Eric welcomes Will Selber, Military Affairs Fellow with the Bulwark and a 20 year veteran of U.S. military intelligence with multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to his writing at the Bulwark, you can read Will's substack - Grumpy Combat Veteran - and listen to the podcast he co-hosts, Shoulder to Shoulder. They discuss the recent IS-KP attack on the Crocus City Theater in Moscow, the terrorist threat from both IS-KP and al Qaeda operating from Afghanistan, the difficulties of establishing an over-the-horizon counter-terrorist capability for CENTCOM, the Trump and Biden decisions to withdraw from Afghanistan, the failure to hold the Taliban to the terms of the Doha agreement, the repetition of US failures in Vietnam in training the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), a post-mortem on the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, the reputational damage to the U.S. for abandoning its Afghan allies, the importance of military introspection and accountability for some of the failures in Afghanistan, and the ongoing impact of the Afghanistan debacle on military recruiting for the all volunteer force (AVF).
Thank you for your service, Will. I served in 1980-87 in the US Navy including three deployments aboard the USS Tarawa. Thanks to the all volunteer service I was able to get two years of excellent training in electronics and computers by scoring 97% on my ASVAB. This training has been the foundation of my civilian career.
A return to the draft would be a return to draft evasion and a sense of enlisted men (and now women) being “suckers and losers” as Trump calls us. If America wants strong recruitment, it needs to provide strong incentives to join. I signed up because in 1979 the economy was bad, and as a senior in high school it was a better option than continuing to bag groceries for minimum wage!
Such a great episode. So many great points made here.
I'd add that if the state department pulled the plug on the withdraw early it would have shown both the Taliban *and* the ANSDF the writing on the wall and whatever resistance the ANSDF put up prior to the fall of Kabul would not have even been there because they all would have taken off their uniforms and I wouldn't have blamed them one bit. I think it was always destined to end this way.
I'd further add that the real lesson that should be learned here for US DOD planners is that the American public's patience on winning a war is not infinite, and they should plan how they plan to conduct a war and what kind of timeline it's going to look lie before deciding to execute that war. Case in point: Panama. We did regime change there like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan but we didn't do nation-building, so that operation lasted a lot less than a regime change + nation-building mission did. Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn Rule" ("you break it, you buy it") is kind of what got us to where we were ultimately, because we broke Panama and we broke Saddam's forces in Kuwait without doing any nation-building/occupations in the aftermath. Bush the senior did 2 conflicts in 4 years versus 4 presidents doing 2 conflicts over 20 years.
And yea, with recruitment levels where they are as a direct consequence of the fallout of GWoT, we're likely going to need a draft coming back if we plan to get through any kind of near-peer conflict in the future where the American casualty rates look more like Ukraine's than what we were taking in GWoT. The worst casualty periods were in Iraq during select months from 2003-2007 where we lost a maximum of like 140ish troops KIA per month (plus x7 WIA). If we see a larger scale war like Ukraine we're not going to have enough bodies leftover to recycle to the conflict zone and we will *need* a draft to field a sustainable force in that kind of fight.
Excellent podcast. I learned a lot. I did not realize how this "Forgotten war" and its ugly withdrawal has affected our recruiting capabilities too. I pray that that someday our Leaders will acknowledge their wrongs. Hope springs eternal right?!
My heart goes out to all of our combat Veterans. As one who battles ptsd daily, I can only imagine their struggles. Especially knowing they left so many friends and allies behind. Just heartbreaking. Thank you so much for sharing as always Will. Keep up the great work. ❤️🇺🇸💙
Perhaps. I do believe we need to support Ukraine however. We are one country away from a Russian invasion into a NATO country. Do you really think they will stop with Ukraine?!
Will is right too. If they just would've been honest with us about what was really going on with us re: the progress of the war, maybe things might've turned out very differently.
The one thing I will never understand is why do national security elites always pretend they don’t know what the public wants. The public wanted out of Afghanistan. 3 presidents ran and won on it. I think what is happening in Afghanistan is awful but natsec elites have to stop pretending that the American people don’t matter or that “if a leader would just lead” people will not ask “why are we still paying 10b a month for a war that isn’t going anywhere?” Americans wanted out. Our leaders wanted out. Getting out was a complete clusterfuck but it had to happen.
If you want to see the pitfalls of natsec elites never ever facing up to reality: look at the current nature of our politics on fp. Americans want no part in wars in Israel or Ukraine or Taiwan because Iraq and Afghanistan turned out so badly. I honestly don’t know what the right strategy would have been because I think in 2001 if you told the American people that they would be at war in Afghanistan for 20 years I really don’t think bush could have gone to war. It’s a conundrum because if you tell Americans the truth they will not support what natsec elites want to do around the world.
People like to pretend that every conflict is WW2 and we can create a new Marshall Plan, forgetting that Europe and Japan had coherent national identities before they were destroyed. They were both also developed economies.
But how do you create a national identity for a region that has none? Seems like it would have been feasible to dismantle terrorist organizations without a full scale invasion.
It sort of irks me how much heat Democrats get on foreign policy when Republicans invaded two nations with seemingly no real plan (or a really naive plan). Bush was warned - if you break it, you own it.
They depleted the "political patience" of the American public by signing onto wars that they couldn't win on short enough timelines. I don't know why Pentagon planners don't think about that part, but they ought to. A lot of it came from Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn Rule" concept (you break it, you buy it) concept where if we were going to do regime change then we were on the hook for a nation-building mission thereafter, which I always thought was dumb as hell--especially compared to conflicts like Panama and Kuwait. George Bush the senior finished two large-scale conflicts--one of which included regime change, the other didn't--within a 4-year period. Know why? Because he avoided regime changes where he could, and didn't stick around for nation-building missions when he couldn't.
Of course, if Colin Powell were alive today and were confronted with this post-hoc argument he would still probably waive off any kind of personal accountability for pushing that kind of mindset into the Bush admin, because it's like JFK once said: "success has many fathers, failure is an orphan."
Travis, since I have all of you FP experts here do you think it would make any difference if Bush would speak out against Trump. I was very disappointed to hear John Bolton speak today. Yes he said Trump was a danger to America but he also said Biden was too. Arrgh. As an Activist I try to find all the ammunition I can use against Magas in my Red state. Thanks in advance.
I don’t think it would make a difference because the MAGA base hates neocons, the Bush people, and old guard NatSec experts in general. The only people they seem to like in the NatSec realm are guys like Mike Flynn and Allen West who speak out against the old guard. Everyone else is either considered suspect or openly hated.
Very very interesting. I honestly don’t know what the “right” thing to do is but leadership had to know that nation building wasn’t something Americans would be interested in.
I mean it took a huge attack from Japan to force our hand in ww2. It’s amazing that people think that Americans would concern themselves with how women are treated in Afghanistan or Iraq (I’m not saying this as a positive thing just that it is how we are).
"...but leadership had to know that nation building wasn’t something Americans would be interested in."
I think they knew this--which should have been enough to not do it--but I think they also worried about a repeat of the post-WWI situation that led to WWII. Germany had to foot the bill for WWI, leaving them impoverished and susceptible to populist autocrats riding "stab in the back" narratives to power. But even then, that's the German people's fault rather than the allied power's fault in my book. People have agency and choices after wars and we can't absolve them of that by blaming ourselves for not supporting them better via nation-building--which can be done from afar rather than through occupation as it was done after WWII via the Marshal Plan. An alternate scenario to imagine is if we had left after capturing Saddam and discovering no chem weapons (besides the American ones we sent him in the 80's) and then just sending money to whoever filled the vacuum via a kind of neo-Marshall Plan.
It’s why I don’t judge Biden to harshly when it comes to Ukraine (beyond that the republicans wouldn’t do shit for Ukraine). I try to listen to a lot of fp podcasts and I always get mad because every analysis goes “what Biden needs to do is to tell the American people what is at stake and that we want Ukraine to win.” I’m always like are you guys fricking nuts? Do you have any idea who votes? They couldn’t point out Ukraine on a map and couldn’t give a shit if it was run by islamists. You really want to tell Americans how much it will cost for how many years? You want a quick NO or a HELL NO.
These very intellectuals really think it’s another time where a president can mold public opinion (shit Roosevelt was an astounding politician who literally had super majorities in both houses and still couldn’t convince anyone to send shit to Britain for 5 years). Obama who was an amazing political figure couldn’t get more than 52% of the vote. We just live in very different times.
If republicans think their voters will go to war in Iran or Taiwan I got a bridge to know where to sell them
Vietnam started off as a funding/advising campaign until the Turner Joy/Maddox. What happens if Russia starts getting desperate if we ramp up weapons deliveries and decides to hit an American-flagged ship delivering the weapons via a submarine-launched torpedo while denying they did it? I've yet to hear anyone in NatSec land talk about that scenario, and it could potentially draw us into that conflict. At best we'd start sending Navy escort vessels alongside the weapons deliveries and then hope that Russia doesn't engage the delivery ships with the escorts in place.
I still don’t get how these people are still giving us opinions on foreign affairs though. When you fuck up as much as they did you got to question their judgement. Have you noticed that everything is a nail to these idiots
So were the 9/11-era neocons when you give the recent pass a real look. See my comments in this thread about Powell's "pottery barn rule" and all the neocons who got on board with it as compared to conflicts like Panama and Kuwait where we broke things and then left. Somehow Bush senior was able to get through 2 conflicts in 4 years by avoiding the pitfalls that the Bush Jr neocons fell into via Powell's logic.
Yea but Panama and Desert Storm worked out far better than most expected. The big mistake was Bush, Sr urging the Shia and Kurds to rise up when he knew darn well we weren’t going to do a thing to help. The Iraqi Shia never forgave us for that.
Yea that part was a terrible sidebar choice in the Kuwait conflict, but we now know what it looks like when Saddam *does* get removed (a chaotic civil war on top of a power vacuum on top of an insurgency). Turning the entire Iraqi military into unemployed men with military experience paved the way for the insurgency that raged there from '04-'08 and the civil war that raged there from '06-'08, which was another terrible choice by guys like Paul Bremmer.
In the end, at least Iraq has a 30/100 on Freedom House's democracy index now--still a "not free" rating--which is better than flat out autocracy I suppose. But now Iran has a partner instead of a competitor in the region as well on the greater geopolitical side of things.
All four administrations have dropped the ball. Biden is probably less than others, but his handling of Afghanistan hasn't been deft. I concur on the problems of 9/11-era neocons. I have a working theory: this is a byproduct of the All-Volunteer Force. People just don't have any concept of war anymore because they don't have skin in the game. Just my .02 cents.
All volunteer force or conscription, either way you don’t abuse your fighting men and women the way we did in Afghanistan and Iraq post 9/11. We have the best military in the world and when you go you either go big and get it done or don’t go at all.
Zero Americans wanted a nation building expedition in Afghanistan and most certainly saw right through the Iraqi WMD bullshit being dumped on them. We should have blown into Afghanistan and killed OBL right there and left.
The consequences of those wars cannot be overstated. As a Reagan Republican I am pissed beyond words at my party.
Obama/Trump/Biden all share blame in this as well--I don't mean to absolve them of any of their own mistakes, and there were many--but they were given a problem that wasn't of their making and so they don't share responsibility for the original sin, which starts with the Bush admin and the pottery barn rule in my estimation (YMMV).
And yes, I've long held the opinion that the end of the draft was going to water down our collective shared experience of war and concentrate it among a small group of peoples. Nixon basically ditched the draft as a way to stomp out the protest movement to buy himself more time in yet another conflict (Vietnam) where we decided that nation-building was in our best interests. Panama and Kuwait were contract force conflicts like the GWoT ones were, but the regime change and nation-building aspects were either not done or kept very limited, and so the conflicts were much shorter and tolerable for the American public's patience meter. Bush senior still lost reelection after deftly handling those two conflicts, which is kind of crazy in retrospect.
I greatly appreciate this perspective about Afghanistan, and I greatly appreciate this podcast.
Thank you for your service, Will. I served in 1980-87 in the US Navy including three deployments aboard the USS Tarawa. Thanks to the all volunteer service I was able to get two years of excellent training in electronics and computers by scoring 97% on my ASVAB. This training has been the foundation of my civilian career.
A return to the draft would be a return to draft evasion and a sense of enlisted men (and now women) being “suckers and losers” as Trump calls us. If America wants strong recruitment, it needs to provide strong incentives to join. I signed up because in 1979 the economy was bad, and as a senior in high school it was a better option than continuing to bag groceries for minimum wage!
Such a great episode. So many great points made here.
I'd add that if the state department pulled the plug on the withdraw early it would have shown both the Taliban *and* the ANSDF the writing on the wall and whatever resistance the ANSDF put up prior to the fall of Kabul would not have even been there because they all would have taken off their uniforms and I wouldn't have blamed them one bit. I think it was always destined to end this way.
I'd further add that the real lesson that should be learned here for US DOD planners is that the American public's patience on winning a war is not infinite, and they should plan how they plan to conduct a war and what kind of timeline it's going to look lie before deciding to execute that war. Case in point: Panama. We did regime change there like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan but we didn't do nation-building, so that operation lasted a lot less than a regime change + nation-building mission did. Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn Rule" ("you break it, you buy it") is kind of what got us to where we were ultimately, because we broke Panama and we broke Saddam's forces in Kuwait without doing any nation-building/occupations in the aftermath. Bush the senior did 2 conflicts in 4 years versus 4 presidents doing 2 conflicts over 20 years.
And yea, with recruitment levels where they are as a direct consequence of the fallout of GWoT, we're likely going to need a draft coming back if we plan to get through any kind of near-peer conflict in the future where the American casualty rates look more like Ukraine's than what we were taking in GWoT. The worst casualty periods were in Iraq during select months from 2003-2007 where we lost a maximum of like 140ish troops KIA per month (plus x7 WIA). If we see a larger scale war like Ukraine we're not going to have enough bodies leftover to recycle to the conflict zone and we will *need* a draft to field a sustainable force in that kind of fight.
Excellent podcast. I learned a lot. I did not realize how this "Forgotten war" and its ugly withdrawal has affected our recruiting capabilities too. I pray that that someday our Leaders will acknowledge their wrongs. Hope springs eternal right?!
My heart goes out to all of our combat Veterans. As one who battles ptsd daily, I can only imagine their struggles. Especially knowing they left so many friends and allies behind. Just heartbreaking. Thank you so much for sharing as always Will. Keep up the great work. ❤️🇺🇸💙
Perhaps. I do believe we need to support Ukraine however. We are one country away from a Russian invasion into a NATO country. Do you really think they will stop with Ukraine?!
Will is right too. If they just would've been honest with us about what was really going on with us re: the progress of the war, maybe things might've turned out very differently.
Good podcast.
The one thing I will never understand is why do national security elites always pretend they don’t know what the public wants. The public wanted out of Afghanistan. 3 presidents ran and won on it. I think what is happening in Afghanistan is awful but natsec elites have to stop pretending that the American people don’t matter or that “if a leader would just lead” people will not ask “why are we still paying 10b a month for a war that isn’t going anywhere?” Americans wanted out. Our leaders wanted out. Getting out was a complete clusterfuck but it had to happen.
If you want to see the pitfalls of natsec elites never ever facing up to reality: look at the current nature of our politics on fp. Americans want no part in wars in Israel or Ukraine or Taiwan because Iraq and Afghanistan turned out so badly. I honestly don’t know what the right strategy would have been because I think in 2001 if you told the American people that they would be at war in Afghanistan for 20 years I really don’t think bush could have gone to war. It’s a conundrum because if you tell Americans the truth they will not support what natsec elites want to do around the world.
People like to pretend that every conflict is WW2 and we can create a new Marshall Plan, forgetting that Europe and Japan had coherent national identities before they were destroyed. They were both also developed economies.
But how do you create a national identity for a region that has none? Seems like it would have been feasible to dismantle terrorist organizations without a full scale invasion.
It sort of irks me how much heat Democrats get on foreign policy when Republicans invaded two nations with seemingly no real plan (or a really naive plan). Bush was warned - if you break it, you own it.
Absolutely. Republicans are good at breaking things and dems are force to clean it up.
They depleted the "political patience" of the American public by signing onto wars that they couldn't win on short enough timelines. I don't know why Pentagon planners don't think about that part, but they ought to. A lot of it came from Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn Rule" concept (you break it, you buy it) concept where if we were going to do regime change then we were on the hook for a nation-building mission thereafter, which I always thought was dumb as hell--especially compared to conflicts like Panama and Kuwait. George Bush the senior finished two large-scale conflicts--one of which included regime change, the other didn't--within a 4-year period. Know why? Because he avoided regime changes where he could, and didn't stick around for nation-building missions when he couldn't.
Of course, if Colin Powell were alive today and were confronted with this post-hoc argument he would still probably waive off any kind of personal accountability for pushing that kind of mindset into the Bush admin, because it's like JFK once said: "success has many fathers, failure is an orphan."
Wonder where General Powell is? I'm waiting for him to speak out.
That dude has been dead for like 3 years now
Travis, since I have all of you FP experts here do you think it would make any difference if Bush would speak out against Trump. I was very disappointed to hear John Bolton speak today. Yes he said Trump was a danger to America but he also said Biden was too. Arrgh. As an Activist I try to find all the ammunition I can use against Magas in my Red state. Thanks in advance.
I don’t think it would make a difference because the MAGA base hates neocons, the Bush people, and old guard NatSec experts in general. The only people they seem to like in the NatSec realm are guys like Mike Flynn and Allen West who speak out against the old guard. Everyone else is either considered suspect or openly hated.
Just read that covid got him. That's probably why I missed it. Makes me sad. Thanks for the info.
Oh my I didn't know that. Guess I missed that one. My bad. I'm sorry to hear that. Damn. He was one of the good guys.
Very very interesting. I honestly don’t know what the “right” thing to do is but leadership had to know that nation building wasn’t something Americans would be interested in.
I mean it took a huge attack from Japan to force our hand in ww2. It’s amazing that people think that Americans would concern themselves with how women are treated in Afghanistan or Iraq (I’m not saying this as a positive thing just that it is how we are).
"...but leadership had to know that nation building wasn’t something Americans would be interested in."
I think they knew this--which should have been enough to not do it--but I think they also worried about a repeat of the post-WWI situation that led to WWII. Germany had to foot the bill for WWI, leaving them impoverished and susceptible to populist autocrats riding "stab in the back" narratives to power. But even then, that's the German people's fault rather than the allied power's fault in my book. People have agency and choices after wars and we can't absolve them of that by blaming ourselves for not supporting them better via nation-building--which can be done from afar rather than through occupation as it was done after WWII via the Marshal Plan. An alternate scenario to imagine is if we had left after capturing Saddam and discovering no chem weapons (besides the American ones we sent him in the 80's) and then just sending money to whoever filled the vacuum via a kind of neo-Marshall Plan.
I do too.
It’s why I don’t judge Biden to harshly when it comes to Ukraine (beyond that the republicans wouldn’t do shit for Ukraine). I try to listen to a lot of fp podcasts and I always get mad because every analysis goes “what Biden needs to do is to tell the American people what is at stake and that we want Ukraine to win.” I’m always like are you guys fricking nuts? Do you have any idea who votes? They couldn’t point out Ukraine on a map and couldn’t give a shit if it was run by islamists. You really want to tell Americans how much it will cost for how many years? You want a quick NO or a HELL NO.
These very intellectuals really think it’s another time where a president can mold public opinion (shit Roosevelt was an astounding politician who literally had super majorities in both houses and still couldn’t convince anyone to send shit to Britain for 5 years). Obama who was an amazing political figure couldn’t get more than 52% of the vote. We just live in very different times.
If republicans think their voters will go to war in Iran or Taiwan I got a bridge to know where to sell them
Vietnam started off as a funding/advising campaign until the Turner Joy/Maddox. What happens if Russia starts getting desperate if we ramp up weapons deliveries and decides to hit an American-flagged ship delivering the weapons via a submarine-launched torpedo while denying they did it? I've yet to hear anyone in NatSec land talk about that scenario, and it could potentially draw us into that conflict. At best we'd start sending Navy escort vessels alongside the weapons deliveries and then hope that Russia doesn't engage the delivery ships with the escorts in place.
I still don’t get how these people are still giving us opinions on foreign affairs though. When you fuck up as much as they did you got to question their judgement. Have you noticed that everything is a nail to these idiots
What the natsec elites never understood is that all the American people wanted was OBL’s head on a platter.
That's a big part of why the MAGA coalition lost no sleep replacing the NatSec elite leg of the GOP stool with the new conspiracy theory leg.
MAGA is clueless when it comes to national security and foreign policy.
So were the 9/11-era neocons when you give the recent pass a real look. See my comments in this thread about Powell's "pottery barn rule" and all the neocons who got on board with it as compared to conflicts like Panama and Kuwait where we broke things and then left. Somehow Bush senior was able to get through 2 conflicts in 4 years by avoiding the pitfalls that the Bush Jr neocons fell into via Powell's logic.
Yea but Panama and Desert Storm worked out far better than most expected. The big mistake was Bush, Sr urging the Shia and Kurds to rise up when he knew darn well we weren’t going to do a thing to help. The Iraqi Shia never forgave us for that.
Yea that part was a terrible sidebar choice in the Kuwait conflict, but we now know what it looks like when Saddam *does* get removed (a chaotic civil war on top of a power vacuum on top of an insurgency). Turning the entire Iraqi military into unemployed men with military experience paved the way for the insurgency that raged there from '04-'08 and the civil war that raged there from '06-'08, which was another terrible choice by guys like Paul Bremmer.
In the end, at least Iraq has a 30/100 on Freedom House's democracy index now--still a "not free" rating--which is better than flat out autocracy I suppose. But now Iran has a partner instead of a competitor in the region as well on the greater geopolitical side of things.
All four administrations have dropped the ball. Biden is probably less than others, but his handling of Afghanistan hasn't been deft. I concur on the problems of 9/11-era neocons. I have a working theory: this is a byproduct of the All-Volunteer Force. People just don't have any concept of war anymore because they don't have skin in the game. Just my .02 cents.
I agree. Could this also contribute to a La k of common purpose? On the other hand, a national military draft has issues.
Would a massive influx of short term (1-2 years) involuntary troops really serve the needs of a modern military?
All volunteer force or conscription, either way you don’t abuse your fighting men and women the way we did in Afghanistan and Iraq post 9/11. We have the best military in the world and when you go you either go big and get it done or don’t go at all.
Zero Americans wanted a nation building expedition in Afghanistan and most certainly saw right through the Iraqi WMD bullshit being dumped on them. We should have blown into Afghanistan and killed OBL right there and left.
The consequences of those wars cannot be overstated. As a Reagan Republican I am pissed beyond words at my party.
Obama/Trump/Biden all share blame in this as well--I don't mean to absolve them of any of their own mistakes, and there were many--but they were given a problem that wasn't of their making and so they don't share responsibility for the original sin, which starts with the Bush admin and the pottery barn rule in my estimation (YMMV).
And yes, I've long held the opinion that the end of the draft was going to water down our collective shared experience of war and concentrate it among a small group of peoples. Nixon basically ditched the draft as a way to stomp out the protest movement to buy himself more time in yet another conflict (Vietnam) where we decided that nation-building was in our best interests. Panama and Kuwait were contract force conflicts like the GWoT ones were, but the regime change and nation-building aspects were either not done or kept very limited, and so the conflicts were much shorter and tolerable for the American public's patience meter. Bush senior still lost reelection after deftly handling those two conflicts, which is kind of crazy in retrospect.