Veterans' voices shape a report on the Afghanistan War's lessons and impact
The bipartisan Afghanistan War Commission aims to reflect such veterans' experiences in a report due to Congress next year, which will analyze key strategic, diplomatic, military and operational decisions made between June 2001 and the chaotic withdrawal in August 2021.
The group released its second interim report on Tuesday, drawing no conclusions yet but identifying themes emerging from thousands of pages of government documents; some 160 interviews with cabinet-level officials, military commanders, diplomats, Afghan and Pakistani leaders and others; and forums with veterans like one recently held at a national Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Columbus, Ohio.
'What can we learn from the Afghanistan War?' asked an Aug. 12 discussion session with four of the commission's 16 members. What they got was two straight hours of dozens of veterans' personal stories — not one glowingly positive, and most saturated in frustration and disappointment.
'I think the best way to describe that experience was awful,' said Marine veteran Brittany Dymond, who served in Afghanistan in 2012.
Navy veteran Florence Welch said the 2021 withdrawal made her ashamed she ever served there.
'It turned us into a Vietnam, a Vietnam that none of us worked for,' she said.
Members of Congress, some driven by having served in the war, created the independent commission several months after the withdrawal, after an assessment by the Democratic administration of then-President Joe Biden faulted the actions of President Donald Trump's first administration for constraining U.S. options. A Republican review, in turn, blamed Biden. Views of the events remain divided, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered yet another review this spring.
The commission wants to understand the bigger picture of a conflict that spanned four presidential administrations and cost more than 2,400 American lives, said Co-Chair Dr. Colin Jackson.
'So we're interested in looking hard at the end of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan, but we're equally interested in understanding the beginning, the middle and the end,' he said in an interview in Columbus.
Co-chair Shamila Chaudhary said the panel is also exploring more sweeping questions.
'So our work is not just about what the U.S. did in Afghanistan but what the U.S. should be doing in any country where it deems it has a national security interest,' she said. "And not just should it be there, but how it should behave, what values does it guide itself by, and how does it engage with individuals who are very different from themselves.'
Jackson said one of the commission's priorities is making sure the final report, due in August 2026, isn't 'unrecognizable to any veteran of the Afghanistan conflict.'
"The nature of the report should be representative of every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine experience,' he said.
Dymond told commissioners a big problem was the mission.
"You cannot exert a democratic agenda, which is our foreign policy, you cannot do that on a culture of people who are not bought into your ideology,' she said. 'What else do we expect the outcome to be? And so we had two decades of service members lost and maimed because we're trying to change an ideology that they didn't ask for.'
The experience left eight-year Army veteran Steve Orf demoralized. He said he didn't go there 'to beat a bad guy.'
'Those of us who served generally wanted to believe that we were helping to improve the world, and we carried with us the hopes, values, and principles of the United States — values and principles that also seem to have been casualties of this war," he told commissioners. "For many of us, faith with our leaders is broken and trust in our country is broken.'
Tuesday's report identifies emerging themes of the review to include strategic drift, interagency incoherence, and whether the war inside Afghanistan and the counterterrorism war beyond were pursuing the same aims or at cross purposes.
It also details difficulties the commission has encountered getting key documents. According to the report, the Biden administration initially denied the commission's requests for White House materials on the implementation of the February 2020 peace agreement Trump signed with the Taliban, called the Doha Agreement, and on the handling of the withdrawal, citing executive confidentiality concerns.
The transition to Trump's second term brought further delays and complications, but since the commission has pressed the urgency of its mission with the new administration, critical intelligence and documents have now begun to flow, the report says.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Politico
27 minutes ago
- Politico
The scramble to keep public media afloat
'The people who are paying the price are local communities, in an era where local community connection is being eroded and local news is in crisis,' Tim Isgitt, CEO of Public Media Company — a nonprofit public media consulting firm that launched the bridge fund — told POLITICO. 'These members of Congress voted to kill what, in many communities, is their only source of local news and information and they did it eyes wide open.' Conservatives in Congress have long sought to eliminate federal funding for public media, and scored a major victory with Trump's rescissions package. In May, Trump issued an executive order looking to restrict all funding for NPR and PBS. CPB, PBS and NPR challenged the order. But Congress, which appropriated more than $500 million to CPB annually, codified the president's move in this year's Rescissions Act. 'I don't want to sugarcoat this, but the loss of CPB funding to local rural communities is devastating,' said Isgitt. 'We're doing what we can to do what Congress failed to do: protecting stations.' Isgitt expects things to worsen in November, when CPB normally doled out funding to affiliates. Newsrooms that depended on at least 30 percent of funding from CPB are now at risk of going dark, he said. 'From Mississippi to Idaho, local public media organizations are run by people who live in their communities, governed by people who live in their communities and reporting on community issues,' said Isgitt. The loss of CPB funding, he added, will 'have ripple effects across the system.'
The Hill
28 minutes ago
- The Hill
Texas Democrat says she was threatened with arrest after escort lost her on trail
A Texas state House Democrat said she was threatened with arrest after an officer assigned to follow her lost track of her on a walking trail. Texas state Rep. Sheryl Cole (D) said in a post on X on Tuesday that an escort from the Texas Department of Public Safety, whom she said 'was forced upon me to track my every movement,' lost track of her on the trail, became angry and 'made a scene' in front of her constituents. 'While a little shaken up from the incident, I remain undeterred by this intimidation tactic by House Republicans to have a 24/7 state police presence to intimidate me and my colleagues,' Cole said. Cole's account of the incident comes as a fellow Democratic state representative, Nicole Collier, has chosen to stay on the floor of the state House chamber for more than 24 hours rather than having a law enforcement officer shadow her. After the state House Democrats returned to the Lone Star State on Monday, ending their two-week out-of-state stint to prevent Republicans from passing a new map, state Speaker Dustin Burrows (R) declared that those who came back would have an officer with them to ensure they didn't leave the state again. Collier chose to stay in the state House overnight instead and told MSNBC's Ali Vitali in an interview that she would stay 'as long as it takes.' 'At the moment that the directive was issued, I felt like it was wrong. It's just wrong to require grown people to get a permission slip to roam about freely. So I resisted,' she said. Cole said she stands in solidarity with Collier, who has 'refused to go along with this charade.' 'We will not be intimidated by this, and history will remember this,' she said. The Texas state legislature is expected to approve a new map as soon as this week, with enough Democrats back in the state for the body to conduct business.
The Hill
28 minutes ago
- The Hill
There is a solution to America's gerrymandering problem
The redistricting war going on across the country began with the president asking — or, as some see it, directing — Texas to redraw its congressional map to give the GOP as many as five additional House seats in the 2026 midterm elections. Given that the party that holds the White House typically loses House seats in the midterms, and with a thin GOP majority after the 2024 election, the president is looking for any advantage to hold the House. This action has elicited outrage among Democrats, pushing the most populous state, California, to redraw its map. Several other states, including Ohio, Florida and Indiana, are also investigating the possibility of redrawing their maps, in an all-out gerrymander fest to squeeze every last seat out of Congress. Yet the maps drawn after the 2020 census were already well gerrymandered. Of the 435 total seats, just 36 were deemed competitive in 2022, defined as winners determined by a margin of victory below 5 percent. In 2024, the number of competitive seats jumped to 43. Though the problem appears to be the gerrymandering of congressional maps, the real problem is how representation is determined. The popular vote in each congressional district determines its winner, but the way the population of each state is dissected into discrete districts partitions the popular vote across each state. Since each district seat is represented by a winner-take-all vote, the design of each state's congressional map effectively determines how its voters are represented in Congress. Take, for example, Massachusetts. Its nine congressional seats are all represented by Democrats. In the 2024 election, five of the seats were uncontested. Among the four contested races, the closest margin of victory was 13 percent. Yet in the presidential race, 36 percent of the votes cast were for Donald Trump, the same percentage that voted for the Republican candidates in the four contested seats. This begs the question: Should these 36 percent of voters have some GOP representation? A similar situation occurred in Oklahoma, with all five of its congressional seats held by Republications, even though 32 percent of the votes cast were for Kamala Harris. Given that computational redistricting can draw House maps that are either maximally gerrymandered, provide sensible voter representation, or anything in between, there is no need for maps to be drawn by redistricting commissions, whether they are independent or made up of partisan legislators. The necessary mapping criteria specified by state laws can now be incorporated into mapping algorithms. Examples of such criteria include compactness of districts or preserving communities of interest. The only role for redistricting commissions is to specify the desired bias of the map. Gerrymandered maps demonstrate that we no longer have representation of the people but of the parties, making Congress a de facto House of Mis-Representatives. At the core, the problem is how members of the House are elected, and indirectly, the Electoral College. As long as voter preferences are packed into discrete ongressional district seats, the current gerrymandering wars will continue to discount and ignore voters. In fact, Trump told a group in 2024 during his campaign that they would not need to vote again if he were elected. Despite not knowing precisely what he had in mind, he may indeed be correct, given that representation of voters is mostly predetermined. Is there a solution? Continue to hold elections with congressional districts. However, the number of seats won by each party should be allocated by each party's state popular vote. Then the top vote getters, either in absolute number or in percentage of votes won, across all the districts from each party are assigned seats, up to the number of seats won by the party. This means that all the representatives in each state would be at-large, representing all the people of the state. A formula for rounding would be needed to determine which party gets the partial seat fraction, much like how congressional apportionment is used after each census to determine the number of House seats in each state. With such a system, in Massachusetts, Republicans would have won two congressional seats and Democrats would have won seven. In Oklahoma, Republicans would have won four seats and Democrats would have won one. Such a process would neutralize the impact of gerrymandering, since each state's haul of seats would be determined by the state popular vote, giving every eligible voter the added incentive to cast their vote. The net effect of such a system would likely not yield a difference in the overall number of House seats held by each party. It would, however, redistribute party representation across all 50 states. Most importantly, it would neutralize the benefits of gerrymandering to the parties, since each state's popular vote would determine representation. —Such a new system would require a change in the Constitution something that is highly unlikely in this vitriolic political environment. Yet without such a change, gerrymandering will continue to erode the influence of voters and elevate the power of parties. Texas's actions to redraw their congressional map midterm has unleashed a war on democracy. More accurately, it has taken gerrymander politics to unprecedented levels. The final outcome will be less voter representation and more partisan party politics. What the Texas 'seat steal' effort demonstrates is that, in the eyes of parties, voters are no longer relevant. Every voter in the 2026 midterm elections who is disgusted with such disrespect should write in an unnamed candidate, 'Other' — if such a name won a seat, it will send a strong message that gerrymandering is no longer acceptable, that the current toxic mapping system is shattered beyond repair, and a new model for earning representation is needed. Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a computer science professor in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As a data scientist, he uses his expertise in risk-based analytics to address problems in public policy. He is the founder of the .
