Brigadier General Don Bolduc led a team into Afghanistan on horseback to support former president Hamid Karzai.
For retired U.S. Army Brigadier General Don Bolduc, one of the first American servicemembers to enter Afghanistan after September 11, watching the scenes of chaos and desperation play out in Kabul this week has been heartbreaking.
Bolduc, who served in the U.S. Army for 33 years and is now running for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire as a Republican, said that years of poor decisions made by four administrations “sowed the seeds for what we see today.”
The world has watched in horror this week as Kabul fell and masses of people scrambled to leave, with Taliban fighters whipping and beating Afghans trying to enter the airport where the U.S. military is handling evacuations. Seven people died at the airport on Monday when hundreds of Afghans flooded the tarmac, desperate to flee the country and escape the Taliban.
All of this comes as U.S. intelligence agencies reportedly warned that the Afghan military and government were in danger of collapse just last month, as Biden publicly assured Americans that the Taliban’s takeover was “not inevitable.”
“This is an American disaster,” Bolduc said in an interview with National Review. “But this was a decision by President Biden and he’s the one that’s going to have to assume responsibility for it.”
Bolduc deployed to Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as part of a small team to advise and assist future Afghan president Hamid Karzai. He arrived in Afghanistan on November 1, 2001, and says he was the first U.S. Army major in the region. He led one of the first groups in Afghanistan, riding on horseback to take the southern Afghan region from the Taliban.
“Our mission was to defeat the Taliban, al-Qaeda in southern Afghanistan and to set conditions for later-President Karzai to take over as the interim prime minister of Afghanistan and so that’s what we did,” said Bolduc, who received two awards for valor, five Bronze Star medals and two Purple Hearts.
After Karzai became interim prime minister and Afghans began reforming their government and “rebuilding the societal, culture structure in the villages that the Taliban had decimated,” Bolduc believed the Afghan people were “doing great” and the American military mission was complete.
“It was now a matter of supporting this government, internationally, diplomatically, development-wise, but let them do it their way,” he said. “Of course, that’s not what we did. We decided to go into nation-building and create national military, national police there, rebuild their institutions, write their constitution, name their government. It was huge overreach and something we shouldn’t have done.”
Bolduc argues a series of mistakes followed, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq that removed resources and attention from Afghanistan and allowed the Taliban to resurge by 2005. Then, another error by the Obama administration in 2013, in deciding to abandon a successful bottom-up counterinsurgency strategy that consisted of creating Afghan local police in villages.
As U.S. forces were pulled out of the villages and the mission shifted away from counterterrorism to state-building, leaders found that an earlier reliance on independent militias and commanders undermined state-building efforts. The regional militias could not be pushed to move beyond the independence and corruption they had known for so long and could therefore not reliably contribute to the new mission of propping up a democratic government.
After the mission changed, U.S. casualties in Afghanistan sharply increased, eventually reaching a near-decade high in 2019.
While the retired general said he was an advocate of shifting the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan and acknowledged that it was “inevitable” for the U.S. to create a plan to transition security and governance responsibilities to the Afghans, the way Biden handled the withdrawal was “absolutely irresponsible” and “should not have been done this way.”
With the Trump administration already having set a May deadline, Biden followed through but at a later date, withdrawing American forces at the height of fighting season amid a gathering Taliban offensive. The U.S. military left Bagram Airfield last month without informing its new Afghan commander and before extracting all U.S. civilians and Afghan special immigrant visa applicants. Afghan forces were left without any substitute for U.S. air support or the American contractors who serviced the planes they were left by the U.S.
“There had to be a mechanism to hold the Taliban fighters back so that they didn’t commit atrocities across Afghanistan, against the Afghan people, women and children and so on, like we had seen in the past,” he said.
For Bolduc, Biden should have “known better” than to exit Afghanistan so hastily given the dire warnings he received in the spring from U.S. intel agencies and his experience serving in the Obama administration.
Bolduc said it seems U.S. leaders didn’t use the hard-learned lessons of the past to guide their decision-making, nor did they listen to what was being said by members of the military on the ground.
“We wanted a political outcome that was completely disconnected from the reality on the ground and how the Taliban and al-Qaeda were going to react to it,” he said.
Still, as mayhem unfolded in Afghanistan on Monday, Biden defended his decision to pull out U.S. forces, saying he “stands squarely behind” the decision to withdraw while acknowledging the Afghan government deteriorated “more quickly than we had anticipated.”
Bolduc called the situation a “failure of our senior military, failure of our senior politicians on both sides of the aisle” but said leaders must now focus on how best to secure the region and uphold a reputation for resolve.
“What are we going to do about the signal that this sends to people across the world about America and its support for its allies?” he added. “What signal does it send to China in regards to Taiwan? There are a lot of geopolitical second and third-order effects here that are seriously negative and we have to start taking all those into account.”
Yet Bolduc, who survived both a helicopter crash and a blast from a 2,000-pound bomb in Afghanistan in a friendly fire accident, cautioned his fellow servicemembers not to treat Afghanistan’s fall as a failure of the troops.
“There should be a national message on this that says, ‘You did your job. You did it with honor, you have nothing to be ashamed of or to regret because these are decisions that are made at much higher levels,'” he said. “And that’s where the responsibility lies.”
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