Afghanistan War Commission wants veteran stories and questions

When the congressionally appointed Afghanistan War Commission holds its first public hearing on Friday, witnesses will convene in a location chosen to send a message: the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

The 16-member commission, which has spent the last year hiring staff and getting organized, has an historically unique tasking: it aims to produce an accessible and cohesive “after-action review” of the 20-year war that includes perspectives ranging from the U.S. State Department to international governmental partners and possibly even the Taliban.

And as they begin their information-gathering in earnest, the commission’s leaders want to show that the perspectives of the U.S. service members who fought in the war are not merely an aspect of that story, but at the heart of the entire project.

The “Veterans” tab on the commission’s website leads to a form that invites Afghanistan veterans to share their experiences and questions with the commission. “What did you view as your mission during the war?” the form asks, and “To what extent do you believe that mission was accomplished?”

“The veterans community is kind of the wind in our sails, if you will,” commission co-chair Shamila Chaudhary told Military Times during an interview at the commission’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

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Chaudhary, a former State Department and National Security Council official with expertise in U.S.-Pakistan relations, said it quickly became evident to her as she began her new role that veterans were continuing to discuss and evaluate the outcome and meaning of Afghanistan in a way unparalleled by other stakeholder groups.

“The most vibrant conversations were actually happening in the veteran community, and they were very open,” she said.

Colin Jackson, the commission’s other co-chair, is himself a veteran of the war who served multiple deployments as an Army officer and later served as the senior Defense Department representative to the U.S.-Taliban peace talks. He also chairs Strategic and Operational Research at the U.S. Naval War College. Jackson, who has a son and a daughter serving in and entering the military, hopes the commission’s report will in part formalize the kind of conversations and insights shared while “standing in the driveway at Fort [Liberty]” following a deployment.

“I feel viscerally that we owe it to this future generation to be smarter, better,” Jackson said. “If we don’t do that, then we’re not doing our job properly.”

Veteran responses so far have been few but high in quality, said Matthew Gobush, the commission’s strategic communications advisor. Some responses, he said, will prompt follow-on engagement or interviews. Others may help guide the commission in the inquiries it pursues.

The commission’s mandate is broad. The congressional language that created it in 2021 tasked it with studying aspects of the conflict ranging from U.S. decisions immediately prior to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the initial invasion to peace negotiations and the ultimate military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 that was quickly followed by Taliban takeover. The commission chairs don’t describe their objective as creating an aura of defeat. But in the absence of similar projects compiling broad-ranging multi-agency analysis of past U.S. wars, they are informed by another analysis of catastrophe: the 9/11 Commission Report, published in 2004.

That 585-page volume garnered literary praise, climbed some bestseller lists and even received a National Book Awards nomination. Trying to create an accessible, narrative-driven equivalent that covers a sprawling two-decade war rather than a single-day attack is a mammoth task, and the commissioners know it.

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“I mean, we get a lot of unbelievable stares when we talk about the work, because it’s very ambitious. And we could have easily interpreted it in a less ambitious way,” Chaudhary said. “And we decided not to do that, because doing the hard thing at this moment is the right thing to do.”

As the committee has begun to engage with veterans from various eras of the war, using the networks of congressionally chartered veteran service organizations like The American Legion and the VFW, the passion they hear encourages them in their approach.

“The fact that we have the veteran community so interested in our work directly challenges the notion that nobody cares about Afghanistan,” Chaudhary said.

The commission will deliver its final report in 2026, with an interim report charting the way ahead and work already completed set to come out in August. Leaders hope that veterans who read the report will be able to find themselves in the narrative in the context of the whole war, Jackson said.

“This report ideally allows an individual who, say, served once, twice, three, four times in Afghanistan to say, ‘Ah, now I understand how my piece of the action at various points in time related to the larger whole,’” he said. “So while we cannot conceivably cover the entire waterfront, on the technical aspects of the war, hopefully we give an architecture that allows individuals to say, ‘Okay, now I understand how I fit in, in 2005 in Farah province, to a larger project that spanned two decades.’”

Active-duty military leaders, they said, may find a new depth of analysis and application for future conflicts as well.

“They’re going to process current and future events through this Afghanistan lens, whether we like it or not,” Chaudhary said. “And so we will be doing them a service by providing them some depth that doesn’t exist right now. And the report will be just as much about Afghanistan as it will be about future scenarios, future intervention. It has to be; otherwise, it’s just history.”