I had a very different experience. As a combat cameraman, I supported every aspect of the Marine Corps. I did female engagement teams, I did mortuary affairs. I did logistics, I did helicopter drops, I did helicopter recoveries. I've been around that whole country.
I think there was a series of events in that deployment that made me realize the reality of the situation. I saw a number of things that made me question the viability of our strategy over the long run. I believe then and I still do believe that counterinsurgency can work, but on a timeline and a commitment that I don't think is realistic for the United States, given our system and our interests domestically.
“There was for me a decreasing sense of what we were going to be able to achieve. And a decreasing sense of what we were even trying to achieve.
But the biggest problem—the 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.
If you want to give give props or credit to the Taliban, they did a great job with the green-on-blue attacks—they 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.
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.
“It's also tough to not get caught in the gambler's fallacy of, well, we've already done all this, we should just keep going.
So, again, a lot of this is a self-inflicted wound. It's the inability of Americans to realize that we can't have absolutely everything we want. We cannot shape the world in foreign countries the way we want them to be.A big concern I had about the withdrawal of American troops was: Where does this leave women in the country? I had the opportunity of working with female engagement teams on training midwives, also working to get literacy rates of young girls within Helmand Province up.
Let's make this trend... Na na na na, Na na na na, Hey, hey, hey, goodbyeden
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