So, Who's To Blame For Afghanistan?

Timothy Kudo is pissed:

America’s retreat from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years of war, $2 trillion in taxpayer dollars, and 2,448 dead service members is nearly complete.

...We can now say that this war, in which I fought in 2010–11, will end in defeat. The Taliban currently controls half of Afghanistan’s districts and actively contests an additional quarter that, on paper, remain in government hands. 

...For the second time in the modern era, including the Vietnam War, our military has not accomplished the mission prescribed by the White House and Congress. ... It is the generals and admirals’ foremost job to fight and win wars; dozens of them in every branch of service, across presidencies of both parties and multiple generations, have decisively failed.

Across two decades, our military leaders presented rosy pictures of the Afghanistan War and its prospects to the president, Congress, and the American people, despite clear internal debate about the validity of those assessments and real-time contradictory information from those fighting and losing the daily battle against the Taliban. Or, to put it in the words of John Sopko, the inspector general who issued a series of reports known as the Afghanistan Papers: “The American people have constantly been lied to.”

The promise that victory was just around the corner proved intoxicating to presidents and politicians, not to mention everyday Americans, who blindly trusted anyone with four stars on his epaulettes. ... Cloaked in near-universal trust, these officers repeatedly argued that an unwinnable war could be won.

For example, when President Obama put an 18-month deadline on the surge of 30,000 troops he would announce at the end of 2009, Gen. David Petraeus said, “The timeline was just sprung on us.… And we were then asked, are you all OK with that? [Obama] went around the room and everyone said yes. And it was take it or leave it.” But he later admitted thinking at the time that “40,000 additional U.S Forces was the minimum needed to do the mission” and that it would take much longer than the president’s timeline. And in uniform-clad testimony to Congress, he failed to air his concerns, instead selling the war as vital to the national interest and being fought with a winning strategy.

...These men should have been fired like any other person who fails to do their job. During World War II, it was common for officers of all ranks to be relieved for failing to achieve military objectives. But since Vietnam, the generals have had the kind of job security only afforded to tenured professors. ... The military can only remain an honorable profession if those who partake in it are willing to accept shame as a consequence of failure. But for far too many generals, shamelessness is exactly what is required to reach the top of the flagpole.

...Gen. David Petraeus, who, along with Gen. James Mattis, was a primary architect of our counterinsurgency approach in Iraq and Afghanistan, continues to be idolized in American culture. Petraeus broke the Uniform Code of Military Justice by cheating on his wife—an offense any lesser service member would have been harshly disciplined for—and illegally sharing classified intelligence with a reporter. Generals like Petraeus trade on the trust the American people give them to act with impunity during and after their military service because they justifiably know that they are above the law.

But even an officer like Mattis, who is revered in the Marine Corps and considered one of the great military minds of his generation, should not escape culpability for our loss in Afghanistan. As a two-star general, Mattis upheld a similar standard during the Iraq invasion, when he was one of the few commanders to relieve a subordinate during wartime for failing to achieve a battlefield outcome. ... By any normal standard, Mattis is a decent and honorable man, and yet the stakes are too high in war to hold generals to a normal standard.

...Whatever lessons we learn from Afghanistan will be meaningless if they don’t result in consequences for the war’s leaders. That means no lucrative speeches, no hagiographic book deals, no fawning interviews, no plum sinecures in the private or nonprofit sector, and no appointments to blue-ribbon government posts. May they, in the words of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, end their “military career and just fade away”—and may their retirement be spent quietly contemplating the profound damage they’ve done to their country.