The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

The Fifth Act: America's End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman A powerful and revelatory eyewitness account of the American collapse in Afghanistan, its desperate endgame, and the war’s echoing legacy Elliot Ackerman left the American military ten years ago, but his time in Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines and later as a CIA paramilitary officer marked him indelibly. When the Taliban began to close in on Kabul in August 2021 and the Afghan regime began its death spiral, he found himself pulled back into the conflict. Afghan nationals who had worked closely with the American military and intelligence communities for years now faced brutal reprisal and sought frantically to flee the country with their families. The official US government evacuation effort was a bureaucratic failure that led to a humanitarian catastrophe. With former colleagues and friends protecting the airport in Kabul, Ackerman joined an impromptu effort by a group of journalists and other veterans to arrange flights and negotiate with both Taliban and American forces to secure the safe evacuation of hundreds. These were desperate measures taken during a desperate end to America's longest war. For Ackerman, it also became a chance to reconcile his past with his present. The Fifth Act is an astonishing human document that brings the weight of twenty years of war to bear on a single week, the week the war ended. Using the dramatic rescue efforts in Kabul as his lattice, Ackerman weaves a personal history of the war's long progression, beginning with the initial invasion in the months after 9/11. It is a play in five acts, the fifth act being the story’s tragic denouement, a prelude to Afghanistan's dark future. Any reader who wants to understand what went wrong with the war’s trajectory will find a trenchant account here. But The Fifth Act also brings readers into close contact with a remarkable group of characters, American and Afghan, who fought the war with courage and dedication, and at great personal cost. Ackerman's story is a first draft of history that feels like a timeless classic.

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Hey, I did that pretty good. Maybe I should sign up for opera. Thanks for tuning in, guys. We certainly appreciate you guys being in the show. We have amazing returning guests and journalists on the show, multi-book author. I think you're going to be amazed to hear his story of what he'll be talking about. As always, refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Remind them that they're a family that loves you but doesn't judge you.

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the kids playing these days. His returning guest on the Chris Voss Show wrote a bunch of amazing books. We got him for the last one, and he's here with his newest book that's coming out August 9, 2022, The Fifth Act, America's End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman. And this thing is going to be pretty interesting to find out about Afghanistan. Of course, if you're familiar with the history or you're watching this video 10 years ago, it will get you caught up on what happened. He is an acclaimed novelist and memoirist who breaks down his involvement in Afghanistan into five phases that focus on his combat deployments in the country as a Marine infantry officer, as a CIA or a military officer overseeing Afghan commandos and counterterrorism units.

He and his coordinating with colleagues to oversee our Afghan allies' evacuation from the airport the week before the Taliban took power in August of 2021. Wow, it's been a year. The Taliban victory was really more of an unconditional surrender by the U.S., Ackerman notes. This book will not be a comprehensive analysis of the full 20 years of Afghanistan. It is a powerful testimony of what went wrong, despite the bravery of the American military personnel and our Afghan allies. Welcome to the show. How are you, Elliot?

Good. Thanks for having me, Chris. Good, good. It's great to have you as well. I started getting the whole bio of the book there. So there you go. There you go. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. Easy. ElliotAckerman.com.

Two L's, one T. There you go. And I'll hold up a picture of the book, of course, in the final copy. We'll have it right between us. Give us what motivation. How many books do you have so people can look that up on the interwebs as well? This is my eighth. Eighth book. Congratulations, my friend. So what motivated you to want to write this book? Yeah, it wasn't really a book that I was planning

to write. And as things were happening in Afghanistan last summer and everything was collapsing, my book editor reached out to me and said, you know, maybe we should do like a kind of a short paperback book kind of about what happened in Afghanistan, republish some of your essays, you know, we'll do it quickly. And I said, okay. And that was like at the beginning of August. And then everything happened at the airport last summer, this total collapse of the American presence there, Kabul falling. And by early September, I kind of wrote him back because I'd been involved in a lot of the evacuation efforts. And I said, hey, I think this is going to be a very different book. I think it's going to, yes, talk about Afghanistan. And as

you mentioned, kind of the arc of the whole war and these five acts over 20 years. But it's also got to talk about the evacuation efforts. And so in the book, I write about five different and distinct efforts that I was involved in of trying to get people out of the airport. And those are each woven through the book. And lastly, I also wanted to write about something from my own past that I'd never talked about before when I was fighting in Afghanistan, because through this whole thing that happened last summer, you know, the question was kind of, you know, what does it mean to leave no man behind? And that's what I think a lot of us are wrestling with, you know, with our Afghan allies is how do we get out of Afghanistan, but also stay true to this idea that we don't leave our people behind.

So I wanted to write about an instance in my own time fighting in Afghanistan back in 2008, where I felt like maybe I didn't do the best job of living up to that standard. I mean, I write about an ambush that I was involved in many years ago. Wow. So the fifth act, the title of the book refers to the five stages of your interaction with Afghanistan. Is that correct? It does. I mean, you know, listen, when you're going to write a book about Afghanistan,

the thing that's tough is how do you write a digestible book about 20 years war? So as things were collapsing in Afghanistan, you know, I work as a journalist, an editor friend of mine reached out to me and said, Hey, Elliot, you know, would you could you contribute like a 500 word essay to what's going on right now in Afghanistan? I said, Well, you know, I don't really know if I'm going to write anything right now. And what do you want me to write in like only 500 words? Maybe you feel like maybe you could describe everything that's going on, because a lot of people haven't been paying attention to Afghanistan. And she said, you know, because this whole thing is just

such a tragedy. And that was the first time someone had really said tragedy. And maybe it got me thinking. I was like, well, you know, if you look back in classic, like just dramatic structure, tragedies from like Horace in the ancients to like william shakespeare are typically told in five acts and so the five acts of the book are you know they're bush obama trump biden and the fifth act is the taliban oh wow wow so you broke it down by presidential thing the 20-year war you know we left almost like we left saigon i mean you know it was almost watching those planes was almost like watching that helicopter atop that atop that thing with a line of people trying to get out. Yes. But, you know, and there was a lot of talk in the lead up to the withdrawal of, you know, many, many members of the

administration saying this isn't going to be a Saigon. That's not going to happen. In many ways, it was worse than Saigon because when Saigon fell, like, yes, you could watch it on TV. And if you were a Vietnam veteran or had spent time in Vietnam, you know, it was worse than Saigon because when Saigon fell, like, yes, you could watch it on TV. And if you were a Vietnam veteran or had spent time in Vietnam, you know, it was disturbing to watch. But in Afghanistan, you could watch everything on TV. But, you know, we all have these phones. So my phone was lighting up with every, you know, Afghans I'd served with 10, 15 years ago, many of whom had immigrated to the United States who are now American citizens, but saying, you know, my sister is still there.

I can't get her out. My uncle is there. They're going to cover him. My brother still works for the Americans. So everyone, whether they were a veteran, a journalist who had been tied in with Afghanistan, they were getting pulled back in because unlike Saigon, people couldn't reach out on social media when at the end of the Vietnam War. But in the case of Afghanistan, they could. And their, you know, their voices were being heard and loudly. And, you know, and many of us were trying to help.

Yeah. And the stories were heartbreaking. I mean, you saw a guy who, you know, the people cleaned the planes. I think there was at least one guy who was killed because he tried to ride up on the plane and was thrown to the ground. That was the story of the pilots that said, we're not deboarding the people on this plane. Fuck it. We're out. We're going to fly them out. And that's it. You know, it was, it was extraordinary. And to see, you know, the babies being tossed at the, at the soldiers. I mean, you, you know, when you, when you think of the, I remember writing about this just on Facebook know, when you think of the,

I remember writing about this just on Facebook, but when you think of the love of a mother that she has for her child, I mean, you're not going to take her child away from her without her putting up a fight. But for her to throw her baby to give it up to what, you know, she figures would be a better life in America. What an extraordinary,

extraordinary probably might not be the best word, what a heartbreaking or, I don you know, she, she figures would be a better life in America. What an extraordinary, I, extraordinary probably might not be the best word. What a heartbreaking or, I don't know, it's, it's a, it's a human moment, I suppose. Well, I think that, you know, we can, you know, we can offer up words about what it's like to live under the Taliban and, you know, what, what all of the Afghans who allied themselves with their government and what the americans were hoping for with regards to the future of their country and we can try to intellectualize that but an image like a mother as you as you said who loves you know who loves her child so much that she will hand that child to a stranger with the hopes that they'll have a better life or

you know or a person i mean that the afghan who fell to his death from that plane was a young soccer star. The desperation that he felt that he would hold on to the landing gear of an airplane to try to get out, you know, speaks to in very evocative ways how desperately so many Afghans didn't want to see their country regress to Taliban rule. Yeah. And then, of course, the, what was it, Omar Khalid? I can't pronounce his last name. Yeah, Salahiri. Yeah. And the fact that we just, we basically were going back to what, you know, was going on 20 years ago. I mean, it was almost like every dollar we spent, we were talking before about how I saw a recent photojournalism shot.

I think it was the New York Times or WAPO. I think it was the New York Times. But when the photojournalists land, you know, they have all the guns that we left behind in a hurry. They have all of our equipment, you know, millions or billions of dollars probably just to see that. So let's get more into your book. What are some stories that you want to share, some teasers that we can tease out to get people to pick up the book and and maybe some things that you really sit out for you in it? Well, as I mentioned, you know, the book sort of yes, it tracks like the arc of these four presidencies and the Taliban. So, you know, you do get the politics and the context of what was going on in Afghanistan. But it's a it's a memoir. I mean, it's a personal book.

And as Kabul was falling the last two weeks of August, I was actually on a long-planned family vacation in Italy, of all places, with my wife and we have four children between us. So it was the juxtaposition of being kind of pulled back into this war that I thought in many ways I'd left 10 years ago. Um, but while also trying to, you know, be with my, be with my children and when writing the book, I felt that was very important to keep that in. Cause I wanted to

show how far I think for many veterans in particular, because there, you know, was really no coherent response on the part of the administration. Like, of course, like, you know, was really no coherent response on the part of the administration. Like, of course, like, you know, we had soldiers and Marines, and I'll be very clear, at the airport, who were doing heroic work in incredibly difficult circumstances. But that was not, you know, a policy. So what you saw was this basically crowdsourced, what many people call the digital Dunkirk, of veterans and others all just trying to facilitate afghans getting out of kabul international airport and so you know the book kind of goes through these you know these these five different instances and i was working with a number of you know

journalist colleagues of mine what i sort of figured out quickly was that the the value i could add was i still had lots of contacts in the military who were there in Afghanistan. And so, for instance, there were two Marine infantry battalions at the airport, a battalion of about a thousand Marines. And one of those battalions was the battalion that I had fought with in Iraq in 2004, the 1st Battalion of the 8th Marine Regiment. This is like my old unit, just by coincidence, happens to be the airport. And the colonel commanding that unit happens to be one of the guys I went through training with when I was a 23-year-old lieutenant. And so in the book, kind of what happened, what I write about is you see how at the end

it becomes this very personal experience of everyone, myself included, just using our contacts to, you know, Chris is at the airport, you know, Jack is at the airport. I'm going to call him up. And then being on the phone, you know, which is surreal. I'm on the phone with my kids in Italy talking to one of my good buddies who I haven't, you know, we haven't talked to him in a year or two, but like, you know, we're old comrades from the war being like, hey, are you at the airport? Yeah, I'm at the North Gate. Do you need help? Yes, I do. And how that played out and how we were, you know, trying to help folks get through all the security who had worked, you know, with the Americans and with the Afghans so they wouldn't fall into the hands of the Taliban.

So the book documents the desperation. And I mean, it must have been heartbreaking for you because you've got people on the phone desperate. You know, for some people, if they've advised the U.S. government, their lives are on the line if they're hunted down. I believe the if I correct me if I'm wrong, I believe the Taliban promised they wouldn't hunt people down, but they did. Is that correct? Yes. Yes, that's correct. And we're going and we're actively going when they got into Kabul, you know, house to house looking for these people. And I think what was, you know, what was also surreal too was the, you're actively making lists.

So it was, you know, I mean, it was like the movie Schindler's List. So you're adding people to manifest. So you're getting emails and text messages. You know, two friends of mine who were journalists were actually in France where one of them lives and they were the ones keeping these manifests. So I would get emails, you know, and I was just one of many people who was having this experience, but I was getting text messages saying, you know, this is a friend of a friend who's in Afghanistan. Can you help him or her? I would send them to these guys who were making the lists and they would say, well, we have, you know, a flight that might leave in two days. I'll put them on the list

and we can try. So the morality of making lists, you know, who gets on the list? It's a very, you know, it's a very disorienting thing to realize that, you know, you're in the process of figuring out, you know, who is going to live and die in these circumstances. Yeah. You were a CIA paramilitary officer. Do you talk about in the book about what was interesting was the CIA chief, I believe, flew into Afghanistan, if I remember correctly, and met with the Taliban leader. It was really kind of interesting. Do I have that right in my memory? Yeah. I don't know if that happened exactly during the fall, but there was, you know, the agency was also getting a lot of its people out at that times, too.

And I write about in the book, one of my very old and good friend of mine from the Marines who since went into the agency, he was very instrumental in helping a pretty large group of Afghans, nearly 200, get out one night. And I think, you know, as Kabul was collapsing, you know, there are many, many instances of people like him who, you know, don't necessarily know every single person who's coming through the gate, but knows that so many of them need to get out. And because there was no formal process here, it kind of came down to, as I said, this crowdsource process with people saying,

well, I might not know who this person is, but I know who this other person is. And he's saying that person's okay. So let's get them in and get them out. And it was really kind of a collapse, you know, a collapse of American competence and morals in these last days in Afghanistan. While at the same time, individuals are, you know, I think doing things that were, were pretty remarkable. I was, it was the story of the CIA time, individuals are, you know, I think doing things that were pretty remarkable. It was the story of the CIA director, William Burns, having a secret meeting, but it was after the fall of the airport and everything. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break.

Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you or anyone that you want to invite me to for your company. Thanks for tuning in. We

certainly appreciate you listening to the show and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com now back to the show do you think we could have do you think we could have held do you talk in the book about this so do you think we could have held at least the capital if we really had our heart and minds into it or well as a point yes if we had our heart and minds into it absolutely i mean i think it's important to always keep in mind right right, that war is politics. So political will is not just sort of a secondary consideration when you're talking about war. I mean, you know, listen, we have the 82nd Airborne Division, the 82nd Airborne Division and our ranger battalions like they exist to to seize and hold airfields. Yeah. So but there was no political will for it well you know we we you know

the united states military more than a million strong got chased out of afghanistan by 50 members of the top 50 000 taliban members jesus and that is not indicative of necessarily the incredible fighting prowess of the taliban although they you know certainly had operational patience but of the fact that you know there was just no will left anymore for Americans to stay in Afghanistan. Is it just indicative of that country? Do we just come to some summation that just like the British and the Russians and everybody who's tried to modernize that country or, I don't know if modernize is the right word, but to try and, I don't know, bring that country out of the tribes, the tribal nature of it. Is it just indicative of that country that we just can't get their culture?

I don't know. I'm not sure what the appropriate thing is to say. It sounds like we're, I mean, it's almost Zionism if I say we're trying to change their culture, but maybe that's what we were trying to achieve. I don't know. What do you think? Well, there was sort of one of the truisms of the Afghan war when you were there was people would often say, in Afghanistan, the Americans have the watches, but the Taliban have the time. Wow. So, you know, we had all the technology, all the resources, everything, but the Taliban knew they could just wait us out. So you can look at Afghanistan, too, and you say, listen, Afghanistan, we fought a 20-year war. That's a, you know know that's a long time for fighting but if you look at the arc of those

20 years kind of at any given point in those 20 years we were always about 18 to 24 months from a troop withdrawal that we had announced wow so we never we were never able to convince the taliban or necessarily the afghan people that we had both the watches and the time. A lot of that, again, goes back to politics. I mean, listen, when President Obama announced his surge in Afghanistan in July of 2009 in a speech he gave at West Point, he announced both the beginning of the surge and the date of our withdrawal in the exact same speech. I was in Afghanistan when he gave that speech.

So that had very real consequences. I would sit down in tribal shuras that I frequently did where you're trying to convince local leaders that, hey, listen, what you want to do with your people is you want to align yourselves with the Afghan government and the American forces because they're the future of your country. You want to be in bed with us. They would look at you and say, listen, I mean, I know you guys are going to give me a road and you want to do this and you want to monitor.

And that's all great. But I've got a Taliban shadow governor and he lives down the road. And the president just came on. Your president just came on TV and said, you're all going to be gone. Wow. And so he, that guy, that Taliban shadow governor, he's not going to be gone. He's going to kill me. So like, I'm sorry.

Like, what do you want me to do? Wow. You know, trust me, like people in Afghanistan, like they watch, they watch TV, you know, when President Obama gives a speech, they watch the speech. So listen, do you know, does that all mean that, oh, you know, we, I don't want to be Pollyannish about this and say, oh no, we would have won the war but you know acts like that certainly don't help when you're trying to convince people to align themselves with the afghan government and and our efforts there it was extraordinary for me to watch the people just give up like and when we were through like the people that we left behind and they're like yeah we got them trained they're gonna they're gonna fight and defend their country and they're just like left behind and they're like, yeah, we got them trained. They're going to, they're going to fight and defend their country. And they're just like, fuck it.

And they just basically surrendered city by city, block by block as it went down. Do you, I kind of realized now and looking at that and what you just said that, you know, they, they're just like, okay, well, the America's leaving. So we know who's taken over. So we might as well just roll with it.

Yeah. I think it's, i think it's twofold i think the way that we left just like from a tactical perspective was very difficult for the afghan military because we pulled out all of our enablers too so like suddenly they don't have the logistical infrastructure to like do their own medevac or call in close air support anymore so all the sort of advantages that they had because yes you, you know, like they were flying their own missions, but like when their planes would come back, we had contractors who would help them

maintain their planes. So they weren't fully self-sufficient. So they lost a lot of military capability when we left. But I think your broader point, yeah, like, you know, people could see which way the wind was blowing when we left. And, you know, war, you know, the great military theorist carl von

klaus which famously said war is politics by other means and you could see politically which way the wind was blowing and so they you know so the tout so you know as you said city by city you saw it all roll up you know we saw a very similar thing in iraq in 2014 with the islamic state when they sort of swept through huge swaths of Iraq too. So it's always important to really keep the politics at the moment front of mind when you're seeing these military developments. That saying really applies to what's going on with Russia and Ukraine too as well. Absolutely.

I mean, that's really interesting. What was also interesting in Afghanistan was how we try and create an economy and Americanize or Westernize everything. We did that with Iraq. You know, I remember soldiers talking to me about how, you know, no one had electricity, and then we set up electricity, we pump it in houses. Then when the electricity dies, they hate Americans. And they did that in Afghanistan where they were, you know, I think they were one of the largest, what, heroin poppy seed dealers ever.

And I think now they've flipped to something else. But, you know, and then we go in and destroy their whole economy that they have for that and tell them, okay, we need to rebuild. And, you know, like somehow you can just Americanize or Westernize everything and pop up McDonald's and then somebody has money and pick a fence and two cars in the garage, which we don't either. So I don't know what we're trying to sell over there. So it's just crazy.

Five acts of the book and your personal experience, I think, was kind of interesting because it belies to the reader how personal this is for you, right? Well, absolutely. I mean, it's, you know, I'm just bringing up my experience. I don't think it's an outlier experience. I think, you know, many people, they're kind of, you know, who are involved in the war, their life kind of arc this way. But, you know, I was 17 years old when I kind of got on the path to head into the military. I'm 42 years old right now.

And the war kind of firmly ended last year. This is more than half my life. This war is sort of, I've either been participating in it or it's been kind of operating in the background of my life. And my, you know, all my best friends are the people I served within the wars. I mean, you know, so this is something that's very present. And as the war was ending, was, as I mentioned, very personal. It's, you know, it's my, like, all the contacts in my phone are lighting up, you know, my WhatsApp messages. Guys, I'm usually texting with about, you know, if we're going to have dinner with our wives this weekend, now suddenly we're texting about, you know, getting out the extended family of our interpreters. So yes, it absolutely has this sort of, the end of the war, it ended in a very personal way. But you know, Chris, what you were saying before kind of between had me thinking as well, you know, one of the things that was always interesting to me, Iraq versus Afghanistan, as soon as I served in both was, you know, in the Iraq war that you know one of the things that was always interesting to me Iraq versus Afghanistan as soon as I served in both was in the Iraq war you know we invade in 2003 I was

first went there in 2004 when you would sit down you would talk with Iraqis about kind of like what does peace look like and you know how do we sort this out there was always a sense with them that like yes you know peace was this state we were in before like yes it was under Saddam Hussein and it wasn't great but you know but there was peace and they knew them that like, yes, you know, peace was this state we were in before. Like, yes, it was under Saddam Hussein and it wasn't great, but, you know, but there was peace and they knew what that was. And it was the idea of returning to a state of being that had one spit. The war in Afghanistan began in 1979. So when I'm like sitting down with that tribal elder and I'm like, you know, trying to convince them that, yeah, you know, we got to be on the side of the Afghan government and the Americans and then we'll have peace. Well, the average life expectancy in Afghanistan is around 63 years old. So, you know, anyone who's under like 50 or 45,

which is most of the population there, when you talk to them about peace, you're not asking them to like revert to a way of being that had once been. You're literally asking them to like revert to a way of being that had once been you're literally asking them to imagine something if they have to completely imagine out of whole cloth wow right because they've never known peace you know unless they have no adult memories of peace or weren't alive when there was peace and that is you know and that is a real challenge it's a economic challenge it's a it's a cultural challenge and ironically too as we get to the end of this war as Americans now, it's become a challenge for us as well. And for me, because it's 20 years of war. In my entire adult life, there's been this war going on. And a friend of mine, I write about the beginning of the book named Jack. He said to me once, he said, you know, man, the sad thing is that we grew up over there. And it's really true. And I think that is unique from the American vantage point of this war is,

you know, what does it do to a society to go to war for 20 years? Yeah. And you look at the cost of what we spent over there, but not only the cost of what we lost over here, the stuff that wasn't reinvested in our country. And, you know, it made me think to what we've been talking about too when you're there trying to sell peace to these people who have no idea what peace looks like you know as americans we you know what war time is like we know what peace time is like but you're trying to sell peace to those people or you know hey let's let's all do the thing they're just going hey you know the russians came here and sold that thing the british came here and sold that crap you know

we just we just know how this goes you know you, you're, you're a visitor, a tourist here and you're going to go. And I can imagine that maybe their mindset. Well, you know, like any, like any place or any country, right? Like the Afghan people are not a monolith. So on the one hand, you know, you have many in that country I came across who, you know, wanted that peace, wanted to see things modernized, didn't want to regress to a Taliban way of life. Others who, you know, obviously were aligned with the Taliban and, you know, unlike a country like Iraq, you know, a much more segmented society, you know, regionally, tribally. You know, Afghanistan has a very long history of having, you know, somewhat fractious alliances and being fiercely independent. You know, one of the things I really came to appreciate in Afghanistan is, you know, like there, there's just many ways that

the Afghan mindset and sensibility of how they think of their liberty is very recognizable to any American as well. A good buddy of mine who grew up in, you know, Western Appalachia, you know, we used to tease him and call him the American posh because he who grew up in, you know, Western Appalachia, you know, we used to tease him and call him the American posh because he was, you know, you know, a guy who loved to hunt from the hills of Appalachia. And like when we were fighting in North Eastern Afghanistan, he just, you know, he fit right in with the postures up there because he felt like the culture was sort of the same. It was really interesting to me. I watched a video one time of talking about the drug issues over there,

the heroin addictions and the opioid addictions and stuff like that. And there was, you know, they were talking about, you know, training these soldiers and trying to get them to fight, and they just want to fight like Americans. And it was almost like we cared more about fighting for the country than they did. Is that an accurate picture of what went, those soldiers over there, you know, or what is the accurate picture, I guess? Well, I think it depends on the units that you're with, right?

So, but one of the, you know, after September 11th, we come in and the, you know, the Afghan, you know, the Republic of Afghanistan is founded and then there's going to be the creation of the Afghan National Army, right? And so there's a question there what should that afghan national army look like so if you look at afghanistan sort of the you know the tribal and regional bonds in afghanistan are and familial are very very strong and in many ways are at least if i've observed are the source of so much of the afghan's reputation as being these incredibly fear and effective fighters but if you create an afghan national army that was all sort of like regionally located the challenge that existed if you built that way where you know there was heavily you

know units were all from the same tribes and same families was that you would wind up with warlordism and a very weak central government in kabul and those warlords could become a threat to central government in kabul right so we saidlords could become a threat to the central government in Kabul. Right. So we said, no, we're going to have a national army. So we're going to recruit from the whole country. So if you're like a Hazara from northern Afghanistan near Mazar-e-Sharif, you can go fight in a unit down in southern Afghanistan in Helmand province, which is like heavily posh. And because we're all Afghans, that's fine. The challenge is that a guy who's like a Hazara from Northern Afghanistan, if he's fighting in Helmand province, like that

guy is as foreign to poshness from Helmand province as I am. He doesn't get any advantage from being Afghan per se. So that's where you kind of wind up with some of the dysfunctionality that existed in the Afghan national army. Conversely, when I was a CIA officer, the group of Afghans I advised actually didn't work for the Afghan government. They worked for the American government. And as such, they were recruited locally. So it was all guys from the same tribes, same families.

So like, for instance, when, you know, the private soldier loses his night vision goggles, his squad leader is probably his cousin who's gonna smack him on the side of the head and be like, you know, the private soldier loses his night vision goggles, his squad leader is probably his cousin who's going to smack him on the side of the head and be like, you can't do this because it's, you know, our family or any of our family, a bad reputation. These units are actually much more cohesive. But the challenge was you couldn't adopt that policy on a national level because, again, it had this threat of devolving into warlordism. I just bring that up because it's, you know, this tension that exists between, you know, recruiting people locally in the military and creating something that's really

kind of multicultural and national across Afghanistan, you know, is a balance that you had to get right. And in many ways, there's sort of parallels to the similar balances we've had to find in American life, right? The tension that exists between the rights of the federal government and the rights of state governments and local governments. And the way any society draws that balance, whether they do it effectively or ineffectively, can ultimately lead to, you know, the success or failure of the society. And in Afghanistan, you know, the balance was never totally right.

Watching what was happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, where, you know, we kept trying to sell that peace, but also we were trying to sell, you know, Westernism, Zionism in our stuff. I've been trying to find this here on search, but somewhere in the Bush administration, one of the people wrote a document that was, I think it was somebody with Cheney,

Dick Cheney, who wrote a document that talked about the Zionism, you know, nation building and Zionism. I think it was. I can't seem to find it on search. I don't know if you remember that conversation, but it came out after the war started. Bush administration was, W. Bush, was to promote Zionism or nation building or, you know, basically setting up the satellites or franchises of the U.S. thing in the Middle East. Do you remember that, what I'm talking about? I don't remember Zionism per se. I think there was always a tension that existed as to, okay, what, you know, what is the objective of the war in Afghanistan, right? In early days, it was, I mean, in my early days, I mean, the days right after September 11th,

it was, you know, to bring Osama bin Laden to justice and to deny terrorists the safe haven in Afghanistan. But then it sort of starts to veer in 2002 and 2003 into this idea of nation building. We're building and create a free and democratic afghanistan you know what does that mean it gets fuzzy and then you have sort of this broad mission creep or sort of over the subsequent i mean decade plus no one can really agree with the war is about whether it's about counterterrorism about nation building and the fact that we can never agree what the war is about and what the objectives are of the war i would say is one of the key reasons why we end up losing yeah do you think it's we really misread the population like in afghanistan i know in iraq we we we didn't realize

how much saddam hussein was keeping the sunnis and the shiites from you know going full civil war on each other and and, and I remember reading some different things that a lot of the people who are advising the Bush administration didn't realize, like Rumsfeld didn't realize that unleashing those two to fight with each other, we would, you know, basically be the downfall of the war. I don't know. Well, you know, I mean, with regards to Iraq, right, anytime you come in and you topple a government, you create a power vacuum. And you don't necessarily have a complete and total say as to what occupies that power vacuum. And so, I mean, I think Iraq's an interesting case.

Because the stories we tell ourselves about war really matter in terms of how we strategically behave. So like, for instance, in Iraq, a story we were telling ourselves in Iraq was, we're going to come in, Saddam Hussein is such a brutal dictator. When we get rid of him, the Iraqi people will treat us as liberators as though we got rid of Hitler. And we were telling ourselves these Second World War stories that were not apt. And so, for instance, like one of the reasons Saddam leaves, one of the huge strategic mistakes in Iraq was the debathification of getting rid of the Saddam Hussein's bath party. So if you ever worked for the bath party, you weren't allowed to have a government job, weren't allowed to serve in the military. So we completely eliminated this whole category of Iraqis who, you know, weren't necessarily Saddam Hussein's sympathizers.

And we did that very much echoing the denazification policies after World War Two. Right. But then the result is there's a huge vacuum. So, like, who's going to be in the Iraqi army we're trying to build if it can't be anyone who is in Saddam Hussein's army? Who are the administrators who are going to run all the Iraqi cities? And it was no one. And coming into this vacuum, you wind up with al-Qaeda in Iraq, and you wind up with deep resentments amongst many Sunni Iraqis

who've been aligned with Saddam, who are people under different circumstances we could have potentially aligned with us. Now, if we go to Afghanistan, there's somewhat of a similar failure there because we conflate, after 9-11, al-Qaeda with the Taliban and they are different right I mean you know first of all Al-Qaeda Arabs Taliban Afghans totally different right and then the Taliban as a group you know we are not once they you know once they don't give up bin Laden we won't deal with them in 2002 and 2003 times when we could have potentially tried to integrate certain elements of the Taliban into the Afghan government. We don't do this. And so by completely isolating them, you wind up by 2005 and six with a new insurgency in Afghanistan.

But again, we were telling ourselves the wrong story. And then you had ISIS. They'd been around since 1999, but then they really, you know, rocket ship to power over what's going on from the disarray of everything. I mean, we just, it's really funny. You know, when I was reading books as a kid, I remember reading, I think it was 1000 Days about the john f kennedy administration and the story of you know the bay pigs and how the cia was trying to you know overthrow the government and etc etc and and there's other there's lots of you know segments of our history

where we try and you know muck up governments and put our thumb on the scale and do our thing and we end up doing something worse and you know saddam hussein you know we weuck up governments and put our thumb on the scale and do our thing. And we end up doing something worse. You know, Saddam Hussein, you know, we created the monster fund to them, gave them a ton of money. And then, you know, we end up on the wrong side of that stick. And we have like a history of doing this through at least a hundred years, I guess. And we just never learn. And so it's good that we have books like yours, because I think a lot of people have fogged over the memory of Afghanistan in 20 years. And, you know, the saying I always say is the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. And so we need books like yours to bring us back and remind us

and to document the failures so that hopefully we don't do them again. You know, I mean, Vietnam, Afghanistan, I mean, who's next? I don't know. And it's tough to not overlearn, you know, the lessons of history. You know, you want to learn the lessons but not overlearn them in a draconian way, right? I mean, it's often been said, you know, history doesn't repeat that it rhymes. And you kind of have to look for the patterns but then also see the way certain situations can be unique. Like, you know, for instance, you know, what's going on in Ukraine right now, I think, is how how do we process that after what just happened in Afghanistan? I mean, first of all, I would argue that, you know, Putin's decision to invade Ukraine is absolutely connected to what happened a year ago in Afghanistan. I mean,

which was the single greatest military defeat that NATO had ever endured. And then six months later, Putin invades Russia, which is, you know, basically, or sorry, Putin invades and basically believing that there will be no NATO response. But then there is a pretty strong NATO response that keeps Ukraine from toppling and sort of, you know, so how do we understand these things? Is Ukraine Afghanistan or is Ukraine Poland in 1939? Like, we don't know. I mean, these are the, but, you know, but to be fluent with the history, you know, it matters because you have to be able to kind of try to situate these events outside of a vacuum. What do you think most people are going to learn or come away from with your book? Well, I hope people will get kind of a more personalized view of,

you know, of the Afghans who are coming here and why they're coming here and who these folks are. I mean, you know, the heroes of the book are some of the families I write about and what they were doing to get their loved ones to America. Well, you know, our values as Americans are universal values, right? They're not just American and they appeal to people no matter what passport they carry. And so to see the lengths that, you know, many Afghans would go to to make a life here, I think, should make a stop and say, wow, maybe we've got something that's, you know, that's worth a damn if these people are going to fight so hard to come here. So I hope people will come away with that. I hope they'll also come away, you know, thinking about, okay, how did we get to a place as a country where we just fought a 20-year war yeah and and our relationship with our military and how we make

war you know every war the united states has fought since our founding has had to been fought with a construct my construct i mean you know how do we continue this how do we continue the war in terms of blood meaning you know who's going to fight it and treasure how we're going to fund it. And for instance, like the civil war, first ever draft comes out of the civil war, as is the first ever income tax in America. World War II, characterized by a bond drive and a national mobilization. Vietnam, a very unpopular draft. The war on terror, the way we fund it is in terms of blood, our all-volunteer military and treasure deficit spending. We put the entire thing on our credit card, so there's never a war tax. The last year

the United States passes a balanced budget is 2001. That's not a coincidence. So the result is the entire American population, unless you serve in the military, have a loved one who serves in the military, is anesthetized to the war. We don't feel it. Hence, the war goes on for 20 years and is that a healthy way for a demo for a democracy for a republic to wage war you know i would argue that it probably isn't that you know our our political leaders shouldn't get a blank check to go to war and the way they get a blank check to go to war is they put it on the credit card and they have an all-volunteer military do it and that does not help yeah and i remember them saying about the war, they're like, if you don't vote for the war, if you're not with us, you're with them.

Very interesting spin they put. You know, one of the things that will probably haunt me a little bit is you mentioning your Schindler's List of people. I imagine there's people you haven't heard from that may have disappeared or hopefully they'll turn up somewhere crossing a border or something. But I imagine there's people on that list that, that you may never hear from again. Yes. And there's people on that list who I still, still hear from going to get out and are still trying to get out. And it's become very difficult to get anybody out. So, you know, how do you, how do you turn off your phone? You can't just

turn off your phone, right? Yeah. Yeah. Desperate times. And I imagine there's quite the danger of contact and stuff like that. You know, so I encourage everyone to read your book and you've written some great books over time, but yeah, this one's important that we learn from it. And, and you know, you making it a human story in integrating your, what has engaged your whole life in it is is quite extraordinary yeah well thank you chris i i appreciate it appreciate you having me yeah it's definitely something that i don't know i i've i've watched that war for 20 years and and thought you know what are we doing how are we doing it this makes sense and you know to see the way that we left it and the way it just completely fell, it was extraordinary.

And I never thought about the point that you made that Russia looked at how we ran off and probably encouraged them in the Ukraine war. Oh, yeah. I mean, if you're Vladimir Putin and you're weighing whether or not you're going to make a move into Ukraine and the only thing that's stopping you is there can be a strong NATO response. And you watch the images coming out of the airport in kabul which is which is a nato mission like there's no way these guys are going to do something i mean they you know they can't they can't get up the will to to fight against you know this taliban i mean they're taking terms from 40 000 50 000 taliban fighters i mean what are they going to do against the russian army so absolutely they're connected i think that probably what really surprised Putin was that there was a

strong NATO response. Let me say, it surprised me for the summer that there was a strong NATO response. Yeah. And even commercial, for commercial businesses and stuff. Yeah. They're taking quite the hit over there. Just extraordinary times that we live through. What's the old Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times. Yeah. Take it from Bobby Kennedy's speech. Thank you very much, Elliot, for coming on the show. Give us your.com so people can find you on the internet, please.

Sure. I'm Elliot, E-L-L-I-O-T, Ackerman, A-C-K-E-R-M-A-N.com. There you go. Thanks, Vonn, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4ortunes, Chris Voss, YouTube.com, Fortunes, Chris Voss, and all those places the crazy kids play, LinkedIn, et cetera. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe.

And we'll see you guys next time.