America’s Righteous Warriors?

The U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Misguided Effort to Rescue Select Afghans from the Taliban

As Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government collapsed to the Taliban in 2021, ad hoc groups of veterans, active-duty servicemembers, and civilians of various stripes and nationalities mobilized to assist some Afghans flee their country. But facing thousands of other Afghans also attempting to flee, all converging on Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, the last remaining U.S. base, these groups not only had to contend with getting their chosen Afghans onto planes for abroad but also through the airport’s thickly crowded gates. Using little more than cellphones and communications apps, the various groups leveraged personal connections and professional contacts to successfully airlift out hundreds. Yet while their efforts were well-meaning, they were, however, misguided.

In two books documenting these aid efforts, Elliot Ackerman’s The Fifth Act and Scott Mann’s Operation Pineapple Express, both published in 2022, we principally find veterans of the Afghanistan war coalescing out of shared frustration from both the bungled withdrawal and backlogs in the U.S. Special Immigrant Visa program for Afghan allies. In Mann’s book especially (as well as in a highly fictionalized, sadly over-the-top film, The Covenant), there’s also a strong moral component about not abandoning foreign allies, be they soldiers or civilians. With both authors having been in special operations—Ackerman later a CIA paramilitary officer—they accept as creed that to leave such partners behind America was also leaving “moral injury” in its wake—battlefield promises made but not kept. But this supposed moral injury is simply a fallacy as to what it means to wear the uniform.

The U.S. Army inculcates its troops with seven “Army Values”: loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. The other military branches have similar values. Yet none of these values, not even duty (described as a team-oriented value), expresses the fundamental purpose of a servicemember in uniform: to execute the commander-in-chief’s foreign policy decisions. However, as would transpire in Afghanistan (and Iraq), some warfighters unfortunately conflated four-star happy talk of “winning hearts and minds” and describing Afghan/Iraqi partners as “friends” as being tantamount to them as fellow Americans. Mann in fact categorically states that upon final withdrawal we abandoned “brothers and sisters.” And that the mission in Afghanistan involved “eternal promises.” Ackerman doesn’t go quite that far, yet he gives a similar impression by becoming involved in the extraction effort.

In their books, both Ackerman and Mann, as ex-Special Operators, confer upon themselves a moral higher ground as to what America’s commitments should be in wartime. But this confer-ence is unduly granted. Just as everyone volunteers for military service, special operators volunteer too. And as every volunteer should make peace himself: Afghan (and Iraqi) allies were just further tools in our toolkit for executing U.S. foreign policy. Nothing more. If untenable, then one needn’t volunteer. Mann clearly had other ideas: “some promises are written in blood,” he writes, meaning that he, as a warfighter, fully believed that the enemy of our enemy was indeed our friend. But such thinking, as will be seen, is not only mistaken, it can also lead to a great deal of selective self-righteousness.

As will be seen in Operation Pineapple Express, Mann had close ties to only one Afghan: Nezam, who served in Afghanistan’s Special Forces. But oddly, not until very late in the game did Mann learn that Nezam had a wife and three children. But with Mann’s help, this led to the later extraction of all five, meaning one Afghan soldier plus four noncombatants. And while can reasonably argue their case for extraction, Mann however participated in further efforts to aid other Afghans, most of whom he did not know nor did they have any ties to U.S. forces. For instance, Mann and others tried to “shepherd” out a mix of Afghan girls affiliated with a soccer team and music school. Plainly, these girls were no threat to the Taliban, which made it unlikely that they’d ever be targeted. But regardless, as the shepherding group took it upon themselves to guide them along a sewage canal near one of the airport gates, at that moment an ISIS-K suicide bomber fatefully struck. Besides many others, an unknown number of these girls perished in the canal, girls who were too young to make their own life decisions. So Mann decided for them.

Meanwhile, Ackerman as well only had direct ties to just one Afghan. But this Afghan, along with his family, as we discover in The Fifth Act, had already emigrated to the U.S. They’d obtained special immigrant visas prior to the Taliban takeover. Yet Ackerman, despite having no direct ties to anyone else he’d ultimately help, still got on board with the exodus mission.

Even worse, beyond Ackerman and Mann and those others who also more-or-less spontaneously participated, many organizations back in the States, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, picked up the flag to push legislation backing further Afghan resettlements. Seemingly breathless amidst the pile-on, no one seemed to grasp that, by supporting these resettlements, they were essentially strengthening the Taliban’s grip on power. Ad hoc groups of veterans were evacuating trained fighters with access to weapons—a potential Afghan resistance movement. And all groups were evacuating Western-leaning Afghans—potential subversives. If it were the mid-1990’s, these evacuations would’ve been equivalent to plucking fighters from the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s greatest foe till our coming in late 2001. And while some of these Afghans would’ve regrettably been killed by the Taliban after our withdrawal, what do we instead see now as to Afghan opposition to the Taliban: protests in the streets of Kabul by unarmed, defenseless women.

What a sad legacy, of both the war and the “rescue.”