General Donald Bolduc & Ali Latifi on What’s Next for Afghanistan

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

General Donald Bolduc— I Served 10 Tours in Afghanistan. It’s Time for Us to Leave (Time Magazine, 8/23/2019)
Ali Latifi— Whatever Happens on Tuesday, Afghans Just Want an End to Their Own National Nightmare (Foreign Policy Magazine, 11/02/2020)

Archival audio:

Obama Announces Sending Troops to Afghanistan (ABC News, 12/01/09)
2010 Key Year for Afghan Strategy (Voice of America, 01/04/2010)
What did the Afghan surge accomplish (American Enterprise Institute, 12/18/2012)
Afghanistan's Taliban, US sign peace deal (Alja Zeera English, 02/29/2020)
Historic Afghan-Taliban peace talks begin in Doha, Qatar | DW News (DW News, 09/12/2020)
Joe Biden talks Afghanistan, future of troop presence overseas (Face the Nation, 02/23/2020)

Transcript:

November 10, 2020

ALI LATIFI: The fear is that Biden may take a page from Obama and Trump and rely as much as possible on things like drone strikes, which are highly, highly dangerous and have far too often led to civilian deaths.

***

MARK HANNAH: My name is Mark Hannah, and I'm your host for None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. In honor of Veterans Day this week, today's episode focuses on America's longest war, the war in Afghanistan. Our first guest is General Donald Bolduc, who joins us from New Hampshire. He's a retired United States Army officer and served ten tours of duty in Afghanistan. Second up, we have Ali Latifi, a journalist who joins us from Kabul. I'm very glad to have both of these guests with us today to talk about the war in Afghanistan, the status of the negotiations between the United States and the Taliban, and the talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, as well as, of course, what Joe Biden's winning the U.S. presidency means for all of this.

But first, some background on the war. Now, General Bolduc, you've written that the United States essentially won the war in Afghanistan in 2002, but, quote, “Instead of recognizing victory and departing, Washington took on greater responsibility by building political and security organizations that would ultimately lead to Taliban insurgents, unparalleled corruption across the political system, and an eighteen plus year conflict.” Talk to me about how the definition of victory changed, how the mission changed during your time in Afghanistan, and why we should have departed in 2002.

GENERAL DONALD BOLDUC: Right. We were a small group of guys—no more than three hundred on the ground—truly working through, with, and by our Afghan partners. We had Hamid Karzai, and we had to get him to Kandahar to receive the surrender of the Taliban. And we did that by December 8, and he received it. I was there. He received it. And once we did that and once he seated in his governors and once he went up to Kabul by March of 2002, in my opinion, it was a done deal for the military mission. We no longer needed to be there. But, let me tell you, General Mattis came in as one star, all gung ho, wanting to do a whole bunch of things there in southern Afghanistan from the airport. The army wanted to bring in more troops. It brought in the 10th Mountain and the 101st, and then it just continued. And the next thing you know, we're doing major military operations with our large force structure, and, you know, it didn't work. And then it was, “Oh, now we’ve got to make this a democracy, so we're going to turn into a democracy,” which is a failure in most every place we go. We shouldn't do that. They know how to rule themselves. They are a very democratic society anyways with their shuras and their jirgas and so on, so forth. Let them do it, and let's just help them economically, politically, and diplomatically. Let them do it. They'll do it. And then all we had to do was just help out with a few security things and be there for advice. They needed money, so we helped them out with money. And, you know, they did it, and it worked fine. But, oh, no, you know, we want to make this thing something it wasn't. And then we just reinforce failure.

HANNAH: So you're saying we should have left in 2002, that it was a done deal, that the main objectives had been achieved. But you're also saying the strategy deployed between 2010 and 2013 within the Obama Administration after President Obama surged the troop levels was working, that it was sort of a bottom up, population centric approach. But the strategy did change in 2013 when President Obama drew back America's troop presence, and you're arguing that chaos then ensued. Go ahead and explain that to us.

BOLDUC: They wanted to take U.S. forces—U.S. special operation forces—out of the villages and return to a top down strategy that hadn't been working for years and years and years and go away from a bottom up strategy that, over a three year period, had been working extremely well and in two years would have solidified success against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Interlude featuring archival audio

BOLDUC: I was the one star general in charge of the Village Stability Operations and Afghan Local Police program on the U.S. side, the coalition side, working closely with the Afghan government from top to bottom and from bottom to top. And we started doing this, putting the program together, in 2010. By the middle of 2013, we had reduced U.S. casualties significantly. Remember, they were at their highest level in 2010 and steadily went down because we were operating truly through, with, and by the populace, where the center of gravity is in Afghanistan. They've won every single war against every single invading country in the rural areas.

And so we were finally getting it right, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, because of a political promise, we’re going to get folks out of Afghanistan. And that's the wrong reason, right? And it was the wrong reason, and I stood against it. We ramped up and created an army, a police, a justice system they didn't agree with. We even wrote their constitution, which they didn't agree with. We even named their country, which they didn't agree with. And then we continued to do this, and we decided, well, we're going to invade Iraq. So there's no more resources for Afghanistan. So we're just going to muddle through. And from 2003-2005, while we were muddling through and focused on Iraq, they were searched. And in 2005, we were fighting them even harder than we did in 2001 and 2002. And that continued into 2010 with top down counterterrorism and conventional sweep and clear strategies that did nothing but destroy everything in our path and create more insurgents. By 2010, McChrystal came in with a new idea, a new strategy. We rolled up our sleeves, put our minds together, listened to the Afghans in the rural areas, the villages, and what they needed. We did it, and we did it the Afghan way. And by the middle of 2013, almost over eighty percent of Afghanistan belonged to the Afghans. We had the lowest casualty rates of the entire war.

HANNAH: And now what percentage of Afghanistan belongs to the Afghans?

BOLDUC: After the change in strategy in the middle of 2015, beginning of 2016, that had completely reversed, and now almost ninety percent of Afghanistan belongs to the Taliban in the rural areas. Al Qaeda has resurged, and ISIS has joined the fight.

HANNAH: Why is that not the case for increasing America's troop presence in Afghanistan, if our departure has coincided with a reduction in Afghan held land?

BOLDUC: Right. Well, if we used the right force structure and if we did the troop to task analysis appropriately, we would be around four thousand or so troops in Afghanistan working a bottom up strategy. The top down strategy takes more troops and wastes more money, wastes more time, and the Afghan government can't even employ its military or its police to solve any problems. It's completely dysfunctional. And by the way, those entities cost more than one hundred percent of their GDP, whereas the Afghan local police is a local solution, sustainable, controlling large areas, connecting one village to the next, village elders and tribal elders working together inside a government construct they recognize and can afford. And by the way, do you know how many battles the Afghan local police lost to the Taliban and Qaeda? Zero. They're fighting for their families. They're fighting for their livelihood. They're fighting to protect their homes and their farms. They fight hard for that, and they can see it. And when they win, it's tangible. The Taliban made them their number one priority to destroy, and they couldn't do it. And how many fights do the Afghan military win? None. None, without our help, without air power coming in.

HANNAH: You said you took your case to the four star generals, and they weren't exactly receptive to your argument for a bottom up strategy. How did you present your case, and why did they respond the way they did?

BOLDUC: I had a very good slideshow that demonstrated how we went from a complete red area in the rural areas. It was set to a timing sequence, and it showed—with the different building of the Afghan local police and putting the things in—how it went from red to yellow to green and how we would sustain this and what the end state looked like around 2016. And we had the metrics. We had everything. We had previously failed attempts at a top down strategy. We knew that wasn't going to work. Right? At the time I was the most experienced—not the smartest, but the most experienced—guy in Afghanistan at the general officer level and special operations. I had the most tours, the most time there, the most command at the lowest level.

HANNAH: Specifically you had how many tours?

BOLDUC: Ten.

HANNAH: Wow.

BOLDUC: Sixty-six months. And with McChrystal and Petraeus and General Allen, this program was working great, and I worked for all three of those generals from 2010 to 2013. And I worked for General Dunford. Under General Dunford’s watch the order came in to change strategy—we're not at war in Afghanistan anymore. We’re at peacetime. Well, the people in Washington, D.C. can't make that decision. It's up to the general officers to stand up and say, “Hey, listen, that's not right.” I tried to do it at my level, and I could only get so far. But nonetheless, I did what I could. I continued to talk and write about it even after they sent me to Africa for four years, my last four years in the military. I found the same strategy problems there. So it's not that I'm a genius. It's that I listen to the people on the ground, and I listen to the Afghans and to people in Africa. They tell us what the answer to the questions is. You just have to listen, learn, and then lead as a senior officer, and you'll get it right. The people on the ground have the experience. The people that have lived there for decades and their whole life know how to fight. They know how to secure themselves. And we weren't listening to them. When we started listening to them, we started to see it. And so I said, “Hey, it's a huge mistake—what we're doing.” We have senior leaders who have made mistakes, from the one star to the four star level, and they brought people up behind them to cover their tracks and fill in behind them. They're unwilling to tell the American people or anybody else the mistakes they made. I'm willing to tell people the mistakes I made. I have done that in articles, and I hold myself responsible for not being handsome enough, tall enough, or articulate enough to be able to talk to my senior leaders and get them to recognize this is a bad time to change strategy.

HANNAH: If there is one takeaway, for Americans listening, about the war in Afghanistan that you've come to after ten tours of duty in the country, what is that?

BOLDUC: Well, I'd like everyone to come to a conclusion on is that, if we're going to put one American in harm's way anywhere in the world—and this includes Afghanistan—we have to have a policy and a strategy that justifies the potential body bag or hospital bed that's going to be filled by that person. And we have not done that. We haven't done it as Americans. The oversight in Congress and the general officers, including myself, have failed to do it. The American people need to wake up, and anyone who is going to go into public service needs to look at it just that way—public service. You are there to serve others, not the other way around. And we should all be there for a limited amount of time because the longer we stay there, the more we become part of a potential problem. We’ve got to have that policy. We’ve got to have that strategy. We've got to hold ourselves accountable. We’ve got to be there serving others. The saying in the Army is, “We will give a private an Article 15 for losing a weapon, and promote a general for losing a war.”That's an actual statement. That's an actual belief. And I'll tell you, it's true. There's been no accountability on civilian leadership and no accountability on senior military leadership. We’ve got to start doing that. And the American people have got to start to wonder, if we're on the ground fighting anywhere in this world, there had better be a damn good reason for it. Hey, I'm no dove, right? I will fight for our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. I will fight for our national interest. I'll put on a uniform again tomorrow and go stand a post. I'll do that, but we had better have it tied to a policy and strategy that's connected to our national interests that justifies the sacrifice.

HANNAH: After nearly two decades of war, the U.S. is now in negotiations with the Taliban to put an end to the war. Intra-Afghan talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government are also underway.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: To find out about the status of those talks, we turn to journalist Ali Latifi, who joins us from Kabul in Afghanistan. Ali, really glad to have you with us here today.

LATIFI: Oh, thank you for having me.

HANNAH: Right now, what is the status of the intra-Afghan dialog?

LATIFI: The intra-Afghan talks are at a standstill at this point. There really haven't been any actual meetings about any issues or agenda items. They're still saying they're working out the logistics and how they want to talk and when they want to talk and what they want to talk about. And then there are also disagreements about what needs to happen right now. The government keeps pushing for a nationwide ceasefire. The Taliban say that no, it's not ready for that now. And they've said from the beginning—even in 2013 when they finally officially opened their office in Doha for literally like twenty-four, forty-eight hours—they went on television and said, “We're going to continue to fight while negotiating.” Those negotiations never actually took off. But that's what they're doing now. Their belief is that we're not going to stop fighting just because we're having peace talks, because the peace talks don't necessarily mean anything yet in terms of actionable difference to them. And that, in turn, is making the government continue their fight as well.

HANNAH: I know the U.S. is very eager to have the Taliban and the Afghan government talk to one another, and they are to some extent today. I know these two groups are extraordinarily suspicious of each other and disregard, to some extent, the legitimacy of each other. Are these talks going to get us anywhere? What are the challenges here?

LATIFI: I don't think there is good faith. I think the Taliban feel like, “We're ahead. We got what we wanted, and we've been asking since 2001 for the U.S. to sit down and negotiate with us, make a deal with us. We got them to do that.” Right? And since they first got to Doha in 2011, 2012, they've had all kinds of unofficial meetings with different foreign dignitaries, different ambassadors, and different representatives from Germany, Norway, Sweden, the U.S., and all these other countries. So they've really learned diplomacy. It may sound odd that the Taliban has learned diplomacy, but they've really learned how to sit down with these governments. And in the last few months, they've been touring the region. They've been to Iran several times. They’ve been to Pakistan. They've been to several of the Central Asian states, and they've been trying to reassure all of these countries of what would happen when they come to power in any capacity. So they really feel like they have the upper hand in this, whereas I feel like the government almost feels like they've been forced into this, like their hand was wrung into this. If you remember, the deal was signed on February 29—the deal between the U.S. and the Taliban. The president and his now-head of peace, who was at that time his election rival, sat with U.S. generals and high-level U.S. security officials in Kabul, watched the signing, cheered the signing, said it was a good step, and literally the next day on March 4, they said, “We're not releasing the Taliban prisoners. We're not releasing five thousand Taliban prisoners. The U.S. can’t dictate to us.” And it was completely confounding for people here because they were like, “You stood with them, and you cheered on the signing. You stood and accepted the signing. If you didn't know what was in that agreement ahead of time, after it was signed, if the media knew, how did you not know?

HANNAH: It sounds like there is an inherent paradox between the U.S. and the Afghan government, right? I mean, the U.S. is trying to get the Afghan government to be self-reliant, but the U.S. is also saying, “You have to abide by the terms we negotiate with the Taliban in the U.S.-Taliban talks.” So, isn't the Afghan government saying, “Well, we're just not going to do that. We're not going to abide by your terms.”

LATIFI: Yes and no. On the one hand, like I said, they stand. But this process has gone on for more than a year now—almost two years. And the government has known it's been going. Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief U.S. negotiator comes and briefs the government here. So it's not as if it's catching them by surprise, as if they haven't known all along. But what it seems like they're doing is dragging their feet. It's kind of like you're being forced to go there, and every now and then they will use their pressure. The other thing is, if you look at it, it's been the last year that people within the government—high-level people within the government, including people like us and the British and German and Swedish citizenship, who flew in and got high-level positions all of the sudden—talking down about the U.S. and foreign presence in Afghanistan in general, trying to say, “Who are these foreigners to dictate to us?” all the while forgetting these foreigners are the ones paying their paychecks. And at the same time, what's happening now is the U.S. and all of the other foreign governments are slowly becoming very critical of this government. They're actively making statements against this government and criticizing things they've done.

HANNAH: Let's take a step back in history and rewind a bit. What is the main conclusion of the U.S.-Taliban agreement that was signed in February? Has that agreement been violated?

LATIFI: I mean, that's what the government constantly says, right? And the Taliban say it too on different issues. But that the agreement has been violated, because the Taliban were supposed to have a reduction in violence, and there was a short period leading up to the signing in February and a little bit after it where there actually was a reduction in violence. And part of that reduction was that “You cannot target major cities.” And that was happening for a very short window of time. But subsequently, over the last—I mean, what? We're in November now—the last four, five months, there have been any number of Taliban-claimed attacks on provincial capitals—maybe not the big five cities, but definitely on provincial capitals. And there have been attacks they have claimed responsibility for. The use of IEDs has gone up all around the country.

HANNAH: As you write, many in Kabul fear the U.S. is going to stay and continue stringing the country along, especially with a new U.S. administration coming in. How are Afghans feeling right now?

LATIFI: The exasperation of the Afghan people is that it's been twenty years—twenty years of war. On November 2, there was an attack on Kabul University, where anywhere between twenty to forty students and faculty and staff of the university were killed. The law faculty they entered in was riddled with bullet holes, blood everywhere. This is an example of the level of violence—the atrocity—and it took six hours to clear that area. Now the Taliban say they weren't responsible. And the belief is that the so-called Islamic State is responsible. But at this point, beyond just who is responsible, what this shows is there have been increasing levels of attacks in this country. Every time there's an attack, people feel like this is the ceiling, like this is the most heinous these attacks can get. It can't get any worse than this. And every time they say that, it does get worse, and something even more unexpected happens. And there's never really—we still don't know who was actually responsible for this attack. The Taliban say they didn't do it. A group claiming to be the Islamic State here said they did it. There were doubts that they didn't do it. In the end, it doesn't really matter who who's behind it. What matters is the level of violence and carnage.

HANNAH: A lot of people in the national security establishment—and presumably those who are going to fill foreign policy positions in a Biden administration—argue that until the intra-Afghan agreement is reached, there needs to be a U.S. ground troop presence. But isn't that a violation of the agreement the U.S. signed with the Taliban to withdraw troops even without that condition?

LATIFI: What I meant to say when I said in the story that people feel Joe Biden may string the country along is that this will be his first term as president. So, your first year as president, what are you busy with? You're setting up your cabinet, right? And then on top of that, he has a pandemic to deal with. He has the economic recession or depression or however you want to refer to it from the pandemic to deal with. He has to reverse the policies of Donald Trump he didn't like. He has pressing domestic matters he's going to try to address first. He even said in a CBS interview—when they asked him what happens if the Taliban take over again, he was like, “I'm not responsible for the Afghan people. I'm responsible for the American people.”

Interlude featuring archival audio

LATIFI: So that's what I mean by the fear that we’ll be strung along for at least another year.

HANNAH: Joe Biden just won the presidency here in the U.S. this past weekend. What is your expectation for a Biden presidency and the future of the war in Afghanistan?

LATIFI: There’s a couple of points. One is this is exactly the fear of the Afghan government. They really have no sense of who Joe Biden is as a president and of what he wants out of Afghanistan. We don't really even know what kind of a relationship he has with the president here, Ashraf Ghani. We know what kind of a relationship Hillary and Bill Clinton and Obama and obviously Trump and his administration had, but people are asking if Joe Biden even knows who Ashraf Ghani is, other than knowing he's the president? So that's what I'm saying. People don't really know what Biden wants, and what he's saying about the counterterrorism thing—I think the fear is that if we remember, even once the surge ended, Obama, to make up for it, took the drone war way past where George Bush took it. Afghanistan became the most drone-bombed country in the world under Barack Obama. And he changed the laws of who was considered an enemy combatant. They stopped reporting numbers, and their numbers were very suspicious and very low—very, very, very suspicious.

I think the other fear is that Biden may take a page from—and Trump did even worse with drone strikes and things like that. But the fear is that Biden may take a page from Obama and Trump and rely as much as possible on things like drone strikes, which are highly, highly dangerous and have far too often led to civilian deaths.

HANNAH: General Bolduc is also concerned that President-elect Biden, once in office, might prolong the war, since every U.S. president before him has since the war began and hasn't been able to, essentially, get U.S. troops out.

We have a Biden Administration coming in in January. Do you think Joe Biden is somehow a threat to the peace process? Do you see it unraveling under him? He's made clear that he wants to keep a sustained U.S. military footprint on the ground, at least a nominal one for special operations against ISIS and such. What does this mean for the peace process? Isn't one of the four pillars that we have to be out of there by April?

BOLDUC: Yes, it is. And I would offer President Biden the advice that we don't have to be in Afghanistan to execute that type of mission, and so he doesn't have to be in Afghanistan to do that. And, you know, you call it a peace process. Call it whatever you want. The bottom line is we have signed up for certain things, and we have to make those things happen. And we haven’t. We get reminded that every time the Taliban attacks. You can't straddle the fence, because you're straddling a fence, and it's very precarious because there's razor sharp cuts to wire right below you. And if you lose your balance, you're going to pay the price. That's what we're doing essentially. We're in this very precarious situation. And he's getting advice from the Department of Defense, or he would. The previous president got advice from Department of Defense to stay there when he knew he should have demanded us getting out. He asked for a plan, and when it wasn't able to be delivered, the secretary of defense resigned. So, come on.

HANNAH: The American public overwhelmingly supports an end to this war. That's what a lot of surveys show, including one of ours here at the Eurasia Group Foundation. Joe Biden did oppose the surge when he was vice president. Do you have any hope in this incoming administration? And if not, what will prevent him from listening to the will of the people?

BODLUC: It just depends on who's putting around him to tell. I certainly would be encouraging him to get our military out of there, give our international partners the warning, and tell the Afghans, “Militarily, we're done. We will be part of an international coalition to continue to support you economically, politically, and diplomatically. We'll leave our diplomatic mission in place with the necessary safeguards to ensure our security and safety of Americans working in Afghanistan. But, hey, this is now a civilian situation to solve.” The military “easy button” can no longer be pushed in Afghanistan. It just can't. And he needs to be told by people who actually have an idea about it. This is what I think. I think what they get themselves elected on isn't necessarily anything they're going to pursue once they get into office, because there are all kinds of people with other agendas coming at them, and it gets them uncertain, gets them confused. Here's the message: for almost twenty years our service members have gone to Afghanistan, and they have done the right thing. They have done everything our country has asked them to do. They have served with honor, and they have brought the Afghan government as far as we can bring them. And we bring them home with honor. Policies have failed them. Strategy has failed them. That's at the higher level. The lower level guys? Great, great work. And we should be ionizing them and honoring them. There's no shame in pulling out of there. Afghanistan is what it's going to be. It's up to them. But the bottom line is it's time for us to get out of there. And that's what President Biden needs to do.

HANNAH: Turning back to Ali, I want to hear his thoughts on what the relationship between the U.S. government and the Afghan government should be if and when U.S. troops fully leave Afghanistan?

LATIFI: A political and diplomatic financial relationship. You can still invest in this country. One of the reasons people are fed up is that the U.S. put so many stipulations on what can and cannot happen here. There are just certain developments. I was talking to a business businessman friend of mine, and he said they wanted to open up a concrete factory—can't remember in which province. And they were literally told that the U.S. agreement with Afghanistan forbids that because it would be competing with the U.S. industry, or there were people that wanted to make bullets here—recycle old ammunition and remake bullets and things like that. The DOD will never allow that. So if you're keeping people from being industrious, that's part of why they want you out, in that sense, as the overlord. They want to maintain diplomatic ties with you. They want to maintain economic ties with you, but they don't want to be told what to do.

HANNAH: Ali, what do you say to those Americans who say Afghans just simply can't govern themselves, that they're incapable of it, that they need the U.S. and our assistance?

LATIFI. Look at your election right now. That's what I would say.

HANNAH: Thanks so much to General Bolduc and to Ali Latifi for joining us.

I am Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I am giving a special thanks to the None of the Above team here: our producer, Caroline Gray, our editor Luke Taylor, our mixer Zubin Hensler, and of course, our graduate research assistant, Adam Pontius, who all make this possible.

If you enjoy what you heard, we'd appreciate you subscribing on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or anywhere else you find your podcasts. Rate and review us. It means a lot. And if there is a topic you want us to cover, please send us an email at info@egfound.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there. See you next time.

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