Farewell Afghanistan

A FULLER VERSION OF MY TIMES STORY TODAY: America’s Great Exit from Afghanistan is now approaching the endgame. It’s not just about troops withdrawing. It’s also about 20 years’ worth of accumulated paraphernalia vital for the sustainment and survival of a superpower force confronting a resilient and well-armed insurgency. The American military footprint, human and structural, is being reduced to zero. Around 900 US Air Force C-17 transport aircraft loads of equipment from armoured vehicles, trucks, highly classified computers and munitions to spare parts for everything , furniture and fast-food stalls, have already been flown out of the country. So far, more than 16,000 separate pieces, most of them now “non-defensive articles”, as the Pentagon puts it, have been extracted. What the US created over 20 years was a vast empire of warfighting support structures that in many cases changed the landscape of once primitive areas of Afghanistan. With the war and training mission officially over, it’s now all about completing a “retrograde” programme which is how the Pentagon describes it. As with the wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, the logistics kings of the US military divide up the huge tonnage of materiel deployed for a conflict into three categories: “First, must be sent home. Second, can be left for the host country to use. Third, no longer needed or obsolete but too sensitive to give away or against US law to do so, therefore trashed and turned into scrap metal”. “Retrograde requires a full inventory of equipment which is a complex operation due to the amount, variety, condition and sensitivity. The fate of the equipment is assessed after it’s inventoried,” Lieutenant Commander Karen Roxberry of US Central Command said. Afghan Del Boys have had their eyes on making a small fortune with the scrap but have watched with dismay as the Americans destroyed perfectly good vehicles which they could have sold. But the US which lost dozens of Humvee armoured vehicles and other military kit captured by the Taliban over 20 years would rather turn such valuable assets into twisted metal than risk them being bought on the market by the insurgents. The first US soldiers to arrive in Afghanistan, a dozen Green Berets from 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) who set foot on Afghan soil in October 2001 after flying from Uzbekistan over the Hindu Kush mountains, resorted to riding horses when they teamed up with the Northern Alliance to take on the Taliban. Their mission was codenamed Task Force Dagger. They joined a CIA paramilitary team, codenamed Jawbreaker, which had arrived on September 26. It was warfighting at its most primitive. But over the next few years as mass troop reinforcements built up to a peak of 100,000 US personnel, it was not just American forces residing across the length and breadth of Afghanistan, supported by thousands of Nato and other coalition troops. They brought mini-Americas with them. Kandahar, a huge airfield in the south, was a classic case. “They built a boardwalk with coffee shops, McDonalds, Burger Kings, even TGI Fridays, “ Seth Jones, a longstanding adviser to US special forces in Afghanistan, told The Times. “When Canadian troops arrived at Kandahar they built a hockey rink and we played against them.” “Now no more McDonalds, no more Burger Kings, no more TGI Fridays. It was like a fast-food mirage in the desert and it’s all gone,” he said. To underline the impact a large-scale foreign conventional force had on Afghanistan, you only have to look at the statistics following the first retrograde programme carried out in 2013 and 2014 when the US and Nato combat phase of the war came to an end. By then the US military had 11,000 huge mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPS) to evacuate. Nine thousand were repatriated and 2,000, judged to be surplus to requirement, were destroyed. It took around 12 hours with a special blowtorch to turn each $1 million vehicle into scrap. The 2014 exit of heavy armour was the largest retrograde operation in history, with 24,000 pieces of rolling stock shipped back to the US. Today, everything is being dismantled at a rapid rate. Bases which had housed thousands of US and coalition troops are being handed over as empty shells with destroyed equipment lying around - permanent mementoes of what was once a great endeavour by the western world to bring peace, stability, human rights and modern thinking to a country gripped by tribal war lordism, a fanatical insurgent militia, international terrorists and corruption. Were lessons learned from this experiment in nation-building? “I think for the American military who served in Afghanistan there is currently a feeling of detachment. But it will really hit home if there’s an advance by the Taliban on major cities such as Kandahar, Jalalabad and Kunduz where US troops fought and died to protect,” said Jones who spent 12 years advising special forces in Afghanistan, both in the field and at the Pentagon. “I don’t think people will fully appreciate what the end of the mission means until they see Taliban flags flying over these cities,” he said. “What will we do if the Taliban expands its control over the country? The Afghans may then fracture in which case the war will continue and the US will have to decide who to back. Then it will be like the US backing an insurgency against the Taliban rather than being involved in counter-insurgency against them,” he said. “But the US footprint will be different, it will be done from the Persian Gulf and from carriers and it will be like returning to 2001 when the CIA and special forces deployed to Afghanistan. The US has now learned this lesson [after 20 years], you don’t deploy large numbers of conventional forces,” he said. Andrew Krepinevich who spent 20 years as an officer in the US army and served in the private office of three secretaries of defence, agreed. “We need to avoid getting caught in these kind of wars. But we will need to maintain a baseline level of training proficiency in these sort of operations.” “So, always have special operations forces aiding allied partner countries confronting insurgencies or large-scale terrorism to pass along what we’ve learned and to stay current on changes in enemy tactics; and figure out how to expand this capability quickly and effectively,” he said. “It could be a tall order but let’s hope we have political leaders who can think strategically,” he said.