Here my CNAS colleague Michael
McCarthy reports on an unusual book party he attended at Fort McNair, here in
Washington, D.C.:
Last night I went down to Fort McNair, home of the Near East South Asia
Center for Strategic Studies (NESA). The occasion was a book launch event for Enduring
Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan 2003-2005. The book, edited by Army historian Christopher Koontz, is
textbook-heavy and filled with maps, charts, and long interviews with veterans
of those two years of the conflict. The interview subjects range from
commanding officer LTG David Barno all the way to a civilian political advisor
on one of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams.
In the conference room at
McNair, uniformed officers from most of the services filed in while I sat
wondering how to pronounce the acronym "NESA" (turns out it's Nee-Suh).
Barno-now retired from active duty and the director of NESA-introduced the
panel, which was composed of soldiers he'd worked with closely in Afghanistan.
Not being a historian of the Afghanistan conflict, I was struck by the relatively
rosy picture these men painted of that period in the war: the Taliban
resistance was disorganized and ineffective, with little predilection for IEDs;
Afghan officers were starting to be embedded with NATO forces and serving as a
vital cultural link; and governance was improving. All the panelists were also
in agreement about the close and effective working relationship between LTG
Barno and Ambassador Khalilzad, holding this up as a model of civil-military
cooperation in a warzone.
Of course, all was not well, as
even people with obvious vested interests were able to admit. For one,
cooperation was poor between the military and most civilian agencies (including
those of the three-letter
variety). In addition, British MG
Peter Gilchrist (ret.) discussed the futility of the U.K.'s counternarcotics
portfolio in Afghanistan. This effort ultimately became an attempt to keep
order at meetings where some 40 civilian agencies squabbled amongst themselves
while refusing to share intelligence. And the Secretary of Defense's
micromanaging didn't help either, once he suddenly began holding weekly
videoconferences (which "brought us to our knees" in terms of productivity,
according to Barno).
Before the event, I thought I
would hear plenty about the fate of Afghanistan going forward. But this was a
purely history-minded crowd, and aside from a mention of the book's timeliness,
none of the participants offered assessments of the war effort today. The words
"McChrystal" and "30,000" were deafening in their absence. Doubtless, every
person in the room had his or her own well-defined views on what to do next and
had probably watched the
president's West Point speech
three or four times. But it was as if, for just a few hours, everybody wanted
to harken back to a different time, when things seemed to be looking up in
Afghanistan.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
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