Like many Utahns, including members of the Utah National Guard, regular military, civilians in government service and contractors, I spent too much time, energy and passion there in my four years on the ground, working with too many Afghans I came to admire and value both as colleagues and friends, losing more people I worked with and cared about than I want to remember but can’t forget, not to feel profoundly shaken, saddened and guilt-ridden by last week’s events.
By the time I got to Afghanistan in 2010, the U.S. had been an “occupier” for nearly a decade. No occupier has ever survived Afghanistan — not the Greeks, not the British, not the Soviets and, now, not us.
Nonetheless, my role was not to make policy and there was work to do, so I strapped in and did my job as best I could, as did almost everyone I knew, military and civilian. The price I paid for my service was small compared to what it cost others, including our Afghan colleagues; lives lost and injuries, physical, mental and emotional that many will live with for the rest of their lives.
Whatever we accomplished, it is not likely to survive Taliban rule, but that doesn’t mean what we did is any less worthy. We did not serve in vain. We are not to blame for what is playing out now in Afghanistan. To watch it unfold the way it has hurts us deeply.
Those who spent time on the ground in the middle of things, as I got to for almost four years, soon learned we couldn’t “win” the war we were in. If you were involved with the Afghan government and the Afghan security forces, you knew Afghans in important positions who were living large off our billions of dollars of military aid and reconstruction spending. Their greed and self-interest got in the way of what we thought we had been deployed to do; help secure safer and better lives for the people of Afghanistan. Nonetheless, despite warnings that went unheeded, we as a nation kept spending, sometimes recklessly, unwittingly and sometimes consciously tolerating corruption that steadily ate away at the confidence Afghans had in their government.
In time, we knew we were not getting value for the blood, money and effort invested in many of the programs and projects in which we were involved, including training, equipping and paying an army we created in our own image, an army that was not sustainable, that never received the political support from its own government that it needed to fight an adversary as committed as the Taliban.
Regardless of the numbers, we knew Afghan security forces, except for a few elite special units, were not capable of carrying the fight to the Taliban in any sustainable way. Last week should have surprised no one.
President Biden is relying on what the previous administration cynically agreed to with the Taliban to do what he’s known for years needed to be done, what he promised to do as a candidate, to do the right thing, to do what the American people overwhelmingly favor; get us out of Afghanistan and end the war we could not win.
It is not that we must withdraw that is deeply disappointing, but the way we are leaving. It is a national embarrassment that we failed to do more to do what could and should have been done sooner to discharge our responsibility to the Afghans who worked for us. They gave us much more than we’ve given them in return. For years, too few Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) were allocated for them. The SIV process was intentionally made difficult, arbitrary and opaque to discourage people from applying.
For a decade or more, the SIV program was an afterthought, under-funded and under-staffed. It just wasn’t a priority. We see the consequences playing out in Kabul; people who have a right to rely on us to protect them and to whom we owe a duty of care are now stuck in frightening limbo.
Afghans who are vulnerable because they bought into what we were selling and openly partnered with us to realize the kind of Afghanistan we and they hoped would emerge from our 20-year engagement also desperately need our help. Evacuation must be arranged now to get them into safe-haven until their long-term status can be resolved.
The ghosts of those we left behind will haunt us forever if we fail to act now while we still can.
| Courtesy Photo David Schwendiman
David Schwendiman, Park City, spent four years, from 2011 to 2015, in Afghanistan as the U.S. Department of Justice attache in the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and as the director of forward operations for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). He is a former federal and state prosecutor and served as a senior foreign service officer in Brussels and The Hague.
