Tag Archives: Afghanistan

Current Events

Vietnam Remembered

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It matters not whether you were there or not. In fact, some of you are too young to even remember the state of the country during those tumultuous years. While I am not 100% a Webb fan, he is an intelligent Marine brother and I respect his service and loved his first book. The author; however, asks some good questions and presents an  interesting perspective on all that went wrong and what went right – yes there were some things that we did right. The Cronkite’s and Rather’s be damned, we did accomplish something there, and we certainly were not all drug addicts and baby killers. It’s somewhat of a long read, but I ask you to read it and think about those days, especially if you were there in the mud. I do apologize for the tardiness of this post; it should have been posted last Thursday, but my house took priority.

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Jim Webb

By Barton Swaim WSJ

Arlington, VA

Echoes of Vietnam, 50 Years Later

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, popular culture had basically one message on the Vietnam War: that it was conceived in American arrogance, was perpetrated by American savages, and accomplished little but psychological devastation and national disgrace.

Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979), Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” (1986) and “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989), Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” (1987), Brian De Palma’s “Casualties of War” (1989)—these and a thousand other productions, documentaries and articles told my generation that the war had been a gigantic fiasco that turned those who fought it into war criminals and frowning, guilt-ridden drug addicts.

The war ended officially on Jan. 27, 1973, with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. That’s 50 years ago next Friday—an anniversary that will likely occasion a round of retrospective think pieces and cable-TV segments on the war’s legacy. More will follow in 2025 to mark the final American pullout from Saigon in 1975.

The country has moved on since the ’80s. The Vietnam War no longer elicits the sort of ostentatious regret it did a generation ago. To confine the discussion to Holly-wood, “We Were Soldiers” (2002) was one of the first major films to portray the average American soldier in Vietnam as decent and valorous; more recently “The Last Full Measure” (2018), though indulging in the usual antiwar pieties, acknowledges the bravery and decency of American soldiers.

We’ve moved on in politics, too.

The great scourge of supposed American war crimes in Vietnam, John Kerry—the man who averred in 1971 that American soldiers serving in Vietnam perpetrated war crimes “in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan”—was the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 2004. He felt obliged to refashion himself as a war hero, and he lost.

The Vietnam War doesn’t lend itself to unambiguous interpretations in the way many wars do.

But with media-generated myths no longer dominant, and with the pain of losing 58,220 servicemen subsiding, are Americans ready to think about the whole thing anew? “Maybe,” Jim Webb answers after a thoughtful pause. Mr. Webb, 76, who served as President Reagan’s Navy secretary (1987-88) and a Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia from (2007-13), commanded a Marine rifle platoon in the Vietnam bush in 1969-70. “Maybe,” he says again, looking unconvinced.

The biggest myth, to my mind, holds that the ordinary Vietnam combat veteran was so scarred by the experience that he couldn’t get his life together back home. Think of Travis Bickle, the lonesome, deranged vet of Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film “Taxi Driver.”

Is there any truth to the stereotype? Mr. Webb recalls an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1986 claiming to find that Vietnam veterans were 86% more likely than everyone else to commit suicide. “I read it,” he recalls, “I broke down all the authors’ numbers and figured out how they came to this conclusion, and it was total bulls—.” The paper considered only men born during 1950, 1951 and 1952, and only those who died in Pennsylvania and California between 1974 and 1983. That didn’t stop the press from touting the study, “in essence claiming if you served in Vietnam, you’re probably going to kill yourself.”

In 1979 Congress hired the Harris polling firm to survey Americans on what they thought about the war and its veterans. At the time Mr. Webb was counsel to the House Veterans Affairs Committee. “Of Vietnam veterans,” he recalls, “91% said they were glad they served in the military, and 74% said at some level they enjoyed their time in the military. And 2 out of 3 said they would do it again.”

Was the war worth fighting?

Mr. Webb thinks on balance it was. He recalls a meeting with Lee Kuan Yew, founder of modern Singapore. “I asked him a similar question,” Mr. Webb says, “and in his view, America won—only in a different way. We stopped communism, which didn’t advance in Indochina any further than it reached in 1975. We enabled other countries in the region to develop market economies and governmental systems that were basically functional and responsive to their people. That model has stayed, and I like to think it will advance, even in Vietnam.”

But clearly a lot did go wrong between 1963 and 1975. In his autobiography, “I Heard My Country Calling” (2014), Mr. Webb writes of “the arrogance and incompetence of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his much-ballyhooed bunch of civilian Whiz Kids whose data-based ‘systems analysis’ approach to fighting our wars had diminished the historic role of military leadership.” He repeats the same criticism of the war’s civilian leadership, and he insists the military tacticians in the field—American and South Vietnamese— did their jobs superbly.

Mr. Webb describes two problems the U.S. military was largely powerless to solve. First, the North Vietnamese government’s policy of sending assassination squads into the South. “Bernard Fall, a great French journalist, writes about this in ‘The Two Vietnams,’ ” a book published in 1963, Mr. Webb says. “It had been happening since at least 1958. The Vietminh started sending these squads back into the South, particularly central Vietnam. They were extremely smart and ruthless about it. These guys would go in and execute anyone with ties to any part of the South Vietnamese government—government officials, teachers, social workers, anyone.”

Over time, these murders sapped the population’s loyalty to the government in Saigon, and there was very little the U.S. military could do about it.

The second problem was the one many readers will remember well: the radical left’s successful use of the war, with the news media’s complicity. “Take Students for Democratic Society,” Mr. Webb says. “They were founded before there was a Vietnam War. The Port Huron Statement of 1962”— the document that founded the SDS—“doesn’t say anything about Vietnam. The goal of these revolutionaries was to dissolve the American system, and they thought they would accomplish that through racial issues. They didn’t get any traction—until about 1965 and the Vietnam War.”

Mention of the news media raises the subject of class.

The journalists reporting on the war, interpreting events for the American public, “were articulate, were from good schools, had important family connections,” Mr. Webb says. “You could see it all coming apart.”

Coming apart?

Mr. Webb describes a “divorce” between “upper strata” Americans and the military’s base of enlistees. That divorce didn’t begin with the Vietnam War, but the war accelerated and exacerbated it. “The military draws mainly from people within a certain tradition. It’s a tradition of fighting for the country simply because it’s their country.” Mr. Webb’s first novel, “Fields of Fire” (1978), is in many ways an imaginative portrayal of this fragmentation.

The book, which captures the war’s brutality but carefully avoids criticism of its policy makers, follows the war experience of three American servicemen. One, a Harvard student, means to get a spot in the Marine Corps band as a horn player but winds up as a grunt. He begins his tour by viewing the whole conflict through the lens of Jean-Paul Sartre (“Suffering without meaning, except in the suffering itself”) and ends, permanently maimed, shouting into a microphone at antiwar protesters back in Cambridge: “ I didn’t see any of you in Vietnam. I saw . . . truck drivers and coal miners and farmers. I didn’t see you.”

The military’s present-day recruitment difficulties, Mr. Webb says, have a lot to do with this cultural stratification. When civilian political leaders announce they’re “going into the military to purge ‘whites with extremist views,’ do they know what they’re doing? A lot of the U.S. military comes from a certain cultural tradition, and right now a lot of parents are saying to their kids, ‘Don’t go. You want to have your whole life canceled because someone said you were at a meeting where there was a Confederate flag or whatever?’ ” Mr. Webb sought the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, although he dropped out before the end of 2015. At a CNN debate Anderson Cooper asked each of the candidates: “You’ve all made a few people upset over your political careers. Which enemy are you most proud of?” Others answered predictably: the National Rifle Association, the pharmaceutical industry, the Republicans. Mr.

Webb’s response: “I’d have to say the enemy soldier that threw the grenade that wounded me, but he’s not around right now to talk to.” The liberal commentariat disparaged him for boasting that he’d killed a man, but Donald Trump won the general election by appealing to the sort of swing voters who weren’t offended by Mr. Webb’s remark.

Max Hastings, in “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy” (2018), writes of the Paris Accords that the U.S. “eventually settled on the only terms North Vietnam cared about, whereby its own troops remained in the South, while the Americans went home.” Mr. Webb, who speaks Vietnamese and has visited Vietnam many times as a civilian, agrees: “We did the same thing there as we did in Afghanistan: We cut our allies out of all the important decisions.”

“In 1972”—here he becomes animated—“ the South Vietnamese military was really starting to grow and become a lethal fighting force.” In the Easter Offensive, the North Vietnamese “ hit the South with everything they had.”

He picks up some nearby papers and reads figures: “14 divisions, 26 independent regiments and several hundred Soviet tanks hit South Vietnam. The Americans— we were nearly all gone by then. South Vietnam lost 39,000 soldiers; the communists admitted in their own records that they lost 100,000. They tried to take the South, and the South beat them.

And then, at Paris, we cut them out.”

Soon afterward, Richard Nixon resigned, Congress cut off funding, and Saigon fell.

“Then, of course,” Mr. Webb goes on, the communists “did the Stalinist thing—they put hundreds of thousands of the South Vietnamese finest into re-education camps. Two hundred forty thousand stayed there longer than four years. I have a good friend who was in a re-education camp for 13 years.”

Recalling a visit to Vietnam in 1991, Mr. Webb describes a night when hundreds of South Vietnamese Army veterans who had spent years in re-education camps gathered in a park near Saigon’s old railway station. “My Vietnamese friend told me many of these guys had been high-ranking officers. We could see some of them shooting heroin through their thighs. I thought to myself, ‘Wait a second— these were our people.’ ” Mr. Webb pauses for a moment, then recovers.

What have we learned from Vietnam? Not much, if the Afghanistan pullout is anything to go by. “The way they left was horrible, disgusting,” he says. “People said it looked like the fall of Saigon. No, it did not.”

As a military procedure, “the evacuation from Saigon was brilliant. In 1975, we had refugee camps all over the place ready to take people in—Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, Camp Pendleton in California, Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Operation New Life in Guam.

These places were ready to go before the fall. We got 140,000 people out of there. What this administration did was a disgrace. There was no excuse for it.”

Before I leave, Mr. Webb shows me various pictures and artifacts in his office. The leg injured by that grenade still troubles him; he walks around the office with a slight but discernible limp. One black-and-white photograph he particularly wants me to see.

Taken in 1979, it shows a much younger Jim Webb with two pals from his rifle platoon. Tom Martin, who enlisted in the Marines while a student at Vanderbilt and served as a squad leader, is in a wheelchair. Mac McGarvey, Mr. Webb’s fifth radio operator—three of the previous four were seriously wounded—has no right arm.

All three men in the photograph are smiling.

Current Events

Joe Dumbkirk

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Tomorrow is a day that as Churchill stated many more years ago, “A day that live in infamy.’ For those who who were alive and coherent enough to remember that day, it was the most tragic incident of my lifetime. I was a mere year old when Pearl Harbour happened; therefore, this one is significant for me. I know, as I am sure you do as well, exactly where I was and what I was doing when it happened. I was mending fences on my ranch in Montana when my wife came streaming looking for me May we never forget that day and WHO it was that caused it.

Here’s another good one from my frequent contributor and friend Greg Maresca, a noted historian who only write facts!

By Greg Maresca

It was theatrical in its design and a Shakespearean tragedy in its unfolding. As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approached, President Biden desperately desired a historical and symbolic end to the nation’s longest war.

Biden’s vision turned out to be nothing short of a ‘70s era U.S. military and intelligence debacle taken to an unprecedented scale paid for in American blood, fortitude and treasure.

Where are the resignations of all the generals and admirals who argued against capitulation?

Robert Gates, the respected former secretary of defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, wrote in his memoir that Biden had been wrong on “nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Some things never change.

Biden’s foreign policy rewards our enemies and punishes our allies.

It was in June as the Taliban began their march to Kabul that all U.S. embassies throughout the world celebrated sodomy via “Gay Pride Month,” as part of the Biden’s Administration’s foreign policy.

American exceptionalism was replaced with American perversion.

As Great Britain’s Neville Chamberlain is remembered for appeasement in the Nazi takeover of Sudetenland, Biden will be remembered for leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban, while abandoning thousands of America’s allies and rebooting Islamist fundamentalists the world over.

Allowing the Taliban to dictate the terms of withdrawal was reprehensible and irresponsible. As such, it raised the threat of terrorism to levels it had not witnessed in years.

Biden is a shoo-in for the Nobel Appeasement Prize for his military retreat – Dumbkirk.

Biden bequeathed the Taliban a reported $85 billion in military hardware that will allow them to wage war and terror for years. Moreover, Bagram Air Base is now China’s de facto world class central Asian integrated air headquarters courtesy of the American taxpayer. Likewise, Afghanistan is rich in rare earth minerals that China will certainly exploit and profit from.

Biden’s surrender plays daily throughout our fruited plain. Portland, Oregon is lawless permitting Antifa, and the Proud Boys to wage battle without consequences. In Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco homeless bivouacs and unbridled crime have turned these cities into dystopian, democrat nightmares. In Chicago, gang warfare runs rampant with shootings far worse than what our military experienced in Afghanistan especially over the last 18 months going without casualties.

What Biden has succeeded in doing is uniting nearly two-thirds of Americans — all of whom believe his flight from Afghanistan was a colossal disaster.  It is the one-third who believe Biden is actually doing a good job that is most concerning.

In a successful military and intelligence campaign in Afghanistan, we had 2,500 troops with a strategic presence in central Asia’s foremost terrorist breeding grounds. Continued funding certainly could have been found in the series of COVID relief packages passed by Congress, of which less than half went to anything remotely COVID.

For over 70 years, we have maintained thousands of troops in South Korea, and since the end of World War II we have had troops in Japan and Germany. Maintaining a contingent of troops in Afghanistan that have been successful in deterring terrorism at home you think would be a given.

The Russians, Chinese, Iranians and the North Koreans will certainly test our defenses especially in cyberspace.

Come 9/11 our enemies will be dancing in the streets as our southern border is wide open and we are lectured about how vaccinations, global warming, and systemic racism are the most pressing problems facing the nation.

Perhaps Biden should send an army of social workers and psychologists into Afghanistan who could reason with the Taliban and show them the errors of their ways. Instructing them how they were wrongfully utilizing microaggression, ignorant of Facebook’s 58 genders, and the wonders and marvels of applied critical race theory.

Such a pathetic ending in Afghanistan was most unworthy of this 20-year epic struggle.

It was not a departure but an abandonment.

Could there have been any less planning and foresight?

Whatever possessed Biden to believe that the 20th anniversary of 9/11 was the right time for such a pullout?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ensuing chaos at Kabul’s airport with people falling to their deaths from American Air Force planes is seared into the Biden legacy.

Postscript: This will be my last post for a little over a week. My bride and I will depart on the 11th, Saturday, on a LONG overdue Honeymoon (35 years). We never had one as I was in the middle of SOC workups , then deployed for six months. She understood completely as all Marine wives do. So we are going to some faraway place and hideout for a week. No, I won’t tell you until we return. No phones, no internet, and no TV. Swim, snorkel, scuba dive, sail board, relax, refresh, drink umbrella drinks under a canopy on the beach, and have a specially prepared dinner for us on our day — 13 September — on the beach under the same personal umbrella. 

I wish you all the best, stay safe, keep up the pressure on you know who and all the holders of his many puppet strings. I hope he hasn’t destroyed America so we have a place to which to return. Semper Fi; Jim and my bride of thirty-five years.

 

 

Current Events, Recent Posts

A Little History

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Failure in Afghanistan Has Roots in the All-Volunteer Military

For the past three decades, careerism among senior officers coupled with the disconnect between the American public and the All-Volunteer Force have led to failed and unnecessary overseas military interventions.
By Paul Cavallo

September 2021
Proceedings
Vol. 147/9/1423

The tragedy that unfolded over the past several weeks in Afghanistan began with the creation of the “all-volunteer” military in 1973 and the self-promoting careerism that has stalked the Pentagon ever since. Too few leaders have been willing to speak truth to power and say no to overseas military adventurism that had little bearing on the safety and security of this nation. And it goes without saying that those in charge when the war begins are never those who have to finish it.

We saw this most clearly when, in 1990-91, America sent its young warriors into the deserts of the Middle East. We called it “The Gulf War” and “Desert Storm,” but it was, in reality, America’s first mercenary war. The Bush administration cut a deal with the Saudis and Kuwaitis: our men, their money. Kuwaiti “princes” lived large in hotels from Saudi Arabia to Paris while our young soldiers and Marines dug fighting holes in the desert under a searing sun.

U.S. Marines in Desert Storm
U.S. Marines in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. (Naval Institute archives)
The peacetime, all-volunteer military, after all, was a good job with benefits and perks. And that “war” went relatively well and quickly with few American servicemembers killed or injured, to the high praise of the U.S. public who were entranced, awed, and seduced by the lethality, performance, and accuracy of our high-tech weapons, while forgetting that the troops on the ground, in the desert, held it all together and made the irrefutable success of the war possible. Yet it was also the start of the forever wars. Saddam Hussein remained in power after the war and the U.S. military remained in the Middle East—enforcing no-fly zones and oil embargoes on Iraq with naval forces in the Persian Gulf and air and land forces based in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.

While it might be a “chicken or the egg” argument, it is hard not to see that the permanent increase of U.S. military presence in the Middle East went hand in hand with the rise of militant Islam and anti-American terrorism. How many Americans remember the 1996 terrorist bombing of a U.S. Air Force barracks in Khobar, Saudi Arabia? Nineteen U.S. servicemembers were killed and 498 wounded. Two years later, the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya killed 12 Americans and hundreds of civilians and wounded 4,500 people. Then came the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole (DDG-67) in Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors and injuring dozens of others. Less than a year later came the 9/11 attacks, answered shortly by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. A little over a year later, under the false pretense that non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction would be used against the United States, came the invasion of Iraq.

Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 in Saudi Arabia
The 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia killed 19 U.S. servicemembers and injured nearly 500 more. 

By the end of 2003, U.S. special operations forces had completed much of their mission in Afghanistan to capture or kill senior leaders and high-value targets within both al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Pentagon, however, rather than putting their “swords” away somehow decided to “nation build” a medieval land of warring tribes into a Western-style democracy, ignoring the fact that our democracy took centuries and many great wars to achieve.

For the past 31 years, the brunt of the cost has been borne by the all-volunteer force. The majority of American citizens have not served (none were required to), and most know few who have. A few dozen—or even a few hundred—servicemembers killed per year was the cost of doing business. But where were the generals and admirals who should have stood up to the civilian leaders, without compromise, to say “enough,”—that foreign wars too often leave our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines dead and forgotten, and for what? Were the military’s senior leaders just following along in-line, waiting for their moment, their chance for another star, or a richly coveted post-retirement job with a “vendor.” Were they just inured to the burdens of the profession? Unable to see the giant machine in which they were cogs—the failed foreign policy that resulted in the spilling of blood and national treasure for questionable (if any) gain.

It is no surprise that the “war” in Afghanistan eventually became a bottomless money pit. More than a trillion dollars was spent; did it make our nation safer, or did it just make Washington-connected corporations rich? Some of that money was funneled back to Congress through campaign donations and favors, all the while young Americans were being killed and wounded. Walk into any Veterans Administration hospital and see first-hand the reality that was brought home.

So, with the most recent deaths and injuries at Kabul International airport—clearly caused by a lack of planning, foresight, and courage at the top—we witness more evidence of the ongoing tragedy and travesty that is American “foreign policy” and the willingness of senior military leaders to go along with it. Will we ever learn? History suggests, no.

Postscript: While some commenters on the  actual article disagree with the author, I do not. I understand where he is coming from and follow his line of thought completely. The disconnect between the American public in general and the military and their assigned missions is indeed relevant. A quick “war story” if I may.

Serving as a temporary Chief of Staff at a command when the actual made a quick decision to retire, I had to handle my job as well for a few months while the Corps had to find a colonel for the billet. After a few months of this double duty my general, a fresh-caught BG, comes in my office with a cup of coffee to shoot the bull. Out of the blue he calmly says, Jim you know you will never make general.” To which I laughed telling him all I ever wanted to be was a Gunny. He asked if I wanted to know why, and of course I knew he wanted to tell me so I said yes.

He told me he knew several generals who would jump at having me as their COS because I had a knack of letting seniors (and juniors) know that if they cannot handle your answer they should never ask me the question. He said generals cannot do that. They must always speak the party line or they will never move above one star, which is why so many generals retire as a BG. They spoke outside the party line once and were passed over, or they  want nothing to do with it and retire.

Personally, I took his comments as compliment as that philosophy helped me to rise from private to colonel, and I was not about to change it. When a general speaks, understand he is never telling you what he truly believes in his heart. He is simply a mouth piece for the admisntration at the time.

Current Events, Recent Posts

Who Will Trust Us after Afghanistan?

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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.

Afghanistan, C-17, Kabul Airport

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?

Current Events

A Real Marine???

Video 25 Comments

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.