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CAMP PENDLETON

Almost 300 Marines and sailors returned to Camp Pendleton Sunday after a six-month deployment to the Middle East where many of the troops found themselves among an emergency response force sent to Kabul, Afghanistan, to assist in the massive August evacuation.

Ten service members assigned to the unit were among the 13 killed in a suicide bomb attack at the Kabul airport Aug. 26.

The unit, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, deployed as part of a rapid-reaction force in the Middle East. As the Taliban seized the Afghan capital of Kabul, the unit mobilized to secure the citys airport alongside other Marine, Army and Air Force units.

During the ensuing 18-day airlift, almost 124,000 people were evacuated from the country. After an initial, chaotic surge of desperate Afghans flooded the airports tarmac, U.S. troops were able to secure the airport and began the painstaking process of screening people for evacuation.

On Aug. 26, at the airports Abbey Gate where Afghans had been congregating en masse trying to escape troops were conducting searches of evacuees when a lone ISIS-K suicide bomber approached. The bomber detonated his or her vest in the midst of the crowd. At least 170 Afghans were killed alongside 13 U.S. service members.

The 282 Marines and sailors who returned from deployment Sunday were not the first from the battalion to come home, said Maj. Roger Hollenbeck, a spokesperson for the 1st Marine Division.

Of the roughly 1,000 Marines and sailors that deployed, just over half have returned, including Golf ompany, whose Marines and sailors were killed in the explosion.

Marines and sailors marched onto the large asphalt parade deck at the Camp Horno area of Camp Pendleton around noon where hundreds of friends and family members waited under the sweltering October sun. Temperatures at the base topped out just above 90 degrees. Marines in civilian attire brought ice chests full of beer and handed them out to the just-returned Marines and sailors.

No Marines from the unit were made available for interviews although some did talk to reporters. Marine public affairs personnel would not allow reporters present to leave a cordoned-off area to talk to Marines and their families although some did.

Lance Cpl. Robert Kunz, 23, a mortarman from 2/1, said he was among those sent to Kabul but declined to go into detail about what he saw. He said he was proud of the work they did, however.

It was just another day, Kunz said. We did what we could do.

Selina Sweet, whose husband, Nathan, is a corporal in 2/1, waited for her husband with their two kids, 6-year-old Damian and 8-month-old Sabrina. She said it was a difficult deployment because so many of the units troops were placed in harms way, although, she said, her husband was not among those sent to Kabul.

It hit close to home, you know? she said. You just didnt want to hear bad news. Luckily, we were able to hear from him.

The rest of the Marines and sailors from 2/1 are expected to return over the coming days and weeks.

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Camp Pendleton battalion returns from deployment that included Afghanistan evacuation mission - The San Diego Union-Tribune

In August, the world looked on in anguish as chaos erupted in Afghanistan. The United States was hastily withdrawing its forces after occupying the country for nearly twenty years, and the Talibandislodged from power a generation earlierwere swiftly regaining control. Panic swept across Afghanistans cities, and desperate citizens crowded the airport in Kabul in an attempt to flee.

Abdul Wahid Wafa, a longtime journalist from Afghanistan, was stunned but not surprised. For months, he had observed ominous signs of what awaited after the U.S. departure, and had been making plans for his family to leave. I knew that something is going to happen in Afghanistan, he told New Yorker subscribers, on Thursday night. The collapse was very gradual. I can remember that, months ago, I started calling my friends and colleagues, that I see something that completely goes to a wrong direction.

Wafa was speaking from the safety of Houston, where he and his family took shelter last month, following brief stops in Qatar and Mexico. A former Kabul-based reporter for the New York Times, Wafa was taking part in The New Yorker Live, a monthly digital event series for subscribers to the magazine. The panels other participants included Anand Gopal, who recently wrote in The New Yorker about support for the Taliban among Afghanistans rural women, and returned to the country last month, and Eliza Griswold, a contributing writer for the magazine who received a PEN Translation Prize for I Am the Beggar of the World, a collection of Afghan womens folk poetry. David Rohde, the executive editor of newyorker.com, who has reported from Afghanistanand who described his kidnapping there by a faction of the Talibanserved as the moderator.

In the video above, you can watch highlights from the discussion, which covered topics including Donald Trumps unprecedented decision to engage in negotiations with the Taliban; the responsibility that the Biden Administration bears for Afghanistans collapse; how ordinary Americans can aid Afghans; and the Talibans prospects for remaining in power. The event, which can be viewed in full by subscribers, was extended to allow the panelists time to answer questions submitted by members of the audience.

Details of the next edition of The New Yorker Live will be announced after the twenty-second New Yorker Festival, which begins on Monday and is open to both subscribers and non-subscribers. (Subscribers are eligible for discounted tickets.) New Yorker Live programming is available exclusively for subscribers, who can enjoy all past episodes at any time.

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The New Yorker Live: The Future of Afghanistan - The New Yorker

After the First World War, a conspiracy theory dubbed Dolchstosslegendeor being stabbed in the back was popularized in Germany to explain its historic military defeat. The myth claimed that the war had actually been lost by weak civilians who had caved to the enemy, signed an armistice, and stabbed in the back a brave German military that would otherwise have won.

There were echoes of that after the war in Vietnam, Stephen Biddle, a Columbia University professor and the author of Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, told me this week, as top U.S. military leaders testified about Americas defeat in its longest war. The loss in Vietnam was all President Lyndon Johnson and the feckless civilians who wouldnt let us do it right. Donald Trump invoked the same conspiratorial idea to explain just about everything that went wrong during his Administration, including his election loss. Stab-in-the-back myths can be poisonous in all sorts of ways, Biddle warned.

A month after the Biden Administration completed the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Washington is struggling to understand how its vast human, military, financial, and diplomatic investment, made over two decades, simply collapsed, with the Taliban sweeping back into power and the United States scrambling to get out. The rancorous debate over blame threatens to further divide the nation. In two days of testy and occasionally snarky questions, members of the Senate and House challenged the three men who oversaw the wars end to explain it. They were painfully candid. And there were plenty of mea culpas.

We helped build a state, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told a Senate panel on Tuesday. But we could not forge a nation. He questioned whether the United States ever even had the right strategyor, over two decades, whether it had perhaps too many strategies? The United States now has to acknowledge uncomfortable truths, he said. The fact that the Afghan Army that we and our partners trained simply melted awayin many cases without firing a shottook us all by surprise. And it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Americas most senior military officer, bluntly conceded failure at an incredible cost. Strategically the war was lost, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. The enemy is in Kabul.

The testimony revealed a chasm between what President Biden claimed came out of a lengthy consultation with his generals and what the Pentagon advised. The military recommended keeping a residual force of twenty-five hundred U.S. troops in Afghanistan, General Kenneth (Frank) McKenzie, Jr., the head of Central Command, testified. The goal was to prop uppsychologically even more than militarilyPresident Ashraf Ghanis fragile government and Afghan security forces to allow more time for elected leaders in Kabul to negotiate with the Taliban on the makeup of a transitional government. The rivals had been talking since last September, and the Taliban had refused to make major concessions. Under the plan, U.S.-led NATO forces would have been able to hold Bagram (a strategic air base that provided air support to Afghan forces; it was abandoned during the U.S troop drawdown). The timing of a future withdrawal would then depend on conditions, such as a successfully brokered peace, and not tied to an arbitrary date.

The sworn testimony was in stark contrast to the version Biden has offered the American public. Last month, the President claimed that the military never advised him to stay. In an interview, ABCs George Stephanopoulos asked him, So no one toldyour military advisers did not tell you, No, we should just keep twenty-five hundred troops. Its been a stable situation for the last several years. We can do that. We can continue to do that? Biden replied, No. No one said that to me that I can recall. The White House has been scrambling to rectify the discrepancies. These conversations dont happen in black-and-white, like youre in the middle of a movie, the White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. Pressed by Republicans about their conversations with Biden, the Pentagon leaders declined to criticize him. I was present when that discussion occurred and I am confident that the President heard all the recommendations and listened to them very thoughtfully, McKenzie testified. Thats all any commander can ask.

Other themes emerged from the testimony that may prove more important in understanding the scope and consequences of an epic failure by the worlds most powerful nation against a guerrilla insurgency that lacked both armor and air power. The fallout will extend well beyond South Asia. Our credibility with allies and partners around the world, and with adversaries, is being intensely reviewed by them to see which way this is going to go, Milley told the Senate committee. I think that damage is one word that could be used, yes.

A deeper assessment of Americas mistakes, which were many, is still to come. This is a twenty-year war, Milley told the House committee on Wednesday. It wasnt lost in the last twenty days, or even twenty months, for that matter. There is a cumulative effect to a series of strategic decisions that go way back.

Milley cited many decisive factors and pivots: he noted the problem of Pakistan offering sanctuaryfor decades, and continuing to this dayto the Talibans fighters and leadership. The U.S. military was just a thousand metres from Osama bin Ladens hideout in Tora Bora in the first two months of the U.S. intervention in 2001; the Al Qaeda leader slipped away into Pakistan, where he hid for another decade.The general didnt get into politics or diplomacy, but none of the four Presidents who waged the war was able to get Pakistan, a nuclear power which sees the Taliban as an ally against its archrival, India, to contain the extremist movement. The Pentagon leaders admitted to other mistakes: poor U.S. intelligence; endemic Afghan corruption exacerbated as the U.S. poured billions of dollars into the country; the Doha agreement negotiated between the Trump Administration and the Taliban that excluded the elected Afghan government; and especially the U.S. militarys fundamental misreading of the Afghan militarys lack of leadership, morale, and will.

Austin, a former four-star general who served in Afghanistan, was explicit in a stream-of-consciousness list of the mistakes the U.S. made in simply misunderstanding Afghanistan. That we did not fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in their senior ranks, he said, that we did not grasp the damaging effect of frequent and unexplained rotations by President Ghani of his commanders, that we did not anticipate the snowball effect caused by the deals that Taliban commanders struck with local leaders in the wake of the Doha agreement, that the Doha agreement itself had a demoralizing effect on Afghan soldiers, and that we failed to fully grasp that there was only so much for whichand for whommany of the Afghan forces would fight. A fatal flaw in U.S. strategy, the Pentagon officials said, was trying to create a military that was a mirror image of the sophisticated U.S. military in a poor South Asian nation with limited literacy. It was costliest for Afghans. Somewhere between sixty thousand and seventy thousand members of the Afghan security forces died in the twenty-year war, compared to more than twenty-four hundred U.S. service members. An estimated forty-six thousand Afghan civilians perished, too. The United States had the technology to track the Afghan military in its fight with the Taliban, Milley said, but failed to grasp how its pullout would affect Afghan morale. You cant measure the human heart with a machine, he said.

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Afghanistan and the Haunting Questions of Blame - The New Yorker

Afghanistan. Illustrated | iStock, Library of Congress

The United States will continue "over the horizon" strikes against suspected terrorists in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said Thursday, a month after the U.S. war in Afghanistan theoretically came to a close. The statement raises an important question: Just how completely did the war end?

When President Biden first announced his withdrawal timeline in May, his administration sent decidedly mixed messages. Biden himself had long favored keeping a residual American force on the ground indefinitely. Reports at the time indicated U.S. airstrikes would continue, a sizable presence of "clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors, and covert intelligence operatives" would remain, and many recently exited U.S. forces would set up shop in nearby nations and waters so they could continue training Afghan allies and conducting airstrikes.

Clearly some of that plan has changed following the chaotic U.S. withdrawal and Taliban takeover of Kabul. In recent weeks, Biden has rejected the residual force idea. Hopefully, we're no longer training the military of an Afghan government that no longer exists. But the status of clandestine troops, contractors, and spies is more uncertain. In early September, the Biden administration said only 100 to 200 Americans remained in Afghanistan. But some U.S. contractors aren't American, and if the Special Ops forces and spies were still present, they might not be included in that count. Admitting covert operatives are still in the country kind of ruins the whole "covert" thing.

Then there are these "over the horizon" strikes, which Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby clarified aren't exclusively drone hits, like the recent U.S. strike that killed seven children and no terrorists. "It doesn't even always have to mean aviation," Kirby said. "'Over the horizon,' as [Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin] defined it, means that the strike, assets, and the target analysis comes from outside the country in which the operation occurs."

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In other words, plans to restation U.S. forces just outside Afghan borders may be significantly unchanged. (Strangely, those forces may set up shop on Russian military bases.) Some of these strikes if they're not airstrikes may even have U.S. boots once again on Afghan ground. And the strikes will fall under the aegis of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). That's the very authorization that launched the war in Afghanistan, the war that's supposed to be done.

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A hint the Afghanistan war isn't really over - Yahoo News

Members of the Taliban patrol in the back of a pickup truck with a Taliban flag along a street in Kabul. (Bulent Kilic / AFP via Getty Images)

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Bush and Cheney sold the war, Obama normalized it, Trump disowned it, and Biden had the courage to end it.

Cecil Rhodes once said he would annex the planets if he could, and the United States, over the past four decades, has nursed an ambition quite as otherworldly. Everyone (we believed) would choose our way of life if only they had the chance. It followed that we should try to get them there through arts and manners and commerce and, if necessary, through wars. The wars would, of course, be fought against the enemies of freedom, even if the enemies were their neighbors and compatriots.

Tony Blair put the case memorably, just three weeks after September 11, 2001: The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux, soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us. What poetry! To look on the world as a toy! That, for me, was the initial impression of Blairs words. More peculiar, as one looks back, was the emphasis on dispatch. The reordering would be done soon and speedily, with a brave unconcern for prudential caution.

A few days earlier, Dick Cheney had spoken about the necessity of working the dark side. The larger context of the vice presidents September 16 appearance on Meet the Press showed the consonance of his thinking with Blairs. Things have changed since last Tuesday, Cheney said. The world shifted in some respects. But he spoke with a dour realism about the likely duration of the conflict: Theres not going to be an end date that we say, There, its all over with. George W. Bush, for his part, issued a promise of both lasting resolve and a lucky ending: We will not waver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail. MORE FROM David Bromwich

The regrets now emanating from the North Atlantic policy elite suggest how little the fate of that project has changed their thinking. In an August 31 New Yorker piece deploring the US evacuation from Afghanistan, Robin Wright commented with punitive scorn: America did tire. It did falter. And it did fail. Bold promises, over time, turned into mission abandonment. The hope of personal freedom has evaporated. But whose hope and whose mission was she speaking for? Ellen Knickmeyer, in an August 17 Associated Press story, made a tally more matter-of-fact than Wrights. Besides the 2,500 American dead, there were 66,000 killed among Afghan military and police, 51,000 among Taliban and other opposition fighters, 47,000 among Afghan civilians.

No metaphor of evaporation is needed to conclude that a large fraction of those 164,000 dead would not have died if the US had never occupied Afghanistan. For a proportionate sense of the numbers, imagine a civil war on American soilfomented, funded, and protracted over 20 years by a foreign powerwhich ends up taking one and a half million American lives.

The dwindling Afghan support for the US mission was not a rejection of freedom but a last heave of disgust at the staggering burden of corruption this war spawned and nourished. As for the European criticism of our departure, it has been reported without the slightest irony regarding the relationship between defunct 19th-century empires and their successor. Britain and France showed an understandable embarrassment at having ceded to America so much authority for such a dismal result. Blair weighed in again, with a magnificent ferocity of reproach, and Bernard-Henri Lvy was grandiloquent: The image of the liberal democracies, epitomized by the greatest among them, is tragically tarnished. Lvy denounces only our exit. He does not say the liberal image was tarnished by anything the US did while it occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. Regrets in a lower key were uttered by Leon Panetta: We can leave a battlefield, but we cant leave the war on terrorism. But Afghanistan was not only a battlefield but a proving ground for a system of bribery, bounty-hunting, and assassinations, as Cheney acknowledged early on:

A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion. You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, youre going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena.

Our interest in the dark side increased the supply of dark operators. Current Issue

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The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were debt-financed at a cost of $2 trillion. The final bill of health care for veterans of the wars, encompassing disability, burial, and related expenses, will probably come to another $2 trillion, Knickmeyer reports. The Senate Finance Committee questioned these costs just once over the past 20 years; the Senate Appropriations Committee queried them five times. Should that level of oversight be taken to exemplify the freedom we were bringing to people 7,000 miles away?

We think more easily of the saved than the drowned: We saved the women. What will the Taliban do to them now? American intervention improved the lives of some Afghan women, and many of those who hoped to leave will not be able to. It is harder to sayharder, even, to rememberthat we also killed many of the innocent and tortured brothers and husbands; or that the wedding parties we slaughtered in misjudged drone strikes also contained somebodys children.

Some years ago a friend, a Cold War liberal, surprised me by saying out of nowhere, Americans are better than other peopledont you think? It was clear from the context that this was not a chauvinist remark. The sense was rather that Americans, from a combination of national temperament and luck, were more generous than other people; and if on occasion we did real harm, it came from a reckless exuberance of goodwill. I didnt agree at the time, and dont agree now, but I believe this is the way a good many Americans think about us. We are generous judges in our own cause.

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Our Foreign Policy Elite Has Learned Nothing From Afghanistan - The Nation