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Sapp: Having watched the arc of the conflicts and being one of the first guys on the ground, I first started questioning things in probably December '02. I know that seems kind of early. But all of a sudden, they were doing the conference in Bonn and they were talking about [writing an Afghan] constitution and so forth. And I thought, wow, that sounds kind of Jeffersonian. But you've got to understand, the attitude of the time was very upbeat and very optimistic. And we had been successful. It was clear that things were shifting to Iraq. I went into Iraq in '03. We were focused on Iraq, and that was also indicative of the overall look of the Defense Department at the time.

When I came back to Afghanistan [in 2011], it was a very, very different paradigm. The IED techniques had migrated from Iraq. You couldn't drive anywhere. When I was [in Afghanistan in 2001], we were on horseback or we're on foot or we're in light-skinned vehicles. Now, you couldn't get from A to B without being in an armored vehicle or flying a helicopter.

But the biggest problemthe big point where I said, things aren't going as well as I had hoped for was dealing with these district governors, whom I dealt with frequently. They didn't have a long view. They were not invested in the central government. There were a lot of reasons for that. Every day was a new day to them and it was a fight for survival. They had no incentive to build these relationships that we designed for them.

For example, we were paying nine and a half dollars per gallon to ship gas from Karachi to outlying districts. And when I approached the district governor'Hey, you need to learn how to use your own bureaucratic requisition systems'he said, 'Why should I do that when you're doing it for me?' And he was dead serious. And of course, he died a couple of months later, as probably 60 percent of the guys who I worked with did on the Afghan side.

You feel like a little piece in the game and not someone who's able to see the whole board.

Jess Gonzalez

Dempsey: I actually want to push back just a tad. It's absolutely truethe [Afghan] commandos are successful. But they're successful when we provide air support, planning, high-tech weaponry and a ton of in-depth training. And frankly, the question we have failed to ask is: Why are the commandos and everything that we've given them, why are they necessary for defeating a force that's for the most part equipped with AK-47s and flip-flops? It's because we became enamored with [creating] a force that looks like us and is effective by our measures.

What we miss is that the Taliban are actually playing the long-term political game. They're not getting money hand over fist, month after month that would incentivize them to be a client of the Americans. They're working inch by inch, working politics. We may not like it, but they're damn effective. And they're much more effective, unfortunately, than a force that we prop up to be tactically efficient in our image, but politically illegitimate and unable to win the battle for hearts and minds in a lot of these villages that are on the edge.

Matisek: The thing that became pretty apparent that kind of shocked me, but I guess it really shouldn't have: We had been there almost two decades. I'm talking to Afghan troops about, well, how do you get jobs in the Afghan military? Theyre just like [makes money gesture with hand]. So you mean to tell me that there is no record-keeping in the Afghan military about what you're qualified to do or what you can do? And they're just like, no [makes money gesture again]. You get around the military and get new jobs and promotions just by virtue of paying somebody off.

That's insanewe've done all this for almost two decades and we couldn't get them to do a basic personnel system to make it at least halfway meritocratic. Yeah, that's a bad sign.

If you want to give give props or credit to the Taliban, they did a great job with the green-on-blue attacksthey were able to basically keep turning Afghan troops and policemen against U.S. and coalition forces in a way that didn't really happen in Iraq. Really did a number on the way we tried doing military operations in Afghanistan.

The Taliban seemed to have moved into a phase, by the time I was leaving, of being able to approach government forces and not just kill them and basically make a deal that they couldn't refuse. So, for example, there was an Afghan army NCO [non-commissioned officer] down at Kandahar that had been approached. He came into work the following day and hes like, 'Hey, guys, it's my last day at work. Taliban came by my house. They basically offered to pay me double. They won't kill my family and I'll just go maintain their vehicles at the Taliban maintenance depot shop.' And he was like, 'Goodbye, guys.' It was sort of like, this is the way it is. And everyone saw the writing on the wall.

Gonzalez: You know, its those little things that everyday junior enlisted guys had to deal with that were always these big moments for me within my deployment. I was expecting to go for a six-month deployment. One of the admin guys was like, 'Hey, where do you want to go for R&R [rest and recuperation]?' 'Oh man, Im not going on R&R. Im only here for six months, R&R is for people here for 10!' And theyre like, Nope, youre on the year list.' Things like thathow disconnected a lot of the times a junior enlisted is from the decisions that are made within our own lives. It's funny looking at it down the line.

There was a big controversy around the time I was leaving about a giant building that was getting built on Camp Leatherneck, a multimillion-dollar facility [at a time] when the Marine Corps was supposed to be somewhat pulling out of Afghanistan. That was always the big talkhow the Afghan National Army wasn't able to use that facility because we had set it up for American power. There were a lot of logistical problems that junior enlisted heard about through thewe call it the lance corporal underground.

Caruso: We made a lot of efforts to pacify villages that were more hostile to us. And we succeeded in some cases by putting an Afghan National Police checkpoint in a village that didn't have one to help deter the Taliban from launching rockets at the base. [In one instance] we convinced a village elder, who was a Ghilzai Pashtun, to support us, which was a big deal because many of the people to whom he had tribal ties were Taliban supporters.

But he was assassinated. Then his brother stood up and took his place and said, 'We'll stand with the government, the Americans.' And he was assassinated. By that point, the Taliban had essentially regained control of the village. I spoke to one gentleman on the side of the road one day, and he was subsequently beheaded for talking to me and made an example of.

I saw through that that some of these things were almost Pyrrhic victories because we were doing the things that, [per] the counterinsurgency manual, doctrinally, we were doing the right things. And we were succeeding in some cases. But at the end of the day, the sacrifice and the loss of trust in the villages was starting to hamper our effectiveness in getting people to want to work with us, to follow our goals and objectives, to cooperate with us and to resist the Taliban and ultimately for us to succeed. I think they were going to have to resist them on their own. We couldn't maintain a permanent presence of U.S. forces indefinitely to keep them safe or to deter the Taliban.

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We Never Got It. Not Even Close: Afghanistan Veterans Reflect on 20 Years of War - POLITICO