from my desk at Bagram. In one conversation with my French counterpart, he reflected solemnly on the lives his country had sacrificed for the sake of the mission. Those lives were supposed to mean something; now that we have lost the war, I think often of the French, the Brits, the Australians, and all the others who sent some of their best men and women to perish in the carnage. The weight and futility of this loss is sickening to me now, but at the time the international coalition added a novel element to my deployment. I had long idolized the French Foreign Legion, and now here I was standing shoulder to shoulder with them, united with our oldest ally to tackle NATO’s greatest challenge since the collapse of the Soviet Union. I had studied international relations as an undergraduate, and now I was doing it in real life. 

As for the mission itself, our goal was to build up the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) to an army of 300,000, which someone far above our pay grade decided would be the ideal size for holding the country together. As a logistics officer supporting the ANSF in eastern Afghanistan, I tracked equipment needs and made sure that commanders on the ground had what they needed to carry out the training mission. On occasion, I left the oasis of Bagram to see the gears of war turning elsewhere. I recall a four-hour ground convoy to Gardez, soaking in the barren landscape through the narrow viewports of my humvee: women clad in sapphire burkas, mud-walled compounds, plunging ravines, and the occasion copse of riverine trees. The next morning, when I awoke on the US-run training base outside the city, I was greeted with the silhouettes of armored vehicles, machine guns, and concrete-filled barriers. There was always this divide between us and them, between inside the wire and outside of it. Beyond the wall was a realm though which we traveled as if passengers aboard a time machine, touring a landscape of ancient values barely touched by the industrial revolution. Though I did not fully realize it at the time, the persistence of this divide all but guaranteed that our nation-building mission would end in failure.

To be sure, I did see impressive things in my travels, notably in Kabul, that confirmed our commitment to the training mission. During a brief visit to the country’s national supply depot, I toured mammoth warehouses packed from floor to ceiling with war materiel. In one, I saw thousands of metal lockers stacked like giant Tetris blocks, awaiting their turn to be shipped out to one of the regional training facilities. The national depot was supposed to become the linchpin of an Afghan-run system, in which the ANSF would be able to manage their own supply chain. During my tenure at Bagram, we managed the logistics for the Afghans while making nascent efforts to teach them how to make and fill supply requisitions. We pushed out countless vehicles and weapons from Kabul to equip the ANSF, but we didn’t make much progress in constructing an “indigenous” supply chain adapted to the Afghans’ limitations, which included mass illiteracy and lack of reliable Internet. Here again was a flaw in our thinking: believing that we could mold Afghanistan into our own image, a replica of our twenty-first century democracy and modern military fashioned from one of the world’s poorest and most isolated countries. 

In the ten years that followed my redeployment, I thought often about the war and wondered if our sacrifices were worth the ever-diminishing gains. I disagreed with the decision to remove our forces completely and was disappointed to see Biden adopt the same goal as Trump. Nevertheless, I had expected an orderly, honorable withdrawal, one that didn’t precipitate the immediate collapse of the Afghan government. Most importantly, I expected that our withdrawal would be accompanied by the evacuation of most or all of the translators, drivers, and others who partnered with us over the last twenty years. When Biden said that Kabul wouldn’t be like Saigon, I believed him. Even as province after province fell to the Taliban, I felt confident that the Afghans would not give up the capital without a fight. 

I was wrong, of course, but in retrospect no one should have been surprised. The Taliban’s ten-day blitzkrieg across the country, culminating in the fall of Kabul, revealed the Afghan government for what it was from the very beginning: a house of cards entirely dependent on American largesse. It was the spigot of unconditional foreign aid, in fact, that fueled the non-stop corruption that sabotaged our nation-building efforts. A corrupt government inevitably preys on its population and will never succeed in gaining legitimacy or commanding faithful allegiance from its soldiers. Fraud, waste, and abuse occurred so frequently during the war years that on many occasions we simply shrugged it off as the cost of doing business. I recall ordering tens of thousands of dollars in supplies to equip the Afghan military with full knowledge that the soldiers would inevitably “lose” their equipment (just as they had many times before) and demand replacements, which we would be obligated to provide. The message was known by all: don’t let perfection be the enemy of what was termed “Afghan good.” Forcing accountability on our Afghan partners was rarely a priority, and in any case we all knew that we wouldn’t be over there longer than a year. Most of us were there to get short term “results” before redeploying. I remember telling my French colleagues that were were fighting ten consecutive one-year wars, rather than one coherent, decade-long campaign. I could not have imagined then that 2011 was only the halfway point, and that these inconclusive one-year wars would be repeated ten more times before we decided to pull the plug for good. 

Over the second half of August, as coalition aircraft furiously tried to accomplish Dunkirk on steroids, I found myself overwhelmed with the same questions that haunt thousands of other veterans and family members, many of whom lost something or someone over there. What was the point of it all? How did our leaders lie for so many years about “progress” in the war and get away with it? I have concluded that our nation-building enterprise was doomed to failure from the beginning, and indeed fated to collapse without continuous military and financial support. We should never have attempted to build democracy in Afghanistan, but once we started doing so we created a new generation of young Afghans who share our values. We gave birth to them and became their protector. To abandon them now to the medieval brutality of the Taliban represents a stunning betrayal. America is not, in fact, “back.” Indeed, as we trade innocent lives to meet arbitrary political goals, America First now takes the shape of a giant middle finger pointed at our friends and allies. The chaotic and haphazard nature of our withdrawal, embodied by days of desperation and chaos outside Kabul’s airport, makes me feel ashamed to be an American. In the end, I suppose the silver lining of a Taliban victory is that the country might at last know some semblance of peace after four decades of war. It will be a brutal, inhumane peace, without respect for civil liberties or women’s rights, but some Afghans may understandably prefer that to a continuation of the status quo.  

Other, more personal questions whirl about in my head, far removed from the realm of geopolitics. What did the war mean to me? I was a young man back in 2011, barely 25. Death never seemed so near as it did then, and I came to accept my mortality with a kind of moral rationalization that made sense at the time: better for me to die than the guy with a wife and three kids waiting back home. The war was perhaps the first reminder in my life that I would not be around forever, and that the end can come when one least expects it. The war also made clear to me the depravity of the human condition, where strangers kill strangers because their respective tribes have told them it is right and just to do so. Over 200,000 people died in Afghanistan as a result of war over a twenty year period, including some 40,000 civilians. Our great crusade to bring the light of civilization to a foreign people, while noble in its intentions, also unleashed nonstop horrors upon the Afghan people. War may have moments of heroism, but it is a grisly, horrid thing whose scars remain long after the guns have fallen silent. After returning to the US, I remember the serenity of driving out into the Arizona desert and watching the sunset without the fear of being blown up. Having approached the edge of darkness and looked into the abyss, I found myself loving peace – all the banality of it – more than ever. There can never be enough peace in this world, and God knows there are far too many people who have never even tasted it. 

In remembering the war, I have come to accept that Afghanistan is and always shall be part of me. Perhaps I realize this even more now that our defeat is clear. Like other veterans, I feel the same collective ache of loss in the fall of Kabul. There is a sadness that lingers over everything now: the legionnaires who bled alongside us in foreign soil, the Afghan soldiers that we trained and then abandoned, the rosy reports of progress that belied the absurdity we could all see around us. It is the latest phase in my emotional journey of war, which began as idealism that then progressed to post-deployment cynicism. Sadness reigns now, but I’m not content to remain in it. I want to find hope after the sadness: in the Afghan refugees who find new lives in the US, enriching us all, or in the brave young women fighting for their rights under the new Taliban regime. One day, I wish for my journey to arrive in this hope. For that reason, perhaps more than any other, I will always care what happens to Afghanistan.