I know Col Anderson having personally served with him. He has been a thorn in public officials’ sides for many years. Even while on active duty he was an avid writer. For example, In December 1988, in a Washington Times article, Gary criticized the Air Force, suggesting that it be dissolved and folded into the other military branches. The piece earned him a personal call from the Commandant and a temporary stay from public writing. “He took my crayons away for a while,” Gary said.
I suspect no one reading this post will have difficulty agreeing with Gary’s thrust. That abysmal, downright disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan where Marines lost their lives needs to be thoroughly investigated and some one in the hierarchy held accountable, and I don’t mean some colonel or brigadier general. Heads need to roll, but generals investigating generals is a joke. The upper echelon of flag officers are as inept and unprofessional as they have ever been.. Let’s just refer to them as members of the GPA (General’s Protective Association). Put retired senior enlisted and field grades who ate Afghan dirt on the investigation team, and we will find the truth.
There is so much truth in this article about our generals. Read and learn.
Keeping the Generals Out of the Afghanistan Investigation Is a Great Idea
6 Jan 2022
Military.com | By Gary Anderson
Our general officers should not be allowed to investigate themselves, and any conclusions about the rapid collapse of the Afghan government and its military forces inevitably will be tied to the actions of those officers who for two decades shaped U.S. strategy.
The recently passed annual defense policy bill includes a requirement for a new study of the failures in Afghanistan. In the past, it was pro forma to appoint retired flag rank officers, usually four-stars, to lead such an investigation. The current legislation precludes the generals and admirals who were part of the problem, as well as members of Congress serving since 2001, ostensibly a roundup of all of those who were responsible for the decisions made in Afghanistan.
That is a good call, but giving the Investigation three years is not; the war will be ancient history by then.
Several recent opinion polls suggest that the traditionally high regard that Americans have held for our military is eroding. But a closer look shows that the public still respects our troops. It’s senior military leadership that is losing the trust of the public. Americans appear to be far ahead of Congress, which let the generals who fouled up the Afghan evacuation off the hook with a proverbial slap on the wrist during hearings last fall.
The sad truth is that our flag rank officers have become merely another political interest group. They know that upon retirement they will be appointed to the boards of think tanks, corporations and universities. Going along to get along is the norm, and one never criticizes another member of the club.
This careerist, risk-avoiding atmosphere has been developing for years. Not all modern general officers are guilty, but far too many are. This goes a long way in explaining why no senior flag officer demanded that serious questions be asked about the course of the war in Afghanistan while their subordinates, particularly in the enlisted ranks, knew it was going sideways for two decades.
I listened as soldiers and Marines complained bitterly of being told that they had to abandon terrain that they had fought hard to take and hold because a general officer miles away had decided that it was no longer important or that the Afghans would take over, when it was obvious that they were not ready. Some of the revolving door American commanders in Kabul tinkered at the margins, but none had the intestinal fortitude to ask the really hard questions such as:
Why did we create an Afghan army in our own image? Soldiers from Herat in the west were defending Kabul while soldiers from Kabul were defending distant Herat. Regional forces would have made sense. That was the way the Taliban organized; they were not dependent on outside supplies that might or might not arrive, or far away chairborne Afghan generals who were pocketing soldiers’ pay. Such a reorganization was possible even as late as 2019, but the idea was never seriously considered.
Why was the Afghan air force not a priority? Given the nation’s abysmal road system, the only way to support remote army posts was by air. The Afghan air force was always a secondary consideration. Support to the air force was one of the first capabilities to be eliminated as the decision to leave was implemented while remote outposts were being left to wilt on the vine, and no American general officer had the moral courage to go public with the fact that the organization could never be self-sustaining.
About roads, why was the completion of the Ring Road, which would have connected the nation to Kabul, never a military priority? Instead, construction was left to often corrupt civilian contractors who lacked the ability and force protection to operate in contested areas. In 2012, my civilian District Support Team and our military partners in the remote northwest of Badghis Province were still totally dependent on NATO aerial resupply. That was 11 years after the initial NATO incursion. Nonetheless, no U.S. commander voiced opposition to handing over the province’s defense to the Afghan government, which was totally unprepared to assume the responsibility. Instead of publicly telling President Barack Obama the truth, the American commander of NATO forces, Gen. John Allen, punted.
Finally, as it became obvious that we were going to quit the country, why was the defensible Bagram Air Base abandoned in the dead of the night and the vulnerable Kabul Airport chosen as a point of embarkation? This was military incompetence of the highest order. Thirteen service members died unnecessarily, and no one has yet been held accountable. The same holds true with a drone strike that decimated an innocent Afghan family.
Who then should make up the congressionally mandated Afghanistan investigation commission? There are many retired midgrade officers who served in Afghanistan and have gone on to succeed in business and in the academic world over the past few decades; some are now in Congress. The same holds true of any number of enlisted personnel who have achieved advanced degrees.
People who saw the war up close should make up the commission. There should also be retired State Department and CIA operatives who knew what was really going on while the generals acted as combat tourists, occasionally visiting the troops and handing out challenge coins.
Without the perspective of those who did the real fighting, we will learn nothing.
Who is Bing West? In case you do not know of him here is a quick rundown from Wikipedia of his early life as a Marine and shortly thereafter:
West was an infantry officer in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. He led the mortar platoon of 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines. Later, he served with a Combined Action Platoon that fought for 385 days in a remote village. He was also a member of the Marine Force Reconnaissance team that initiated “Operation Stingray”: small unit attacks behind enemy lines. He authored a study at the RAND Corporation entitled “The Strike Teams: Tactical Performance and Strategic Potential”. This paper was the featured event at the 1970 Department of Defense Counterinsurgency Research and Development Symposium. The RAND Military Systems Simulations Group implemented a classified model of West’s concept. This doctrinal innovation was directly opposed by Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), which favored the Army’s concept of Air-Mobility “Fire and Thunder Operations”. By way of rebuttal, West wrote The Village, chronicling the daily lives of 15 Marines who protected Vietnamese villagers by living among them in their hamlets. The book became a classic of practical counterinsurgency and has been on the Marine Corps Commandant’s Required Reading List for five decades. (One of only three books I have ever read about the Vietnam War – great read if you’ve not).
Our disaster in brief
By Bing West
Following 9/11, a bit of wreckage from the Twin Towers was buried at the American embassy in Kabul, with the inscription: “Never Again.” Now Again has come. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Taliban flag will fly over the abandoned American embassy and al-Qaeda will be operating inside Afghanistan. Fifty years from now, Americans will stare in sad disbelief at the photo of an American Marine plucking a baby to safety over barbed wire at Kabul airport. What a shameful, wretched way to quit a war.
The root cause was extreme partisanship in Congress. By default, this bequeathed to the presidency the powers of a medieval king. The Afghanistan tragedy unfolded in four phases, culminating in the whimsy of one man consigning millions to misery.
Phase One. 2001–2007. After 9/11, America unleashed a swift aerial blitzkrieg that shattered the Taliban forces. Inside three months, al-Qaeda’s core unit was trapped inside the Tora Bora caves in the snowbound Speen Ghar mountains. A force of American Marines and multinational special forces commanded by Brigadier General James Mattis (later secretary of defense) was poised to cut off the mountain passes and systematically destroy al-Qaeda. Instead, General Tommy Franks, the overall commander, sent in the undisciplined troops of Afghan warlords, who allowed al-Qaeda to escape into Pakistan. Thus was lost the golden opportunity to win a fast, decisive war and leave.
Acting upon his Evangelical beliefs, President George W. Bush then made the fateful decision to change the mission from killing terrorists to creating a democratic nation comprising 40 million mostly illiterate tribesmen. Nation-building was a White House decision made without gaining true congressional commitment. Worse, there was no strategy specifying the time horizon, resources, and security measures. This off-handed smugness was expressed by Vice President Dick Cheney early in 2002 when he remarked, “The Taliban is out of business, permanently.”
On the assumption that there was no threat, a scant 5,000 Afghan soldiers were trained each year. But the fractured Taliban could not be tracked down and defeated in detail because their sponsor, Pakistan, was sheltering them. Pakistan was also providing the U.S.–NATO supply line into landlocked Afghanistan, thus limiting our leverage to object to the sanctuary extended to the Taliban.
In 2003, the Bush administration, concerned about the threat of Saddam’s presumed weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq. This sparked a bitter insurgency, provoked by Islamist terrorists, that required heavy U.S. military resources. Iraq stabilized in 2007, but by that time the Taliban had regrouped inside Pakistan and were attacking in eastern Afghanistan, where the dominant tribe was Pashtun, their own.
Phase Two. 2008–2013. For years, the Democratic leadership had been battering the Republicans about the Iraq War, claiming that it was unnecessary. By default, Afghanistan became the “right war” for the Democrats. Once elected, President Obama, who said that Afghanistan was the war we could not afford to lose, had no way out. With manifest reluctance, in 2010 he ordered a “surge” of 30,000 U.S. troops, bringing the total to 100,000 U.S. soldiers plus 30,000 allied soldiers. The goal was to implement a counterinsurgency strategy, yet Obama pledged to begin withdrawing troops in 2011, an impossibly short time frame.
The strategy aimed to clear villages of the Taliban, then leave Afghan soldiers — askaris — to hold them and to build infrastructure and governance linked to the Kabul central government. In a 2011 book titled “The Wrong War,” I described why this strategy could not succeed. In Vietnam, I had served in a combined-action platoon of 15 Marines and 40 local Vietnamese. It had taken 385 days of constant patrolling to bring security to one village of 5,000. In Afghanistan, there were 7,000 Pashtun villages to be cleared by fewer than a thousand U.S. platoons, an insurmountable mismatch. Counterinsurgency would have required dedicated troops inserted for years. President Obama offered a political gesture, not a credible strategy.
My experience was different. In trips to Afghanistan over ten years, I embedded with dozens of U.S. platoons. When accompanying our grunts, the askaris did indeed fight. But ten years later, it remains a mystery to me why our generals refused to acknowledge what our grunts knew: namely, that the Afghan soldiers would not hold the villages once our troops left.
This wasn’t due to the structure of their army. The fault went deeper. The askaris lacked faith in the steadfastness of their own chain of command. Afghan president Hamid Karzai reigned erratically from 2004 through 2014, ranting against the American government while treating the Taliban with deference. His successor, Ashraf Ghani, a technocrat devoid of leadership skills, antagonized both his political partners and tribal chieftains. Neither man instituted promotion based upon merit or imbued confidence in the security forces. Familial and tribal patronage pervaded.
From the Kabul capital to province to district, from an Afghan general to a lieutenant, positions and rank depended upon paying bribes upward and extorting payments downward. We were caught on the horns of a dilemma caused by our political philosophy. Because we wanted to create a democracy, we chose not to impose slates of our preferred leaders. On the other hand, the askaris had no faith in the durability or tenacity of their own chain of command.
In contrast, the Taliban promoted upward from the subtribes in the different provinces. While decentralized, they were united in a blazing belief in their Islamist cause and encouraged by Pakistan. The Afghan army and district, provincial, and Kabul officials lacked a comparable spirit and vision of victory.
Phase Three. 2014–2020. From 2001 to 2013, one group of generals — many of them household names — held sway in the corridors of power, convinced they could succeed in counterinsurgency and nation-building. That effort, while laudable, failed.
But that did not mean that a Taliban victory was inevitable. Quite the opposite. A second group of generals came forward, beginning with General Joseph Dunford. The mission changed from counterinsurgency to supporting the Afghan army with intelligence, air assets, and trainers. President Obama lowered expectations about the end state, saying Afghanistan was “not going to be a source of terrorist attacks again.” U.S. troop strength dropped from 100,000 in 2011 to 16,000 in 2014. With the exception of Special Forces raids, we were not in ground combat, so there were few American casualties.
Battlefield tactics shifted to what the Afghan army could do: play defense and prevent the Taliban from consolidating. By 2018, U.S. troop strength was lower than 10,000. Nonetheless, General Scott Miller orchestrated an effective campaign to keep control of Afghanistan’s cities. Afghan soldiers, not Americans or allies, did the fighting and dying. The last U.S. combat death occurred in February of 2020.
Nevertheless, narcissistic President Trump, desperate to leave, promised the Taliban that America would depart by mid 2021. He cut the number of American troops in country to 2,500. With those few troops, General Miller nonetheless held the line. The U.S. military presence, albeit tiny, motivated the beleaguered Afghan soldiers. When the Taliban massed to hit the defenses of a city, the askaris defended their positions and the U.S. air pounced on targets. In addition, our presence provided a massive spy network and electronic listening post in central Asia, able to monitor Russia, China, Pakistan, and Iran. At a cost of no American lives and 5 percent of the defense budget, Afghanistan had reached a stalemate sustainable indefinitely at modest cost.
Phase Four. Bug-out in 2021. President Biden broke that stalemate in April of 2021, when he surprised our allies and delighted the Taliban by declaring that all U.S. troops would leave by 9/11, a singularly inappropriate date. As our military packed up, the miasma of abandonment settled into the Afghan psyche. In early July, our military sneaked away from Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night, which triggered a cascading collapse. Once Afghan units across the country grasped that they were being abandoned, they dissolved. What followed was a chaotic evacuation from the Kabul airport, with the Taliban triumphantly entering the city.
Asked why he had pulled out entirely, President Biden said, “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point, with al-Qaeda gone?” That stunning fabrication was a denial of reality: Al-Qaeda are commingled with the Taliban in Kabul. As the world watched, America had to rely upon Taliban forbearance to flee. President Biden had handed America a crushing defeat without precedent.
Evacuees wait to board a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 23, 2021.
President Biden has claimed that the ongoing evacuation occurred because the Afghan army ran away instead of fighting. In truth, the Afghan soldiers did fight, suffering 60,000 killed in the war. Their talisman was the American military. No matter how tough the conditions, somehow an American voice crackled over the radio, followed by thunder from the air. Those few Americans were the steel rods in the concrete. When that steel was pulled out, the concrete crumbled. The spirit of the Afghan army was broken.
During the month following the abandonment of Bagram Air Base, the Pentagon remained passive. In contrast, a month before the abrupt fall of Saigon in 1975, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger was concerned about the North Vietnamese advances. As a former grunt in Vietnam, I was his special assistant during that turbulent time. He informed State and the White House that he was ordering an air evacuation; 50,000 Vietnamese were rescued before Saigon fell. In the case of Kabul, the Pentagon took no such preemptive action.
Worse, selecting which Afghans can fly to safety has been left to State Department bureaucrats, although State has an abysmal ten-year record, with 18,000 applicants stuck in the queue. Each day approximately 7,000 undocumented immigrants walk into America; about 2,000 Afghans are flown out daily from Kabul. In the midst of an epic foreign-policy catastrophe, the priorities of the Biden administration remain driven by domestic politics and constipated bureaucratic processes.
What comes after the botched evacuation finally ends?
(1) A course correction inside the Pentagon is sorely needed. Our military reputation has been gravely diminished. The 1 percent of American youths who volunteer to serve are heavily influenced by their families. About 70 percent of service members have a relative who served before them. The Afghanistan War spanned an entire generation. What they took away from this defeat will be communicated from father to son, from aunt to niece.
To avoid alienating this small warrior class, the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs must put aside their obsession with alleged racism and diversity in the ranks. Former secretary of defense Mattis said that lethality must be the lodestone of our military. Sooner or later in the next six months, we will be challenged. Instead of again waiting passively for instructions, the Pentagon should recommend swift, decisive action.
(2) President Biden’s image as a foreign-policy expert is indelibly tarnished. As vice president in 2011, he vigorously supported the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq. Three years later, U.S. troops were rushed back in to prevent Iraq from falling to the radical Islamists. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote at the time, “he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.”
President Biden bragged that under his leadership, America was “back.” Instead, while denying that our allies were upset with his performance, he has destroyed his credibility. Perhaps there will be changes in his foreign-policy team, but President Biden himself will not be trusted by our allies as a reliable steward.
(3) In his Farewell Address, Washington wrote, “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.”
As Washington warned, due to extreme partisanship, the American presidency has accumulated the powers of a king or a despot. In matters of war, over the past several decades one party in Congress or the other has gone along with whatever the president decided. This tilts power decisively in favor of the White House. Congress has abdicated from providing either oversight or a broad base of public support. The White House as an institution has become regal and aloof — the opposite of the intention of the Founding Fathers.
Afghanistan, from start to finish, was a White House war, subject to the whims and political instincts of our president. The result was an erraticism that drove out strategic consistency and perseverance. A confident President Bush invaded Afghanistan, blithely expanded the mission, and steered a haphazard course from 2001 through 2007. Presidents Obama and Trump were overtly cynical, surging (2010–2013) and reducing (2014–2020) forces while always seeking a way out divorced from any strategic goal. President Biden (2021) was a solipsistic pessimist who ignored the calamitous consequences and quit because that had been his emotional instinct for a decade.
(4) Our Vietnam veterans were proud of their service. The same is true of our Afghanistan veterans. In both wars, they carried out their duty, correctly believing their cause was noble. After nation-building was designated a military mission, our troops both fought the Taliban enemy and improved life for millions of Afghans. With the Taliban now the victors, it hurts to lose the war, especially when the decision rested entirely with one man.
Who are we as a country? Who will fight for us the next time?
This article appears as “Who Will Trust Us the Next Time?” in the September 13, 2021, print edition of National Review.
Postscript. I have not always been a great fan of West. As a Marine in RVN he served courageously, and I loved his book The Village. However, it is always easy to be an armed chair QB and on Monday morning outline everything Tom Brady did wrong, despite his seven Super Bowl rings. He is obviously a good friend of the former Marine about whom I have nothing good to say. I’ll let you decide who that may be, albeit Bing mentions him several times in the diatribe.
Despite all that I do believe and agree with much he says, but then that’s Bing’s way, I mean it is Monday morning right?
One might think the author of this video had some very big gonad’s to make and post this on You Tube. While it did require some gut wrenching decisions on his part, he did it because it needed to be done by some one with some skin in the game. Regardless, I have the highest respect for Marine LtCol Stuart Scheller. I respect his decision to do it more than you will ever know. One reason is that it makes me feel good to know we still have Marine leaders with their head screwed on correctly and unafraid to open their mouths and say what’s right and ask the important questions. During my time in the Corps, I was surrounded by Marines like him. I can name literally 100’s of Marines I would have expected to do what he is doing, including myself.
BZ Stuart!!! Keep us posted on what that “general” in CMC’s office has to say about this.
God Bless you Sir and Semper Fi Brother, I for one am proud of you!!!
UPDATE 8/30/2021: I have somewhat changed my thoughts on this Marine LtCol. Something is awry here. I know not what his master plan is, but something does not set right with me. Since his video went viral, he was relieved of his assignment at SOI (East), and now it appears he is resigning his commission having served 17 years, which is three years from eligibility to retire. Hmm? It will be interesting to see what he does now; therefore, I will reserve my final decision as to what I think of him and his decision to do what he did. Stay tuned.
I am, as I suspect my followers are, absolutely horrified as to what is transpiring in that shithole we know as Afghanistan. The fact that my RVN battalion (2/1) has lost Marines and a Corpsman after having to go into that country to do something that should have never happened had we had an administration and generals who had even the slightest clue as to what they were doing. A fresh-caught second lieutenant right out of OCS could have developed a better plan than any of those fools. Sad, Sorrow, angst is all I feel. I have lowered my Flag to haft mast; it will remain in that position until this is all over and everyone is out and safe. I would encourage all of you to do the same. I can assure you this would never played out as it did had we had Trump where he was supposed to be — our legal and duly elected POTUS.
Our current flock of generals and admirals are more concerned with diversity and weeding out so-called extremists from their ranks than doing what they are charged to do. The perfect example is our CJCS, Miley, what a life-long POS! Every one wearing a star today needs to be fired w/o pension!
The title Photo says it all. How pitiful he appears having followed those handling his puppet strings. God help us, not him!
Below are comments from who should have been running this OP.
