“This War Mattered”
Congress’ 16-member Afghanistan War Commission includes three UConn alums
As part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2022, Congress called for a commission to study the war in Afghanistan, which lasted from Oct. 7, 2001, to Aug. 30, 2021. Three UConn political science alums are leading the nonpartisan effort. Commissioner Dan Fata ’94 (CLAS) is a national security expert who has focused on foreign policy issues for the past 30 years in think tanks and on Capitol Hill. Commissioner Jeffrey Dressler ’08 (CLAS) is a national security practitioner who previously worked on Afghanistan issues. Executive Director Jaime Cheshire ’99 (CLAS) is coordinating the study. She has 25 years of public service focused on national security, including 17 years on Capitol Hill and as an advisor to CIA leadership on legislative matters.
“This is unique,” says Cheshire. “This is the only time Congress has chartered a holistic war commission right after the conclusion of a war. We’ll be looking at all 20 years. That includes DOD, the diplomatic piece of it, the intelligence piece, and interagency deliberations and leadership decisions, covering four administrations and 11 Congresses. It’s intended to be the breadth and scope of the war. None of us have seen anything like it in our experience.”
“A lot of our modeling has been based on the 9/11 Commission,” Fata says. “Though 9/11 caught us by surprise. With the Afghanistan War, there’s far more data available. This was something that was big and important and tragic. People want answers.”
Deconstructing a “forever war” presents a monumental challenge. Each of the 16 members of the commission, all with different areas of expertise and experience in Afghanistan and the Middle East, will have their own take on what to examine — including Fata, Cheshire, and Dressler.
“The Taliban had freedom of movement across the Pakistan border,” notes Dressler, “so we were trying to fight an insurgency that could go to areas where we couldn’t, and rest and refit and recruit, and then come back across the border. That was a continuous challenge. We tried to stand up an army and police force that was unified and responsive to the center. Afghanistan has a complicated history of governance from the center. You can debate about whether that was the right approach.”
“We owe it to the American public to look at this, to study it, and to explain what we did, why we did it, and what we would do differently ...”
“The war planners never thought the war would take as long as it did,” says Fata. “The belief was, we could get Osama bin Laden far faster than it actually took to get him.”
Some thought getting Bin Laden (who was killed by U.S. forces on May 2, 2011) might have presented a window to withdraw, while others saw it as an opportunity to escalate and go after other targets taking refuge in Pakistan.
“There was an inflection point in 2011,” says Cheshire, “and decisions related to whether or not to rescale the effort. Bin Laden was not the only member of al-Qaeda with an external plot capability against the United States, but he was a hugely symbolic and operational leader of al-Qaeda. What did the U.S. consider in 2011, post-raid, in terms of decision-making and policy? Did they debate rescaling? Or changing the objectives? What was discussed at the time? That would be important for us to look at.”
The U.S. learned from Vietnam to form coalitions rather than go it alone so as not to look like a hegemonic bully, to not fight with drafted soldiers who don’t want to be there, to embed journalists who can relay real stories, but the U.S. did not learn how to best end this type of conflict. A key mission in Iraq was to stop al-Qaeda from attacking the U.S., and in 20 years, it has not. Yet there’s a difference between the cessation of hostilities and resolution.
“This war mattered,” says Dressler. “There were 800,000 Americans who served, 20,000 who were wounded, and nearly 2,500 who passed away, and tremendous costs in terms of resources. We owe it to the American public to look at this, to study it, and to explain what we did, why we did it, and what we would do differently — or what we did wrong and what we did right — and capture the right lessons from this to inform future policymakers.”
“We need to help our fellow Americans, and our veterans, come to closure on this,” agrees Fata. “Families were torn apart, people died, people lost limbs, their lives were forever changed, only to have us walk away, and the bad guys are still there.”
“We really want to capture what happened, while it’s still fresh,” adds Cheshire. “We very much care about providing answers to the American public, and to the service members who served in Afghanistan over the 20 years, and the diplomats. A lot of them are very proud of their individual service, and what they accomplished within their tours and within their specific missions, but they want to know why we didn’t achieve what we had hoped to achieve, in terms of an independent Afghanistan government. They do see their services contributing to the security of the country, but there’s an incredible amount of frustration and disappointment at the outcome.”
By Peter Nelson
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