Adm. James Stavridis: What We Must Learn from Afghanistan

The end was going to be painful. During the course of several administrations, the American public has grown tired of the war in Afghanistan and simply wanted it to end. The Biden administration decided to rip the bandage off, but unfortunately, it appears that they ripped off a tourniquet and we are watching the hemorrhaging of American honor and the death of the hopes and dreams of many Afghans—particularly for many girls and women.

How did we get to this point? Let me share my journey.

The war in Afghanistan began on September 11, 2001. I was a freshly selected one-star admiral, the gold braid brand-new on the sleeves of my service dress blue uniform. My office was on the outer “E-ring” of the Pentagon, and through the windows across the corridor, I glimpsed a Boeing 757 just before it struck the building. The nose of American Airlines flight 77 hit the Pentagon’s second floor. I was about 150 feet away on the fourth floor, and was spared.

As the flames and smoke engulfed the section of Pentagon with my office, I stumbled down several flights of stairs out onto the grassy field below and tried to do what I could for the survivors and wounded until the first responders arrived. All I could think of was the irony of the day for me: after decades in the military, I had seen my share of combat—yet I was almost killed in what we all believed was one of the safest buildings in the world. The Pentagon is guarded by the strongest military on earth in the capital of the richest and most powerful country on the planet. Yet it was there where I came the closest to being killed over the course of my 37-year career.

And I did not know it at the time, but the terrorist strikes on New York and Washington were also connected to a previous attack I had conducted several years earlier. As a destroyer squadron commodore, I had overseen the Tomahawk cruise missile strikes in August 1998 against bin Laden in Afghanistan, conducted in retaliation for Al Qaeda’s deadly bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. In what became known as “Operation Infinite Reach,” we had barely missed killing bin Laden as he escaped his camp, probably after being alerted to impending attack by the Pakistani intelligence services. My Tomahawks had almost killed him, and now his attack nearly finished me.

Within weeks, I was placed in charge of the Navy’s “Deep Blue” innovation cell, a small elite team charged with coming up with strategic ideas and tactical operations to leverage the capabilities of the Navy in what would become known as the “Global War on Terror.” After a year in that role, I was sent back to sea as a Carrier Strike Group commander embarked in the nuclear carrier U.S.S Enterprise—conducting operations on the Horn of Africa and in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Later, I’d serve as Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and eventually become Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, with strategic responsibility for the war in Afghanistan.

I was thus deeply engaged in what came to be known as the “Forever Wars,” from their start in 2001 in Afghanistan, throughout the tragic misadventure in Iraq, until my retirement from the Navy as NATO commander in 2013. All of the U.S. armed forces were profoundly changed by the experiences in both Afghanistan and the war in Iraq that followed. Today, I watch with great sadness the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops and diplomats from Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul.

What did it all mean, and what lessons should the U.S. military draw from this long conflict?

Over three thousand U.S. and allied dead, tens of thousands with significant wounds, and a few trillion dollars expended—to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of Afghans killed and wounded as well. Was it worth it?