Ominous signs on a grim anniversary for U.S., Afghanistan

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U.S. Army Sgt. Xanthin Luptak vividly recalls watching on television as the chaotic final days of America’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan unfolded in August 2021.

In his mind, it was crystal clear what his country had to show for 20 years of combat in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history, a $2.3 trillion campaign that killed thousands of U.S. troops and injured many more.

“It was all boiled down to nothing in a week,” Sgt. Luptak, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who helped train Afghan police forces, said in a recent interview.

“I’m still angry every time it comes up,” he said. “I’m able to handle it better now, but it really upsets me and angers me. I think about my time over there, all the people I worked with, people I’ve trained, friends I met, people I served with. I feel like everything was reduced down to being a pawn in the game.”

His bleak view is common among those who served in Afghanistan. The war created a deep and simmering undercurrent of emotional turmoil up and down the ranks of the U.S. military. Along with the even bloodier conflict in Iraq, it defined a generation of service members and sparked more fundamental questions about what the world’s No. 1 superpower can and should try to achieve militarily in the 21st century.

To even a casual observer, it’s easy to see why the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the way it was conducted, and its aftermath may fuel a wave of psychological trauma that veterans’ organizations, government agencies, the American medical community and veterans themselves will be dealing with for decades to come.

The war ended with the Taliban, the radical Islamists whom the U.S. overthrew in its post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan, once again taking full control of the country.

Recent U.S. and U.N. reports and security assessments have highlighted the growing Islamic extremist presence in Afghanistan, including apparent al Qaeda training camps in some corners of the country, fueling questions about whether the Taliban could again be offering a haven to terrorists intent on targeting the U.S. and its allies, just as they did in the years before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

The terrorist group ISIS-K, the Islamic State’s Afghanistan affiliate, has shown its lethal ability to conduct high-profile attacks in Russia, Iran and elsewhere this year. The organization has made no secret of its desire to strike American targets as well. ISIS-K was responsible for a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport on Aug. 26, 2021, that killed 13 Marines and encapsulated what critics generally consider to have been a disastrous U.S. withdrawal that sent President Biden’s poll numbers plunging.

Since then, women’s rights in Afghanistan have been curtailed. Many of the accomplishments of nongovernmental organizations and aid groups over two decades have been reversed. Afghanistan is facing a crumbling economy and widespread famine. The Taliban have closed schools, especially those for girls, and have reinstituted their harsh interpretation of Islamic law throughout the country.

Many U.S. allies, such as Afghan interpreters who put their lives on the line to aid American troops, are stuck in the country. They were left behind as the Biden administration raced to meet its self-imposed deadline of Aug. 31, 2021.

“I think we left people behind that we should have brought out, and that is a moral failure,” said retired Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, who led U.S. Central Command from March 2019 to April 1, 2022. CENTCOM oversees U.S. military activities in Afghanistan and across the Middle East.

Gen. McKenzie said in no uncertain terms that the men and women who fought in Afghanistan have no reason to apologize.

“I don’t feel guilty about anything at all,” he said in an exclusive interview recently with The Washington Times. “I feel sad about the loss of life. I feel sad about the loss of American life, the loss of Afghan life, the lost opportunities we had, and I bitterly regret the way the campaign ended.

“The reason to go into Afghanistan was clear and unambiguous: to prevent further attacks on the United States,” he said. “The problem was not going in. The problem was that after we went in, the mission changed over time to become nation-building. And that’s where the tragedy of the campaign is. And that was not a military decision. That was a political decision.

“We went there to protect our country from further attack. We were successful in doing that,” said Gen. McKenzie, who headed CENTCOM leading up to and during the Afghanistan withdrawal. “I don’t think there’s anything ignoble or wasteful in that. Some people paid a very high price. Some people paid the ultimate price. But I think they did it for a good cause, and I don’t think there’s any blame on them. If there is blame anywhere, it is actually on the political leadership that dictated the war, not on those who executed it.”

Deep emotional wounds

Troubling widespread trends deepen fears about the long-term psychological toll that the Afghanistan withdrawal could take on veterans. Data from the Department of Veterans Affairs shows that the suicide rate for veterans ages 18 to 34 nearly doubled from 2000 to 2020. Although some statistics vary, overall data shows at least 17 veterans die by suicide daily.

Even before the U.S. exit from Afghanistan was completed, VA psychologists were bracing for a significant spike over years and even decades.

“Our research shows that it isn’t just the combat. It isn’t just the PTSD. It’s also the reintegration difficulties we face as we transition. These difficulties greatly increase the risk for suicide,” Joseph Geraci, a VA psychologist and Afghanistan War veteran, told the VA Research Currents publication on Aug. 30, 2021, the day the final U.S. forces left Afghanistan.

“When combined with what is currently being played out in Afghanistan — which can be viewed by some as a form of moral injury — it has the potential to leave us more susceptible to psychological challenges,” he said at the time. “Processing the emotions related to the Afghanistan withdrawal may be a sizable burden for some veterans that can weigh them down. It is yet another heavy rock for them to carry in their ‘rucksacks.’ At this point, it’s just anecdotal, but I am concerned that the situation in Afghanistan is going to increase the suicide risk for some post-9/11 veterans.”

Behind the numbers, of course, are personal stories.

“Six just from my Iraq unit alone have taken their lives,” said Sgt. Luptak, who was wounded and acquired non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after exposure to toxins from burn pits while stationed abroad.

‘Why are we still here?’

Sgt. Luptak said he deployed to Afghanistan shortly after the 2011 U.S. mission that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. That operation, nearly a full decade after bin Laden’s terrorist outfit carried out the 9/11 attacks, sparked a significant wave of patriotism at home and seemed to offer something of a clear payoff for the massive investment of lives, money and time the U.S. had made in Afghanistan.

“I was under the impression we were going to go over there and that we were supposed to be the initial portion that was going to finish up whatever missions were left, and then we were going to be ripping out of there within two years,” Sgt. Luptak said.

“I started to get really disappointed. Why are we still here?” he said. “Down the road, another year or two, I still don’t know the answer.”

Indeed, the underlying reasons for American military involvement in Afghanistan shifted in the months and years after the bin Laden operation. With the al Qaeda leader dead, the overarching U.S. goal morphed into less of a direct mission to capture or kill al Qaeda leaders and more of an effort to sustain the U.S.-backed government in Kabul and train an Afghan army that would, in theory, be able to step in once the American forces eventually left.

During the subsequent decade, the Taliban slowly but surely took back territory while amassing a level of grassroots support among the Afghan people. That support paid dividends in the spring and summer of 2021, when the forces of the elected Afghan government collapsed in a matter of weeks, giving the Taliban control of Kabul even before the American exit was complete.

The Trump administration struck a 2020 deal to pull out U.S. forces in exchange for security guarantees from the Taliban. Mr. Biden adhered to that agreement despite severe warning signs throughout 2021 that Afghanistan would collapse quickly with the departure of American troops.

Some veterans said they considered the war lost long before that and no one paying close attention should have been surprised by what transpired in the summer of 2021.

“The writing was on the wall,” said Gil Barndollar, a senior fellow at the think tank Defense Priorities and the Catholic University of America’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship, who deployed twice to Afghanistan as a Marine Corps infantry officer from 2009 to 2016.

“I think the war was an ultimate failure, no question,” he said.

Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he said, have placed a heavy emotional burden on many veterans, including a belief that their government failed them by perpetuating wars with no clear endgame.

“For a lot of veterans, Iraq and Afghanistan, either or both, can just be part of a bigger stew,” he said. The experience has become “the foundation stone in a much bigger edifice of betrayal by their government, or society — the ability to have a coherent view of the world that makes sense. That collapses because of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The aftermath

Of all the repercussions of the U.S. withdrawal, the resurgence of Afghanistan as a regional haven and base for Islamic terrorism is perhaps the most troubling.

As of July, al Qaeda operates training camps in 12 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, said Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who cited U.N. data in his recent analysis.

Indeed, a July report by the U.N. Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team found that al Qaeda “remains strategically patient, cooperating with other terrorist groups in Afghanistan and prioritizing its ongoing relationship with the Taliban.” The group has limited ability right now to conduct external attacks, the United Nations said, but it still intends to do so as it rebuilds its networks.

The terrorist group seems to be rapidly putting together a deep-rooted infrastructure across the country.

“Al Qaeda figures located in Afghanistan continue to engage with warlords, propagandists, recruiters and financiers,” the U.N. report says. “Experienced instructors have traveled into Afghanistan to enhance the security of dispersed cells. Al Qaeda prioritizes outreach and recruitment” across the country.

Part of the Biden administration’s justification for leaving Afghanistan entirely, rather than leaving behind a small, semi-permanent contingent of U.S. troops, was that the Pentagon would still have “over-the-horizon” capability to strike targets in the country at any time. Since the withdrawal, the U.S. appears to have carried out just one such operation: a July 2022 drone strike that killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri in Kabul.

Pentagon officials insist the U.S. could carry out more missions if necessary.

“To be clear, we do maintain over-the horizon-capability,” Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, told The Times’ “Threat Status” podcast recently. “One of the capabilities that the U.S. military and the U.S. government writ large have is global strike. If there are threats against the homeland, we have the ability to strike targets anywhere, anytime, as necessary.”

“History has shown we’re going to do what we need to do to protect the homeland,” he said.

The al-Zawahri operation proved such strikes are possible, but they are now far more difficult given the distances U.S. drones must travel and the lack of troops and intelligence assets on the ground to help find targets.

Gen. McKenzie, the former CENTCOM commander, described the situation in Afghanistan as “an increasingly dangerous threat.”

“We have very few tools to use against it,” he said. “We have very little visibility into Afghanistan. We have very few ways to reach Afghanistan. … So, our tools are very limited, and those are decisions that we made.

“I think it’s going to get worse,” he said.