 Aloha. I'm Dan Lee. If I go by Fig, welcome to Figments On Reality, a bi-weekly show where I talk about issues of the day and there's no hotter topic than the one we're going to talk about. Many facets of failure in Afghanistan. It's a tragic few days, actually a tragic 20-plus years in Afghanistan. And there's plenty of blame to go around. I'll do my very best and I think I'll succeed at living by the mantra of the show and being apolitical and avoiding vitriol. I can be non-political in this discussion because there's plain across any aisle there might be in our political landscape and it's not one or the other, but it's 20 years of American failure. And I want to talk about the causes of that failure as I judge it and the costs of the failure in human and material sense and what I think our lessons ought to be. And I'm sure there'll be some disagreement or I no doubt always is. I invite you to drop me a note at info at phase-1.com. Ensure your thoughts or find me on Facebook or do whatever. Just don't come to the house, okay, because I'd better not meet that way. But I'm willing to have a discussion and in addition to being constrained by not always being right, I only have about 28 minutes and this topic will merit many doctoral dissertations in years of research. Furthermore, President Biden may be addressing the nation as we speak. We forget to de-conflict our time slots, so I'm doing it without reference to what he's saying. And I don't think that matters, not that what he says won't matter, but because I'm taking a broader view of it. Now some of you, if I can judge from the vitriol that is present on Facebook and in various other media, would like me to lambaste one or another political figure about their failings in regard to Afghanistan. And as you look at these four presidents, you're going to be disappointed. I'm not going to attack anyone personally. That's not my intent. The shared characteristic that those four presidents have is over 20 years they all failed. They all failed. This outcome is an abject failure and they all bear responsibility. And you could also submit the predecessors, not just President Clinton, but beyond that have some responsibility for where we are today, August 2021. So that's not where I want to go. I understand that they were making difficult decisions in tough times. That's an observation, not an excuse. Life is hard wars, really hard pieces, perhaps the hardest. And I do acknowledge that their subsequent decisions were always constrained by preceding events and preceding decisions. So again, not an excuse. It's a reality and we are where we are. My perspective, my personal perspective as I consider this, comes from my 33 years in the Air Force and the United States Air Force, but also from the fact that I was in the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001, approximately across from the point of impact and down on a lower level, the mezzanine level in the Air Force ops center on the day of the attack. And I subsequently deployed briefly for Operation Enduring Freedom Afghanistan to help assist in time critical targeting, sensitive targeting. I was one star and had recent combat experience that was relevant to this. And then I deployed for several months in the early part of 2003 for the invasion of Iraq. And in that case, I was the senior Air Force representative to the land forces commander, General David McKiernan. So that's my perspective. It does make me right, but at least it's not totally informed. So what happened here? What the heck just happened? How did we get here? I think there's a single word that really captures our failings. And it's a word I like to consider because it's meaningful and important. That word is hubris. Hubris takes some time to read that folks exaggerated pride or self-confidence. We all have some pride and we can easily get overconfident. I'm prone to that everywhere except the Gulf, of course. But it comes from ancient Greece. And I think the three highlighted areas are what we saw and what we're seeing. It's a dangerous character flaw. And it can provoke the wrath of gods. And we're kind of seeing that not in a ethereal sense, but this outcome is so tragic that it's the fitting punishment for hubris. And hopefully the offenders in our nation will be humbled by the mistakes, learn from them, and do better in the future. The hubris that I'm talking about goes across political and military boundaries, thinking we could win in response to the attacks on 9-11 without doing a very good job of defining what winning was. And more importantly in my mind, failing to do the moral math. And I believe that's become a characteristic of modern warfare, especially as it gets more remote with the use of drones, remotely, remote vehicles where war can be waged to some degree without risk and without moral consequences to our side. We have lost sight of the fact that the first calculation should be what's right and what's wrong. And that is in a religious calculation. What's right and what's wrong? What's the cost in human life? And not just the life to friendly force, cost of life to friendly forces. I heard a couple times, military leaders, U.S. military leaders say in a couple of conflicts, there isn't a target in, name a country, worth a single American life. I'm still stunned by that. How can something be worth, how can an objective be worth killing for if it's not worth dying for? To me that moral math does not work. Now, I'm not advocating throwing bodies at a problem and intentionally seeking an opportunity to suffer casualties. But morally, if it's not worth dying for, I don't see how it can be worth killing for. And that applies to all lives, friendly forces, the innocents, if you will, and the adversaries. Now, I know that some of the people that I killed during the war in coastal operations, how I enforced, were committing war crimes because I saw them do it. They're still human beings. And the taking of human beings, regardless of the circumstances, should be a matter that requires a great deal of deliberation and a consideration of the moral equation. I don't regret what I did, but I do recognize that I took human life. Additionally, we have got to consider in our moral math, the aftermath. This is what's starting now. Today and the last few days in Afghanistan are not an end. The U.S. withdrawal is not an end. It's a continuation of the turmoil and, in fact, a beginning of a very dark period in the future of Afghanistan. And we bear responsibility. We broke it. We haven't fixed it. And it's not just the U.S. And I'm not America bashing here. I served my country for 33 years in uniform, five years as a Department of Defense and Senior Civilian. But we have to do better. And we have to accept responsibility. So I think this hubris and failure to consider the moral consequences of our efforts in Afghanistan were a big part of the 20-year failure. I also think that a real challenge or problem mistake was our mission, the andering. What was the mission in Afghanistan? I was in the Pentagon, as I said, on September 11, 2001. In fact, was the crisis action team director for the Air Force on that night. And I believe that night we were already talking about our response measures. We're already looking for forces and ways to attack the Taliban and al-Qaeda, mostly al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan. They've not, certainly, within days of that. But to what end? And the slide you showed some of the missions we had, could have had, might have had. So I'd like to bring that back up. Yeah. Was it revan your retribution? Was it deterring terrorist attack from any number of transnational terrorist groups? Was it specifically the disabling and destruction of the al-Qaeda apparatus? Was it nation building? Or was it simply to find a way out? Well, in fact, I think at times it was all of those, all of those missions. And we never clearly had a mission focal point that we stuck to that allowed us to set the conditions for a victorious exit, if you will. And I don't mean victorious in a parade high five mission accomplished since I mean in defining what our objectives were, scoping the effort accordingly and knowing when to finish. We didn't do that. By the way, I think all of those missions can be legitimate, could have been legitimate, except the revenge and retribution. And again, in a moral math term, I and I, for I in this case, I don't, that's not the way of thing. Operationally, we meandered around as well. And I saw that from afar, was not involved directly in that effort, though I wasn't or I couldn't. Originally, it was largely a CIA special operations effort to find high-value targets and when it were possible, neutralize them, sometimes kill them. That means folks just did not sugar coat it. And sometimes to identify potential allies or co-conspirators, however you want to turn it. And certainly a big part of it was the hunt for Osama bin Laden, which took much longer. And the second element of the initial effort was a bomber offensive, an air power offensive against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the field in Afghanistan. And I just submit that that was very effective and very much undervalued by some of the operational leaders. And again, I'm not criticizing. I was not in their shoes. I might have made the same mistakes. I would hope not. But I do think with my bias as an airman, that bomber effort was very undervalued because it was uniquely effective. The Soviets had used helicopters and fixed wing airplanes against the Taliban, then known as the Mujahuddin in Afghanistan and failed, but they didn't have a key element that we did, the U.S. Air Force did. And that was mass precision because we put B-52 and B-1 bombers against their deployed forces in trenches and caves and hiding spots and were exponentially more effective against them than the Soviet Union had been. And that was undervalued. Why was it undervalued? Because as it became a more traditional conflict, as we got out of the initial holy cow, how do we respond to this? It fell into the traditional command and control structure under U.S. Central Command, which was led by an army officer. Now, I served with our army many times over my career. As I said, I was the senior airman with General McKernan, great general in my mind, just put a plug in there. And I even taught at the Army Command and General Staff College for a couple of years after graduating from that school. We have the best army in the world. They're extraordinarily effective, but they understandably, army senior leaders are products of their upbringing and their environment. And they take a land-centric army approach. In this case, the commander was not just an army officer, but an artillery officer. Again, I'm not criticizing all my friends who are red legs as artillery officers are called. I'm just saying that that's a particular view in bias. And because of that, the effort in Afghanistan morphed into a more traditional land-centric approach in a land that was horribly ill-suited to that. And that didn't work clearly, as we see now. It was the efforts are muddled and meandering. It was conflated with Iraq. And frankly, in my view, as somebody who was looking at both conflicts in Pentagon and then involved in Iraq, it was subordinated to the efforts in Iraq. And so you have one officer in charge of both efforts initially, and we kind of meandered around for a couple of years. And then we went more into, and I'm not giving the specifics of timelines here, because I don't have the time or the resources to do that with any specificity. But then we went into special operations, get out amongst the population, dispersed as it is in Afghanistan, broadly dispersed and difficult terrain. And that in turn morphed following some initial success in Iraq into nation building. And I can't help but sigh when I think about nation building in Afghanistan. And what a folly that should obviously have been to people. There had been success in Iraq. We had done well early militarily. And then we had the purple thumbs, the initial voting, and things that looked like they might serve well. And the counterinsurgency community tended to say, well, that's what we need to do in Afghanistan. I said then, I can't prove it, but maybe somebody who's watching this will recall that I said then, this is crazy. Why is it crazy? If you compare Iraq and Afghanistan on any measure, they don't. They're fundamentally different. In fact, I would say Afghanistan is quite unique. But if you look at arable land, agriculture, electrification, road networks, population density, education, literacy, life expectancy, tribal divisions, anything. There's a reason Afghanistan has been the graveyard of conquerors for centuries. And that nothing changed that. September 11th didn't change that. Modern warfare didn't change that. It's the way it is. And to pursue it in Afghanistan turned out to be folly. And then subsequently, I do believe that for many years, her finding a way out has been our mission. That's no way to win a war. How do you win finding a way out? And how do you have any control over the aftermath? As we can see, we have no control over the aftermath. Right now it's chaos. The tragic chaos. I'd also submit that any effort that was in Afghanistan because of its unique geography, topography, demography, everything about it that was built upon boots on the ground was folly. Now, I know that some of my great army friends are going to unfriend me on Facebook and maybe send me an angry email. But it's on the ground to have a place in conflicts. And this simply wasn't one of them. For one thing, all the unique facets of Afghanistan, the history that we should have learned from, and then the cost. Boots on the ground in a country like Afghanistan is extraordinarily expensive. I wonder what we might have done with that. So let me talk about the costs now and remind you that this is a beginning, not an end. And we can't calculate the costs yet because there are second order effects that are going to be tragic and expensive in many forms of currency, I think. The second order effects are what happens after you do something and every consequence has its own consequence and sometimes has there in this case, they're anti-theatical to what you were trying to achieve. Clearly, what we're seeing with the reemergence of Taliban is the ruling body in Afghanistan and all of the subsequent effects of that weren't what we set out to do. In fact, they were anti-theatical to what we're going to do. Let's cut that cost in lives and the quality of life of the Afghan people is incalculable. But what were the other costs? I don't have accurate data because as far as I can tell all the data I find very so widely that I don't think anybody does. But here's what I think I can say with reasonable certainty of being correct. We lost about 3,000 Americans since September 1. Subsequently, about 3,000 coalition forces died. Many more were injured, cost of life, and then 3,000. Certainly tragic on the scale of other conflicts, not very large, but over 100,000 Afghans and security forces and civilians were killed and perhaps that many, maybe half-precorders as many Taliban and foreign fighters. Almost 200,000. That's a pretty big human cost if you value human life regardless of its origin or orientation. I do. The sucking chest wound to the U.S. budget is incredible. I can't find an accurate estimate. I think from everything that I read, I would say that $2 trillion is a low estimate, $2 trillion dollars. That's 12 zeros, folks. For a war we didn't win. For a war that had no clearly stated objectives. For a war that inflicted tragedy upon Afghanistan. Unbelievable. That's an unbelievable number. The reason there aren't good accurate estimates is because it's hard to calculate the interest on the debt that will compound over time and on the national debt and the cost of the long-term care for veterans. Unbelievable. There's another fiscal cost that I haven't heard mentioned much and that is the shift in procurement priorities for Iraq and Afghanistan. It was both wars, not just Afghanistan. That diverted defense, increased the budget, but at the same time drained funding from capabilities that we think we pretty much need now as we look to counter and deter the rising and increasingly assertive, I'd say, aggressive China. Okay. For example, we took the MRAP in a five-year program. We bought 12,000 MRAPs, mine, reinforced armor, something. It's a truck. It's a big truck. You may see one because your police force might have one because the army doesn't need them anymore. They were short-term fixed to a problem we made long-term that has no outcome, no victory. Those were incredibly expensive, $500,000 a piece. Now they're going to police departments. Even a school district bought one as a police vehicle. That's money that could have gone into a couple. Let me give you a couple options for money that we spent on boots on the ground and the subsequent new equipment for these boots on the ground. One is, how about some intelligence surveillance reconnaissance capabilities because we're really good at that. We did suffer an intelligence failure on September 11th, but we're really good at that. So suppose we took, let's say, half of what we invested in a conventional approach to warfighting and put it into intelligence surveillance reconnaissance and being able to rapidly respond to any reemergence of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. And instead of the 20-year effort that had gone in in early, late 2001 and early 2002, as we did, significantly impacted those forces, the enemy, and left with a message that we're going to be watching very closely. We're going to invest and watch you very closely. And if need be, we'll be back quickly and violent. I'm certain that would have been cheaper, briefer, and more effective. So suppose we had done that. Suppose we had invested in our long-term capabilities instead of a long-term war with no outcome. So the real consequence, the cost, isn't about lives lost now. It's not about the fiscal impact. And it's not about the future of the U.S. military, which I do care about. But what bothers me most is the long-term cost to the people of Afghanistan. And I found this photo during my web sniffing. I don't know what year it's taken. It's in Afghanistan, mother and children. That's our future, folks, because of our failure. That's the future of Afghanistan. We should all be haunted by that. We should all acknowledge that the United States failed. Republicans didn't fail. Democrats didn't fail. No single service failed. As a nation, we failed. And we can't let it happen again. So what do we do about that? I'm sorry, folks. There's no happy ending to this story. I don't have an upbeat closure on this episode in the remaining few minutes. I offer, here's what we should do, instead of my usual, what would they do? I think this is what we as Americans need to do. First is, regardless of upbeat messages, we ought to take no solace in successful evacuation of the embassy and rescuing translators or other Afghans from their country. There's nothing good about this. The tragedy is so broad and so devastating to women and children and the men of Afghanistan. There's nothing good. Second thing we need to do is reinsert moral considerations into every entry into any conflict, no matter how large or how small. Become too easy to apply lethal force. And it shouldn't be. It should be an excruciating decision for civilian and military leaders. That doesn't mean we should never do it. That means we have to consider the moral element of it always. Another thing I think the United States needs to do is diversify military leadership. I'm not talking about the diversity approach that's been the news so much, but I am talking about diversity. I taught for a while, of course, in conflict crisis management, conflict resolution. And I was once asked, how was the Japanese could make the flawed decision to attack the United States when it should have been clear that in the long run it was going to end badly for them? And my response, I think I'm right, was that the decision was made by a bunch of similar white thinking individuals. Diversity matters in all realms. Getting a different opinion and being able to accept that opinion is hugely important. Secondly, we need to hold our military leader. And that means that PECOM should not always be a Navy admiral or name a command where we get in service mindset. We need diversity. And the PECOM leaders, I've known many of them, all of them that I've known are outstanding officers, but we need diversity of thought and approach. And furthermore, we need to hold leaders accountable. In this case, we have 20 years of failure and very limited elements of military leader being held truly accountable. And I'm not talking about court martial, I'm talking about your fire. Sorry for that phrase and sure triggered some folks, but we need to hold leaders accountable. And I don't think we did. And finally, we need to realize that the incremental approach to warfare where we start slow and kind of ramp up increases costs over time. I truly believe this. If we make that agonizing decision to enter a conflict with clearly stated objectives, we should enter fast, hard and violent and win it. And compared to an incremental approach where we sort of figure things out and sort of meander through missions, the long term casualties, human and material will be significantly fewer. I believe that. So that's all I can fit into the time available. There's much more to say. Please comment if you agree or disagree. Info at phase-1.com. Coincidentally, I've got a friend coming on next week's figments, the power of imagination. And this just serendipitously came up. Clusso Tallini and I flew F-15s at Carina 40 years ago, 40 years ago. And he shot 25 during Desert Storm. He wrote a book, plug the book during the show. But we'll also talk about how he and I both learned to live with what we did taking human life because we do think about it one more way. And he's got a unique perspective that I think is invaluable. Finally, thanks to Think Tech for letting me express my views on figments on reality and also share my friends and figments the power of imagination. Remember, they're a nonprofit. They need your support. Please go to their website and support Think Tech Kauai. Thank you for watching. I look forward to your comments. Mahalo and Aloha.