America’s Righteous Warriors?

The U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Misguided Effort to Rescue Select Afghans from the Taliban

As Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government collapsed to the Taliban in 2021, ad hoc groups of veterans, active-duty servicemembers, and civilians of various stripes and nationalities mobilized to help some Afghans flee their country. But facing thousands of other Afghans also trying to flee, converging en masse at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, these groups not only had to contend with getting their chosen Afghans onto planes for abroad but also past the airport’s overcrowded gates. Using little more than cellphones and communications apps, the various groups leveraged personal and professional contacts to successfully airlift out hundreds. Yet while their efforts were well-meaning, they were, however, misguided.

In two books documenting these aid efforts, Elliot Ackerman’s The Fifth Act and Scott Mann’s Operation Pineapple Express, both published in 2022, we find veterans of the Afghanistan war coalescing out of shared frustrations with the bungled withdrawal and backlogs in the U.S. Special Immigrant Visa program for Afghan allies. In Mann’s book especially (as well as in a highly fictionalized film, The Covenant), there’s also a strong moral component to not abandon foreign allies, be they soldiers or civilians. With both authors previously in special operations (Ackerman later a CIA paramilitary officer), they accept as creed that to leave such allies behind America was inculcating “moral injury”—battlefield promises made but not kept. But this supposed moral injury is merely a fallacy as to what it means to wear the uniform.

The U.S. Army inculcates its troops with seven “Army Values”: loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. The other military branches have similar values. Yet none of these values, not even duty (described as a team-oriented value), expresses the fundamental purpose of a servicemember in uniform: to execute the commander-in-chief’s foreign policy decisions. However, as would transpire in Afghanistan (and Iraq), some warfighters conflated four-star happy talk of “winning hearts and minds” or describing our native partners as “friends” as being akin to fellow Americans. Mann, in fact, categorically states that upon America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan we abandoned “brothers and sisters.” And that the mission involved “eternal promises” that were “written in blood.” Ackerman doesn’t go quite that far, although he does give a similar impression by becoming involved in the extraction effort.

In both books, Ackerman and Mann wrongly confer upon themselves a moral higher ground. As special operators, they think they know better than others as to what America’s wartime commitments should be. But this confer-ence is unduly granted. Just as everyone volunteers for military service, special operators volunteer as well. And as every volunteer should fully understand: Afghan (and Iraqi) allies were just further tools in our toolkit for executing U.S. foreign policy. Nothing more. If personally untenable, then one needn’t volunteer. Mann clearly does not accept this, falsely believing that the enemy of our enemy is indeed our friend. Yet such knee-jerk moralizing is not just misguided, it’s self-righteous.

As found in Operation Pineapple Express, Mann had close ties to just one Afghan: Nezam, who served in Afghanistan’s Special Forces. Yet oddly, not until very late did Mann learn that Nezam had a wife and three children. But with Mann’s help, this led to the airlifting of all five—one Afghan ally and four noncombatants. And while one can argue their case for asylum, Mann however participated in efforts to aid other Afghans, most of whom he did not know nor had they any ties at all to U.S. forces. For instance, Mann and others tried to “shepherd” out a mix of Afghan girls affiliated with a soccer team and music school. Plainly, these girls were no threat to the Taliban, which made it unlikely they’d ever be targeted. Yet despite that fact, the shepherds took it upon themselves to guide these girls along a sewage canal near one of the airport gates, fatefully at the very moment when an ISIS-K suicide bomber struck. Besides many others, an unknown number of these schoolgirls perished in the canal, all of them too young to make their own life choices. So Mann chose for them.

Meanwhile, Ackerman also had direct ties to only one Afghan. But this Afghan, along with his family, as we learn in The Fifth Act, had already emigrated to the U.S. prior to the Taliban’s takeover. Yet Ackerman, despite having no real ties to any other Afghans, still got on board with the exodus mission.

Even worse, beyond Ackerman and Mann and the rest of the self-chosen few who participated in the evacuations, several organizations in the United States, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, picked up the flag to push for legislation backing Afghan resettlements. Seemingly breathless amid the pile-on, no one seemed to grasp that, by supporting these resettlements, they were essentially strengthening the Taliban’s grip on power. Ad hoc groups of veterans were evacuating trained fighters—that is, a potential Afghan resistance movement. And all groups were evacuating Western-leaning Afghans—that is, potential subversives. If it were the mid-1990s, these evacuations would have been like plucking fighters straight from the Northern Alliance. And while some allied Afghans would tragically die at the hands of the Taliban upon our own ill-fated exodus, the opposition we left in our wake only demonstrates America’s—and Americans’—folly: street protests in Kabul led by unarmed, defenseless women.

What a sad legacy, of both the war and the “rescue.”