The Pentagon’s ongoing review into the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could prompt the Defense Department to “reform the way that we evaluate and promote young noncommissioned officers and young officers,” Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell told reporters recently.
“If you think back to my time in Afghanistan as a young commander, giving battle update briefs as a captain to my battalion commander, if I were constantly saying that my area of operations was a disaster, it didn’t have the ammo or troops that I needed to accomplish the mission, the likelihood of me getting promoted was probably not great,” Parnell said Wednesday Pentagon news conference. “So, how do we set the conditions in the [Defense] Department to create a sense of honesty where our officers are reporting what they believe to be accuracy — they’re concerned about maybe their area of operations; they’re concerned about the truth and, maybe, less about their careers.”
Parnell added that his comments were not meant as an indictment of officers who served in Afghanistan. “It’s just the way that our system is constructed,” he said.
In January 2020, John Sopko, then serving as special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told lawmakers that the U.S. government had “created an incentive to almost require people to lie” about progress in Afghanistan.
“I’m not going to name names, but I think everybody has that incentive to give happy talk — to show success,” Sopko told Task & Purpose at the time. “Maybe it’s human nature to do that. I mean most of the lying is lying to ourselves. We want to show success.”
More than a year later, the Taliban captured Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, marking the start of a chaotic evacuation of American citizens and Afghans who had worked for the U.S. government. Over two weeks, U.S. troops rescued more than 124,000 people.
Thirteen service members and about 170 Afghans were killed in an Aug. 26, 2021, suicide bomb attack at Abbey Gate outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.
On Wednesday, Parnell said the Defense Department review, which was announced on May 20. will look into key questions about the withdrawal, such as why U.S. forces withdrew from Bagram Airfield in July 2021. As a result, the evacuation the following month had to be conducted from the airport in Kabul, leaving the troops guarding Abbey Gate exposed, an investigation later found.
Parnell also said that he believes the U.S. defeat in Vietnam during which Americans and Vietnamese were evacuated by helicopter from the U.S. embassy in Saigon, left an imprint on a generation of officers who later became generals. He noted that these leaders were in charge during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which the U.S. military had a clearly stated mission and American service members withdrew when the operation’s goals had been accomplished.
When those general officers retired, a lot of their institutional knowledge based on lessons from the pain of the Vietnam War was likely lost, Parnell said.
“Flash forward 10 years: 9/11 happens; 20 years of war in Iraq Afghanistan; and we find ourselves at the end of Afghan War in a remarkably similar situation that we were in in Vietnam,” Parnell said. “So, the question that I have here, and that the department has, is what happened? How do we as a department make sure that something like in Vietnam and something there again that happened in Afghanistan never happens again?”
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