By Frank Sobchak & Matthew Zais
The U.S. war in Afghanistan was a costly failure. More than 2,400 Americans died during the two-decade conflict. Tens of thousands more returned home with life-altering wounds. The Kabul government collapsed before American forces had withdrawn and the Afghan Army simply evaporated. The Taliban marked its victory with celebratory gunfire and parades.
This disastrous outcome deserves an honest reckoning. Such introspection is especially needed within the U.S. Army, which provided most of the mission commanders and a majority of the troops. Unfortunately, there is little incentive for either the service’s leaders or bureaucracy to conduct such an inquiry.
Iraqi forces similarly collapsed after the U.S. departure. We helped draft the Army’s historical inquiry of the Iraq war from 2013 to 2019. This effort was championed by Gen. Ray Odierno, at the time the Army chief of staff, and Gen. Lloyd Austin, who then ran Central Command and is now defense secretary.
Our findings weren’t always flattering, including that American generals had offered inflated assessments of Iraqi military capability. Gen. Odierno’s successor, Gen. Mark Milley, attempted to bury the work and its lessons. Gen. Omar Jones, the Army’s senior public affairs officer who had tried to block a conference that aimed to draw lessons from the My Lai Massacre, supported Gen. Milley’s effort to quash the Iraq study. Gen. Milley eventually agreed to publish the Iraq war history, after the story appeared in the press.
Gen. Milley was successful, however, in shelving plans to incorporate the findings into the Army’s professional military education; releasing the full declassified archives that accompanied the history; and printing copies for military leaders and soldiers. A bootlegged version from Amazon is now the easiest way to get a copy.
The U.S. military needs to avoid repeating the mistakes that doomed the efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. But who should conduct this study? And how should it be done? The House Armed Services Committee recently approved a commission, but an inquiry done by lawmakers will fall prey to partisanship.
The Army’s record suggests the service can’t conduct an unvarnished review of itself. In the 1980s, Army leaders tried to suppress one of the seminal works of the Vietnam conflict, Andrew Krepinevich’s “The Army in the Vietnam War.” The Defense Department and Secretary Austin should instead direct the formation of a team of academics and practitioners. This team should answer to the National Defense University, while being fully empowered by the Defense secretary.
Organizing the group outside normal military structures and having it led by civilians should prevent the services from trying to kill an unflattering assessment. As an additional precaution, the group’s charter should allow civilian leaders to publish the findings without the approval of the military services.
The group should be diverse and include civilian academics, journalists and current and former military members who served and didn’t serve in Afghanistan. The leader will need bipartisan credentials, perhaps an acclaimed author of military history. The inquiry should include members from all service branches, though the team should be focused on the ground war and thus draw members largely from the Army and Marines.
Once formed, the team should focus on providing a brutally honest assessment, one unafraid to criticize senior military officers. The perspective should be of the theater commander, while also including strategic deliberations with the president, senior Pentagon officials and Congress. The study should also look at how well battlefield commanders carried out that strategy.
The study must be unclassified and, similar to the Iraq inquiry, the team should be granted full access to the emails of all general officers who served in or had responsibility for Afghanistan. Secretary Austin should order a full declassification effort and direct his subordinates to cooperate.
The first step in recovery is admitting that one has a problem. Deep introspection is necessary at the Defense Department to understand the role the U.S. military and its uniformed leaders played in the Afghanistan tragedy. The military isn’t infallible, and it is time to be held accountable for our part in defeat.
Frank Sobchak is a PhD candidate in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Tufts University, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a BS in Military History from West Point and a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Read full bio here.
Matthew Zais, a retired Infantry colonel, is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Both were co-authors of the Army’s history of the Iraq war.