Afghanistan War Commission wants to hear stories and questions from veterans

When the Congressional War Commission on Afghanistan holds its first public hearing on Friday, witnesses will gather in a location designed to send a clear message: the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Washington, DC.

The 16-member commission, which has spent the past year recruiting and organizing, faces a historically unprecedented task: to produce a clear and coherent “debriefing” of the 20-year war that includes the perspectives of the U.S. State Department, international government partners and possibly even the Taliban.

And as they now begin gathering information in earnest, commission leaders want to show that the perspectives of U.S. soldiers who fought in the war are not just one aspect of the story, but are at the heart of the entire project.

Under the Veterans tab on the commission’s website is a form where Afghanistan veterans can share their experiences and questions with the commission. “What did you consider to be your mission during the war?” the form asks, and “To what extent do you believe that mission was accomplished?”

“The veteran community is the wind in our sails, so to speak,” 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 she quickly realized as she began her new role that veterans continued to discuss and evaluate the outcome and significance of Afghanistan in ways that other interest groups did not.

“The most lively conversations actually took place in the veterans community, and there was a very open atmosphere there,” she said.

Colin Jackson, the commission’s other co-chair, is himself a combat veteran who served in multiple deployments as an Army officer and later served as a senior Defense Department official in the U.S.-Taliban peace talks. He also heads the strategic and operational research division at the U.S. Naval War College. Jackson, who has a son and daughter serving and joining the military, hopes the commission’s report will partially formalize the kinds of conversations and insights shared “on the driveway of Fort (Liberty)” after a deployment.

“I firmly believe that we owe it to the future generation to be smarter and better,” Jackson said. “If we don’t do that, then we’re not doing our job right.”

Responses from veterans have been sparse but high quality, said Matthew Gobush, the commission’s strategic communications adviser. Some responses, he said, will lead to follow-up discussions or interviews. Others could guide the commission in its investigations.

The commission’s mandate is broad. Congress, which created it in 2021, tasked it with studying aspects of the conflict ranging from U.S. decisions immediately before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the initial invasion, to peace negotiations and the final military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, which was followed shortly thereafter by the Taliban’s takeover. Commission leaders do not describe their goal as creating an aura of defeat. But in the absence of similar projects compiling a comprehensive, multi-agency analysis of past U.S. wars, they rely on another analysis of the disaster: the 9/11 Commission Report, published in 2004.

The 585-page volume garnered literary praise, climbed several bestseller lists and was even nominated for the National Book Awards. Trying to create an accessible, narrative-driven equivalent that covers a sprawling, two-decade-long war rather than just a one-day attack is a mammoth task, and the commissioners know it.

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“I mean, we get a lot of incredulous looks 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 difficult thing at this moment is the right thing to do.”

The committee has begun reaching out to veterans from different eras of the war, using the networks of congressionally established veterans’ support organizations such as the American Legion and the VFW. The passion they see there encourages their approach.

“The fact that the veterans community is so interested in our work directly refutes the notion that no one cares about Afghanistan,” Chaudhary said.

The commission will present its final report in 2026. An interim report outlining the way forward and the work already completed is due in August. Officials hope that veterans who read the report will be able to identify with the narrative in the context of the entire war, Jackson said.

“This report ideally allows a person who has served in Afghanistan, for example, once, twice, three or four times to say, ‘Ah, now I understand how my part in the action at different points in time fits into the larger whole,'” he said. “While we can’t look at all the aspects of the technical aspects of the war, hopefully we provide an architecture that allows individuals to say, ‘Okay, now I understand how I fit into a larger project that spanned two decades in Farah province in 2005.'”

They said active military leaders could potentially gain new levels of analysis and application for future conflicts as well.

“They will look at current and future events through the Afghanistan lens, whether we like it or not,” Chaudhary said. “And so we are doing them a service by giving them a depth that is not currently available. And the report will look at Afghanistan as well as future scenarios and future interventions. That has to be the case, otherwise it is just history.”