Two Decades of Corporate Grift in Afghanistan

Jacob Siegel on what he saw in Afghanistan

“Because I did continue to believe in the military, and I did continue to believe in the guys around me. To this day, the Army is one of the greatest organizations I've ever been a part of. There is no better, purer expression of American genius, than to give like five E-4s a mission to figure something out and then watch them —through sheer ingenuity, and gumption, and American teamwork— go do something impossible, under an insane time constraint, and with a third of the resources that they need to get it done. I mean, it's an organization that I continue to have very fond feelings for—in a lot of ways, even as I see its leadership as being—as having betrayed their own mission, or their own oath, and duty, and having betrayed the soldiers who serve beneath them. So it's a complicated feeling, and not one that I feel any compulsion to straighten out, and to disentangle so that it resolves into some perfect, politically-unified sentiment.”

“But the feeling I had was one of — it wasn't bitterness, but it was, I don't know, deflation or something. It occurred to me that it wasn't that anybody was keeping anything from me. It was what it appeared to be— which was a very, very large machine that had no true, ultimate telos that it could be yoked back toward. But had become, rather, a machine intended to serve the people who adjusted its various knobs and levers. And that was it. And the machine existed for the machine operators.”

“What Afghanistan demonstrates is that the essential character of American power for these people includes, ruinously, a belief in an unlimited capacity for failure.”

Jacob Siegel is a senior writer at Tablet, and co-host of Manifesto! A Podcast with fellow veteran Phil Klay. We spoke on my Callin show about his noble intention to enlist in the Army after 9/11; the primary motivation for invading Afghanistan; why Biden deserves credit for standing up to significant internal opposition and ending the charade, but also responsibility for the shambolic and damaging withdrawal; and finally, how different the last two decades would have been had anyone looked at a topographical map before invading.

The original interview aired on July 21, 2022. You can listen to the full discussion and other Conversations in Year Zero on Callin, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple  |  Spotify  | Google

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