PERHAPS NO image better represents America’s many small wars since the end of World War II than that of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer on the roof of the U.S. embassy, back bent and arms extended, assisting waiting Americans into a UH-1 Huey helicopter. In that one frame, the photographer captured the final outcome of almost two decades of American involvement in Vietnam. Paired with images of aircraft shoved from the deck of an American warship into the South China Sea, one senses the essence of a hurried exit amid chaos engendered by wretched excess. However, that photograph snapped almost half a century ago embodies more than a single event in a single war. It is a snapshot of a string of American failures involving partisans, partners, and proxies who fought at our side or on our behalf, perhaps believing more in us and in our professed values than we have ourselves. In the intervening decades since that signal moment in the South China Sea, and really since 1945, America has engaged in a string of small wars and some that outgrew the title. Consistently, our wars requiring more than pure mass and unrestrained force have resulted in outcomes ranging from failure to inconclusiveness. The only consistent aspect is our continued inability to retain critical lessons repeatedly learned, each time preferring instead to pretend they never occurred.

As of a 2018 RAND Corporation study, deployments representing the broad geographical reach of American intervention since September 11, 2001, at least 2.77 million Americans have seen combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the Sahel and Horn of Africa, and the Philippines. Yet in 2021, the average American seemingly has only a passing understanding of the realities of warfare or the American way of war. It is an understanding seemingly more informed by World War II movies and YouTube videos than reality. Perhaps this condition is unsurprising. Only 1 percent of 330 million Americans have served in the post-9/11 wars, while 11 percent of 140 million Americans fought in World War II. But World War II was a made for Hollywood anomaly; a perfect war for what would become America’s drive-through, disposable culture. The “Good War” was four years of all-out effort driving towards clear end zones in Berlin and Tokyo Bay and spiking the ball with the utter capitulation of two quondam great powers. On the heels of World War II came Korea; reasonably quick, never understood, and quickly forgotten as a tie coming on the heels of a championship season. Whether battles or Big Macs, Americans like results now, fresh and hot and served our way. However, the anomaly of World War II notwithstanding, international competition is not a drive-through and what we want is not what we get. It hasn’t been for seventy-five years.

The American way of war is not resolute sailors coursing across blue oceans, silk-scarved Mustang pilots spiraling through European skies, or artfully smudged GIs and Marines bloodlessly assaulting bunkers. Rather, the real and present history of American warfare is one of outsourcing; of volatile marriages of convenience between the United States and its partisans, partners, and proxies. Like all relationships, they come with mixed expectations and varied intentions. Adherents to realpolitik may argue these relationships are bound only by the interests of the parties, each using the other in the pursuit of goals that may or may not be common or parallel. But like any high-stakes relationship, there is more than cold practicality at play, and the inevitable breakups leave very real lives and nations in ruin.

Having stood alongside our partners, having seen the venality and opportunism as well as the soul-shattering faith they have in America as an ideal, as that shining city on a hill, we must ask ourselves what our national morality demands of us where our partner nations are concerned. In effect, is it proper that our partners in the enterprise of war have more faith in American values than we might, that they believe in us more than we believe in ourselves? Unfortunately, in these arrangements America has not always acquitted itself well, often preferring to leave the green stuff on the nightstand and slip down the fire escape.

AFTER ALMOST a decade and a half spent propping up a series of South Vietnamese governments riddled with corruption, whose control over a culturally balkanized agrarian society largely stopped at the gates of Saigon, the American exit from Vietnam saw the disorganized retreat and ultimate capture of thousands of South Vietnamese forces. Having served a government the United States subsidized until it became no longer politically feasible, thousands were imprisoned in communist “re-education camps.” Countless others fled to uncertain futures outside the borders of Vietnam. Amongst millions of civilians caught in the middle, the mass exodus by boat of approximately 1.2 million Vietnamese saw on the order of 800,000 safely reach another country’s shores. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, between 200,00 and 400,000 Vietnamese, so-called “boat people,” died at sea. 

The outcome for regular Vietnamese forces, though tragic, may arguably represent the final table stakes in today’s state vs. state competition. But what of the other forces; those irregulars that more directly served U.S. ends, those who fought directly with, and for, the U.S. military or the CIA?

When the first U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers arrived in Vietnam in the early 1960s, they immediately recognized that the war was about more than the North/South schism created at a Geneva conference table in 1954. Trained in revolutionary warfare and thus quick to spot a dissatisfied minority, the Special Forces soldiers and their CIA paramilitary counterparts recognized the various mountain-dwelling Montagnard tribes as a third party in the conflict. There was little love lost between the lowland Vietnamese and the Montagnards, whom the Vietnamese referred to as moi, or “savages.” The Montagnards spread across southern China, Laos, and Vietnam are ethnically distinct from the Vietnamese. They are largely subsistence farmers, with a distinct set of languages, a separate religion, and a belief that the Vietnamese had denied them land promised by the French. Attracted to their loyalty, bravery, and stoic acceptance of hardship, CIA officers and Special Forces soldiers formed relationships with them that carved a martial history replete with tales of the “Happy Warriors.”

Nonetheless, after fifteen years, America withdrew from the field in Vietnam. The departure left a generation of Montagnards who spent their adulthood fighting alongside their American partners to fend for themselves between North and South Vietnam—two nations that agreed only that the Montagnards were lesser humans. Suddenly alone, they had little voice amongst the South Vietnamese and by 1975 were willing, but unable, to resist the North Vietnamese onslaught.

As South Vietnam’s government and army collapsed, many Montagnards fled to neighboring Cambodia where they faced equally savage treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Others, who remained in Vietnam, held hope that America would come to their aid. One story details a former Special Forces soldier turned USAID worker escorting two thousand Montagnards to a beach in Nha Trang where they waited for an American rescue that never came. Over decades, a precious few of the total were resettled in Montana by the CIA or assisted to North Carolina by their former compatriots in Special Forces. Those who remained titularly free were, and remain, subject to oppressive restrictions under the communist government. In 2018, Radio Free Asia quoted an ethnic Montagnard spokesman Neil Nay, “The present-day government of Vietnam imposes severe restrictions on the ability of members of its Montagnard indigenous peoples to exercise their cultural rights, to use their native languages, to obtain an education, and to secure reasonable employment opportunities.”

Likewise, the Nungs who fought with the CIA and Special Forces were fiercely loyal fighters. Ethnically Chinese, the Nung moved south to avoid living under communism and were hired by CIA and Special Forces for their loyalty and resolve. They were critical to the defense of Camp Nam Dong, in which Special Forces advisors and indigenous troops held off North Vietnamese forces attacking with a three to one advantage. The camp’s commander, Captain Roger Donlon, received the first Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam for the action and gave particular credit to the Nung security company. That extraordinary performance was not uncharacteristic according to Dan Southerland of Radio Free Asia. One Nung, Vay Nheo Nam,

…signed on with the Special Forces in 1966 when he was only 14 and served until 1972, taking part in numerous reconnaissance patrols. He fled Vietnam in 1991 with his son, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren after the government arrested his wife and interrogated her for two weeks.

Another Nung soldier, Moc Manh Cuong,

…was among about 30 Nung captured in 1966 while defending a landing zone so Americans could be evacuated by helicopter after a Special Forces camp at A Shau was overrun. More than half the defenders were wounded, and all the wounded died in captivity, a U.S. official said. Cuong was one of only 12 who survived, and he rejoined the Green Berets after his release in late 1967.

Service with American forces marked the partisans, partners, and proxies who fought for years in support of U.S. efforts as well as their families. Unknown numbers were executed, died attempting to escape Vietnam, or languished in refugee camps or under a hostile government. Those who escaped feared retribution or a forced return to Vietnam and persecution. Sadly, nativist sentiment in the United States ran strongly against the settlement of Vietnamese refugees of any ethnicity and, despite two critical pieces of legislation—the 1975 Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act and the United States Refugee Act of 1980—the number of soldiers who fought with and for the United States that actually reached the nation that enlisted them is less than those who died in the attempt.

IT IS nearly impossible to write a sentence regarding the wars in Afghanistan without including the words “betrayal” or “disaster.” Such has been the case for more than 2,300 years of foreign invasions by a cast of “superpowers,” from Alexander to the Moguls to the British and to the Soviets, the only constants are betrayal and disaster. The American experience is no exception. The betrayal, as always, will fall upon the partisans, partners, and proxy forces we have created, guided, and supported. 

The authors’ shared experience spans the American wars in Afghanistan from the earliest days of the massive CIA covert action that shattered the myth of the Soviet monolith, to the current meandering conclusion of the post-9/11 American invasion and occupation. After a combined forty years spent partnered with, or fighting against, lightly-armed tribal warriors, there is no clear outcome apparent, save a declaration that we’re tired, we’re fed up, and we’re going home. As our Afghan war sputters out, seemingly canceled for lack of interest, it is an appropriate guide to exploring the means by which America conducts the majority of its modern wars. We must ask whether the conduct and conclusions of our small wars comport with our national values. In short, we should begin to understand the predictable outcomes of continuing down the same path.

The first U.S. betrayal of Afghan proxy forces occurred in 1988–89, after the Afghan resistance, the Mujahedin, “the soldiers of god,” pushed Soviet occupation forces back across the Oxus River in the final act of ten years of brutal warfare. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan can be viewed as the precise moment when the scales of history tipped toward the collapse of the Soviet empire.

The Soviet Afghan adventure began on a snowy Christmas Eve in 1979, when the aging and ailing Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, ordered the incursion into Afghanistan. Brezhnev’s Limited Expeditionary Force was tasked with putting down the fundamentalist insurrection against the Soviet puppet government in Kabul. Brezhnev had been convinced by the KGB that the United States was either still too reluctant after its humiliating exit from Vietnam, or too distracted by its ongoing hostage crisis in Iran, to do much about his quickly tidying up of his problem in Afghanistan. Brezhnev thought he could be in and out before the Americans even took much notice.

Brezhnev was wrong.

105th Airborne and Interior Ministry special forces easily secured Kabul, killed a handful of troublesome Afghan leaders, and put Babrak Karmal in charge. But before they could set about dealing with the Afghan resistance, U.S. president Jimmy Carter responded. Predictably and unspectacularly, he canceled a number of pending agreements with the Soviet Union, such as wheat deals and the expansion of consular posts. Furthermore, Carter set in motion the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Much more quietly and decisively, Carter signed a secret presidential finding tasking the CIA to provide covert lethal support to the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation. 

Within weeks the CIA organized huge shipments of venerable British Enfield .303 rifles to the Afghan resistance fighters with the assistance of the Pakistan Army’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. It soon became clear that many of the Soviet Union’s fraternal socialist nations had no problem providing weapons to the insurrectionist forces fighting the Soviet Union’s 40th Army in Afghanistan. The CIA established an ordnance pipeline through Pakistan that, within a few months, was virtually bursting with Warsaw Pact weaponry from friendly sources such as Egypt, and later China, and several not-so-friendly sources within the increasingly wobbly Warsaw pact. Soon, the U.S.-led coalition of countries supporting the Afghan resistance grew to an impressive collection, amongst others, the United States, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and China. King Khalid bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia pledged to financially match U.S. support of the Afghan resistance in response to the godless communist Soviet invasion of a fraternal Islamic nation.

After the Carter administration handed over its growing covert war in Afghanistan to a Reagan administration eager to ratchet up pressure on the “evil empire,” the CIA program grew from a few tens of millions of dollars per year to several hundreds of millions. Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, viewed Afghanistan as critical to his strategy to bring down the Soviet Union. The other component to his strategy was a rather helpful Polish pope, whose influence in Poland—the cornerstone of the Warsaw Pact—was massive. An equally helpful Saudi oil minister kept destructive price pressures on the Soviet Union’s only export—oil. Under President Reagan, support to the Mujahedin ultimately reached more than $1 billion a year and over the course of the ten-year war, the CIA delivered several hundred thousand tons of weapons and ordnance to the Mujahedin.

By 1985, the Soviet 40th army had grown from its original “Limited Expeditionary Force” to an occupation force of around 120,000 widely dispersed troops. After stoically facing inevitable defeat and martyrdom only a few years before, Afghan resistance groups were advancing on the Soviets on all fronts, buoyed by American largesse and moral support. With more than 250,000 full- or part-time Mujahedin fighters in the field, Soviet forces suffered, though the Mujahedin and the civilian population endured horrendous casualties. Critically, Soviet air operations became severely restricted following the introduction of American Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

Brezhnev, the architect of the Soviet Union’s Afghan misadventure, died in 1982, and a succession of Soviet leaders failed to reverse Soviet fortunes in Afghanistan. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the USSR, declaring Afghanistan the Soviet Union’s “bleeding wound” a year later. He gave his commanders one year to turn things around and even ramped up Soviet operations against the Mujahedin, but failed to reverse the tempo of the war. On April 14, 1988, the signing of the Geneva Accords ended Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. The date for the final withdrawal of all Soviet forces was set as February 15, 1989, a timetable the commander of Soviet forces choreographed to the last moment of the last day.

After ten years of war, the Soviet Union admitted to losing fifteen thousand troops killed in action, several hundred thousand wounded, and tens of thousands dead from disease. The true numbers might be higher. Almost one-third of seventeen million Afghans were directly affected by the sanguinary Soviet occupation with approximately 1 million killed, another 1.5 million wounded or maimed, and 3.5 million forced into external exile in Iran or Pakistan. The United States lost no personnel during the CIA’s involvement in the ten-year covert war.

What followed the Soviet exit from Afghanistan grew rapidly into a cataclysm for the USSR and a national disaster for the Afghans. A weakened Soviet Union faced rebellion throughout its empire, dramatically culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. On Boxing Day 1991, a small detachment of Red Army soldiers marched out on the Kremlin wall, hauled down the hammer and sickle for the last time, and hoisted the Russian tricolor. The Soviet Union was no more—a victim of its own decrepitude.

In Afghanistan, a new post-Cold War construct was born of chaos: the failed state. With stunning events ongoing in Eastern Europe, the USSR, and Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the crisis unfolding in Afghanistan received scant attention from the George H.W. Bush administration or the world at large. By the mid-1990s, the state of Afghanistan ceased to exist. Civil war between the contending factions of the Mujahedin resumed, with horrendous brutality, and continued until the population was ready for any path to peace and stability. Against this backdrop, a mystical group called the Taliban became “the saviors of Afghanistan.” The United States seemed to find comfort with the new sense of order the Taliban brought to a disintegrating Afghanistan, and briefly entertained working with the Taliban on a major pipeline project from the gas fields of Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan and onward to India. But that project failed and, by the mid-1990s, the United States had fully turned its back on Afghanistan, quickly forgetting that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact was rooted in the blood-drenched soil of Afghanistan.

A QUARTER-MILLION Afghan fighters, created, sustained, and supported by the CIA in their struggle against the Soviet 40th Army, were ultimately abandoned. A small number of America’s old Afghan comrades in arms were able to find their way to the United States. But with the concepts of betrayal, revenge, and blood debt firmly fixed in Afghan culture, the now-abandoned fighters who served as proxies for the United States in the brutal, ten-year war were forced to take a second look at their former friends. Thus, the sons, grandsons, and nephews of a quarter-million Mujahedin warriors, either “your best friend or worst enemy,” became the Taliban. Soon they would face off against American troops and a new set of Afghan proxy forces who replaced them as favored by Uncle Sam.

On October 7, 2001, President George W. Bush launched America into its new war in Afghanistan. Preceded by the insertion of CIA and U.S. Special Forces teams into Afghanistan to prepare the ground, Operation Enduring Freedom commenced with massive bombing and airborne assaults. The operation made quick work of dispersing the Taliban and taking something initially resembling control of Afghanistan.

The Bush administration attempted to meet the letter of U.S. and international law. Within two weeks of the 9/11 strike, the U.S. Congress passed legislation titled, “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists.” The Bush administration subsequently made what it believed to be a compelling case for authorization of U.S. action in Afghanistan under the United Nations Charter, a question never effectively resolved. Nonetheless, in December 2001 the United Nations Security Council authorized the creation of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to assist the Afghan Interim Authority in maintaining security and the Bonn Conference selected Hamid Karzai the leader of the Afghan Interim Authority. The second American adventure in Afghanistan was in motion. 

At peak, American forces in Afghanistan reached more than 100,000, almost the same number of troops the Soviets had at their own peak, garrisoned at almost exactly the same spots across the expanse of Afghanistan. In addition, according to the Brookings Institute Afghanistan Index, at the height of the war, there were almost 110,000 U.S. Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan and an almost equal number of local national contractors. Through the end of FY2020, the combined costs of all of the U.S. wars in South Asia and the Middle East totaled $6.4 trillion, according to the Watson Institute of Brown University’s Report in November 2019. According to the Congressional Research Service Report of December 23, 2020, the cost of World War II, in today’s dollars, was $4.1 trillion. Major nation-building costs following World War II, specifically the U.S. Marshal Plan for Europe, were approximately $135 billion in today’s dollars. 

The American response to the 9/11 attacks came swathed in the flags of many nations. That the cause was righteous was not in doubt and international forces participating in ISAF numbered in scores. But as years wore on, signs the American effort was beginning to spin out of control were becoming apparent and by 2014, most of those countries were gone. Now, twenty years after the initial invasion, the second U.S. betrayal of Afghan forces is underway as America slouches towards the exits.

The withdrawal of the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan is one that should be managed with exquisite forethought—a requirement unlikely to be met in a war long guided by political exigency and reinvented almost annually as yet another corner is supposedly turned. An entire generation of Afghans has been born and grown into young adulthood in a society influenced, if not entirely afforded, by an American presence. We must understand that when we depart we leave behind hundreds of thousands of Afghans in whom we have engendered belief in national and local government institutions we created in our own democratic image, with little thought given to their survivability in our absence. We depart with the hope of a population whose percentage of university students over the last twenty years has grown from less than 30,000 to over 185,000 since 2001. We pack up and leave with the expectations of the women who have tripled their numbers in Afghan schools. We take with us the standard of living of a “wired” Afghan population whose access to the Internet rose from 0.01 percent of the population in 2002 to 13.5 percent of the population by 2018 and a “connected” Afghan population where mobile cellular subscriptions rose from 25,000 in 2002 to almost 22 million in that same time. When the last American plane departs Kabul International Airport, so too departs the remaining hope of the 58 percent of the population who still believes the country is headed in the wrong direction and the 73 percent who believe that the greatest single problem facing Afghanistan is insecurity. This is not a case for staying in Afghanistan. This is an illustration of just some of the realities of what appears to be an inevitable decision to withdraw completely.

IF THERE is one issue where the incoming Biden administration seems to agree with the outgoing Trump administration, it is the apparent determination to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan. The Vietnam debacle may not ultimately be the perfect cautionary tale for the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but if we are to leave entirely, we must seriously contemplate the fate of the Afghan National Security Forces now. Peace negotiations with the Taliban in Doha may be reassuring to some, but the chances for smooth reconciliation in Afghanistan after so many years of warfare remains in serious question. Regardless of the results in Doha, an Afghanistan without U.S. forces will be an entirely new standard. Any agreements will at best be fragile. The United States must take into account that the main points of any agreement will likely fall apart soon after our forces leave the field for good. We must ask ourselves of what we are willing to simply wash our hands.

Over the course of our twenty-year engagement in Afghanistan, indigenous security forces have grown from under 5,000 at the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom to more than 350,000 today; about 200,000 under the Ministry of Defense and another 150,000 under the Ministry of Interior. Those numbers do not include veterans of the Defense and Interior Ministries who have retired from service due to wounds or longevity. Agreements with the Taliban aside, the obvious first question will be whether these Afghan security forces will be adequate for, and committed to, protecting the population and the established Afghan government entities the United States created. Will they stand fast when inevitable hostilities with the Taliban break out or will there be significant levels of desertion and defection? That is an unknown. What is known is that there will be a settling of accounts and retribution following an American withdrawal. Those Afghans who have fought at our side, serving as combatants, interpreters, or other close support personnel will inevitably turn to us for salvation. Will we bring them with us? Will we issue visas for them and their families, a process that has not so far given any Afghan cause for faith? Will we simply abandon them? These are just some of the deeply moral questions the incoming Biden administration will face. Our historical record is not promising. Even the relatively well-publicized category known as “Special Immigrant Visas” for Iraqi and Afghan translators/interpreters, designed for those “who worked with the U.S. Armed Forces or under Chief of Mission authority as a translator or interpreter in Iraq or Afghanistan” is available to only fifty persons a year. It is a program in which administration has been so rife with flaws and inefficiencies that far more than fifty Afghans and Iraqis are in very real danger as a result of very real service to American forces.

As in Vietnam, civilians will suffer for an American departure. There will be a massive movement of Afghans across “The Zero Line,” as the border with Pakistan drawn by the British in the nineteenth century, is known. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan almost three million Afghans took refuge across the Zero Line, a demarcation recognized only by Pakistan. There the Afghan drama will play out as it always has. Will the United States walk away from its Afghan adventure completely and consign another generation of hopeless Afghan youth to the waiting arms of the extremist mullahs in the madrassahs of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas? How will we avoid some of our best-trained partner forces in Afghanistan joining the vicious Haqqani Network when American subsidies and trainers disappear? Will we be prepared for events at the Zero Line and help Pakistan deal with the inevitable? Again, the signs are not auspicious. 

AFTER DECADES spent using $100,000 munitions to destroy $1,000 water buffaloes in Vietnam or $2,500 mopeds in Afghanistan, American defense planning currently revolves around great power competition (GPC) and the need to reset for a high-end fight with an international competitor such as China. This seems logical if GPC is simply moving to the fore for planners and force modernizers as irregular warfare takes a step back. But that is not the case. We are once again seeking to deny inconvenient reality; that we fight the wars with which we are presented while preparing for the ones that never come.

American military history is rife with repeated attempts to deny the basic truth that in practice the American way of war is predicated upon working by, with, and through third-party forces, and has been since 1950. It is a style of warfare built upon commitment and trust, two factors that American culture and impatience largely make us incapable of implementing effectively. Worse still, our national predilection for drive-through convenience and a chronic lack of a strategic constant ultimately results in the predictably consistent abandonment of the forces we entice to serve on our behalf. 

To be sure, America’s partners bear responsibility for sidling into bed with us. They come with their own tortured histories, calculated subterfuges, unrealistic goals, and cultural complications. But in the end, we must ask ourselves whether we want to truly be the shining city on the hill or just a Potemkin village. We must ask if we are a people who mean what we say and can seal a deal with a handshake, or whether we are geopolitical hucksters who yell, “You should have read the fine print!” over our collective shoulder as we shimmy down the hawsers and sprint toward the next shiny object.

War is where we find ourselves truly illuminated. Do we like what we see? If the answer is to be yes, we must acknowledge that there is a duty of care when asking fellow humans to take up arms on our behalf. That is not to say that any and all interventions must end in a Marshall Plan. Take for example a rare success in America’s small war history: Ronald Reagan’s bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi in April 1986, in response to the Libyan bombing of La Belle Disco in West Berlin. The heinous bombing of the nightclub by Libyan agents killed three people, including an American serviceman, and injured 229. The operation in response spanned seven hours from first launch to final recovery of all U.S. combat aircraft involved. Two American F-111 pilots were killed in the operation with a reported sixty Libyans killed. There was no occupation of foreign territory, no partisans, partners, or proxies, and ultimately no entanglements to unravel. It was a success not to be repeated over the course of the post-WWII era.

In all of our past small wars, and all those contemplated for the future, there must be some acknowledgment of an implied duty of care after some point in a prolonged relationship. A CIA paramilitary officer recounts entering a remote Afghan village in 2002 and being asked if he was a returning Russian. Explaining that he was from America, he was shocked that the man to whom he was speaking had not heard of the United States. One imagines if the Russians return in twenty years they will certainly be thought to be Americans. Had the United States departed Afghanistan by October of 2002, having brought the justice of fire and destruction to Al Qaeda and effectively dispersed the Taliban, it would have been wholly righteous. We could have, in clear terms and actions, told the Taliban masters and Afghanistan “This is what we do when you give us cause,” and then left. The “Mission Accomplished” banner then-President George W. Bush hung aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 could have been moved up a year and actually been accurate. But we didn’t leave. We stayed and poured trillions of dollars into trying to build a unified nation where one has never stood and at some point, we implied a commitment to the future of a nation that we’ve never bothered to understand. To betray it now is to invite another generation of blood debt.

There now exists an entire generation of Afghans who have never known a nation without an American presence. The median age of Afghanistan is 19.5 years, almost precisely the length of our presence there. There exists an Afghan National Security Force structure we have made in our image, particularly ironic for our nation given that we are yet to reckon with the reality of our own predominant style of warfighting. Flying over Kabul at night one sees electricity, neon lights, bustling traffic. None of this existed in any significant measure at the start of this century. We must at least tacitly acknowledge that none of it will exist in ten years if America abandons its partners. That is not an argument for staying in Afghanistan; it is simply a statement of highly probable fact. It is a measure of the blood calculus with which we must reckon if we are to be true to the national character with which we believe ourselves imbued. It is simply a question as to whether we will fulfill a duty owed to our partisans, partners, and proxies and whether a morality born of blood bonds is not an essential component of what it means to be American.

In 2010, an Afghan colonel, somehow simultaneously hopeful and cynical said, “I hope you stay here forever. I want to be Germany or Japan. If you don’t, there will be rivers of blood.” The same year, then-Vice President, now President, Joseph Biden claimed that the United States would be out of the country by 2014, “come hell or high water.” Two election cycles later, on January 15, 2021, Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller announced that America had achieved troop levels of 2,500 personnel in Afghanistan and 2,500 in Iraq. While declaring that further withdrawals would be conditions-based, he specifically noted that troop levels could conceivably be at zero by May 2021.

We’ve been here before. Alas, so have the Afghans.

Milton Bearden is a Distinguished Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for the National Interest. His highly decorated thirty-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency included service as chief of the Soviet and East European Division in the Directorate of Operations, and as head of the CIA’s covert support to mujahedeen fighting against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

Russell Worth Parker is a United States Marine Special Operations Officer retiring to write and teach. His more than twenty-seven years of service included infantry and special operations assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a member of two separate special operations task forces, he worked with all elements of the Afghan National Security Forces.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Special Operations Command, the United States Marine Corps, the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the United States government.

Image: Wikipedia.