ウィスパリング同時通訳研究会コミュのDavid Petraeus: ‘The Taliban are about to be acquainted with a very harsh reality—that they are broke

BARRY PAVEL: What size force roughly do you think is required, and under what timelines, to successfully and comprehensively conduct the ongoing evacuation operation in Kabul and potentially elsewhere in Afghanistan? It seems to me that the president might have set out the right objectives in terms of the operation, and that is getting everybody back, but it seems like in terms of how we’re accomplishing it, it’s sort of small ball, where—shouldn’t we be laying out the whole requirement and then executing it with allies and partners? So what’s needed? Do any bases need to be reopened? How do we get Americans, Afghan allies, coalition allies, people from far-flung parts of Afghanistan out of the country and to safety and resettlement? And what might the Taliban do in response?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: The only honest [answer to the question] you’ve just asked, Barry, I think, is that we really don’t know. The military always keeps what’s called a running estimate process ongoing, and I’m sure that our military planners, together with coalition counterparts, are looking at all options, including having some folks assemble at other locations, not just inside Kabul but all around the country, where there are large airfields. Kandahar in the southwest would be very helpful, Herat in the west, Mazar-i-Sharif, even Bagram north of Kabul, which has an extraordinary expanse of concrete but we should recognize that all roads in Afghanistan lead to Kabul, not Bagram, as nice as all that concrete might be. And I’m sure that there are all types of forces on call and already participating.

Major General Chris Donahue, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, the commander on the ground in Kabul, knows all of our most special mission units and other elements exceedingly well and he knows how to work with interagency partners from his time with such units also.

I’m sure that State is also examining, together with the Department of Defense and interagency partners, whether we should reoccupy that splendid embassy that we built for $750 million. It would offer a lot of benefits as we figure out how we might influence the government being put together by the Taliban, which is going to be in such a serious fiscal bind in the near to midterm that the lights could literally go out in Kabul and the country, and that’s just one of the many ways in which we have influence, needless to say, on the government that is now being formed.

I do want to offer one caution. It is one thing to fly a C-130 or a Chinook or even a C-17 to pick up folks at Kandahar or Bagram or Herat or Mazar; it is another not so trivial thing to reopen an airfield like Kandahar, as that would require substantial security, fuel, bed down, water, food, maintenance, generators, spare parts, and possibly munitions.

The real issue, I think, at the end of the day, though, surrounds who we will fly out of Afghanistan. Some categories are clear. US citizens, very clear. Green-card holders, even special immigrant visa holders, and applicants and family members are fairly clear. However, where does one draw the line when it comes to anyone whose security is jeopardized because of work with the US or Afghan governments, our innumerable implementing partners over the years, civil society groups that will be in the crosshairs, etc.? The Department of State and the White House really have to come to grips with that pretty quickly or many, many hopes will be dashed.

In truth, right now, having followed numerous individual cases and groups, it appears to me that there is no true system for those inside Afghanistan beyond American citizens, green cards, and SIVs. And those who are getting through have partners in Kabul who can operate effectively in the city, pick up individuals and groups, get them through the Taliban checkpoints, navigate the airport entry control point, and get to a private or chartered aircraft that was able to get landing rights. In sum, what they are doing is working around the system, not through it. I think Washington’s going to have to provide some more specific guidance on who can come to the US or even go to a third country. We have written right now a very substantial blank check that I fear we may struggle to redeem.

BARRY PAVEL: Where do you think the failure in the withdrawal operation to date has been greatest besides the overall policy of withdrawal, which we know you are clearly on record as opposing? Is it more of an intelligence failure, a planning failure, a policy failure, or maybe just an operational execution failure, or some combination of all four? How do we fix things going forward?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: First of all, let’s just remember that there is a common recourse in Washington when something doesn’t turn out quite the way folks had hoped it would be, as Peter Bergen reminded us the other day, to declare an intelligence failure. I’m not sure that is the case at all here in this situation. In fact, if you followed even what’s just on the public record, it would not appear that that is necessarily the case.

Look, I think it was what my great diplomatic partner and great friend Ambassador Ryan Crocker described in a brilliant piece in The New York Times over the weekend. And he called it a lack of strategic patience, which, ironically, we are demonstrating in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere in Africa under this administration. And ironically, where we were prior to the decision to withdrawal was sort of what then-Vice President Biden always wanted us to get to but wasn’t possible back in late 2009-2010 and so forth because of the missions that we had been assigned. But Ryan wrote in this piece: “As Americans, we have many strengths, but strategic patience is not among them. We have been able to summon it at critical times such as the Revolutionary War and World War II, where, for example, Congress did not threaten to defund the war effort if it wasn’t wrapped up by 1944. In Korea, nearly seven decades after an inconclusive truce, we still have about 28,000 troops. But our patience is not the norm. And it certainly has not been on display in Afghanistan as the world watched the Taliban storm into Kabul.

“As the enormity of the events in Afghanistan this past week sinks in, the questions start. How did this happen? How could we not have foreseen it? Why didn’t Afghan security forces put up a fight? Why didn’t we do something about corruption? The list goes on. There is one overarching answer: our lack of strategic patience at critical moments, including from President Biden. It has damaged our alliances and emboldened our adversaries and increased the risk to our own security. It has flouted 20 years of work and sacrifice.”

He then goes on to acknowledge, unsparingly, our successes, our failures, our shortcomings. Near the end, he observes:

“It did not have to be this way. When I left Afghanistan as ambassador in 2012, we had about 85,000 troops in the country. The Taliban controlled none of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals. When President Obama left office, there were fewer than 10,000 troops. And when Mr. Trump departed, there were fewer than five thousand. The Taliban still did not hold any major urban area. Now they hold the entire country. What changed so swiftly and completely? We did. Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw all US forces destroyed an affordable status quo that could have lasted indefinitely at a minimum cost in blood and treasure.”

The bottom line, I think, Barry, is that we needed to acknowledge that we could not win the war in Afghanistan, given that the enemy had sanctuaries and a variety of other factors that made it an exceedingly difficult place to truly prevail. But we could have managed it and retained a critical platform for our regional and Afghan efforts, an ally, however flawed the Afghan government may have been, and access. All of which are now gone and replaced by a regime that may have a more polished public-relations apparatus than it did before, but will likely take Afghanistan back many centuries, if not all the way to the seventh century as before.

Even our country wasn’t built in a couple of decades. In fact, it’s instructive occasionally to remember that we had a brutal civil war some eight or so decades into our history. And terrible corruption was a reality well into the twentieth century. It takes real patience to allow a country to build institutions, capabilities, identity, and so forth. And clearly, two decades was not enough when it came to Afghanistan.

BARRY PAVEL: Is your main point that there was, for a small investment—roughly 2,500 forces—on the ground for a sustained period of time going forward, we could have bought a lot of insurance for the types of threats and challenges that we’re now having to deal with head-on because of the full withdrawal?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: It is, Barry. And, I mean, I don’t know how you can contrast what we had—and, again, of course, it’s 2,500. But what really makes it is the constellation of drones that we can now put over places like Afghanistan, especially if you can do it efficiently from bases in the country so they don’t have to commute to the fight, as we say, as they will now. Probably 60 percent of a Reaper’s flying time now will be taken up just getting to and from Afghanistan if they’re launched out of bases in the Gulf states.

So it would—it’s that. It’s a lot of intelligence fusion. It is close air support that is quite precise and for which we have mechanisms with the Afghan headquarters so that you can actually bring it to bear. It’s not easy to bring airpower to bear. You know that, actually, I know, from your time in the National Security Council staff and all the rest of that, and studying the defense issues, etc. You have to literally have systems. You have to have joint tactical air controllers to authorize it. It is not trivial. And we had that all set up—2,500, 3,500, whatever—plus these enablers.

What we really were doing—we were no longer on the front lines. It’s well known we haven’t had a battlefield loss in eighteen months. Not just because of the very flawed agreement that the previous administration signed with the—with the Taliban, having excluded the elected government of Afghanistan from the agreement, and then forcing them to release over five thousand detainees, most of whom went right back to the fight. So, yes, that would have been the way.

And of course, what we saw is that for the lack of those 2,500 to 3,500, it’s almost one of those tales of, for the lack of a nail the shoe was lost, for the lack of a shoe… and it goes on. For the lack of 2,500 to 3,500 Americans, 8,500 coalition forces withdrew. Eighteen thousand maintenance contractors withdrew, who kept the US provided. And we insisted on providing sophisticated US helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft for transport and close air support. They couldn’t maintain them. You need a whole supply chain and all kinds of diagnostics and kits and everything else. And maintaining that from Gulf states via FaceTime or Zoom just obviously was not possible.

That was the critical element in providing response when the early days of the fighting with the Taliban, Afghan units did fight for two or three days before realizing no one has our back, no one’s coming to the rescue, resupply, aero medevac, or close air support, so why are we fighting? And Afghans have learned over the centuries how to survive. Some have called them professional chameleons at times, and I think that’s more than a bit unfair. But they will cut a deal if they can see which way the wind is blowing in a very strong manner.

Innumerable international organizations have provided very important basic services to the Afghan people, supplementing the government, and probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will leave Afghanistan because of this as well, many of them seeking, of course, to come to the United States either directly or via a third country. And, again, that’s where we need some specificity on who is actually going to qualify because that is not present, to my knowledge, right now.

Much has been made that the Afghans didn’t fight. Look, Afghans have been fighting and dying for their country, particularly since, say, roughly 2014 or so when we transitioned frontline security, by and large, to them. But they’ve had over 66,000 casualties. That’s just, roughly, twenty-seven times the American losses.

So the idea—a lot of my old colleagues in uniform reacted to the assertion that they wouldn’t fight somewhat indignantly, frankly, having been out there and seeing them shed blood for their country. Again, by no means perfect. Lots of shortcomings, many issues, corruption, all the rest of that. But they would fight if they knew that somebody had their back, and for quite a while we had their back if their own air force and their own forces could not provide that.

BARRY PAVEL: Some people who aren’t as familiar with the details aren’t as familiar with how the coalition, the United States, and the contractors worked with Afghan forces. How should a hand-off at some point, assuming that the president was coming in and saying, we’re going to go to zero, how could that have been handled with more effectiveness than, perhaps, we saw?

GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS: Well, certainly, timing is an issue. I mean, this is a very rapid, arguably, hasty withdrawal right at the beginning of what was widely anticipated to be the most active fighting season since we’ve been back.

And so, again, there’s a variety of tweaks. To be fair to the president and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others who have made the point, this was never going to be smooth. The question is, could it have been smoother and, perhaps, again, with some tweaks and at least extending the amount of time.

I have to think that there was probably disbelief still, certainly, in Afghanistan. I think it wasn’t just the agreement the previous year that started to shake people’s confidence. Then it was the announcement that we would withdraw, and I think people still thought they’ll look into the abyss and they’re going to draw back and say, whoa, this could be really ugly. Maybe we sort of, again, maintain some kind of reshaped force.

And then when the withdrawal really did take place and then the contractors and all the others followed, keep in mind, I’m just giving the wave tops here. There’s endless more everything in terms of institutions and organizations and implementing partners and everything else.

And then the dam breaks and everybody starts to try to cut a deal, find a way out, and so forth. And, of course, but people don’t want to leave their home. They don’t want to leave a business in which they’ve invested twenty years and all the rest of that.

So it’s only, I think, when reality really set in, especially in Kabul, because I think a lot of people were just in disbelief that there would not be a massive defense of Kabul and that they had more time than it turned out they really did have.

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