The Fifth Act, page 3
My phone rings; it’s Yeti.
“What’s that noise?” he asks.
Claudio’s music is loud and so are the boys, whom he’s now worked into a frenzy. I stopper my free ear with my finger and walk toward the gate of the gladiator school, apologizing to Yeti. “It’s my kids. Can you hear me better now?”
He can and so begins, “I talked to Jack about your situation. Listen, man, I’m really sorry, but he asked me to step away. He said that he’d handle it.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. He just said he’d handle it and told me to step away.” Yeti apologizes again. He confirms that he passed our manifest on to the chief of Eagle Base and that he wishes he could help more or get me a better answer as to whether our convoy is cleared for the gate. He offers to let me know if he hears anything else, but aside from that there’s little he can do.
Claudio is satisfied with the boys’ progress. “Take a break from your phone,” he tells me. “You will want to watch what comes next.” Then he calls out to the boys, gesturing to the two swords he’d thrust into the earth at the beginning of the lesson. “Come, gladiators. Take your weapons.” They run to the twin swords, their eyes widening when they feel the weight in their arms. “Face your father, our emperor. Hold your sword high and repeat after me: Avē . . . Imperātor . . . moritūrī . . . tē . . . salūtant!” When he asks the little boys if they know what this means, he’s pleased that they both do. (They had, after all, spent the morning at the Colosseum.) Claudio doesn’t waste any time as he continues his instruction. “Now, slowly, do as I taught you.” He picks up his refrain of strike, block, recover, in a more restrained cadence. The boys swing the dull steel blades at each other, occasionally clanging their swords together.
I try Jack at his desk. His personal assistant answers. “He’s in a meeting,” she says. “If it’s an emergency I can get him.” I’m not quite sure how to answer. The hierarchy of emergencies in recent days has collapsed. Tonight, 109 people are going to load buses headed to HKIA. This bid for the airport is their last, best hope to escape a country that is about to descend into a political black hole. So is it an emergency? Yes, of course it is. But no more of an emergency than the myriad other issues Jack is contending with as Afghanistan falls, to include the evacuation of the many thousands of Afghan paramilitaries he’s worked with during nearly two decades of war. What it really is isn’t an emergency but rather a favor—yet another favor—from someone who has done me so many.
“If he could call me back, it’d be appreciated.”
“Sure,” she says. “I’ll let him know.”
The boys are really going at it now, flowing with their newly learned gladiator moves. Claudio, who is watching them closely to ensure no one gets hurt, flashes me a disapproving glance from over his shoulder. He raises his hands as though taking a picture with an invisible camera, as if to say, Is your business call so important that you would miss this?
To Claudio’s delight—and my own—I focus on the boys, photographing them from every angle until they take a break. They sip water on the bench beside me and catch their breath. They’re flipping through the photos I’ve taken when Claudio announces that time remains for one more battle. He tosses me the balled-up tunic I’d declined before. Evidently, this isn’t up for discussion. Soon I’m dressed. When the boys reach for their steel swords, Claudio says that for this battle we will use the wood, practice swords. “Your father,” he patronizingly explains, “doesn’t have your training. He isn’t ready to fight with the gladius.”
The three of us face Claudio. He has us repeat, “Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant!” And our combat begins. The boys, at nine years old, are on the cusp of having real strength, though they are not yet aware of it. When they hit me it hurts. More than once I have to tell them to take it easy. My half strength is no match for their full strength—and what type of father would fight his son at anything more than half strength? Claudio watches from the bench, shouting instructions to the boys and laughing mightily at me. In no time at all, I’m down on my knees. The boys have bested me. Their wood swords are at my throat. They look to Claudio, their emperor, for judgment. His hand, thumb extended, hovers parallel to the ground. When he turns it up the boys groan.
“Come now,” says Claudio. “Be fair. When a gladiator like your father fights well he should be rewarded. Do you know how the empire used to reward the best gladiators?”
One of the boys guesses gold. The other guesses a big house.
“No,” says Claudio. “Nothing like that. They would reward him with something far greater: his freedom. So that he wouldn’t have to fight anymore.” Claudio steps into the arena. He offers his hand and pulls me up from my knees.
SCENE VI
Paktika Province, 2010
One of the last times I saw my interpreter Ali, we were driving through a valley in southeastern Afghanistan when a vehicle in our convoy struck an IED. An ambush followed. Muzzle flashes lit up the rocky hillside as we pried the bodies of four Afghan soldiers out of their mangled vehicle, including Mortaza, a friend of Ali’s. I remember the two of us putting pieces of him in a black vinyl body bag.
Ali isn’t his real name, but it’s what everyone called him. To protect his family, he hid his identity. After I returned to the United States, Ali and I lost touch. But eighteen months before Kabul fell, I received an email from an unfamiliar account with the subject “This is Ali!” He told me that after several years of navigating the exhausting Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, he’d settled with his wife and children in Texas, where he was happy. He was worried, however, about his siblings and parents still in Afghanistan. They had received death threats from the Taliban because of Ali’s work and that of his younger brother, also an interpreter who had been trying for years to get his own visa. We kept in touch after that. When the Biden administration announced its withdrawal, Ali wrote to plead for help in getting his family to safety. Tonight, they are on the flight manifest of 109 people.
My parent command when I first served alongside Afghan security forces was the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force. Nearly a decade after US forces arrived in Afghanistan, its headquarters was still made of plywood, as were most of the other buildings that housed American troops. Resources existed to build out of concrete, but why would we do that? At any given point in our twenty-year Afghan odyssey, we were always—in our minds, at least—only a year or two out from a drawdown followed by an eventual withdrawal. Of course, the Afghans noticed this. At a remote outpost near the Iranian border where I was then deployed, the lead Afghan contractor who worked alongside my special operations team would always scoff whenever an aircraft brought in pallets of plywood for our construction projects. “Wars,” he would say, “are not won with plywood.”
On July 8, 2012, at a White House press conference, when Joe Biden was asked whether a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was inevitable, he responded, “No, it is not. . . . Because . . . the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped [soldiers]—as well equipped as any army in the world—and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.” For years, Afghans like Ali and others in their country’s security forces had been fighting their own civil war against the Taliban, sustaining casualties and holding ground. Their performance allowed US and international troop numbers to dwindle from nearly 150,000 at the height of President Obama’s surge to 2,500 before the withdrawal without the total implosion of the country.
And yet these forces were shown to be a plywood army, one with the capability to accomplish the mission, but with foundational problems in recruitment, administration, and leadership. The Afghan military was, by design, a nationally recruited force, meaning that, typically, Afghan soldiers did not fight in their native provinces. Because of Afghanistan’s history of warlordism, the decision to rely on a nationally recruited army (as opposed to a regionally recruited one) was made early on, in the Bush years; the idea was that an Afghan military without strong regional and tribal affiliations wouldn’t threaten the authority of a central government.
This decision also had downsides. The tribal, familial structures that form the backbone of accountability in Afghan society did not transfer to its military. This created consistent disciplinary challenges within the ranks. It also proved a problem when waging a counterinsurgency. An ethnically Tajik Afghan soldier from Mazar-i-Sharif tasked to fight in heavily Pashtun Helmand Province would find himself as foreign there as any American. Once, when on patrol with Ali in a particularly remote corner of western Paktika Province—that, according to our records, no one from our firebase had ever visited—I recall the two of us lingering by our gun truck as the commander of our CTPT met with a cluster of village elders. Typically, on civically minded missions, we advisers would hang far back, doing our best to present an Afghan, as opposed to an American, face to our efforts. Noting how the villagers kept stealing wary glances at Ali and his Afghan counterparts—kitted out in their Merrell hiking boots and aerodynamic sunglasses—I wondered aloud if the villagers thought that they were Americans. “No,” Ali said, laughing at my naivete. “They don’t think that we are Americans.” Then he cast his gaze out at the mud-walled compounds, some as tall as two or even three stories and layered like clumsily baked cakes. He surveyed the town a moment longer before adding, “They think that we are Russians.” Had we managed to integrate tribal and regional loyalties into a national army, the Afghan security forces would have been built on a far stronger foundation, one in which Afghan citizens wouldn’t have confused Afghan soldiers for Americans—or even Russians.
Aside from recruitment, the other areas where Afghan security forces proved endemically weak—administration and leadership—are closely linked. Slack in their administration—inaccurate troop rosters and incomplete equipment inventories, for example—has fed persistent corruption. Too often, as Americans, we equated corruption in Afghanistan with moral failure on the part of the Afghans, while rarely questioning our own complicity in setting conditions that fostered corruption. Most tragically, our consistent messaging that we were on our way out of Afghanistan encouraged Afghans in positions of power to embrace corruption—specifically, the siphoning of resources for personal gain—as the one clear and sure means of survival. Corruption became a financial contingency plan, the choice any reasonable Afghan would make to secure a safe future for their children. When every year the Americans promised that the next year would bring an American drawdown and eventual abandonment to the Taliban, ask yourself what choice you might make for your family.
Ultimately, the deterioration of the Afghan security forces doesn’t occur on the battlefield as much as it occurs in the negotiating room, in which key tribal leaders (for example, Ismail Khan, whose switched allegiance delivered the entire city of Herat in the summer of 2021) either surrendered without a fight or cut deals with the advancing Taliban before any substantial battle for their cities might occur. The Afghan army is there, well-trained, well-equipped, and standing in the way of a Taliban advance, but in the end, it has no political leadership.
In Afghanistan, there is a saying: “The Americans have the watches, but the Taliban have the time.” As far back as President Bush’s decision to divert troops from Afghanistan to Iraq as part of the 2003 invasion, America has always had one foot out the door. Never once did we convince our allies—or our adversaries—that we possessed both the watches and the time. Ironically, this led to us spending more time in Afghanistan than we might otherwise have if we’d postured ourselves differently. Carl von Clausewitz, the great nineteenth-century military theorist, famously said, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” President Biden’s announcement of a complete US withdrawal from Afghanistan set off a crisis of confidence among Afghans, one that precipitated a political collapse and, subsequently, a military collapse. The Afghan security forces might have possessed numerical and material superiority, but their belief in themselves evaporated when the United States and NATO withdrew the political and material support their government and military relied on. Does this result mean the Afghan government and military were irredeemable institutions, foreordained to collapse? To answer this, one might ask how the Taliban would have fared if, for instance, the Pakistanis had similarly withdrawn support. And if one believes the Taliban might have also collapsed, does this mean that their reliance on Pakistan similarly indicts them?
The ultimate disaster that unfolds in Afghanistan is the accumulation of hundreds of bad decisions over two decades. However, the one I can’t seem to get out of my head is that we chose to build in plywood.
In the weeks before the fall of Kabul, Ali’s requests for help had become more strident. He knew what was coming. What chance did his mother, father, and two sisters have when it had taken him three years to get his US visa? He’d had to gather letters of recommendation from past supervisors, submit to interviews, and undergo a medical evaluation. As the Taliban advance, the State Department is sitting on more than eighteen thousand unprocessed applications for visas. That June, the US embassy in Kabul locks down, not because of the Taliban but because of a COVID-19 outbreak. This halts all visa processing.
On June 4, a bipartisan group of twenty-one members of Congress, many of whom are veterans, deliver a letter to the Biden administration asking for an evacuation plan.
One of them is Representative Seth Moulton, an old friend from the Marines. “There is clearly no way to do this under SIV,” he warns two months before Kabul’s fall. “The US,” he reminds me, “has managed such evacuations before. As the Vietnam War was ending, the US evacuated 111,000 Vietnamese to Guam in Operation New Life. America also evacuated Iraqi Kurds to Guam in the 1990s after the Gulf War. In both cases, once the evacuees arrived, the State Department vetted their applications for asylum in the US.” The signatories to the White House letter believe the Afghans deserve a similar process. They call for extensive airlifts out of Afghanistan as well as temporary housing on the military base at Guam. Michael San Nicolas, the congressional delegate from Guam, commits to such an effort, despite concerns among his constituents about an influx of refugees fueling the spread of COVID-19.
Yet in the months before Kabul’s fall, while there’s still an opportunity to significantly expedite the visa process, or even begin a wider evacuation, the Biden administration does neither, fearing that an evacuation will only precipitate the Afghan government’s collapse. The June 4 letter is met with silence. Representative Jason Crow, a former US Army Ranger and the other chair of the group, grows frustrated, telling me, “Our interpreters lived with us, fought with us, and some died with us. Without them, many of us also would not have come home.” It’s a sentiment shared by many veterans. Leaving those who worked with us behind will not just be a moral catastrophe; it will undermine American credibility abroad, a point the signatories of the June 4 letter address explicitly, believing the collapse is inevitable. “If we fail to protect our allies in Afghanistan,” they write, “it will have a lasting impact on our future partnerships and global reputation, which will then be a great detriment to our troops and the future of our national security.”
But the timeline for withdrawal has been set. The September 11 deadline has, since its inception, been arbitrary, of arguably no military significance, a gimmicky way to add symmetry to an otherwise asymmetrical conflict. As the withdrawal begins and the situation in Afghanistan deteriorates, the date is moved up, to August 31. If our back is up against a wall, it is a wall that we have built.
When I learn about the June 4 letter and its demand for a well-planned evacuation, I mention it to Ali on the phone. He doesn’t say much. For the past three years, his younger brother has been trying to secure a visa. His brother is in Kandahar facing the Taliban advance, American troops having pulled out of the city in mid-May, leaving him and other former partners of ours behind. Ali tells me that his brother had recently sent him a letter by the Taliban, in which the group announced its plan to offer clemency to interpreters and those who worked for the Americans. “Really?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “So long as the interpreters repent and admit that they betrayed the Afghan people.” When I ask what he thinks of the Taliban offer, he laughs and says, “These days, I’d hesitate to take anyone at their word.”
SCENE VII
A hotel room, Rome, at night
The children are asleep in the adjoining room. The news plays on mute. The images from Kabul flash and go dark, flash and go dark. My wife dozes beside me. On Signal, I’m in a group chat with half a dozen others titled “Situational Awareness.” It’s everyone involved with getting out the group of 109—from those riding the buses to those coordinating our clearance through the checkpoints. The first message is posted at 2105 Kabul time when Nick writes, Hey guys. This will be the space for our latest on the move.
Over the next couple of hours, families begin arriving at the Serena Hotel in Kabul. They’ve been told to bring a single suitcase, nothing more. Attendance is taken in the hotel ballroom. A couple more hours pass. The group chat remains mostly quiet. Then Matt, a journalist who’s riding on one of the buses because his Western passport should help the convoy navigate Taliban checkpoints, sends the following:
