‘Never Been Done Before’: A True Investigation of a Failed American War

If you played a role in Afghanistan policy over the past few decades, be prepared for a call.

In their first joint interview since the launch of the Afghanistan War Commission, co-chairs and veteran Afghan policy thinkers Shamila Chaudhary and Colin Jackson discussed their move into an active new phase, including interviewing the diplomats, generals and politicians who shaped the war.

Their goal? To determine just what went wrong in the 20-year conflict.

“No one will look like an unblemished hero, and nobody will look like a complete scapegoat,” Jackson said. “But the key is to be unflinching.”

The commission was established with bipartisan congressional support after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in August 2021, but it’s obvious the seeds of failure were planted long before that. Chaudhary and Jackson are now tasked with developing a major, multipart report on how such mistakes can be avoided in the future.

Jackson is an academic, a military veteran and a former Defense Department official. Chaudhary is a former White House and State Department official. Both worked on Afghanistan policy during their years in the federal government, adding to their strong desire to understand why things fell apart.

In the interview, they discussed everything from talking to the Taliban to whether November’s presidential election could upend their work. And while they told POLITICO Magazine that they weren’t focused on ascribing blame, they acknowledged there’s plenty to spread around.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Your commission launched its work roughly a year ago. Where are you at now? 

Jackson: We’re at the end of the building the team, sort of midway into the genuine research part of the project. The nature of commissions is it takes some time to assemble the right team. We're going to end up having a team of close to 50 people on the professional staff.

Chaudhary: The research and analysis stage allows us to do all the important pickaxe work that commissions do, which is put out requests for information and documents to the different executive branch agencies, to develop our extensive timeline of the war, and the decisions and the inflection points that we want to analyze in the course of our project. And then to also build our extensive list of people that worked on the war that we want to interview.

How granular is the timeline going to be? Am I going to be able to climb up and down it?

Chaudhary: So there's the early part of the war, which was heavily focused on counterterrorism. During the Obama administration, we saw a surge, both military and civilian, and that needs to be documented. Then the latter part of the war which involved these intense discussions about negotiations. All of these themes were present throughout, but they got more complex over time, and we all have our own little sliver of it.

What’s really important about this project is that we're able to put them all together into one overarching narrative that no one has ever seen before. What's so critical about getting this right is producing quite a historic project and report for not just policymakers but for the American public and a global audience.

Your three key goals are to write an official history of the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan; lay out lessons learned from the experience; and make recommendations that could include changes in government process and structures. How will you ensure that people in power listen to you and follow through on your ideas?

Jackson: The imperative behind the entire project is learning. The experience of Afghanistan over 20 years is in the rearview mirror. The question is what can we make of it to improve the performance of a future generation in some unknown, future U.S. involvement abroad? We can't guarantee the reaction of the U.S. government to this, but we can control the quality, depth, seriousness, rigorousness of the study that we produce.

Chaudhary: We believe just by virtue of existing, this project has impact. This has never been done before in relation to any other previous conflict or war. No other commission has been given this much time, this large of a scope, and this much independence and authority to do the work on such an intense issue in our foreign policy — and in recent memory. People are still kind of processing these issues. So I think that impact will be there, and it will speak for itself.

I know you're trying to avoid making your report about laying blame. But let's talk about blame.

 I find it highly amusing when the Defense Department tries to blame the withdrawal chaos on the State Department, as if the Pentagon played no role in the Afghan army's failures, or when members of Congress act like they had nothing to do with making it so hard to get visas for Afghan interpreters. Or when the CIA pretends it's invisible in all this.

 If you don't assign blame here, there, maybe everywhere, then how will anyone be held responsible? And shouldn't people and institutions be held responsible?

Jackson: My guess is that we will see flattering and unflattering portrayals of different institutions and agencies over this 20-year span. No one will look like an unblemished hero, and nobody will look like a complete scapegoat. But the key is to be unflinching, to pursue the truth as best we can understand it and lay it out to an informed general audience so that they can come to the conclusions that are appropriate.

Chaudhary: I think that we can draw a throughline throughout the conflict, in that there was a very limited approach at one point of the war, which then evolved into a whole of government approach. The dissonance amongst the agencies — that's important for our work. We need to understand where the different U.S. stakeholders are coming from.

How does your work compare to the 9/11 Commission?

Jackson: We've been in active discussions with the 9/11 Commission, with the folks who were involved in that team on the professional side. And we're doing our best to sort of extract what they learned from that process. They were the first to point out that the scope we had been given was considerably more challenging in many ways than looking at a single episode and looking to the left and right of it, which is what the 9/11 Commission did.

Chaudhary: The accessibility of the 9/11 Commission report is something that we want to reflect in our outputs, not just in the final report, but also how we engage with stakeholders throughout the process. A lot of people have read the 9/11 Commission report; it’s studied in high schools and colleges and universities.

It almost won the National Book Award.

Chaudhary: That's right. The other critical aspect of the 9/11 Commission’s work that applies to us is how they objectively represent the perspectives of foreigners in their work. They do an excellent job of outlining interests and motivations of people and states and governments that a lot of Americans don't know anything about.

What about Afghans? How can and will they play a role in your work? Because there's no direct Afghan representation on the commission itself from what I can tell.

Chaudhary: Representation of multiple perspectives is really important for our work, in particular the Afghan perspectives and the Afghan experiences of the war. We've done several things to meet this need. We've hired a senior adviser for Afghan outreach. We are planning several outreach events and private engagement opportunities that will help educate us on the Afghan experience.

Several of our commissioners have lived and worked in Afghanistan for long periods of time, have published on these issues and are world-renowned experts. As we continue to do these engagements, we will meet more people and individuals who will inform our work.

Are you going to talk to the Taliban?

Chaudhary: That is under consideration, at the right time. Obviously, we want to talk about everyone that is part of the story of the war.

They were kind of a big part of the story of the war.

Jackson: The question of sort of timing on that is a relevant one, but we're certainly open in principle as we are talking to all sorts of actors in the story.

The Pakistanis?

Jackson: Absolutely.

Chaudhary: Congress has asked us to look at the Pakistanis. They've asked us to look at the foreign interlocutors, other governments. We are willing to talk to everyone who is involved in the U.S. decision-making and the impact of that, and so whoever is involved in that we will have to consider that.

Jackson: We would be telling half the story, one hand clapping, if all we did was look at U.S. government plans in isolation.

On a technical level, some of these groups involved are designated terrorist organizations in one fashion or another. Can you nonetheless engage with them?

Jackson: Any engagement with groups like the Taliban is complicated. We see this in the story of the Afghan War, the United States government came up with ways of interacting with challenging groups and audiences. My guess is that something similar is at least in the realm of the feasible for the commission.

American politics are far more polarized than the post-9/11 years. How are you going to ensure that your work is not distorted by partisanship or that partisans won't try to weaponize your work, including along the way?

Jackson: The payoff of this project, if done the right way, will not occur in the here and now, it won't occur in this political season. It will be a future generation of professionals in the U.S. government who are applying insights that hopefully derive in this 20-year experience. So I think to become too narrowly focused on what will be inevitably polarizing sorts of attitudes in this year would be to miss the larger point here. If learning is the imperative, the political tensions of the present are decidedly secondary in our view.

Chaudhary: Our commissioners were appointed in a bipartisan manner from all the relevant committees, but as actors and agents of the commission, we are nonpartisan and we’ve built a nonpartisan professional staff and we've established bylaws to guide our work and to protect minority views and to protect that nonpartisan nature of our work. The history of this commission when it gets written, it will show that it came into existence because of bipartisan support.

A lot of folks ask us, “What happens if Trump wins the election? What happens to your work?” Our work is going to stay the same. We are persistent in our mandate. We are going to keep pursuing our goal of looking for answers and explanations of the war.

If I'm a government employee who played a role in Afghan policy in the past three decades, how could I be affected by your ongoing work? Will I get called in for an interview? Can I say no?

Jackson: We've been engaged in discussions with past and current decision makers in all branches of government, and I think those conversations will likely continue in various ways. There's no way for us to fully understand the conflict — the decisions that were made, the alternatives that were considered — without canvassing the people who were involved.

So the bottom line for government employees is, “Yes, I could get called in.”

Chaudhary: The legislation is worded that we are to analyze U.S. decision-making, the individuals and the institutions that were involved in that. We will begin to delineate a process by which we identify who we want to talk to. It would be hard to interview everyone at every level that was involved. And so, depending on how we define decision-making, and which decisions we actually look at, that will determine who we speak with.

How do you expect and want U.S. military veterans to play a role in your work?

Jackson: There is no audience more interested in our work at some level than the veteran community — they're intensely interested, and there is a hunger for accountability, understanding and the like. I think the way we ultimately get at that is by laying out for them the logic of the war in these key decisions.

I'm a veteran of the Afghanistan war. I served in uniform there in 2011. I have a son who's an infantry officer now. I have a deep personal, visceral interest both in understanding the conflict in its totality and better arming my son and his comrades with a level of understanding that will ideally make them better.

Chaudhary: We've hired several professional staff who are also veterans of the war in Afghanistan and are guiding our extensive outreach. One of the reasons I took this project on was that I felt like I didn't actually get exposed enough to the perspectives of veterans and Afghans as I was doing the important work of diplomacy from Washington.

What's been the hardest part so far?

Jackson: Probably the hardest part and the greatest opportunity is the scope. It will be illuminating to take a look at how these parts fit together.

Chaudhary: I see the high level of expectations for our work from the different communities that participated in the war as one of the biggest challenges, but it's also an opportunity for us to do good work together in a collaborative way that we weren't able to do during war time.

The other challenge which is also an opportunity is the deep emotion and visceral response that looking at the war in Afghanistan elicits from people. That I see as something very organic and not to be ignored. And how we address emotion and empathy and moral injury through a policy project is a very challenging situation, but I see it as something that we should boldly take on because our country deserves this. Americans deserve it.

Jackson: If we do our work well, it will be foundational.

What’s a question you wish I had asked?

Jackson: You talk about key decisions — what key decisions?

I think the hardest part of the project will probably be narrowing even that set of key decisions to a manageable number. Clearly, there are ones that stand out in the popular understanding of the word, but there may also be ones that we discover in the process of inquiry where we say, “This was a critical inflection point in which there were opportunities to act differently. Why did we choose as we did? If we had chosen differently, what would that have done?”

And a key decision might be something like the decision to surge troops or go into peace talks or decisions about how to build the Afghan army. 

Jackson: Or the organization of the Afghan government at the Bonn conference. We're going to identify a series of sort of critical decisions or critical program decisions that were made.

We're also going to say, okay, across all these strands of government, which were the large things and look to both the left and right of those decisions. What alternatives were considered? Why did we choose as we did? We'll look at implementation of those decisions, and then a reaction of actors in Afghanistan and around Afghanistan.

Do you ever wake up and think, “Oh boy, what did I get myself into?”

Chaudhary: This is an incredible project to work on. I feel like all of the work that we all did, inside and outside government, deserves this chapter in the story now, because if we didn't have this opportunity, it would remain unfinished.

Jackson: The best problem in the world is a job that's sufficiently challenging that keeps you engaged all the time. And no matter how challenging the day-to-day stuff is, you've got this sort of North Star in that the American public deserves a full understanding and accounting of this intervention.