Elliot Ackerman: Leaving Afghanistan, One Year Later

Happy Wednesday, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. One of the things I’ve been really wanting to do this August is is to take some time to look back on what happened a year ago, the anniversary of the fall of Afghanistan, and the fallout from that and who better to talk to than Elliot Ackerman, who is a marine combat vet who served nearly ten years in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Elliot was a lieutenant in the battle of Volusia. Was awarded the silver star, also received a purple heart after being wounded by a grenade, also the recipient of the bronze star, in Afghanistan where he served as a marine special operations captain Elliot Ackerman was also a CIA attack officer in Afghanistan.

And after leaving the military, he’s authored eight books, including his newest, the fifth Act Americas and in Afghanistan. Thank you so much for joining us today, Elliot. Thanks

for having me on, Troy.

So let’s talk about the anniversary It is right now, August twenty fourth two thousand twenty two. On August fifteenth of last year, the Taliban entered Kalbul and took control of Afghanistan. You have described what it was like for you to watch the chaos and violence. So talk to me about

that day and where you were and what your reaction was. Well, for me, I mean, so much of the the fall of of Kabul and the endgame in Afghanistan sort of had a strange dissociative resident. So on on August fifteenth, I remember exactly where I was as I was watching CABL fall and it was in my my mother-in-law’s kitchen. Of all places as I saw those, you know, those images coming across the news. And obviously, I’ve been I’ve been tracking military that’s an Afghanistan prior to that, so it wasn’t, you know, entirely surprising when when Cabo finally fell as many other cities had fallen before it.

But then in the the next two weeks that followed as the evacuation efforts began in earnest in Afghanistan. I was actually with my with my family on a on a long planned summer holiday in Italy of all places. So it was my wife me, my wife, and are four children. So psychically, that seemed about as far away as a person could get from Afghanistan. But as the evacuation began my entire network lit up with, you know, people people needing help, people scrambling to get out either in interpreters they’d worked with or interpreters I had worked with scrambling to get out their families.

So I was my experience with the the book, the fifth act, really tries to convey a sort of this this bifurcated reality. As the war in Afghanistan ends. On one half, you know, those of us who fought there sort of have our lives as we had been living them since the end of our wars, and we since we left the wars. Then on the other side, you have the war itself still going on and concluding in a very dramatic fashion.

So you described in in in your interview that you felt bound to America’s Afghan allies. And so when the United States announced it was leaving, you know, those afghans, many of whom you would work with, were desperate to get out and you described how you were lying awake at night glued to your cell phone. So talk to me about who these allies were and what was happening. You

know, these are my I mean, these are my war buddies. You know, these are the folks that I fought alongside. You know, and these frankly are people who, you know, they might not hold blue American passports, but at least in my eyes, these are, you know, many of them are American heroes, and these are people who have, you know, not only fought for their own country, republic of Afghanistan, you know, but fought alongside us after September eleventh, you know, with the executives of our country, the United States. So And, you know, the war’s been going on twenty years. So, you know, I’d say many of the Indians, probably the majority of the ones that I fought alongside had since immigrated to the United States.

So most of the calls I was getting were were them and desperately trying to get out either their family members who were threatened by the Taliban or, you know, in some case cases, younger siblings who were fighting with the Afghan military. So that was sort of my my entry into the evacuation process. And then very quickly, I wound up subsumed in an effort to, you know, to get out numbers of ATMs who who I didn’t know. Serve these, you know, these you can imagine these lists and we had lists of hundreds of names and people we were trying to get out and we were constantly sort of adding to these lists So when we knew, you know, that we maybe had one flight that was coming in a a privately funded flight, we would fill that flight. But there are always more people trying to get on the flights than flights coming in.

And it was sort of this process of making, you know, twenty first century Schindler’s list — Mhmm.

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over and over again. And who gets on the list and who doesn’t get on the list? So I don’t have any better way to describe it.

So you you actually write this this struck me. No American war has ever ended the way that Afghanistan did in which those who were being abandoned could communicate directly with the outside world in real time on WhatsApp signal and other platforms. The result was what’s been called a digital dumb perk, but also, you know, this strange collapse of distance. I think that made it feel so much more real that we were able to hear the voices that we actually knew. I mean, in the past, we have abandoned allies before tragically, unfortunately.

But this this had a different feel to it. And so you were you became a key player in dealing with the allies who were trying to get out. I mean, you you knew somebody named Jack the guy that runs the CIA program that pays paramilitaries. So give me just a sense of of what your these days will like for

you. You know, with this evacuation. Obviously, you know, there was a, you know, a a a presence and an evacuation going on at the airport and around the airport. That, you know, US soldiers and marines were conducting. You know, and they were really, their efforts were heroic trying to get people out in addition to the many of the state department officials on the crowd.

But the overarching US policy, you know, there really was no process. And so there was really, you know, bedlam at the airport. And, you know, I’ve gotten myself involved with what I would just term a crowdsourced effort. And that consisted of US military veterans. I work as a journalist, so many journalists who have covered the war in Afghanistan and Stanford decades.

And and democracy, you know, activists and humanitarian activists as well. And so each one of us in this process were as I said, there’s crowdsourced where, you know, we were playing our our position. So I was in touch for instance with people on the ground at Cabo who were journalists were organizing mini buses to take people from pickup points around Cabo into the airport. Then another colleague of mine who is also a journalist was the one helping raise the money for private flights coming in and and helping curate these manifest of people and keeping the whole thing organized. Another colleague who is a journalist who had written a book about the Taliban and had actually very good contacts within the Taliban.

Was negotiating with the Taliban police checkpoints inside convo so that our convos could get into the airport. You know, the the value add I was able to bring was I, you know, I have a a whole network inside the military and intelligence just for my time serving there. And by coincidence, a number of my former colleagues and comrades were were on the ground in Kabul. And so could just reach out to them and and coordinate with them and tell them when we were trying to get commvoices of people inside. But this is, you know, very much a a team effort, you know, and then and then to sit back, the book, you know, one of the reasons it’s title to fit back is there are really five set piece evacuations that I write about in the book and some were successful and others were not successful and I want the reader to to see why they didn’t work.

What’s turned away? In

the book, your your wife serves as a sort of a Greek chorus conscience for you. And when you’re in Italy, she’s asking you. So why are you all having to do this? You know, why are the people who left the wars ten years ago now being sucked? In.

What’s the answer?

Should be very blunt because the, you know, the administration had not planned for an evacuation of the scope. There there was not a plan. So what filled the vacuum of that plan was a ad hoc effort to get as many people out as possible. The administration did not expect the cobble would fall as quickly as it did. The expectation was that America, American troops wouldn’t be able and personnel would be able making orderly withdrawal from Kabul.

And then whatever the endgame was between the Afghan government and the Taliban would occur at some point down the road, and he wouldn’t be responsible for it. But that didn’t happen, Hubble fell on our watch. And as such, we were responsible for the evacuation. And because there was no plan, you saw the the chaos that ensued at the airport. And I think, you know, everyone who was involved in these ad hoc efforts, you know, if there was any state department phone number or email address that we felt we could give them to someone and say, if you call this person, if you send them an email, you will hear back and they will tell you how to get out.

You know, we certainly would have done it. But what was obvious was that the people who needed to get out had no had no recourse to get out aside from, frankly, the network they had in their cell phones. And that’s one of the things that was so difficult to realize is that, you know, there were a number of people, yes, who successfully got out but whether or not a person could get out of Afghanistan with their family really had far less to do with the the nature of their service to the Afghan government or to the American government or whether they were deserving. It really just came down to who they knew, who they could call whether or not they were lucky enough to have someone in their cell phone who knew someone inside the airport, who could help them get inside. How many

did we get out and how many did we leave behind? Well,

the estimates of that we got out approximately one hundred thousand personnel in total and probably about seventy or eighty thousand of those were Afghan nationals. And I know that there are still about three hundred thousand who are trying to get to the United States. The problem though too is that there was really no vetting process in those days. So, you know, many, you know, many people got out just because it was, you know, survival of the fittest. They were able to claw their way into the airport.

The challenge is that many very deserving Africans whose lives are very much under this for the Taliban couldn’t get out, maybe because they couldn’t necessarily claw their way into the airport. They weren’t able to call upon the right person or, frankly, just because they they weren’t in Cabo. If you weren’t in Kabul, there were very few other points of demarcation. So if you were Andy or Harat or Kandahar or anywhere else in the country, and there were Taliban checkpoints everywhere between those cities and cobble,

so you were stranded. So looking back on what happened a year ago, do you think it was avoidable or was it inevitable? I mean, there is sort of a talking point out there, look, that, you know, it was going to be chaotic no matter what we did. I mean, what what happened was was unavoidable? What do you think?

I think I’ve

heard that talking point, and I think that that talking point is you know, is a pretty lazy talking point to be candid. You know, there were, for instance, people like congressman Jason Crow, Congressman Seth Moulton and Peter Meyer. And actually, there are a whole number of numbers of congress who back in May there’s more than two dozen. And bipartisan sent a letter to the administration saying there needs to be some type of a contingency plan for an evacuation from Kabul. And one of the plans they put in place was to begin ferrying people to Guam, for instance, or to be ready to ferry people to Guam, which is what we did at the end of the Vietnam War.

And actually with the Kurds in Iraq. So that administrator that letter was sent to the White House. There was a good deal written about it in the press. I actually wrote about it in the press as well. And the White House didn’t respond.

So I think, you know, had there been a contingency plan, which there clearly was not. I do not think you would have necessarily seen the deadline that we we witnessed at the airport. You know, then there’s a broader conversation that we can have over, you know, the last twenty years of war and the inevitability of a on categorical US defeat in Afghanistan, but that’s a different conversation. So

you have just scribe the American exodus from Afghanistan as a collapse of American morals. Talk to me about that. I think,

you know, over over twenty years of war, through our actions and, you know, frankly, our our words as well, you know, the United States had made twenty years of of promises to the Afghan people. And, you know, that doesn’t absolve the Afghan government and the Afghan people, of course, of responsibility. But sort of the the uncategorical withdrawal of US troops, you know, scenes of us, for instance, you know, abandoning ballroom airfield in the middle of the night. And then the images of, you know, the chaos at the airport, the just complete stalling of the SIV program to, you know, to end the weeks before CABL falls, hardly hardly any SIVs are getting processed. All of this, again, it speaks to a collapse of American moral.

And this is not our our finest hour. We are not living up to to our values. And I think that it impinges upon our ability to be a credible ally going forward. So where do you place

the responsibility. And it was the Trump administration that essentially said, hey, we are out. We’re gonna, you know, cut this deal with it with the Taliban and, you know, setting various dates but the Biden administration inherited that. They doubled down on it, and then they set a deadline of August thirty first, which you’ve talked about this this artificial but very rigid deadline. So when you’re sorting this out, who do you hold responsible for this collapse of our effort in Afghanistan.

There’s

plenty of blame to go around for what happened in Afghanistan. So I don’t know that, you know, I don’t think you can I don’t think you can put all the blame really one person. It’s on everybody’s head. Listen, I mean, we can tick through the administrations and and I think you can blame the Bush administration right off the bat for the invasion of a rock, for taking their eye off the ball in Afghanistan for allowing the mission to lurk into a broader nation building effort that that probably wasn’t necessarily realistic. You can blame the Obama administration for doubling down on the war in Afghanistan.

And in two thousand nine, President Obama gives a speech where he announces a surgeon in Afghanistan. And then, literally, in the very same speech, announces a withdrawal date, thus, undercutting his search. You could blame the Trump Trump administration for initiating a very flawed negotiation process in Doha in which he cuts out the Afghan government from negotiations with the Taliban, which which is really, I would say, the the beginning of the death knell of the Afghan government because seen as them having no credibility and a vote of no confidence in them. And you can blame the Biden administration for doubling down on Trump’s policies. Biden did not have to continue Trump’s policies.

I mean, all throughout his administration, he did not continue Trump’s policies. So the idea that he had no choice but to continue Trump’s policies, I think, is is a false argument. So he continues with those policies, and then hinges the entire withdrawal in Afghanistan based on this idea that there will be, you know, what Nixon called the Vietnam a decent interval, meaning the time between the US withdrawals and the time between the collapse of the government. So in Vietnam, there was a decent interval. US troops fall out in nineteen seventy two, Saigon falls in nineteen seventy five.

The problem that we saw in Afghanistan was there was no decent interval. And the Biden administration had hedged its entire strategy on the idea that we would leave on a date certain for September eleven, twenty twenty one, then August thirty first. And there would be some time would collapse, whether it was as little time as three to six months would collapse before Afghanistan would collapse. And we, as Americans, could say, well, it didn’t happen on our watch. So that’s the decent interval.

So I mean, that’s just going through the administrations. There are, you know, there there is plenty of blame to go in around Afghanistan, and I think it would be a a shame if this conversation sort of devolved into the the partisan finger pointing that characterizes so much of American life. See, what what’s interesting about this though is

that it is not really a partisan issue. As you point out, there’s something sort of fundamental about America’s you know, the way that the America addressed this war, a twenty year war that most Americans just stop thinking about it at a certain point. So let’s talk about the veterans and how, you know, people who had lost loved ones, you know, lost, you know, comrades in in

Afghanistan. What what

is it like for the veterans to look back on this twenty year failed war that America essentially lost interest in

and then abandoned. It gets really down to the the fundamentals of how this war was waged. What I would call the construct of the war. Every war that the United States has fought since the revolution has had to be fought and sustained with the construct. And what I mean by that construct is you fight a war really with two broad variables.

You fight with blood and you fight it with treasure. Blood is who’s gonna fight it, treasure is how you’re gonna pay for it. So if we look back for instance like the American Civil War, the first ever draft in the United States is to is to man the American Civil War, the first ever income tax the US has is to fund the US civil war. In the second world war, for instance, that’s characterized with a construct that is a national mobilization as well as war bond. Strides.

In the Vietnam War, we remember as a very unpopular draft that leads to an anti war movement that results in the ending of that war. After nine eleven, the United States goes to war again, and we put in place a construct to sustain these wars. And the construct this time was the blood will come from our all volunteer military, and the treasure how we’ll fund the war will come through our deficit. There’s never gonna war taxes where it’s all been paid for through our deficit. If you actually look at the with the ballooning US deficit right now, about a quarter to a third of that, is spending on the wars on terror.

You know, and the result of that that construct is that the American people are an exercise to the cost of the war. They they don’t feel them. You know, unlike other wars, which were generationally defining events, you know, Vietnam define my parents’ generation, for instance, World War II, the greatest generation. The second the first world war. Right?

We have the lost generation.

This

was not a generationally defining event. You know, when I when I look back and I think about these wars and how they featured on my own generation, I’ve never felt like, for instance, I was part of a loss generation. I actually think it would be better to be part of a loss generation. I always felt as though I am sort of the lost part of a generation and that the war generationally for me and for veterans who fought it was to sort of a a sub experience in what happened to our generation and was fought by a a subsection of our society I think it’s it’s very dangerous, particularly in a democracy when the burden of a war is not shouldered by the society at large. It leads us into morally very gray and murky territory.

So I think coming out of these wars, we as citizens should be very skeptical the next time that any of our political leaders try to send send us and send our nation off to war. But while telling us at the same time, don’t worry, most of you aren’t gonna feel it. Take this into, I think, into various places. I think

this is a crucial point. You’re describing the subsection of of this generation. And and you were part of this. Who are they? Who are the veterans of Afghanistan?

Where did they come from? Just give me a sense of we have this all volunteer army which as you point out, has enabled us to take our attention away to think that they are other people’s kids, other people, and you can go through vast wavs of America. And talk to people, particularly among, you know, the political elites who literally don’t know a single person. Who has served in the military, who who can’t understand why any family would send a son or daughter to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq. So who are they?

Where did they come from? Well, I’ll offer I think a couple

of interesting points. Is if you look at military recruitment, and you look at it by zip code, the zip codes that are in the top decile of this country in terms of income and the zip codes that are in the lowest decile in this country in terms of income are the two ZIP codes that the lease represented in the

US military.

The top decile, obviously, because those are elites who will do not send their children into the US military. And the bottom decile, because those are the individuals in this country who can’t qualify for the US military. Who are lowest income based off of access to education and other, you know, contributing factors. So I think that should concern us. That we have that bifurcation society and that’s only increasing.

I think another trend that is concerning is that, you know, military service increasingly is becoming inter generational. So it’s something that’s passed down. And this sort of speaks to that trend that we see across American society, the atomization of America. So our US military becomes, you know, one of all of these subcultures. We’re seeing spread out around America.

So we have lots of subcultures in America as opposed to sort of what we we used to add a little bit more of a monoculture. And now the military is one of those subcultures and that should concern us. And I think lastly, it should concern us because, you know, If you look back historically, anytime an empire begins to outsource its military to a a sub part of the empire. I mean, you look back to the Romans, you know, one of the key contributing factors of the fall of the Roman empire was when the legions stopped coming from Rome, they started coming from the provinces. Well, we are outsourcing our military service, you know, not to the provinces per se, but to an increasingly bespoke subculture in America.

And that is straying from the tradition we used to have of a citizen soldiery. And the tradition we used to have when America went to war, everyone went to war. And that made it very difficult to keep wars going. Like, we just fight a twenty year war. You can never fight World War II or the Civil War for twenty years.

And that’s good. You shouldn’t be able to fight a war for twenty years. I can’t think of any war that’s a quote unquote good war that you fight for twenty years. By the time you’re fighting it for twenty years, it

stinks. I find this absolutely fascinating and really really important. You say that we should be concerned about this. Put this in some perspective because I’m thinking that most Americans have not thought about this. I I think that they tell themselves the comforting fiction that, well, you know, is an all volunteer force.

They are citizens, soldiers. It’s same old same old. You’re suggesting that that in fact, it’s a fundamental and it sounds alarming on some levels where it goes. So give me your sense of that? Well, I think that one

of the results of the civil military divide that exists in the United States, which is based off of the all volunteer enforcement we just spoke about, is that everyday Americans who don’t touch the military, they’re militarily illiterate. Yeah. They don’t necessarily intuitively understand. They don’t understand the difference between, you know, when a retired four star general goes on TV in areas of political belief and when an active duty general does. And there’s a very stark difference between the two.

And I think when we look at conditions in the United States right now, you know, we have a very, very large, all volunteer military, which is something that, actually, you know, the founding fathers warn against and we’re always very skeptical. Collection, I think, for good reason. And we also have an incredibly dysfunctional internal politics. And if you look back from history, From from Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, when you combine those two variables, the large standing military and the dysfunctional internal politics, democracy does not last long in countries that combine those two variables because they are combustible. And so we’re sitting here in the United States.

It’s twenty twenty two. If I would argue if you look back at the last two elections, presidential elections, they’ve been contested elections with a degree of contest station only accelerating. And becoming more and more intense, I don’t think it is beyond plausible to believe that the next presidential election will be contested in some way. When you go from contested election to contested election, you know, at each juncture, there’s a game of brinkmanship that’s going on with whether or not the military will have to come in and restore some type of order. You know, there was talk about them having to restore order after the January six riots.

And there was National Guard. I’m actually from Washington, D. C. There was National Guard all over Washington, D. C.

In the wake of those riots. There was talk of them of President Trump. Remember there was the Tom Cotton, New York Times op ed and president Trump talking about evoking the Insurrection Act in the summer of twenty twenty. I mean, that wasn’t a presidential election. But it shows how there is a temptation for our political class to start politicizing the US military.

And that is very, very dangerous because although the military is seen as a as a non political entity in the United States, that does not mean that those in uniform do not have their political biases like every other American. The only difference is there’s a culture of Omerta in the U. S. Military. We don’t speak it.

But that culture can can break. And it seems as though our political leaders from the right and the left, and at every juncture are eager to politicize the US military. And it’s something we should be very aware of and alarmed about is citizens. My just my concern is that because so many citizens, again, don’t don’t speak the language aren’t necessarily literate with what’s going on inside the military. They won’t be able to see it until it’s too late.

The

line held it it held and I I I think reassured some people because you had people like General Mark Milley who made it, you know, issued public statements. There is no way the military is going to be involved. We had a letter signed by, I think, eleven former secretaries of defense saying, you know, the military is not going to play any role, you know, whatsoever. So at least in the existing top ranks of the military, they understand they seem to understand the danger, but If I understand you correctly, you’re saying, don’t become complacent about that or assume that that that necessarily reflects what might happen in the culture of the military

going forward? Absolutely. I mean, listen. And we, again, sort of our popular culture tends to fixate on these four star generals. You know, the most, I mean, the most senior sliver of the US military.

But the military is a massive organization with officers up and down the chain of command. You know, who are not? Mark Milley and might not do what Mark Milley says in in in the heat of the moment. And I I write in the book a little bit about lieutenant colonel Stuart Sheller. And Steve Sheller and I were actually contemporaries in the Marines.

We served in the same infantry battalion and did a deployment together. And I don’t know him that well, but I I knew him when I saw him, when he came out right after the bombing at Abigail, and he was a battalion commander in the Marine Corps member of this. That means, you

know, his career

was going well. They don’t select everyone to command the tie ins in the Marine Corps. You know, in his anger about the debacle that was going in Afghanistan, he’s a veteran of the Afghan war, recorded an excurating Facebook post Basically, I mean, he knew it would end his career and it did end his career in which he he called for accountability up and down the chain of command from the chairman of the joint chiefs a comment on the Marine Corps or the Secretary of Defense. And, you know, and I think the sentiments he was expressing were, you know, although believe they’re inappropriately expressed. You shouldn’t express those when you’re wearing the uniform.

I think we’re shared by many military members. And I think, again, if we look back at history, when these events happen, I’m not and I’m not necessarily the thing. Like, this is gonna happen to the United States. I think we should be aware of this. I don’t know we’re not.

It’s not the generals who do it. Right? There’s a reason that it’s colonel Khadafi. There’s a reason that it’s, you know, the the young Turks, it’s colonel Attiturk. It’s often sort of the the the younger up and comers who out of disgust will engage in some dramatic act.

And so again, you know, I’m not I’m really not trying to be alarmist. But we have such high levels of dysfunction domestically. And every time we kind of set up these scenarios where we’re asking our military to play a role in domestic politics. We’re really tempting the fates. The, you know, the analogy I use at least for sort of elections is Having these contested elections, it’s it reminds me of a drunk driver.

You know, like, a a drunk driver will will go to the bar. Right? And they will get some completely hammered drunk and they’ll drive home. And probably the first time they do that, like they make it a home and they do it and they make it home the second time to third time, And then it’s like on the fourth or fifth time they get hammered drunk and try to drive home. That’s when they wrap their car on the telephone pole.

And when I look at our contested election It’s like we’re we’re doing the equivalent as a nation of going to the bar, getting just hammer drunk, and we try to drive home. And like we’ve done it twice now and we have sort of managed to make it home. But one of these days, if we keep doing this, like, we are gonna we are gonna wrap our proverbial caller around a telephone poll. And it worries me. Like, we have to stop engaging in these behaviors.

So going back

to the the subculture of of the military, and and particularly your fellow Afghan veterans, is there a sense of anger and trail among them? And and does that contribute to the kind of alienation and radicalization that we’re seeing? And I’ve I’ve asked a lot of things that you can

unpack whoever you you like. Well, I in no way should perform purport to speak for all veterans, the war of Afghanistan. And I think you will find as many varied opinions amongst veterans as any other group. I have certainly encountered amongst certain veterans, that sense of, yes, that sense of betrayal, that sense of disgust with how it all ended. You know, I also have encountered veterans, you know, who have long ago through their hands up to the air and said this thing is unwinnable and at least it’s over even who’s a debacle on how it ended.

So I think there’s a variety of views. I think that, again, there’s to go back to the things we were talking about before, a failed war, particularly one that ends as badly as the war in Afghanistan did. If we look in history, there’s a political energy around that. That is a real thing. That we should be aware of.

When the Vietnam War ended, you know, there was sort of a a vortex that exists in the US military afterwards. And if you talk to people who are serving the US military in the early to mid seventies. They’ll tell you, those are very tough years in the military. I think we should be prepared to sort of psychically for some tough years now. In the military.

And, you know, and a little bit in American culture as it relates to the military in

these in these years that follow. So I’m I’m certainly cognizant of that. You’ve also touched on something else. Hopefully, you you can help me out on this one because I’ve assumed that the military has a very effective and competent way of vetting, picking who is going to be put in positions of responsibility. It is not easy to become a general, not everybody becomes a general.

And yet as you look across the political military landscape, and I’ll put this rather bluntly is We have some people who have risen to high ranks, lieutenant generals, like general Flynn, and they’re nuts. I guess I’m a little concerned about where the number of people who had been trusted by the military with command and yet are now among the ranks of the conspiracy theorists and among the most reckless extremists out there. I mean, that’s the scariest thing for me. I mean, how do you get to be? Someone like Michael Flynn promoted to his rank and b, I’m sorry, batshit

crazy. Well, I think, you know, it is Michael Flynn notwithstanding. I think we have a country that is pretty schizophrenic right now politically. And, I mean, I’ll be candid, Charlie. I I kind of think that the the two parties are nuts right now.

I’m not much of a partisan and I kind of don’t like either of them. So so I think I don’t like either of the parties and I think they go in very nuts so directions and do things that are not in the best interest of the broader body politic on a frequent basis, but I think there is a tendency that alarms me amongst retired military generals to use their cache to get involved in politics. And so by definition, if you’re gonna get involved in politics in America today, you’re gonna have to be a little nuts. And then, you know, and then we can talk about the degree of of nuts. And I think that, you know, that we’ve seen this trend.

I mean, in twenty sixteen, the year that Michael Flynn came onto the scene in the Trump administration, you know, was he was really the the the first year that you had seen to retire very recently retired four star generals, I guess Michael Son was a a three star, but give speeches at the Democratic and Republican national conventions. And that was something that in the before was sort of, you know, rebooting. And so, you know, the US military remains one of the most trusted institutions in the United States. And senior retired military officers have been, in recent years, leveraging that trust to get into politics and play in the political realm and our politicians are happy to to capitalize on their cache. But what’s dangerous is more they can involve the politics, the more that trust erodes.

On yesterday’s podcast, we talked about the blurring of the

line between entertainment and politics. You are describing a blurring of the line between the military and politics that there used to be a pretty clear line that you do not trade in your your celebrity. Of course, I mean, look, Dwight Eisenhower became president of the United States. I mean, so we have elected generals in the past. To a high office in the country, but but there does seem to be kind of a blurring of those lines now.

Doesn’t there? Well, it does. And of course, you know,

you’re I mean, listen, our first president was a general general Washington. Yeah. So, you know, we have we have always sort of had that uneasy

— grant. General grant. I

mean, yeah, there’s there’s been many. So we’ve always had that sort of uneasy relationship, you know, well, you know, what is the line between our military and politics. But I think there’s a little bit of a perfect storm here going on. Right? And so much as Eisenhower becomes president after the second world war, grant becomes president after the civil war.

Those are two wars that were national mobilizations and fought by citizen soldiers. So they were more reflective of the citizenry. I think what’s difficult now is we have generals whose cachet doesn’t come from really a national movement, a national type of service, and it sort of comes from this abstract, well, their generals and we’re going to defer to them. And, yeah, and again, that I just find that I find that somewhat alarming, particularly as the military seems to be increasingly used as a political football, you know, in a context which we already spoke about in which we have decreased military literacy in this country. And and the parties are more extreme.

So you get more craziness. I mean, I think we’ve seen this with our politicians. Right? Yeah. You know, why often you see people who’ve seen they’re very sane in their public lives or maybe they’re not politicians and they run for office, and they seem like lunatics when you see them on the stump.

I mean, like, like, look at someone like JD look at someone like JD Vance for instance. No. Who was sort of this centrist Republican, you know, right? He was normal. He was normal.

And now he’s way out there. But that’s sort of what he has to transform himself into if he wants to become a senator from Ohio. And that’s our political system right now. That is our political, so that that all

of the incentives in our political system and the arc toward crazy. I’m gonna just go back to the the fall of Afghanistan and the aftermath. Because, of course, one of the more fundamental questions is, is America safer? Has America’s rule in the world been damaged? And and I guess one of the things that that I keep wondering about is in what you think about, you know, America’s abandonment of of Afghanistan.

Whether that played, and of course, we can’t possibly know for sure, but whether that played in the Vladimir Putin’s decision to go into Ukraine, the sense that we were weak, that we would not stand behind our allies. Do you think there’s any connection? Was there any Was there any fallout in that in that direction? Oh, oh, yeah. I

think you absolutely can drop a direct plumb line between our decision to get out of Afghanistan and the way we got out with Putin’s invasion of of Ukraine. I mean, listen, he’s sitting there in August of last summer and he’s considering whether or not to launch this invasion, one of the most essential variables in that decision is is what will the NATO

response be?

And he turns on the television and he sees these images coming out of of Kabul. And he sees, again, just the chaos at the airport, our inability to do this in an effective way the way NATO was really being dictated terms by the Taliban and had no stomach to stay one day past August thirty first. I mean, if he’s trying to determine what NATO’s response is gonna be, that clearly tilts him towards, I think the NATO response will be muted. And that NATO cannot get its act together. And the US can’t get its act together to act with real resolve.

I think what’s remarkable is that within six months of, you know, what I would call, probably NATO, I mean, darkest hour. Like, we should remember, you know, an Afghanistan is the first time in NATO’s history that the alliance of those article five the condition, you know, when attack against one is the attack against all. And that article five ends in this debacle. But it’s amazing that six months after that darkest hour. We have what I would say is one of NATO’s, you know, brightest moments, which is the way the alliance holds together and outperforms in Ukraine.

And, you know, and Charlie, like, again, I think as Americans, we have this tendency to sort of want to sort of Stowe pipe Afghanistan says, well, it’s just this one country and we’re gonna turn the page. And and the administration of this effect said this because we need to focus on great power politics now. Well, Afghanistan is great power politics. So, you know, if you could draw a plumb line between Afghanistan and Ukraine, and had Putin’s invasion of Ukraine gone gone better and he’d swept through Ukraine, we would probably be drawing a plumb line right now between Ukraine and a past able Chinese incursion on invasion of Taiwan. And if China were to invade Taiwan and there and there were to be an American response, of the great challenges we face as Americans in our responses, we have to do it across the Pacific Ocean, which is logistically very, very difficult for us.

Then wouldn’t it be nice if we were trying to respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan if we had, let’s say, strategic air bases in a country like Afghanistan, which shares a border with China. So again, I mean, these issues are all connected and it’s important for us and for the conversation

around them an authy stow fight in to show that connectivity. So you are also the co author with admiral Stavritas, NATO’s former supreme allied commander of a novel twenty thirty four, which I have nothing already. Can you give me a quick Spark’s node, pitch for what do we have to look forward to in twenty thirty four? The year

and the book. Unfortunately, not much. But the book imagines a war fought between China and the United States primarily at sea in the aforementioned year two thousand and thirty four. And the book was written in the spirit of if you believe and I do that as Henry Kissinger says that if we’re not in a cold war with China right now, we are at least in the foothills of a cold war with China. But if you look back at the cold war, against the Soviets.

One of the things that we had in the United States was a very rich literature that imagined what third world war fighting the Soviets would look like. And the Soviets had the same literature. And that’s books, films like Red Dawn and Doctor Strange Love and Books, like, you know, the Bedford incident. And if you look at this cold war in the China, there’s been really no films, no very little books and and imagining done. So we wanted to sort of imagine that war as a precautionary measure.

You know, if you can imagine it, you can avoid it. And if you look at the Cold Oregon Civilians, we didn’t agree on much with the silliness. The one thing because we had done this richer management work that we did agree upon was that no one would win the third full war and none of us wanted to fight it. And eventually, it was avoided. So we’ve

heard the book was written. I have got to read this. Elliot Ackerman’s latest book is the fifth Act, America’s End in AF ganistan. Elliot Ackerman, thank you so much for joining me on the Bulwark podcast today. Thanks so much for having me on, Troy.

The Bulwark podcast produced by Katie Cooper with audio production by Jonathan Seary. I’m Charlie Sykes. Thank you for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast and we’ll be back tomorrow and do this all over again. You’re worried about economy. Inflation is high.

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