Afghanistan: the good old days of 2001-2004

Here my CNAS colleague Michael McCarthy reports on an unusual book party he attended at Fort McNair, here in Washington, D.C.:

Last night I went down to Fort McNair, home of the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies (NESA). The occasion was a book launch event for Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan 2003-2005. The book, edited by Army historian Christopher Koontz, is textbook-heavy and filled with maps, charts, and long interviews with veterans of those two years of the conflict. The interview subjects range from commanding officer LTG David Barno all the way to a civilian political advisor on one of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams.

In the conference room at McNair, uniformed officers from most of the services filed in while I sat wondering how to pronounce the acronym “NESA” (turns out it’s Nee-Suh). Barno-now retired from active duty and the director of NESA-introduced the panel, which was composed of soldiers he’d worked with closely in Afghanistan. Not being a historian of the Afghanistan conflict, I was struck by the relatively rosy picture these men painted of that period in the war: the Taliban resistance was disorganized and ineffective, with little predilection for IEDs; Afghan officers were starting to be embedded with NATO forces and serving as a vital cultural link; and governance was improving. All the panelists were also in agreement about the close and effective working relationship between LTG Barno and Ambassador Khalilzad, holding this up as a model of civil-military cooperation in a warzone.

Of course, all was not well, as even people with obvious vested interests were able to admit. For one, cooperation was poor between the military and most civilian agencies (including those of the three-letter variety). In addition, British MG Peter Gilchrist (ret.) discussed the futility of the U.K.’s counternarcotics portfolio in Afghanistan. This effort ultimately became an attempt to keep order at meetings where some 40 civilian agencies squabbled amongst themselves while refusing to share intelligence. And the Secretary of Defense’s micromanaging didn’t help either, once he suddenly began holding weekly videoconferences (which “brought us to our knees” in terms of productivity, according to Barno).

Before the event, I thought I would hear plenty about the fate of Afghanistan going forward. But this was a purely history-minded crowd, and aside from a mention of the book’s timeliness, none of the participants offered assessments of the war effort today. The words “McChrystal” and “30,000” were deafening in their absence. Doubtless, every person in the room had his or her own well-defined views on what to do next and had probably watched the president’s West Point speech three or four times. But it was as if, for just a few hours, everybody wanted to harken back to a different time, when things seemed to be looking up in Afghanistan.

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