Decisive Point Podcast – Ep 4-02 –COL George Shatzer – “Afghanistan: The Logic of Failing Fast and Slow”

In the fifth installment of the SRAD Director’s Corner, “Afghanistan: The Logic of Failing, Fast and Slow,” George Shatzer focuses on the failure of the US-led war and reconstruction campaign in Afghanistan. He reviews The Forty-year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold by Tariq Ali and The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman. He brings personal experience to bear in his review, painting a picture of why the United States failed in Afghanistan and posing these failures as lessons that must be learned before the next war. The books also provide insights for strategists attempting to plan for security in the region.

Keywords: NATO, policy, strategy, Afghanistan, logic

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/4/

Episode transcript: “Afghanistan: The Logic of Thinking Fast and Slow”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Decisive Point.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army, War College, or any other agency of the US government.

In your SRAD Director’s Corner series you review books of possible interest to contemporary military strategists, especially those serving in US Army and Joint positions. The spring issue contains the fifth installment of this series, and the focus is on Afghanistan. Thanks for joining us again.

Colonel George Shatzer

Thanks as always for having me. I enjoy discussing these important issues.

Host

Each of you articles in the series include a personal component. You have had direct experience in dealing with the issues and strategies discussed in the books you review. That’s true again with the topic of the US war in Afghanistan.

Shatzer

Yes, very true. I don’t claim to be an expert on Afghanistan but that country and the US war there have factored significantly in my Army career. The terror attacks of 9/11, emanating partly from Afghanistan, inspired my interest in national security and strategy and were a big part of the reason I chose to become an Army strategist in 2005. As a much younger officer then, I felt strongly that the so-called Global War on Terror should have remained centered on Afghanistan and the terror groups operating there. My views on that have changed some over the years, but the issue of our commitment to campaigning in Afghanistan remained the vital question all the way to the collapse of the campaign in 2021. And, I know we’ll take more about that later. I was also a student at the Army’s Command and General Staff College in ’05 and decided to write my master’s thesis on proxy warfare which led to me to research and write a lengthy case study on the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980’s and the subsequent Afghan civil war that led to the development of the foreign terrorist base there. And while I would continue to follow events in Afghanistan closely, it would be another nine years before I actually served there in country. The experience was probably the most difficult of my entire career. That tour challenged me the most intellectually and was personally and professionally very trying.

Host

So, an easy question then – why did the US war in Afghanistan fail?

Shatzer

Oh boy. Joe Collins’s article in the same edition of Parameters does a great job at answering this. I offer many reasons why in my article as well. The reality is that the array of problems in Afghanistan is vast and their nature is so complex as to almost be alien to us as Americans. But if I had to select the one issue that set up the US campaign for failure it would be the mismatch in the aims of US political leaders and those of the US military.

For the Department of Defense, and especially the Army as the lead service in the campaign, there was a deep-seated reluctance to fully commit to a war in Afghanistan. Even years before 9/11, the DoD and the Army actually did a fair job of examining the British and Soviet experiences in Afghanistan and concluding that operating there was a dead end – a graveyard of empires as the phrase goes. So many books like the Bear Went Over the Mountain by Les Grau, The Bear Trap by Mohammed Yousef, and post 9/11 works like Soldiers of God by Robert Kaplan were very popular and all played on the same theme: that powerful militaries go into Afghanistan and cannot deal with the terrain, the culture, and myriad other issues, and only end up wasting years and precious resources. So, DoD and the Army planned what amounted to a very large-scale raid of Afghanistan beginning in October 2001 to punish and oust the Taliban and to capture and kill as many Al-Qaeda and other terrorists as possible – and, critically, to not become so decisively engaged with a large footprint of conventional forces that would only lead to a long-term and aimless campaign vulnerable to failure.

But US civilian leadership had a different view. While they recognized what history had to say about major powers entering Afghanistan, they were rightly aggrieved by the Taliban’s treatment of its people, especially women and children and the internal violence that had gripped the country since at least the mid-1970’s. To US political leaders, 9/11 was proof that a deep commitment to and investment in Afghanistan was needed to end the decades of conflict there and eliminate so-called “ungoverned spaces” – the underdeveloped and seemingly chaotic hinterlands of Afghanistan that gave bad actors like terrorist groups free range to operate. So, while DoD and the Army were thinking “in and out with some training to get the new Afghan security forces up and running so they could quickly take over,” the US civilian authority was thinking, “nation-building, democratization, remaking Afghan society and bringing it into the modern era.” This fundamental misalignment of views set the stage for what followed – a never-resolved tension between a “realist” view (held mostly by the military) and an “idealist” view (held mostly by civilian authority. The military, imbued with a can-do mission first attitude, dutifully followed orders but never fully committed to Afghanistan because it assessed the country as beyond help. The civilian reconstruction mission was deeply committed to the future vision of Afghanistan but failed to be cleared-eyed about the profound difficulties there. Unfortunately, this created a tendency by both camps to overstate progress year after year.

This disconnect in views, aims, and assessments created a dynamic that badly undercut the campaign and made it much less able to deal with the whole host of other problems in Afghanistan that it faced.

Host

So, from a very high-level view there were serious issues. During your tour in Afghanistan you experienced how that played out day-to-day. Describe that.

Shatzer

Sure. Expanding on what I mention in the article, what I experienced even preparing for deployment to Afghanistan demonstrated the limits of our commitment. I should say that I deployed to Afghanistan as an individual augmentee to the mission, not as part of a deploying unit. The Army’s individual augmentee deployment preparation was geared almost exclusively toward training service members for personal self-protection while in country and refreshing on basic tactical soldier tasks. To the extent that there was training on Afghan culture or on the US campaign, it was barely more than what you might find on Wikipedia. Even as a senior lieutenant colonel who had done serious study on Afghanistan in the past, and did another round of my own professional study before deploying, I felt grossly unprepared to deal with the tough operational and strategic issues facing the plans team that I joined at NATO headquarters.

On top of that, as I mention in the article, the turnover in personnel in the NATO headquarters was tremendously disruptive. Most personnel were on six-month long tours with a small minority assigned for a year. In my year-long tour, the plans section had four US colonels serve as the chief of plans. Two different British brigadiers would serve as the plans director. It seemed every month there was an officer either joining the section, leaving the section or going on R&R leave. This contributed to a pervasive sense that many were just putting in their time – doing their reports, delivering briefings, engaging with Afghans – but at the same time detached from it all as they anticipated the next drawdown or going home. For most of my tour, LTG John Campbell commanded the mission and he recognized this short-timer attitude and approach. He tried to combat it. He frequently said, “Make the days count, don’t count the days.” Too many individuals were just counting the days. Institutionally, the Army was doing much the same.

Host

That’s a major point that Elliot Ackerman makes in his book, The Fifth Act.

Shatzer

Yes, he does. He relates how after nearly a decade in Afghanistan that the US Combined Joint Special Operations Task force headquarters was still made from plywood – a fact noted by our Afghan partners in the observation that “wars are not won with plywood.” Ackerman extends this point into a metaphor. The Afghan army was a plywood army, effective for some things but foundationally unsound in so many ways for trying to win an actual war. His point of course, is that our short-timer, always partly-preparing-to-leave approach undercut the effectiveness of everything we tried to do. We were always dealing with expedients, trying this and that for “quick wins,” but frequently shifting means and methods when priorities invariably shifted as people passed through the mission.

Ackerman recounts how he, like many other veterans of Afghanistan, t...