'We are very good at blowing things up and inflicting maximum punishment on our adversaries, but we ought to get the hell out of the nation-building business because we don’t know what we are doing.'
Back in 2005, I found myself interviewing a retired Marine general about his experiences on Iwo Jima and in Vietnam for a book I was writing on the history of the Marine Corps. Before putting on the tape, Major General Fred Haynes, a tall, courtly Texan in his mid-eighties, sighed, and said, “James, I hate to say it, but we are never going to win this thing in Afghanistan. Thirty-seven years in the Marine Corps taught me a few things about the United States.
Since the astonishingly rapid collapse of the American-supported regime in Kabul before the Taliban last August, Americans have done their best, it seems, to forget about their most recently lost war, though the anniversary prompted several important reflections and reassessments by participants. The stories of the rescue efforts are often gripping and harrowing. Thanks to the sheer resourcefulness and resolve of Ackerman and scores of other people in his network, most of the Afghans ultimately reach their objective. Among those contacts are a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and a former CENTCOM commander, General John Allen, U.S Marines.
Petraeus has also weighed in with his thoughts about how the war looks a year after the fall. His essay in,” is rather disappointing. If there was some new personal insight or revelation about the war itself, or what we can take away from the tragedy, I couldn’t find it. The tone of the piece is detached and clinical, almost as if Petraeus himself wasn’t a key player in the events, but an outside observer.
Of course, how one feels about Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S forces from Afghanistan, and about the frantic last act of pulling out of Kabul in August 2021, hinges on one’s view of the viability of the war itself. Certainly, one can empathize with the views of Ackerman and so many of his contemporaries that it was morally wrong to give up and leave. It was morally wrong.
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