When the United States invaded Afghanistan in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11, it had a handful of drones, only a fraction of which were armed. America’s intelligence officers and special operations forces had a history of working together within the context of major wars or national crises but did not cooperate in their tactical or operational activities as a matter of course. U.S. officials typically viewed terrorism through the lens of law enforcement, emphasizing the collection of evidence in the wake of terrorist attacks with an intent to prosecute those responsible. Even those U.S. military units that had a dedicated counterterrorism mission spent most of their time conducting training and rehearsals for singular terrorist incidents, such as airplane hijackings or large-scale hostage events. The war in Afghanistan — and the Global War on Terror — changed all of that.
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The record of adaptation and innovation in Afghanistan demonstrates an impressive ability of the U.S. military to learn tactical and technological lessons and to apply those in near real-time on the battlefield. The full potential of these technical advances would likely have remained unmet; however, had the U.S. government not also engendered a cultural revolution within its component agencies. Perhaps the most important cultural change — which was advanced by the task force in Afghanistan that was dedicated to counterterrorism but eventually spread broadly across U.S. military forces — was the fusion of intelligence and operations via the targeting cycle known as “Find-Fix-Finish-Exploit-Analyze-Disseminate.” In this cycle, U.S. forces used their intelligence tools to identify targets, raided or conducted drone strikes against those targets, and exploited the information gleaned from those raids or strikes to continue the cycle by generating more targets.
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…for much of the war, the prevailing assumption of the U.S. military was that turning the targeting cycle ever faster — in other words, killing or capturing ever greater numbers of Taliban — would generate strategically beneficial effects.
This belief explains the almost fanatical zeal with which U.S. commanders of the war sought to increase the pace of raids and strikes against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and (later in the war) the Islamic State. As described by a U.S. Navy SEAL: “The one thing I learned from McChrystal was if you can’t get quality, get quantity of missions.” The seemingly logical appeal of this attrition-centered approach, the seductiveness of its simple kill/capture metrics, and the consistent promotion of its practitioners and advocates within the U.S. military cemented the “find, fix, finish…” approach — and more generally, an operational model centered on lethality in overdrive — as the way for the U.S. military to conduct successful operations in the modern age.
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Over the course of the war, America killed thousands of Taliban commanders and perhaps 10,000 or more of the group’s fighters. At the height of U.S. presence in Afghanistan, it was common for its counterterrorism forces to eliminate entire cells of the Taliban’s fighting structure in a matter of days. And yet, the group’s strength grew almost continuously in proportion to the length of the war, in direct defiance of lethal actions against it.
… the find, fix, finish model has its origins in theories for optimizing the destruction of physical systems (such as electrical grids or manufacturing networks), which can be effectively modeled because they follow well-understood laws of physics. The assumption that a model based on physical principles will apply equally well to human networks — and that it can yield reliable insights into how those networks might react to the removal of specific individuals via lethal targeting — is a fallacy of the first order. Humans and the interactions between them do not adhere to any analogous set of immutable laws or principles.
… There is a hard-wired assumption in this approach that only effects against the enemy matter, and U.S. intelligence assets and analysis in Afghanistan were therefore laser-focused on al-Qaeda and the Taliban — a fact that some U.S. military intelligence leaders openly admitted (and complained about) during the war. This assumption, however, ignores the impact of lethal actions on non-enemy civilian populations. At various times in Afghanistan, one can find publicly–cited estimates of the so-called “jackpot” rate — meaning the percentage of raids or strikes that netted their intended target — ranging from 50 percent to as high as 95 percent.
In no case, however, was the jackpot rate 100 percent. This meant that throughout the war, U.S. forces were consistently and mistakenly raiding and striking the homes of civilians who had little if anything to do with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. An unknown fraction of those incidents resulted in the death or injury of those civilians, but even in cases in which physical harm did not accrue, those civilians nonetheless carried away at least some degree of mental anguish from having been wrongfully targeted.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. military believed that an ever-faster rate of lethal raids and strikes — in line with the find, fix, finish model — would generate predictably crippling effects on its enemies. Had the military instead employed a more holistic operational model that sought a nuanced understanding and analysis of the structure of both the Taliban and Afghanistan’s civilian networks, it might have been able to see in real time what is evident in hindsight: the application of industrial-scale lethal actions against the Taliban, and the consistent drumbeat of civilian harm that accompanied it, was — in contrast to Petraeus’ assertion — counterproductive to U.S. counterinsurgency goals in the war.
Genuine credit should be given for sober analysis, but it’s worth pointing out the obvious. I have, as one example, a book on the shelf called Dissent From the Homeland: Essays After September 11. It contains the voices of Stanley Hauerwas, Robert Bellah, Wendell Berry, Rowan Williams, and over a dozen others, and it was published in 2003. So it should be noted that this is not limited to “hindsight”; many (myself, I confess, excluded) saw it not just “in real time” but saw it responsibly and prophetically.
What Susan Sontag wrote on September 16, 2001, for instance, is worth remembering:
Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. “Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.
Then again, why would we listen to a writer like Sontag or a pacifist like Hauerwas when we can send the military to learn its lessons and our lessons in hindsight?
Schroden continues:
America has continued its emphasis on technological innovation with impressive tactical results. It has become increasingly enamored of the use of AI to help it more efficiently analyze intelligence, generate targets, and assess the effects of those targets having been struck. In particular, the MAVEN Smart System — which grew out of Project Maven, an effort that was initially focused on improving lethal counterterrorism targeting — has been increasingly integrated into the U.S. military’s analysis and decision processes, all with the goal of further speeding up the lethal targeting cycle. This enabled U.S. forces to strike well over 1,000 targets in Iran during the war’s first 24 hours, a more than tenfold increase from what it could do before.
The United States has also increasingly integrated the use of unmanned systems into its operations, going well beyond the use of drones for airborne intelligence gathering and limited strike purposes by employing surface drones (e.g., for strike and rescue operations) and underwater drones (e.g., for mine clearing). It has even gone so far as to reverse-engineer Iran’s famous Shahed drones and to use them as a cheap direct-attack munition.
Yet, the U.S. government continues to see the application of lethal military power as the path to victory against Iran. It has struck many thousands of physical targets, including the wholesale sinking of Iran’s conventional navy. Israel, its partner in the war, killed Iran’s supreme leader on the war’s first day and has continued targeting high-level leaders in the Iranian government since then. These operations have resulted in a remarkable degree of destruction within Iran. They have also resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians that we know of and undoubtedly scores more that have not been publicly reported.
And he concludes:
The overarching lesson that U.S. leaders should learn from our experience of the past 25 years is that dogged pursuit of overwhelming attrition is not a reliable pathway to success, and blind faith in lethality is strategic folly. And yet, the lesson they seem to have actually learned is to employ every technological means available to destroy things and kill people at an ever-faster pace, in the belief that war is little more than “fighting to win.”
The upcoming milestones of the Afghanistan withdrawal and the attacks of 9/11 should be national moments of reflection on their own merits. This year, though, I believe they should be even more than that. These are moments of national crisis, given that we are once again losing a war of our choosing.
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If insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting different results, the U.S. way of war is nuts. As we approach the milestones of the Afghanistan withdrawal and 9/11, let us pause — really stop and think — and have a national discussion on how we walked ourselves into the asylum of lethality, and how best to get back out.
Nota bene, the above piece is from War on the Rocks — for anyone familiar, not exactly a pacifist or anti-military platform. Nor am I, Berry and Hauerwas student that I am, strictly speaking a pacifist. 95% pacifist is what I can claim: it’s far reaching, sacrificial and serious, but it leaves unclaimed — undefined or at least less defined — a very complex, open, and, yes, “realist” 5%.
But it should be worth noting the overlap between the warnings of pacifists/pacifist-adjacent folks (Sontag was not exactly a pacifist) and the military lessons learned in hindsight.
I don’t trust my memory enough to say whether I watched the second plane hit that day. I do know that both towers were still standing when they rolled that TV stand into Mr. Kohl’s history classroom my junior year of high school. When I joined the Air Force a year later, it was on a whim. I recall no strong sense of duty, much less of anger or desire for revenge or justice or whatever. I had a friend who had always wanted to join the Air Force. A few of us simply tagged along with him to the guidance counselor’s offices to talk to a recruiter who came to school. A month or so later we were taking the ASVAB and signing the forms, co-signed by our parents since we were still 17 years old.
Like many, I do remember eventually sitting quite complacently within the zeitgeist of pathetically questioned National Pride, Etc. In July of 2003 I stood in church on Sunday in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio and listened to one of our commanders remind us that “we are here to break things and kill people.” I don’t recall this striking any of us there as wrong in any sense; we the mission-focused believed it to be true and found it inspiring.
I have written some about my grapple with that speech while sitting bedside with a little girl in Mosul, Iraq fourteen years later. And I have written some about the “tele-murder” we still call “war” and the sheer moral laziness with which we all confront it.
“Do we have a population trained well enough in the habits of sacrifice to make just war possible?” Hauerwas once asked. Do we? Are we such justice-enabling members of the world? Am I?
More than anything else today, what I’m thinking about and what I want to say is that the bar for honesty and integrity is lower (i.e. more human and achievable) than we often allow it to be. It’s got nothing to do with left or right, conservative or liberal, realism or localism or globalism. The hardest military veteran can see it as well as the staunchest pacifist. All it takes is a moment — and who knows where these moments come from — with the will to step back from what Catherine Lutz called the “crazy quilt of antagonism.”
“All the stories in the world surround us,” wrote David James Duncan in the book mentioned above. “We’re in a kiln with India, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Mobil, Shell, and Exxon. Even if we’ve no power to guide the firing, we possess the power to think infinitely more clearly and compassionately than Dan Rather, power to empathize, power to consume less and to consume more peacably.”
“The time will soon come,” Wendell Berry wrote in December 2001, “when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.”
That time, sadly, has not yet come. But it can come for any of us at any time of any day. The lessons are right there, if we desire to learn them. And mercy, mercy, mercy, we pray, for those of us who take longer to learn them.
I went down in the river to pray,
Studyin’ about that good ol’ way,
An’ who shall wear the starry crown,
Good Lord, show me the way.
O mourner, let’s go down, let’s go down, let’s go down,
O mourner, let’s go down,
Down in the river to pray.