U.S. Air Force pararescuemen from the 83rd Expeditionary Rescue Squadron secure the landing area after being lowered from a HH-60 Pave Hawk during a November 2012 mission in Afghanistan. (Jonathan Snyder/U.S. Air Force)
Against the backdrop of America’s roiling political landscape and two raging foreign wars, a coterie of former U.S. government officials and academics on Friday opened what will be an extensive examination of the United States’ 20-year foray in Afghanistan — the nation’s longest conflict.
“Today we make history,” said Shamila N. Chaudhary, co-chair of the Afghanistan War Commission. “Never before has the United States commissioned such a wide-ranging independent legislative assessment of its own decision-making in the aftermath of a conflict.”
The mission is daunting. The 16-member bipartisan panel has been tasked by Congress with determining what went wrong and what U.S. leaders could do differently the next time the United States goes to war. Their mandate encompasses policies and actions taken by four presidential administrations, the U.S. military, the State Department, U.S. allies and many other agencies, organizations and people.
The commission has 18 months to carry out its research and until August 2026 to deliver a final public report.
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 ended the war but delivered the country back into the hands of the Taliban, an enemy Washington spent trillions of dollars trying to vanquish beginning in the aftermath of 9/11. The bloody and chaotic exit resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and scores of Afghans; left thousands of American allies behind to an uncertain fate; triggered broad, bipartisan outrage; and gave rise to bitterly politicized congressional inquiries and hearings.
The Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee is expected to deliver a final report next month detailing the findings of its investigation of the withdrawal. That inquiry has featured hours of heated and sometimes emotional testimony from Biden administration officials, military commanders, veterans and their families. The committee next week intends to interview Jen Psaki, President Joe Biden’s White House press secretary at the time of the withdrawal.
The war commission’s 4½-hour discussion Friday, held in the Washington headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, featured former ambassadors, military officers and CIA personnel as witnesses. It drew a small crowd of observers, many of whom were also connected to the war.
Chaudhary and her co-chair, Colin F. Jackson, a former Defense Department official, are cognizant of the charged atmosphere that surrounds their undertaking. The commission itself was born of the collective outrage that followed the withdrawal three years ago.
But they stressed that they seek a dialogue that is thoughtful and apolitical, even if commission members were hand-picked by Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the heat of national anguish. “We are bipartisan in our composition, but our work is nonpartisan,” Chaudhary said.
It’s hard to ignore the issue of blame, they concede. It “keeps coming up in our conversations,” Chaudhary told the panelists. People want to know if the commission will name and shame, if it will deliver some measure of justice by calling out the leaders who made the worst critical decisions in the war.
The commission will try not to do that, while at the same time endeavoring to produce “a full, objective, rigorous, unvarnished and unflinching account of our performance as a government and a military,” Jackson said. “We owe it to the generation that served in Afghanistan and the generation that will serve somewhere else.”
It isn’t just an assessment of the war’s failures. The commissioners’ report will include guidance, they said: practical advice that could be applied to other wars the United States is involved in, such as those ongoing in the Middle East and Ukraine, or to wars that have yet to happen but someday will.
If the first hearing can serve as a guide for what commissioners are likely to conclude, it’s that so many different things went wrong.
Consecutive administrations failed to address the critical role that Pakistan — an ostensible U.S. ally — played in sustaining and shielding the Taliban, said Nader Nadery, a witness who served as a senior Afghan government official. U.S. leaders also often prioritized short-term military goals over longer-term values, and sometimes employed rhetoric that undermined the Afghan government’s credibility, he said.
There were convoluted chains of command throughout the war; disruptive personality clashes between American decision-makers and agencies; and commanding officers served tours of duty that were so short as to represent “the institutional equivalent of a frontal lobotomy,” said another witness, Ronald Neumann, a former ambassador to Afghanistan and the author of “The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan” — published 11 years before the U.S. withdrawal.
There was a terribly devised system for parliamentary elections that invited fraud, said Noah Coburn, a political anthropologist who provided testimony Friday. There was too much public meddling in Afghan politics by U.S. leaders and too little policy input solicited from the Afghans. Poor U.S. decisions when it came to security partners, development and investments fueled corruption, which spread mistrust of the government and support for the anti-government Taliban, said Coburn. Civilian casualties, abusive warlords and poor security did that too.
It’s not that no one was saying this during the war. Much has been written. Experts and documentation of on-the-ground events were ample as they were happening, commissioners and panelists acknowledged. But often, U.S. officials failed to absorb the information, and consecutive administrations failed to use that knowledge to change course.
Jackson, the co-chair, said, “A fair question is, but what decisions are you going to look at?”
“The easy answer is we’re going to consider a much larger set of decisions than we can possibly cover in detail, and there will be a very difficult winnowing process,” he said.
Among the obvious points of interest, Jackson said, will be the decision to invade Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The commissioners will examine the decision to surge U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2009. They will look at the decision-making that went into negotiations with the Taliban. And of course, they will look at decisions related to the withdrawal.
The commissioners acknowledged that their mandate has become vast — to cynics, perhaps, so ambitious as to be almost impossible. What started as a mission to understand and to educate is also partly an exercise in collective therapy, the commissioners said, an opportunity not just for government officials, but for the larger population, and particularly veterans, to come to terms with what happened.
“For so many of us, the war still lingers in our minds. We carry the moral, physical and emotional injuries in our daily lives,” Chaudhary said. “Closure may not be possible for everyone.” But a space is needed for “civic discourse,” she added.
