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Shindand Air Base: A Few Quick Thoughts
It was confirmed Wednesday night that Shindand Airbase fell to the Taliban. The news of this, while not unexpected, hurts. It hurts my soul. It hurts the way the passing of a loved one does after years of illnesses. You go from thinking about how you will react, to reacting. From wondering how you will mourn, to mourning.
I won’t say I’ll mourn for Shindand. I hated the place too much when I was there to ever do that.
Shindand is due south of the historically and strategically important city of Herat in Western Afghanistan. In 2009 I was one of the first Americans, who wasn’t a green beret, sent to Shindand as part of President Obama’s “surge.” The Italians had been in charge of that part of Afghanistan since the now temporary fall of the Taliban, and the invocation of NATO’s Article 5. In 2009 I was an Aviation Ops Specialist for a MEDEVAC unit that pushed out to the western high-altitude desert to support the Marines pouring into Herat, and some 82 Airborne units pushing north to the Turkmen border. The only Americans who were there before us were some Special Forces teams and the Seabees. The latter were turning a dilapidated Soviet airfield into a major airbase. Our two Blackhawks were the first American aircraft to stay there overnight, and at first we had to park them in the SF guys’ area, because there was no security anywhere else on the base.
The early days were rough. We were short of pretty much everything, but what I remember most was the toilet paper shortage. We actually saved and used TP from our MREs! We saved every scrap of paper we could. Just in case you needed to go, and it came to that. But being away from the “flag pole” was also a lot of fun. The Italians had the best food I had during my deployment, and every now and then you could sneak a little box of wine out of their dining hall. The wine came in little cartons that looked like a Hi-C and didn’t taste much better. Our NATO allies would join us in Afghanistan, but they wouldn’t give up wine with their meals. American troops were not allowed alcohol, to show respect to the local culture and win “hearts and minds.” The droll and cynical responses to this policy are so obvious I won’t even waste your time with them.
The Seabees finished up the airfield and our whole aviation battalion followed us to Shindand. We moved into the airport building pictured above. I never found out, but I assume it was built by the Soviets. I spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in Shindand. The Italians sounded like they got very drunk on Christmas Eve, we all remained sober. Just before I got sent to another base in an even more remote corner of Afghanistan, a priest came out from Kandahar and said Ash Wednesday mass for the Catholics. Every Catholic in the Battalion went to get their ashes. Afterward, one irascible captain yelled at a poor private who pointed out to him that he had something on his forehead.
Near our battalion area, close enough to walk, but far too dangerous to do so because of mines and unexploded ordinance, was a scrap heap of Soviet materiel; jets, helicopters old trucks, etc.. I started calling Afghanistan the landfill of history, and I didn’t mean that as an insult. The bits and pieces of history somehow make their way to Afghanistan, and the Afghanis preserve them in their poverty. In Kandahar, I saw them selling old Russian money, not Soviet money, but Imperial Russian money, and these sat next to rupees from the British Raj. Leftovers from the Great Game. While looking for old Soviet bric-a-brac I found a Maria Theresa Thaler, according to Wikipedia this might be a counterfeit made by the OSS for resistance fighters during WWII. Like I say, the landfill of history.
And now all the hard work that was done by me, my Medevac company, my battalion, the Seabees and everyone after us will add to that landfill. No, I won’t mourn Shindand, but something was definitely lost yesterday.
Published in General
I feel that way about Los Angeles.
Yes, it was.
The Washington idiots’ actions can never diminish what you and so many others accomplished there. You did a lot of good, and somewhere in Afghanistan are kids who saw and appreciated it and were inspired by it. And there are thousands who are heartsick, and many who are scared, that you and other U.S. military personnel have left.
Thank you.
I’m betting some of the Afghans would have been overjoyed to get some wine or just hooch of any kind.
Great post. I particularly loved the line ‘landfill of history.’
I am grateful to you for your service. You and your fellow servicemen can hold your heads up high. You have performed admirably.
The idiot Democrats don’t understand that our enemies (and they all wear different hats) are very patient. They hail Biden as their patience paying off. You did your part – what you were asked to do. Defend our country and the free world. You should be very proud – and we are proud of you. What happens going forward has consequences that you or none of us have control over.
Thanks for saying that, I appreciate it.
It’s difficult to nation build when you have a group that has a relentless desire to remain in the 6th century. Pakistan offered the Taliban sanctuary and supplied them weapons, and intelligence. The Russians were also supplying them with weapons.
Our men and women that served in Afghanistan have no reason to be ashamed.
After years of illness and scrap heap of history are good analogies for the debacle that was Afghanistan. Fortunately it’s over. It happened 20 years too late. Thing is I doubt the brilliant minds in the foreign policy establishment have learned anything. Wasting lives and money comes much too naturally to them.
It is a tragedy that our national leaders do not have the integrity and courage that is so consistently demonstrated by our service members.
Indeed. The correct response to the fall of the Afghanistan is, “Meh. It would have happened sooner or later. There are far more important things like redistricting, the climate, and China.”
I have enormous faith for them to keep getting China wrong. They’ve had 30 years of doing so. Tianmen Square is something they have busily swept under the rug while enriching themselves at the expense of most Americans.
I did not care if Afghanistan was built as a nation that looked like ours, especially since I am not sure that would ever have been a feasible goal no matter how many decades we stayed, but I thought it was in our best interest to keep a hard enough force in Afghanistan to sustain options in our own country’s interests. Our position had the added bonus of protecting a whole lot of people who will now die in brutal, horrible ways, and yeah. I think how we have left will contribute to that slaughter. We are now weaker. And we look it, too. In truth, as a mom whose only child is still in the military, I worry much more now that we are “bringing our troops home” than I did when we were quietly maintaining our control of a region that this article’s writer helped stabilize….
Anyway, thank you for your service. I’d’ve bought you a bottle of wine if I could have! Good for the Italians.
@danpierson – with the wisdom of hindsight, what should have been done differently in you opinion? Objectives, strategy, tactics?
Just in the news: the US is sending 3,000 troops to Kabul to assist embassy personnel to leave. Also stated: this is not an evacuation.
Seconded.
I think it would have happened if we left in one year or fifty. An occasional MOAB on a Taliban camp pour encourager les autres may have kept Kabul from returning to the 12th century, and provided opportunities for those who wanted to build an outpost of a civil society. There are more important things, but we ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Now it’s stop and have some ice cream.
Maybe an occasional bomb drop would have helped, but to what end? How would US interests be served if only a narrow portion of the country was under friendly control? It would be just another liability.
There are some on the right, the Commentary magazine and general neocon types, who think that the US intervention in Afghanistan was a low-cost exercise by this point. So, they claimed, why couldn’t the US just keep staying? Well, to what end? They sometimes make an argument that the US will be attacked again if the US doesn’t remain in Afghanistan, but the Taliban did not engage in the original attacks, and if US intelligence depends on ground troops then US intelligence sounds like a pile of garbage. Also, if the US can’t protect itself from terrorism with all of the tools of domestic agencies, then a terrorist attack would reveal a valuable downsizing or abolition of those same agencies.
Another argument was made that the US had to stand by an ally. The US stood by Afghanistan for 20 years while they did nothing. If any country or leader thinks that the US abandoned abandoned Afghanistan, then they are not an ally worth having.
As to the end, it would keep them on, and often separate them from, their toes. A “narrow portion” of a country that really isn’t a country, but a portion of a segment of a region, is useful for future operations.
Protection of the friendly kleptocratic elements who enable strategic forward-placement of assets in exchange for rote mouthing of internationalist tropes. The side effect is a protective shield around a coterie of ancillary elites who flourish in a liberalized environment.
It would seem more useful to have people in the region as well as people in a Florida office building listening to intercepted cellphone conversations.
Agreed. Again, this all depends on a mutual hallucination that there is a political entity called “Afghanistan” in the same sense that there is a state called “North Dakota.” We are abandoning a construct, an overlay, a lattice of sugar that disintegrated when its opponents were permitted to pick up a firehose.
There is a structural problem with Afghanistan that makes it highly unlikely to ever be stable. Most Afghans are Pashtuns but most Pashtuns aren’t Afghans. Pakistan created the Taliban to address this and make religion and not ethnicity the focus. We fell for it because of the Soviet Union and because we considered Pakistan an ally. Afghanistan’s foreign policy prior to the communist regime taking over had been geared towards reuniting Pashtun territory which was in Pakistan. Pakistan will have an interest in keeping the focus away from ethnic concerns and towards religious fundamentalism. Because they are there and we are here, guess who is likely to win.
? I thought they emerged from the Mujahidin?
Interesting (but long) article on Pashtuns and the state:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.1930403
Is it not fine to control territory for our own interests whether or not one thinks the people live in the twelfth century? Weren’t girls going to school? Weren’t some Afghani people working with the the Americans? Didn’t we have some security in territory that is strategically located to address other problems? Was there nothing to learn from unintended consequences after we left Iraq? Is the Taliban the only dark force in Afghanistan that we worry about? Do we really love the idea of a bunch of fanatics who cut the noses off of women saying they have defeated the United States? Americans—as well as America’s enemies—saying that is absolutely true? The US has again lost interest, so there you go. Too bad that young Americans died for 20 years of nothing.
Maybe we should not have engaged or engaged differently, but it *was* low cost for us to remain in Afghanistan at this point. The heavy lifting was done years ago. Unfortunately, those 3,000 (newly) deployed troops will have to deal with a hornets’ nest that has been stirred, and I’m sorry. I don’t believe we are “gone” for good even after we evacuate because our leaving will lead to other problems we can’t see. Yet.
Most Americans have sacrificed absolutely nothing in/for Afghanistan. They were not affected in any way by our presence there. It was not the driver of our debt or a driver of American death.
In fact, I hate to admit, if I could raise my son all over again, I would not have emphasized my own family’s record of military service so much to him. I am afraid I’ve not believed in an American commander and chief to make carefully considered foreign policy decisions that don’t use soldiers as political pawns for a very, very long time now, and that’s a problem. (Want to do something fun? Take a look at how quickly the US is shedding young officers. Why, you might ask, can’t they hold onto them?)
No matter what, if I had been wounded/or had a loved one die in Afghanistan, I’d be pretty bitter at this point. I know people disagree with me, including some of those very people who have been deployed to that region. And I’m smart enough to admit that Afghanistan is a whole ball of complex that I don’t fully understand.
But I am being honest with my reaction here. I *do* think this is like the fall of Saigon, and that’s not… good. Our feckless withdrawal itself makes *our* country look pathetic, and this is from someone who loves our country!!! How will our enemies interpret our lack of strength?
I hope/pray I’m wrong, but our actions will not be without consequences for someone down the line. Probably some other soldiers most Americans will still know very little about. Makes me sad.
Nothing new here, but it’s another of the unraveling of policy and gains made by previous administrations, all in service of the BoJiden Administration.
There’s nothing that’s been built that they cannot destroy. Gains reversed. Sacrifices made, discarded.
That’s how we Build Back Better. Just ask them. They’ll tell you. Because they work at desks in Washington, DC, that means they’re the experts, and they really, really know what they’re doing.
I think it is an evacuation – https://www.foxnews.com/world/us-military-help-evacuate-americans-embassy-kabul
https://www.foxnews.com/world/taliban-takes-kandahar
Biden must have a check list from the lesson plan he has been given, that he is ticking off – titled: “How Can I Undo Everything Trump Did Well and Even Screw It Up Worse – 101”
I think so too
To be fair, Biden didn’t sign an agreement with the Taliban.
Funny you ask me. I was just a Specialist. I was never even promoted to NCO. But if you want to read about the “road not taken” I would recommend Bing West’s The Wrong War. You should be able to find it for about 5 cents on Amazon. Not that West isn’t a great writer and thinker, just because the whole premise of the book is now an exercise in armchair historical “what ifs”
Related, I saw this tweet make the rounds yesterday:
My five word answer to what 20 years in Afghanistan got us is simple:
Combat commands for senior officers
I know there are a lot of career and non-career officers on Richochet, so I don’t mean to offend, but allow me my plebian sentiments. Iraq and Afghanistan came at the perfect time where being a military officer was again respected, and the meritocratic system fueled by graduate degrees kicked into high gear.
Every lieutenant knew he would soon command a company in combat, a major could be confident he would command a battalion. One the deployment was over, they could take their Bronze Stars, update their resumes and get a MBA from a “top 20” or a International Relations degree from Georgetown or Princeton. A job at Mckinsey or a civilian job at the Pentagon would follow. Pete Buttigieg is basically the platonic ideal of this careerism.
Again, I don’t want to offend. I myself used my deployment experiences to get into a MBA program and “leveraged,” as they say in those programs, my service for my own career advancement. So I know of what I speak.
Also, the fact that 5 minutes after our embassy will be taken by the Taliban, it will be like we were never there, shows that perhaps the war was never winnable, so of course the smart and ambitious were going to adjust to that fact. Careerism was probably the only rational response to the whole thing.
I agree with this completely. A few years ago, there was an article in the NYT that the end of the Iraq War was disappointing to career army officers, since they no longer would have the same opportunities for promotion. An article in The Atlantic by a former officer who served in Afghanistan in 2019 notes that a lot of the things that people did in Afghanistan were just to advance their military careers.
So fighting the war could be even more harmful than we realize. We could have tons of officers that have no idea how to fight a modern army like China, and can only fight an enemy that they have an overwhelming technological and material advantage over.
What to do in such places, even those far less dysfunctional? Avoid them, let the UN or who ever, deal with them. In this case, let the Soviets struggle, add a little to make if hurt more, if anything if we’re capable, but stay out for gods sake. Our only interest was the Soviet Presence and it harmed them. Have enough presence to know what is affecting our interests always everywhere, but know what those interests are and what, if anything might be done. We used to have a foreign service who could provide good advice and we used to listen to them. It was bi partisan, but so was the subsequent stupidity.
They did. But the Mujahideen were highly factionalized and tribal while being creatures of the ISI and by extension the CIA. The CIA gave material to Pakistan who in turn gave it to the Mujahideen. This allowed the US to say it was not directly funding the killing of Soviet military.
My goodness. And here I was blaming it on the military industrial complex. Who knew?
About nine years ago I flew from Delhi (my home town) to Tashkent. It was a night flight, so as the plane crossed borders you could see the pattern of lights in each country. Our (Indian) Punjab showed many small clusters of light, like little heaps of jewels – many small villages with electricity. Their (Pakistani) Punjab showed the great mass of Lahore with spokes of light (illuminated highways, better than ours boo hiss) radiating out from it. Afghanistan showed – nothing. It was an area of darkness except for a tiny dot of light at Kabul – and so it remained until we turned North and the many little lights of Uzbekistan’s Zarafshan valley presented themselves beneath us.
I don’t know if the Soviets in their last days were still capable of this, but the thought that Afghanistan could have been more like Uzbekistan, or even Tajikistan, flawed grubby police states but with female literacy and running water and flush toilets – even at the cost of a Red Terror – makes me sad. (Would it have been so terrible to let the Soviets give it a go?) And what is happening in Afghanistan today to people like me is tragic.