The fall of Afghanistan is the most humiliating debacle for the U.S. since the fall of Saigon in 1975. Amber Smith, former U.S. Army Helo pilot and Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, joins Independent Women’s Forum for a discussion about the bigger picture, including what this means for the increasingly heated contest to shape the 21st-century world order.
Tune in for this special, pop-up episode of She Thinks:
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
Hey everyone, it’s Beverly Hallberg. Welcome to a special pop-up episode of She Thinks. Your favorite podcast from the Independent Women’s Forum, where we talk with women, and sometimes men, about the policy issues that impact you and the people you care about most. Enjoy!
Claudia Rosett:
Hi everyone, and welcome to today’s policy discussion about the fall of Afghanistan. I’m Claudia Rosett, foreign policy fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum. Today we’re going to be joined by Amber Smith, a veteran and former helicopter pilot, to talk about the unfolding situation. Which is catastrophic, frankly, and you’ve probably all seen the photos from the airport in Kabul. People desperate to get out.
A quick background. In April, President Biden announced that he would be withdrawing all U.S. troops. This turned into a [inaudible 00:01:01] over the past week. On Sunday, a couple fell to the Taliban. They’re now in the Presidential Palace, they control the country. This has been a debacle for the U.S., say, humiliating spectacle. We’re now trying to figure out where does this go and how does this play out? So I’d like to give you a little bit of background on our guest today, Amber Smith, who was really impressive.
She spent 15 years in government service, not all of that into a desk job. She’s a military veteran, a combat veteran. She has done multiple combat tours as a Light Attack/Reconnaissance helicopter pilot. She served in Iraq and Afghanistan. She’s also worked for the Pentagon. She worked for a former secretary of defense, Jim Mattis. She is the author recently of a book, Danger Close: My Epic Journey as a Combat Helicopter Pilot in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is today working as the founder and president of Beacon Rock Strategies, a strategic advisory communications firm. Of course, not least, she’s also a former IWF senior fellow where a couple of years ago, she worked for some time with us. We were honored to have her.
Hey, Amber.
Amber Smith:
Hey, Claudia. It’s great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Claudia Rosett:
Great to be with you. Now, actually need to start by asking, may I call you Amber? With what rank did you retire from the military?
Amber Smith:
Of course. Please call me Amber. I left the military when I was the chief warrant officer 2. So I was a warrant officer. You have commissioned officers, warrant officers. One is a technical and tactical track, and those are the ones in the army who are usually do the heavy flying. And then you have more of the command track where you are in command of troops.
Claudia Rosett:
So I wanted to ask you… I want to get into the situation right now in Afghanistan, but can I just start by asking you when you fly over Afghanistan on a combat mission, what does it look like? What do you see down there? Can you just sort of give us a sense? What’s the view?
Amber Smith:
Yeah. So I flew in RC east, which was our area of operation. Was Jalalabad over by the Pakistan border, Kabul area, Bagram, up the Kunar River Valley into the Pech River Valley. Asadabad, an area where I think around 10 medal of honors and have been awarded within that area. Afghanistan is an absolutely beautiful, beautiful country. It’s like going back in time, though. When you get out of the cities, when you get out of the built-up more urban areas, it really is like going back in time. A lot of people, when you get up into the smaller valleys, have never seen a helicopter before. A lot of them were absolutely terrified of our presence a lot of times, because of stories that they remember from when the Russians were there, and just not having much access to the outside world. So it’s, it’s very different, different things.
Claudia Rosett:
Were people surprised to see a woman pilot? Or were you mostly flying overhead? I mean, did you encounter many on the ground on your missions?
Amber Smith:
Yeah, absolutely. I primarily was in the air flying, so I don’t know if they would be able to tell that, who was flying the aircraft. But on the bases, absolutely. You had Afghans who worked on the bases and a lot of them though were very, very friendly and were interested, were absolutely interested because they… Women didn’t obviously dress the same or be allowed in the same areas or get to interact the same way. So, yeah.
Claudia Rosett:
Let’s jump to the situation today, which looks dire. The rout that we are now seeing, am I properly characterizing it as a rout? Did this have to happen? Was it President Biden said, “It was not an inevitability, but it was a possibility.” Given what he did, how he handled it, was this an inevitability?
Amber Smith:
So, I have long been an advocate to end the war in Afghanistan. I think it is long overdue for the war to come to a close. I think that what is an absolute disgrace is the withdraw. How it all turned out. I think there was a much better way for us to walk away from the war. Unfortunately, we saw the Biden administration appear as if they put zero forethought or plan into leaving Afghanistan. The Trump administration had a plan in place. Obviously it didn’t get to happen because of the election, but the Biden administration did not stick to that. For political purposes, they wanted to extend the date and somehow make it a celebratory withdrawal on 9/11. Which is another absolute disgrace in my opinion. Why would you attach that to 9/11?
They closed Bagram Air Base, which is a very secure airfield. We’ve had it for two decades. It is this enormous airfield that very large planes can fly in and out of. It is secure and they are able… It would have been much easier to get civilians out through Bagram than what we’re seeing now out of Kabul. Now they have one exit point and that is through a civilian airport without the same security measures in place that Bagram had. Which is a quick flight north of Kabul. The cool airport is in the city of Kabul in a very urban environment, and now we’ve seen the Taliban is in, it is in Kabul. They are, setting up checkpoints, they are allowing, they are surrounding the airport as well.
So now we have all of these American troops on the ground in Kabul. We have… I’ve seen reports from credible journalists saying that there are still thousands of Americans that are not inside the perimeter of Kabul airport. That I’ve been told to shelter in place from the state department and because of the security situation at Kabul airport. So, it’s just… It didn’t have to be like this. It did not have a withdrawal should not have, and there’s really no excuse for it.
Claudia Rosett:
I wanted to ask you more about two of the points you just brought up. The first is President Biden’s original withdrawal date of September 11th, which was just very hard to fathom. Any idea why they would pick that symbolically freighted date to basically hand what would be interpreted by the Taliban as a victory? Why September?
Amber Smith:
I think it was of the same mindset. You remember when President Obama brought Bowe Bergdahl home and he brought his parents to the White or the Rose Garden and did this thing. He thought the American people were going to praise him for it. He thought that people were going to be ecstatic and like ‘What a, what a hero, what a wonderful American President that did this.’ And instead America was like, you what? Like, are you serious that you just did this? I think it was of the same mindset. The Biden administration was like, ‘Oh, well attach this to 9/11. It’ll be such a historic big deal event. That if, if we just say 9/11 is the end of the Afghan war.’ No, what a disgraced to not only the people who died on 9/11, but the gold star families who, the people who have sacrificed their lives in Afghanistan. I just thought it was, it was unbelievable that they chose that date.
Claudia Rosett:
Yeah, I’m with you on that one. I just couldn’t figure it. Now it’s moved back to August 31st, but it started to become moot. That’s done. The other one is Bagram, which I think a lot of Americans are less familiar with. But as you said, it’s extremely important. Can you tell us a little bit more about, sort of how big it is, what it mainly provided over the years and why it was so important? What, as far as, what is the situation there now? Because when you said that should be the natural evacuation point, that makes complete sense. And yet there’s the scene at the Kabul Commercial Airport instead?
Amber Smith:
So Bagram is… It’s an old airbase that the… When we went into Afghanistan in 2001, we started building up. It is –
Claudia Rosett:
Soviet Air Base [crosstalk 00:10:48].
Amber Smith:
…Air Base. It has this massive runway that can take any plane in and out of it. It has plenty of room to take off because of the high altitude that it’s at. It’s often harder for airplanes flying at that altitude in February and like a high gross weight situation. As we’re seeing the C-17’s having to take off at probably above max gross weight with the amount of personnel they’re having onboard. They have plenty of room before they have to climb up over the mountain. So there’s maneuver space at Bagram airbase. There’s a significant security perimeter that’s been decades in the making.
Then also something that was at Bagram was this significant prison that was housed that had many Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in it. We just saw a few days, the Taliban released all of the prisoners and you see them walking back towards Kabul. So just absolutely devastating to let go of the base without having evacuated the American citizens. It defies reason why they actually did that. I understand when we’re withdrawing from Afghanistan and closing up shop, eventually we’ll hand it back over to the Afghans, but you don’t do that prior to us getting Americans out. It leaves us with the situation that we are currently seeing. So it’s extremely such a failure that they did that, that they ended up closing that base.
Claudia Rosett:
Everything you’ve just said makes complete sense. It defies reason. Could I ask you nonetheless, this is asking you to speculate, but why? What, any idea, what was the thinking as far as there was some behind closing it when they did? I couldn’t figure it out. You clearly can’t figure it out. You really know the scene. What were they doing?
Amber Smith:
So I think that a lot of the decisions that were made that led to a two-decade failure in Afghanistan… A lot of those decisions that were made were not done so in the context of what it was like on the ground in Afghanistan. So you get briefed in a room in Washington, DC about the situation. It briefs a whole lot differently than the reality of what it looks like on the ground. And then how those decisions made in an air-conditioned room in Washington, DC will then play out when people have to enact those decisions. So, I think that military leadership wasn’t given much of a choice. I also think that the senior military and political leadership did not listen to reports about the actual status of the Afghan military and the Afghan government. I mean, you compare statements about what President Ghani said. Just quick, just recently before he fled the country about how they will stand and fight against the Taliban. They did not believe that the Afghan military and government would collapse. They just didn’t want to believe it.
I think people on the ground and that worked with them knew that there wasn’t much future with an Afghan government and an Afghan military. I served there. I’ve known for a decade that the military and the government will not be able to stand on its own without U.S. dollar, without military leadership. We saw that in real-time in the last few days. But unfortunately our leaders never wanted to believe that. They wanted to paint this rosy picture of the status of Afghanistan. Senior military officials continued to go in front of Congress and testify that the Afghan military was making progress, that they were impressed with the gains that they have made. When the reality was is that they, the Afghan military, could not. The attrition rate was so high, that they were constantly having to just retrain and retrain and retrain.
So when a lot of the recruits were extremely uneducated… So, they had to start… When people enter our military, they have an 18-year education. They are all at a fairly level playing field. That’s not the case in the Afghan military. So they are literally starting a lot of these people from scratch. A lot of them can’t even read and write and follow orders. Believe it or not, all of those basic things that people assume happens, it’s not. Then we haven’t even talked about the corruption that we saw within the Afghan military, where commanders were pocketing their paychecks, the soldiers’ paychecks, they weren’t getting food. So it was just … a lot of things weren’t being acknowledged.
Claudia Rosett:
The phrase that sort of makes some sense to me, is people have been talking about under President Trump, the deal with the Taliban was falling apart. Taliban were violating it. UN report is full of instances of Al-Qaeda being harbored in the provinces today. But there was a fragile stability to it all. Life was going on in Kabul.
Was that something that could have been kept going if we had kept a minimal presence? if instead of withdrawing now, President Biden had decided to sort of keep it at roughly that level or sort of do what it took, but possibly do less of the nation-building, but simply try and support the military? Would that have ever have worked?
Amber Smith:
So I think that… I wanted a complete close to the Afghan war. I was not in favor of leaving behind our presumable force. I think that a lot… When we saw a lot of people were saying like, ‘Oh, after February 20th, there wasn’t a U.S. Debt,’ it’s because that’s when negotiations started happening with the Taliban and they knew it was a condition-based withdrawal. So we weren’t necessarily in that frontline fighting position with the Taliban, since we said that we were leaving Afghanistan. I think that unfortunately the Taliban was… Because of everything we just talked about the weakness within the Afghan military and the government, eventually the Taliban would have risen to power once again.
I mean, it’s a very difficult situation, especially after having served there, losing friends there, to acknowledge that of course the Taliban is going to come back. But because of the failures that we saw, it was the inevitable. Nobody wanted to face that. I think that people were treating the Taliban as if they were, that they wanted to fit into this world of… They wanted to be seen on, acknowledged on, a world stage. The Taliban really doesn’t care about that. They care about ruling Afghanistan. So, no. I mean, I’m not one for drawing out the inevitable. We gave it 20 years. I think that that twenty-five hundred troops when everybody was saying like, ‘Oh, we could have left 2,500 troops and it would have provided stability.’ No, it wouldn’t. The Taliban stopped fighting the U.S. Military. They were still fighting the Afghan military, but that is why there wasn’t much conflict there in the last year and a half.
Claudia Rosett:
Two closing questions. One is, what one is a big one, but in brief… What now awaits the Afghans, especially women under Taliban rule? We’ve just been hearing from the Taliban that they want peace and unity and everything will be fine.
Amber Smith:
I mean, it’s going to be terrible. The Taliban is terrible. I mean, they’re going to be facing Sharia law. If you look back to the 1990s, when Taliban was in rule, that is what it is going to look like for the future of Afghanistan. Women wearing burkas, not being allowed in public without men, and women not being able to work. It’s, very, very sad situation. The Taliban is absolutely brutal and it’s very sad. It’s very sad for women and children.
Claudia Rosett:
My final question to you, is for the Americans for the gold star families, for the people who lost limbs, their eyesight, the people wounded there, the people who went through everything, the comment they’re entailed. Is there any comfort here to be found? Anything you would say, how can they deal with this?
Amber Smith:
I think one of the hardest, or not one of the hardest, but just something that a lot of [inaudible 00:20:54] serve and more struggle with, even aside from what we’ve just seen in the last few days is… Did what happened in war—war’s terrible, war’s hell, regardless of when and where—did it matter? Did what I did make a difference? I think a lot of people struggle with that question just in regular times.
I think a lot of Afghanistan veterans are going to be struggling because of the way it just unfolded. 70% of Americans wanted us to end the war in Afghanistan, nobody wanted to end the Afghanistan war like what we’ve seen over the past week. So I think that that struggle is going to be very real. I like to look at it as… Aside from the political failures, that have been associated with this war, you served your country, you absolutely made a difference for the Afghanistan people for 20 years. You gave them a chance. And you protected the men and women in uniform to your left and your right. So, absolutely your service mattered.
Claudia Rosett:
Beautifully put, thank you for that. And Amber, thank you so much. We’ve been talking with Amber Smith, a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan now running a consulting firm, a strategic rux, Beacon Rock Strategies. Thank you. I want to encourage anyone who found this interesting or enjoyed watching this discussion, thank you again, Amber, to please check out the Independent Women’s Network. We’ve set up a networking site where you can go to the IWF, the Independent Women’s Forum site. Sign up for it. We have chat rooms, we have discussions. It’s a place for free willing discussion, off the grid of the mainstream group thick. We welcome you there. Amber, thank you so much for joining us.
Amber Smith:
Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Claudia Rosett:
It was a pleasure. Thank you.