Just Can’t Picture It
Our failure in Afghanistan began at the highest level of leadership in the US and persisted for two decades. The men and women on the ground, walking around and waiting to be vaporized by a hidden bomb, never had a chance to create the circumstances for a lasting peace. No one in the White House, Foggy Bottom, or the Pentagon could imagine how to translate the expenditure of American blood and treasure into a prosperous, secure Afghanistan.
Our crisis of imagination disallowed even the most rudimentary measures of success. For the entire war on terror, 2001 to 2021, the US government never had a map to show how we were doing. The name for such a map is a Common Operating Picture or COP. There were always maps showing where we — the US and NATO units — were on the ground, always using the appropriate military icons and displayed with GPS precision on gigantic (20’ x 40’) digital wall displays. The displays became like screen captures of performance artists arrayed around the country of Afghanistan. Rather than show what we were doing to achieve the stated goals (i.e., bring peace and stability to Afghanistan) as well as the unstated goals (i.e., don’t get killed, don’t lose anything, and try not to kill civilians), the maps showed where we were and who had attacked us in the previous 24 hours. Like reviews of a lethal ballet, the daily updates would be a recapitulation of the deadly pas de deux of the Taliban and us. This dance occurred against the backdrop of daily drone strikes and IED hits. Gotcha. Gotcha back.
In 2012, US special operations teams were arrayed around Afghanistan in over twenty remote outposts. Comprised of Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and Marine special ops teams, these men and women lived on the edge without a net. They represented the single best effort the US and NATO ever mounted to bring stability to the local population. Most of these outposts, especially in the south, were subjected to daily attacks. In the headquarters in Kabul, Bagram, and Tampa, the giant digital maps reflected the precise location of each little Alamo. What the maps did not show, and never did, was the return on this investment.
A COP is supposed to inform the educated observer what ground is being contested and by whom. In Desert Storm in 1991, as the US armored tsunami washed across the Arabian Peninsula, the COP showed the frontline trace of friendly forces on the map, with arrows showing the direction of travel should the observer not know we had been told to “go North; kill everything.” Yes, all the arrows pointed north, and every day the frontline trace moved in that direction, indicating linear and symmetrical movement to orgasmic victory.
In Afghanistan, the big map never showed arrows. It showed our locations and no movement.
There was one attempt to see how well we were doing, if we were controlling the ground, and the results were not too good though they were telling. A call went to all the outposts requesting to know — by distance measured in meters (or kilometers) — how far from the micro-bases the teams could go without reasonable fear of attack. How far could they travel from their outposts of 30 to 100 men and women without, say, wearing body armor? This distance was called White Space. Keep in mind, we had been in Afghanistan for eleven years at that point.
Some teams were blunt in their responses: “We get hit as soon as we roll out.” White Space equals zero meters. Other teams were positioned in more rural locations, and felt they could travel a kilometer or two with reasonable ease. Three teams — independent of each other — came back with the same distance: 900 meters. I can report there was much smirking when the briefer commented on the coincidence.
Every fifth bullet in a belt of machine-gun ammunition is a tracer round, a bullet with a little pyrotechnic on the back that shows the gunner where the bullets are going. That little pyrotechnic burns out when the bullet has traveled about nine football fields. After tracer burnout, the gunner is shooting blind.
The teams reporting 900 meters were injecting some dark humor into their assessments, and those in charge got the joke. White Space equals whatever they could cover within tracer burnout. Or said another way, White Space equals zero meters.
If this distributed approach of outposts scattered around the country (started in 2009 and very high-risk) had been employed from the beginning, with the accompanying years of assessments plotted onto a map, we would have had a COP that showed how well we were doing. We could have seen the areas of the country where there was hope and hopelessness, and reallocated resources accordingly. We never had such a view, not in 20 years.
Note: The US military has not been in Afghanistan for 20 years. It has visited Afghanistan 35 times or so for six-to-eight months per visit over the last 240 months. But that is a story for another time.
As our latest military adventure in Asia concludes, there is still no map of how well we did nor is one needed now. We need only see the images of desperate Afghans clinging to the fuselage of an American cargo plane as it takes off to know that hopelessness has triumphed in Afghanistan. Saigon circa 1975 does not look so bad now. In the US we have our own indicator of how our failure will be measured, how our crisis of imagination is crushing lives.
When the president announced we were leaving Afghanistan by 31 August and giving the Taliban control of the country we’d evicted them from 20 years before, the suicide hotline at the Veterans Administration exploded.
Originally from Macon, Georgia, Tony Schwalm spent much of his adult life as an Army officer, serving as a tank company commander in the First Gulf War in 1991 and leading Green Berets during the Haiti invasion in 1994. Retiring from the Army in 2004, he works as a consultant to the Department of Defense and lectures to business students at the University of South Florida on the merits of improvisation as learned in the world of guerrilla warfare. In 2009, his essay, Trek, won first prize at the Mayborn Literary Non-fiction Conference at the University of North Texas and was the basis for the book The Guerrilla Factory: the Making of Special Force Officers, the Green Berets published by Simon and Schuster in 2012. He makes his home in Tampa, Florida.
