Afghanistan Project-Scott Kilner

Scott Kilner

Oral Histories of U.S. Diplomacy in Afghanistan, 2001–2021

Interviewed by: Robin Matthewman

Initial interview date: March 23, 2023

Copyright 2023 ADST

 

Q: It’s March 23, 2023. I’m Robin Matthewman. Today I’ll be interviewing Scott Kilner as part of our Afghanistan project. Scott, welcome.

KILNER: Thank you, Robin. 

Q: Can you summarize your career prior to going to Afghanistan?

KILNER: The first point I would make is that my year in Afghanistan was an extremely powerful experience, as powerful as any in my thirty-two years in the Foreign Service. It was also radically different from every other assignment that I had, different in every way, how I got there, what it was like, what the organizational structures were like. It was just something unto itself. 

Afghanistan was my penultimate assignment in the Foreign Service. Apart from Afghanistan, every one of my assignments was within the European Bureau of the State Department. That’s not quite as incestuous as it might sound because a big chunk of my career––almost ten years––was in Turkey, which bureaucratically lies within the European Bureau. 

The easiest way to explain it overall is that I had nine overseas postings. Four of these were in Turkey. I also served four times in big European capitals: in East Germany before the Berlin Wall came down, in Paris, in Rome, and in Vienna. They weren’t all back-to-back, of course, but perhaps that’s why central personnel wanted me to go to Afghanistan or Iraq. 

Q: When did you join the State Department?

KILNER: I joined the State Department in April of 1981.

Q: Were you an economic officer?

KILNER: Yes, I was an economic officer. I worked three years in banking before I joined the Foreign Service, so I was a natural for the economic cone. Up until becoming DCM [deputy chief of mission] in Vienna, immediately before Afghanistan, all of my overseas work had been economic jobs. In Washington, I had done mostly inter-functional desk jobs in the European Bureau––in German/Austrian affairs and later as the head of the office that handled southwest Europe––France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Malta, and the Vatican. So a lot of Europe, a lot of Turkey, a lot of economic work. Then my last three assignments––Vienna, Afghanistan, and Istanbul––were inter-functional management positions overseas. 

Q: What year did you go to Afghanistan and what was the job?

KILNER: I was deputy chief of mission in Vienna, Austria, from late 2005 until 2009. When I came up for reassignment, I threw my hat into the ring for a couple of ambassadorial assignments in the greater Turkic world, but those went to people with Russian experience, which I did not have. As that became clear, the job I set my sights on was consul general in Istanbul––a position that, in many ways, had long been my dream job. 

My assignment to Afghanistan is a long, weirdly fascinating bureaucratic tale. But in a nutshell, after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and behind-the-scenes maneuvers, it became clear that I would get the job in Istanbul if I first went to either Afghanistan or Iraq as a bridge assignment. 

Q: You were talking to them in 2009?

KILNER: That’s right. In 2009, when it became clear what the requirement was, I then had to find a job in Iraq or Afghanistan, which was not easy at that point because most senior jobs had already been assigned. I looked closely at one in Iraq, but then that disappeared. Then one day, I received a message from Under Secretary for Management Pat Kennedy, saying that then-Major-General Mike Scaparrotti, the incoming commanding officer of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division at Bagram Air Field [our largest base in Afghanistan], was looking for a POLAD. He hadn’t found a candidate that he was satisfied with, so Pat Kennedy urged me to interview with General Scaparrotti, who at that time was the commander of Fort Bragg army base in North Carolina. 

Q: Can you explain what a POLAD is?

KILNER: It’s a foreign policy advisor to a military command or commander. We have them in many places around the world. They can be in the United States, they can be overseas, and a few of them are in combat zones. This was one of the latter. As I thought about this option, Afghanistan sounded much more interesting to me than Iraq for a variety of reasons, both for policy reasons and out of personal interest. 

So I arranged for the interview with General Scaparrotti––he at Fort Bragg, while I was in Vienna. We had a one-hour conversation, and it seemed to go very well in both directions. I felt quite relaxed about it, telling him what I thought I could offer, what I could not offer, what my background was, what my strengths were, what the areas were where I had less experience. A few days later, General Scaparrotti notified the State Department that he would like me to join him, and I got the job. This all took place in December 2008 or January 2009. I actually deployed to Afghanistan in early July of 2009, leaving Vienna a few months earlier than I would have otherwise. 

Before I started my actual assignment in Afghanistan, in addition to Washington consultations, I spent a week at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with the Eighty-Second Airborne Division for the second half of their pre-deployment Mission Readiness Exercise. This is where I first set foot in my brave new world and got to know the main players I would be working with.

Then, a month or two later, I joined the Eighty-Second’s Command Group––General Scaparrotti and his inner circle––on a pre-deployment trip to Afghanistan. We had a week of travel around eastern Afghanistan––our future area of responsibility––and received many briefings from the outgoing division located at Bagram. 

Both the Mission Readiness Exercise at Fort Bragg and the pre-deployment trip to Afghanistan were very interesting experiences and informative on many levels. I obtained a sense of what lay ahead for me and––crucially––they helped me form strong personal relationships with General Scaparrotti and his team. When I got out there in July, we all felt we already knew each other. 

Q: What did you mean when you said you felt that you would be exposed to new things? Are you talking about how the military works and how the State Department works?

KILNER: Up until this point in my career, my geographic knowledge was heavily focused on Europe and Turkey. I didn’t know anything about Afghanistan! I often tell friends that I found myself tossed into the most high-profile and important job of my career, but it was also the one for which I was least prepared. I didn’t have any language training. I didn’t have any serious area studies on my brief home leave. I didn’t even know the names of the provinces. I did read a couple of books about Afghanistan, so I knew something of the history. 

I had been to the Caucasus, and I had an interest in the greater Turkic world in Central Asia. I had also worked on or in several NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organizations] countries, although not doing political-military work. I had worked in Germany, France, and Italy, so I had been on many military bases and been on the edges of many political-military discussions. But I was not an expert in those areas. It was not completely foreign to me, but a combat zone was something very new. And working with the military in this way was just a completely new adventure, which was fun.

I should also stress that I was hardly the only Foreign Service officer [FSO] thrown into this kind of situation. After our military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the USG [United States government] got into the business of staffing up gigantic embassies in Kabul and in Baghdad––filled with FSOs on one-year assignments. Every year a whole new team rotated in. The only way the State Department could maintain such staffing was to pull people from all over the Foreign Service––and that’s what happened. So I was far from the only one thrown into a completely new environment with little training. 

Q: This is the beginning of the Obama administration?

KILNER: That’s right. President Obama was elected November 2008 and inaugurated in January of 2009. I arrived in Afghanistan just after July Fourth, 2009. 

President Obama felt that Iraq had been a mistaken U.S. military adventure, but that Afghanistan had been a well-justified intervention. He wanted to rebalance those two commitments––investing more in Afghanistan and less in Iraq. This rebalancing was going to have a huge impact during the year I was there, with U.S. forces and resources surging into Afghanistan.

Q: Both on the civilian side and the military side?

KILNER: Exactly. When people hear the word “surge” they think of a military surge, and there was that. Especially in the south of Afghanistan, there was a big military surge that began in the year I was there and continued on into the next year. U.S. forces peaked around 2011, if memory serves. 

What gets less attention is there was also a civilian surge. In percentage terms, it was even greater than the military surge, although in absolute numbers, it paled by comparison. 

Q: I’ve interviewed a few ambassadors who were serving at that time right before and it sounds like the president, on the advice of Richard Holbrooke, who set up the SRAP [Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan] office, had decided on the civilian surge first, but the actual military surge started happening faster. It sounds like the embassy was a little reluctant about that. They didn’t think that was the right way to go in order to stabilize the country. Did you get any sense of that? The leadership and the embassy in Kabul were writing back home during the year you were there, saying they thought a military surge would be a mistake. Embassy leadership seemed to think it would be better to focus on the civilian surge and not militarize it too much.

KILNER: Absolutely. This is jumping ahead a bit in the story. President Obama had a reputation for being careful almost to a fault. His strategic review on whether and how far to go forward with a military surge in Afghanistan, analogous to the one that took place in Iraq under President Bush, dragged on for months, more than six months, as I recall. Everybody knew this “strategic review” was underway, but it kept going and going. And no decision was made until it finally came to a head. 

When it became clear that a decision was imminent, Ambassador Eikenberry and Ambassador Ricciardone, Eikenberry’s deputy, sent in a top-secret cable, with the most restricted distribution possible, containing a very strong recommendation along the lines of what you were just suggesting. That the military surge was not what they would recommend, that it would not produce the desired results and that they counseled against it. 

Despite all of the restrictions and limitations on how this top secret, no distribution cable was supposed to be held, a day or two later, it was on the front page of the New York Times and became very public. This led to quite a rift between the embassy Front Office and the senior U.S. military commander, General Stanley McChrystal, because of their divergent views. It was easily the most dramatic split in civilian and military perspectives I observed. But at the end of the day, Obama gave the military most of what it wanted, not all, but maybe three-fourths of their request.

Q: Let’s get back to your initial job in Afghanistan. You had been selected, you had bonded with the team, and you went to Bagram. What was your position supposed to do? I worked with POLADs before, but this was quite a different situation. 

KILNER: Foreign policy advisors basically do whatever the officer or the command they’re attached to wants them to do. It’s a very flexible position and can be used in any number of ways. This is why the personal relationship is important. 

The way I saw it, and the way I talked about it in my first interview with General Scaparrotti, was that although I wasn’t an expert in Afghan affairs and I wasn’t a development expert, I knew quite well how the State Department functioned and how other civilian agencies functioned. So I could serve as a useful channel of communication and coordination between his command group and the U.S. embassy, as well as the State Department in Washington. 

I felt confident that I could look at a foreign policy issue in a broader context. In Washington, I had done a lot of inter-functional work at various levels, so I felt I would be able to offer a civilian foreign policy perspective. Within those broad parameters, I saw myself being available for whatever specific requests General Scaparrotti would want to give me. 

Now let me get more specific by talking about our counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan, which had been adapted from the experience in Iraq. According to this strategy, the military would “shape and clear” a given geographic area––stabilize it by making it secure against insurgent attacks. After the area was secure and stabilized, coalition military and civilian forces would then work with local authorities to strengthen and develop economic and governance capabilities. 

The military spoke of three lines of effort: security, economic development, and governance. Security was naturally in the military lane, but General Scaparrotti asked for my assistance in the areas of economic development and governance. He frequently would turn to me to comment on such issues during our many virtual meetings with units dispersed around his area of responsibility. 

Broadly speaking, I was with General Scaparrotti whenever he traveled around Regional Command–East––almost always by helicopter, roughly five out of seven days a week. There were also multiple meetings every day at Bagram, which I also attended. We had established a very good relationship, and I admired him greatly. 

General Scaparrotti, at that point, was a major general, i.e. two-stars. His deputies told me there was no doubt he would become a four-star general. Everybody knew it. And in fact, after Afghanistan, he had several more high-level assignments, the last two of which were as head of U.S. and UN [United Nations] Forces in Korea and then finally SACEUR, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. He was really one of the army’s top officers, and to work for him was a privilege. 

Q: When he went on these trips each day, would he meet with Afghan officials as well as with his team?

KILNER: Yes, from time to time, he would meet with Afghan governors and senior Afghan army officers. But most frequently, he would meet with his commanders on the various bases and installations in his area, Regional Command-East. We’re talking about eastern Afghanistan, including the border region with Pakistan. The military divided Afghanistan into four quadrants. The two hottest areas were the east bordering Pakistan, and the south, which included the Taliban homeland around Kandahar. The other two sectors––in the North around Mazar-i Sharif and in the west around Herat and the border region with Iran––were relatively calm by comparison. Some of the Afghan governors General Scaparrotti met with were quite colorful characters––former warlords who were now senior government officials.

Q: Were there other allied forces that you were working with as well?

KILNER: Yes, but the United States was the big player. Outside the Joint Operations Center at Bagram Air Field, there were a lot of coalition partner flags, even including that of neutral Austria. What was that flag doing up there? I think they had sent one person just to keep tabs with what was going on. By the way, the Joint Operation Center, where the U.S. Command Group worked and lived, was built inside an old Soviet aircraft hangar. The hangar was really just a big concrete shell under which office space had been built out of prefab material. 

To be fair, some allies shouldered important responsibilities in specific areas. The Poles, for example, were responsible for Ghazni Province––a very challenging area not far from Kabul. The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, paid a visit to the Polish brigade in Ghazni while I was there. They were really pulling their weight. The French were also seriously active in RC-East.

I saw more of the international presence when I moved to Kabul because ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] headquarters was located there. In addition, my embassy job in Kabul oversaw activities in all parts of Afghanistan, not just the east. So I had an opportunity to see the Germans in the north, the Italians in the west, and so forth. 

Q: The Poles were relatively new members of NATO at that point, right?

KILNER: That’s right, yes.

Q: How long were you in this position at Bagram? Just a few months?

KILNER: It was a one-year assignment. I went to Afghanistan fully expecting to be in the POLAD position for twelve months and leave at the same time as the Eighty-Second Airborne. But that was not to be, and I should probably explain why.

Q: How long were you there?

KILNER: Just shy of three months, although it seemed like much longer. The majority of my time in Afghanistan turned out to be at the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

Q: Were there provincial reconstruction teams, U.S. teams or combined teams in Regional Command––East? And did you visit them?

KILNER: Yes. They were very much there, and General Scaparrotti and I would visit them. However, when I moved to the embassy, I became much more involved with the PRTs.

Q: The military itself had a lot of money for those other pillars, the development and governance pillars. They had teams that were working on using money to try to help in those areas, which they felt were secure enough from fighting. Correct?

KILNER: That’s right, especially the famous Commander’s Emergency Response Program, or CERP, funds. I don’t recall a lot of detail on how CERP operated, but basically, it was a considerable pool of funds that could be accessed quickly and flexibly by military commanders to move forward with priority development and governance projects. These funds were generally used for short-term, quick turnaround, turnkey projects: constructing a building, constructing a school, building a road, building a new office for a provincial governor. You could see the visible results and point to it and then move on to the next thing.

This CERP approach was philosophically different from the way USAID approached development. USAID, which has a great deal of development expertise acquired over decades, generally preferred to lay the groundwork for the long-term sustainability of projects. While military-funded projects might become visible more quickly, unfortunately, they often turned out to be unsustainable.

Q: If you build a road and you don’t have a long-term plan, equipment, or funding for maintenance, it’s going to disintegrate.

KILNER: Right. You might build a school but then you didn’t have the staff for sustained ongoing instruction there. It’s quick but maybe not sustainable. USAID projects generally would be longer term and slower in gestation but more likely to remain viable over the long run. Each side had its frustrations. The military was frustrated by the slowness of USAID work and AID was frustrated by the lack of long-term planning on the military side. So you had those divergent perspectives. 

Q: It was a very big area that you had. The east is a very big area and it was very dangerous. There was a lot of fighting going on, right?

KILNER: Yes, especially in the outlying areas. Along the border with Pakistan, there were pockets that were quite dangerous. But it was not as dangerous as the south became a few years later when the Taliban insurgency regained momentum. 

Security varied a lot from place to place. Places like the Kunar Valley were very problematic to go into and operate safely. But other areas were much safer––like Panjshir Province, which had been the stronghold of Tajik resistance under Massoud. Panjshir was a protected area in which our PRT could operate quite safely, without body armor and the like. The situation did vary a lot from place to place. 

Q: Is there anything notable that you want to talk about regarding how the military operated on these other pillars or how they worked with you? What was going on in those three months?

KILNER: We have talked about making their approach to development issues. Regarding governance issues, the U.S. military seemed to look mostly through the lens of anti-corruption. Corruption was long recognized as very problematic almost everywhere in Afghanistan. The culture of corruption was certainly widespread. 

So there were efforts by the military through their intelligence sources and the people they worked with to identify and figure out how to deal with the most corrupt actors. It was a very complicated issue and always a big challenge. From what I saw in Bagram, the military’s approach to governance was less about building capacity than about rooting out corrupt bad actors. 

Q: After this period, Ambassador Crocker, who came in after Eikenberry, felt strongly about building an Afghan bureaucratic class, building the capacity for governance. I interviewed somebody who started as an anthropologist doing research in Afghanistan. He pointed out that Afghanistan didn’t have this culture of governance; community leaders and governors didn’t have a lot of power. Everything was still being decided in Kabul. He thought that PRTs had difficulty delivering the things that local folks would ask for because of the centralized structure of the Afghan government.

KILNER: A couple of observations. Afghanistan today is still a very tribalized, decentralized country. So much authority and ways of living and doing things rest with tribes and community groups at the local or regional level. This reality is rooted in geography, history, and demographics. 

But on top of this social structure is overlaid one of the most centralized governmental structures in the world. It’s sort of a French model on steroids, where everything––at least on paper––is controlled from Kabul. The central government sends governors and sub-governors out to the provinces that are not elected by the people. They’re appointed by the central government; they’re responsible to and get their resources from the center. 

The disconnect and frustration expressed by the other person you spoke with probably stemmed from the fact that if one had to work mostly with the governors and the sub-governors, there could be lots of problems in the relationships with local communities. The disconnect between central government representatives and the tribal groups could be a big problem. 

If a PRT, a combined civilian-military group, was working in an area, the real authority to get something done and make it stick probably depended on tribal leaders. But those informal relationships lay outside of the formal Afghan governmental structure. This was where things got very messy. 

Q: Picking up on the tribal leaders, did you ever feel that tribal norms might work in one way but look like corruption to us? For example, stories about how governors would work with tribes on collecting customs duties and distributing them, things like that, might be more of a traditional way of working.

KILNER: It probably was frequently both––both a traditional way of doing business combined with corruption. An effective governor, and there were some, needed to be able to operate with tribal leaders and form cooperative relationships with them. In that sense, it’s positive, but you can easily imagine such networks and relationships being corrupted––“buying tribal loyalty,” if you will. It was obvious that the U.S. and, to an extent, other countries had so much money to throw around that everybody wanted a piece of the pie. Or several slices of the pie. The price of cooperative arrangements with local tribal leaders was perhaps a little bit like pork barrel legislation in the United States. You want my vote in Congress for this? Then how about funding that project in my district? Is it that different? It’s a pretty gray area. 

Q: How did the U.S. view the Afghan Army? It seems during the first decade of presence, the Afghan army still needed a lot of work. By the time we left, it had actually improved quite a lot, but it had taken years. What was the state of development of the Afghan military or how did we feel about them?

KILNER: At Bagram, I think General Scaparrotti had high respect for his counterparts in the Afghan Army. From what I could see, he genuinely thought they had some very high-caliber military leaders he respected and enjoyed working with.

More broadly, the effort to build up the Afghan Army was a huge challenge. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry had been one of the founding fathers of the new Afghan Army when he was there with the U.S. military, so as U.S. ambassador, he was still heavily invested in the project. I think there was a feeling that the army was steadily improving. A comparison would be made frequently with what was happening with the Afghan police. The police force was always seen as much more problematic and a much weaker organization, more corrupt, problems with retention, much less successful overall.

To jump way ahead, to our final withdrawal, for a moment, it became quite evident that despite all the strengths the Afghan Army had developed, it remained heavily dependent upon U.S. contractors and upon U.S. Air Force support. 

Q: That’s a good point. One ambassador I interviewed said we just built them in our own image and that was a mistake. 

KILNER: That’s another way to put it. It was a structure that still needed our support in certain areas, even after we had been there for twenty years. When we removed that support, it just collapsed. If you’re going to identify failures of the long-term U.S. effort in Afghanistan, that’s one of the top ones. 

Q: You were then asked by the embassy to change jobs and to go to Kabul. Talk about that.

KILNER: It’s always cathartic for me to talk about this again. This was probably the most wrenching experience of my career in the Foreign Service. I had made a very big personal investment with the Eighty-Second Airborne and worked with the top levels of the U.S. military in Afghanistan––a group that I really admired and really enjoyed working with. I had taken a big psychological leap into this new military environment. I liked and respected them. And they liked and respected me. 

What happened was the following: Between the time that I accepted the assignment as a foreign policy advisor to General Scaparrotti and the time I actually deployed, the Obama administration’s policy and strategy on Afghanistan began to gel and take form. Karl Eikenberry, a former lieutenant general with deep experience in Afghanistan, left the military and was appointed U.S. ambassador in Kabul. In Washington, Richard Holbrooke was given responsibility for interagency work on Afghanistan. 

During consultations in Washington before departing for Afghanistan, I was told that Ambassador Eikenberry was making big changes in the structure of the civilian presence both in Kabul and around the country in Afghanistan and that my job as POLAD was going to become something very different. The title that they were playing with was Senior Civilian Representative. One day while on home leave, I received a call from Deputy Ambassador Frank Ricciardone, whom I had previously worked for and who was now Karl Eikenberry’s number two. Frank told me that this change in my position at Bagram was in the works. He didn’t want me to be surprised and described it in very general terms. I listened carefully, but I didn’t really absorb or understand what was entailed. And the reason was that such a position––a senior civilian representative––had not existed anywhere else before. It was a new construct that was being built. 

When I arrived in Afghanistan in early July 2009––after having had consultations in Washington, including one meeting with Richard Holbrooke himself––at the embassy, I met with Ambassador Eikenberry. I spent time with Frank Ricciardone. I met with the head of the PRT office at that time, and none of them gave me any clear guidance on what I was supposed to be doing at Bagram. I knew I had a new title, but nobody said, this is the plan; this is what we want you to do; this is what we want you to build. 

To this day, I don’t know whether everybody thought that somebody else was going to tell me. But even after I had covered those bases, it was still a complete mystery to me. So I decided that if nobody was going to give me anything more precise, I would just do what I came out here to do as POLAD. And that’s what I did.

After several weeks, however, Eikenberry especially came to see that things were not changing particularly. It became clear he was not pleased with my performance. He saw that I was just working as a regular POLAD and not a senior civilian representative.

At the same time, within the embassy, another brand new structure that had never existed before had been set up. It was called the Office of Interagency Provincial Affairs [IPA]. The office was quickly becoming the second largest office in the embassy after the big USAID mission. IPA was supposed to bring a whole-of-government approach to provincial affairs––bringing together State, USAID, Agriculture, and military representatives under one umbrella to work on sub-national issues, meaning everything outside of Kabul. Although this office had been created, it was suffering from some very big start-up issues––internal management problems that generated considerable tumult and discontent. 

The head of the Interagency Provincial Affairs office was a very experienced senior USAID officer named Dawn Liberi. Ambassador Eikenberry and Deputy Ambassador Ricciardone came up with the idea that Dawn and I should trade jobs. Frank Ricciardone knew my management style, and he and Karl thought that if I came into the embassy, I could calm the waters and get things running more smoothly in IPA. And Dawn Liberi, who had this long experience at USAID, could bring her economic development skills, which I did not have, to the table as a senior civilian representative. 

The larger rationale for this big restructuring of the civilian U.S. presence in Afghanistan was to try to ensure organizationally that the civilian parts of the U.S. government would have a bigger say in policy formulation and implementation than had been the case in Iraq––where DOD and the military effectively ran the show. There was a feeling that one of the things that went wrong in Iraq was that the military and the Department of Defense really called the shots on everything. 

While there were U.S. civilians and PRTs in Iraq, civilian agencies were constantly being out-maneuvered and sidelined by DOD and the military. Eikenberry’s idea for how to prevent that from happening in Afghanistan was to develop a civilian structure that mirrored that of the military. 

So at every level, in Kabul and around the country, there would be a civilian counterpart for the military. This meant that at Bagram, rather than being Mike Scaparrotti’s civilian advisor, I was supposed to be on the other side of the table from him as his civilian counterpart.

Q: Without any staff?

KILNER: Essentially, yes. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, while he had twenty thousand people under him and I would have twenty at the most, that’s if you counted them all. The numbers were absolutely ridiculous. Conceptually, maybe this arrangement had some logic. But given the psychological and organizational commitment I had made to support the leadership of the Eighty-Second Airborne and given the enormous disparity in resources and numbers, I found it virtually impossible to make the adjustment. 

The mantra of this new arrangement was civilian-military cooperation and integration. We can talk about how well it worked or didn’t work.

Q: The structure of Embassy Kabul was rather unique.

KILNER: Yes, it was, and in so many ways. For one thing, Embassy Kabul had resources thrown at it like I had never seen before and never again saw after. Everywhere else in the Foreign Service, you scraped for pennies. But in Afghanistan, if you asked for something, you’d probably get it. Embassy Kabul was awash in funding and it was a huge embassy! At the top, in the Front Office, most of the time, there were four individuals with ambassadorial rank who had been ambassadors before. During the 2009 Afghan elections, there were five ambassadors in the Front Office. Karl Eikenberry was THE ambassador and the person who called the shots. No doubt about that. His deputy was Frank Ricciardone.

Q: Ricciardone had already served as ambassador in two large embassies.

KILNER: Yes––Manila and Cairo. I had worked for Frank in Ankara when I was an economic counselor, and he was DCM for Marc Grossman and then Mark Parris. So he had a lot of experience. After Afghanistan, he had one more ambassadorship in Turkey, where I worked for him a third time.

Frank’s role, in large part, seemed to be as a political sounding board for Karl Eikenberry. They would talk jointly a lot about policy and strategy. The cable that we were talking about at the beginning was, I think, a joint effort between Karl and Frank. Frank also paid a lot of attention to the Political Section and their reporting. And he would advise Karl on how to work with civilians, with the State Department’s Foreign Service, and how State’s organizational culture differed from the military’s. I’m not sure Frank’s advice was followed a lot of the time. Karl was Karl. 

Q: Then that year, Tony Wayne was the ambassador for economic issues.

KILNER: The third person was Tony Wayne. He had this mouthful of a title: the coordinating director for development and economic affairs, I think. Tony, of course, had been assistant secretary for economic and business affairs, so he knew those issues pretty well. He oversaw the two biggest offices in the embassy, USAID and my office, Interagency Provincial Affairs. I think he also oversaw the State Economic Section, whose purview was rather limited––confined mainly to the central government in Kabul. 

Then there was Joe Mussomeli, who had the title of assistant chief of mission. Joe had previously been U.S. ambassador to Cambodia. His job was essentially that of a DCM in a normal embassy. Everybody thought of him as our DCM. My formal chain of command was to Tony. Every day, a hundred emails from Tony. I had to be in his office for meetings all the time.

Then theoretically, above Tony, I reported to Frank Ricciardone, who wrote the review statement on my performance evaluation. But I didn’t really deal with him too much on a day-to-day level. It was Joe Mussomeli, who I saw more often. Our office had a lot to do with personnel issues and logistical support for civilians out in the provinces. These were things that Joe was concerned with. Tony Wayne and Joe Mussomeli were the two people that I spent a lot of time with.

Q: How did you organize that office? You mentioned that Interagency Provincial Affairs was a new office.

KILNER: Right. It was a new office. I had inherited the structure. There were nearly forty people in the office. Very crowded. Even after we got an upgrade in space, I was the only person who had an individual office where I could close the door and talk to somebody without being overheard. Everybody else did not even have cubicles––there were just rows of desks. It was a very crowded embassy in every way. 

The people who worked for me were divided both geographically and functionally. We had officers responsible for geographic parts of the country: Regional Command South, RC East, and so forth. Then we also had other officers who focused on issues functionally, like the rule of law. This is where the interagency structure of the office came into play.

Most of these people were State Department. But we also had a couple from USDA [United States Department of Agriculture], a couple from USAID, and we had a couple of military people.

Q: Treasury Department?

KILNER: Not in our office. 

Q: They might have an office parallel to the economic office.

KILNER: I don’t recall whether they were integrated into the economic. I think they were a stand-alone unit. 

The USDA people focused obviously on agricultural issues and the USAID officers gave IPA development expertise. The military colonel in our office––a good man named Pete Scammell––helped the rest of us connect with the military and understand their perspectives. 

It doesn’t take too much imagination to see how this kind of interagency structure, while having a certain logic to it, could very easily generate misunderstandings and turf wars between IPA and the embassy offices from which those detailed to IPA originated. 

The USDA, for example, had a substantial agriculture office within the embassy, but then they also had a couple of people detailed to our office. So who do the ag experts in our office report to? To me? Or to the head of the agricultural office? The same tension existed between IPA and USAID. 

The USAID and USDA representatives detailed to IPA often developed different perspectives from their colleagues in the main USAID/USDA offices in the embassy. There were more than a few misunderstandings, rivalries, and arguments over who had the authority to do what. That was one of the challenges we faced. 

IPA was not really a policy-formulating office. Maybe the best analogy is that we were somewhat like an office in a geographic bureau of the State Department––where you have multiple desk officers working on different countries. Just as desk officers are responsible for reporting information from embassies overseas up the chain to the leadership of the bureau, and in the other direction, from Washington headquarters out to our embassies overseas, IPA “desk officers” served as an information conduit between the embassy Front Office and our civilians out in “the field.” 

Q: These were the PRTs and the civilian representatives?

KILNER: Yes. That’s the analogy. If you think of IPA as a collection of desk officers, their “embassies” were, in fact, PRTs in various shapes and sizes out in the field. These “desk officers” would channel information they received from the PRTs––on issues, problems, and opportunities––up the chain to the Embassy Kabul Front Office.

IPA also became deeply involved with logistical support issues. With the expansion of a civilian presence in Afghanistan during the Obama administration, we had new people arriving all the time. So we got quite involved with making sure the right people were going to the right places, that they had a reasonable support infrastructure, and that their housing was reasonable. Basic infrastructure support was something we paid attention to. 

Of course, other sections of the embassy were also involved in logistical support––the Management Section, the GSO [general services officer] in particular. They had the financial resources, but we in IPA could bring problems to their attention. We could say, for example, that we’ve got these new people out in Lashkar Gah who don’t have any decent place to sleep. We need to help them so they can do their work. So our office was in the middle of both recruiting new civilians and then integrating them into the workforce.

Q: Was this support for civilians in the provincial reconstruction teams, or were there other groups out there?

KILNER: PRTs came in many different shapes and sizes. You had civilians that were attached to the military at every level. Again, this reflected the idea of having a civilian presence that mirrored the military structure. 

For example, at RC [regional command] East at Bagram Air Field, Dawn Liberi, who had replaced me and became the senior civilian representative, engaged with the military’s Division Command. Similarly, at RC-South at Kandahar Air Field, which became even larger than Bagram during the military surge, we had many civilians. 

At the brigade level around Afghanistan, there were civilians integrated into Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Usually, the brigade commander and his civilian counterpart would interact with the governor of the province. Finally, in some cases, there were one or two civilians attached to even smaller military units. 

Q: They’re very different. Some of the PRTs were under Polish or Turkish or French or German command.

KILNER: Yes, absolutely. For example, in Bamiyan, which was one of the quieter areas of the country, the New Zealanders ran a PRT. Within the context of Afghanistan, that was a pretty cushy assignment. There were a couple of American civilians out there in support mode, but basically, the New Zealanders were running the operation. 

Ghazni, again, was another example. We had people there working with and for the Poles. Even when the others were in charge, they would always pay attention to whatever the United States had to say. 

Q: A lot of your time was spent recruiting and taking care of the logistical needs of the people?

KILNER: Yes. But before leaving these PRTs, let me try to describe their internal structure. When it worked well, the idea was to establish a kind of civilian-military “board of directors” at each PRT. When we had high-level visitors from Washington, we’d take them out to see how those PRTs were set up. The PRT would show the visitors PowerPoint slides of an organization chart with a brigade commander and a senior civilian rep at the top. Then under them, you would have State Department, USAID, maybe a couple of military people and whatever other entities were there all working together to form a whole government decision-making process.

Q: How were they connected to their offices in Kabul? 

KILNER: In terms of projects and initiatives out in the provinces, things were primarily field-driven. The embassy was not trying to micromanage the PRTs. We weren’t telling them to do this or do that. A PRT would say across agencies, they had identified these priorities and these needs, and that was how they planned to spend their time and resources. It was our responsibility in IPA to stay on top of those PRT priorities and initiatives, and to communicate them to the embassy Front Office, making sure that there were no objections from embassy management. There usually was not. If the embassy Front Office had any feedback or concerns or particular perspective, we would communicate that to the field. But the priorities were largely driven by those that were on the ground and knew the particularities of their area. This was important because conditions varied enormously from place to place. 

Q: Were there civilian representatives or reconstruction teams in every province?

KILNER: I don’t recall if they were in every single province, but there were a lot of them. Probably, nearly all provinces.

Q: I spoke to one person who worked at a PRT in Nuristan from 2006–2007. He described the situation where he didn’t have anybody in Kabul to be able to help get things done. For instance, they wanted to build a school and they needed the land and permission. He said there really wasn’t anybody in the PRT office to help him do that work in Kabul.

KILNER: That’s what my office, IPA, was set up for.

Q: That was two years later. You got there two years later.

KILNER: Yes. Let me mention one other point. As I’ve said, just as the military had divided Afghanistan into four sectors: north, south, east, west, we assigned a Senior Civilian Representative to each of these sectors. The idea was that over time those SCRs and their civilian staff would evolve into consulates. But that never really happened.

Q: Even the consulates that were built didn’t last very long.

KILNER: Yes. The two calmest Regional Commands in the country were the north, at Mazar-i Sharif, and the west, at Herat. I remember visiting the buildings that the U.S. had purchased to house our future consulates. We were starting to renovate those buildings while I was there.

There is one other thing that I think is important to understand. As time went on, I saw that when it came to institution building, economic development, and governance, the issue of scalability in Afghanistan loomed over everything. If we focused enough resources on a limited given area, we could do almost anything. We could make almost any area secure. We could build things. We could move things in a positive direction. But then, as soon as those resources––military security, economic advisors, outside funding––were withdrawn or lessened, things might start to come apart and collapse. 

We might have success here in this little district or that area, but how were we going to replicate that success across the whole country when it took so long and was so expensive? Toward the end of my year, there was an effort in a couple of areas to open up what was called District Support Teams. These were like mini-PRTs, but on a lower level. In Afghanistan, each province is divided into smaller subunits called “districts,” and District Support Teams were supposed to align with those administrative units. By the time I left there, only about three of these DSTs had been set up. This is all just to say that achieving our nation-building objectives required a huge amount of resources for a very long period of time across vast expanses of the country. Ultimately, it proved to be unsustainable.

Q: Because they were at bases, were the civilians that you were supporting around the country mostly safe? The second half of your time there, there might have been an increase in fighting in a large number of areas. 

KILNER: I guess it depends on your definition of “safe.” Personally speaking, I find it interesting how over time, one recalibrates one’s sense of risk and danger in a wartime environment. I remember being unnerved a couple of times during my first weeks at Bagram when I saw where we were going and what I would be doing. 

Later, after moving to the embassy, I felt a similar nervousness the first time I accompanied Ambassador Eikenberry, as part of his entourage, to visit a market in a problematic area of the country. He wanted to demonstrate a visible U.S. presence and a sense of normalcy. So he strolled around the market without any body armor and I had to go with him. I kept my armor on. There were sharpshooters on roofs around the marketplace. There were sizable crowds in the market and you had no idea who was who or what they were doing. In the beginning, this was unnerving, but then after I had done it a few times, I got used to it. 

Were conditions safe? The year I was there, as best as I can recall, we lost no diplomats. I recall that one or two were injured when an MRAP hit a roadside bomb and rattled everybody inside quite a bit. MRAPs––the armored military land vehicles used for transport––were supposed to be resistant to improvised explosive devices, roadside bombs, but they were not perfect. There were people from other agencies, DEA, and other agencies, who did lose their lives while we were there. 

There were civilian losses but not Foreign Service diplomats. I always marveled that we didn’t lose any State Department colleagues the year I was there. Not that I expected it to happen every day, but I was always braced for bad news. I’m relieved it didn’t on my watch. In sum, there was a risk, but it wasn’t terrible.

Q: How would you sum up what you were able to achieve and what you were frustrated about? Is there anything else you want to point out about the work or the situation at that time?

KILNER: One thing I should talk more about is the recruiting of civilians. As time went on, that became almost an overwhelming part of my office’s work. 

I’d say the most graphic way to demonstrate the priority that recruitment and placement of new civilians were given at that time is the following. When I was IPA director, every week, we would have a conference call with the deputy secretary of state on how we were doing on filling jobs. This was Jack Lew, who went on to become, among many other jobs, treasury secretary and OMB director. He was the number two guy at the State Department at that time. Lew was known to be a “detail guy,” and that was absolutely the case. 

We would have a one-hour to two-hour phone call each Wednesday led on the Washington end by Jack Lew and our end by Joe Mussomeli as the assistant chief of mission. We had some fifteen people around our table and Lew had an interagency group on his end. They had a spreadsheet on the number of positions to be filled by which agencies. If USDA hadn’t coughed up the people they were supposed to, Jack would demand to know, “Why not?!” and he would be all over them. That was the level of attention. Lew would say, “President Obama cares about this. This is important to him and that is why we’re doing this.” It was bean counting, but it really had high-level attention. 

To get the required number of civilians out to the field in Afghanistan, the agencies themselves had to recruit from outside the government. Washington agencies did not have sufficient personnel to staff so many positions internally. There was a process in place to recruit from outside––called the “3161 Process,” if I remember correctly. I don’t really know the history of that authorizing legislation.

Q: A certain type of hiring mechanism?

KILNER: Yes. It was a hiring mechanism to get people relatively quickly from outside the U.S. government into the system. It was an intake process. The number had to do with the authorizing legislation. Many of the people that came to us were brought in through this process. Washington and the respective agencies were indeed able to find people. There were more than a few individuals who were interested in an adventure. Many of these outside hires had credible experience and expertise. But there were also serious problems.

Not only were these new recruits being brought into a very challenging working and living environment in Afghanistan, but they were also being integrated into an organization that they had no contact with before. So we might get an agricultural expert, but one who didn’t know anything about USDA bureaucracy or how the Foreign Agricultural Service worked. 

Then we had other cases of people who were past their prime physically but wanted to “relive their youth” or have one more adventure. Some of them could not climb in and out of military vehicles very easily. But we were not allowed to exclude such individuals because of the Americans with Disabilities Act [ADA]. I remember at one point, the embassy pleaded with Washington to include at least a minimal physical fitness exam in the hiring process––a test of whether someone could climb up steps or get into a jeep. Something like that. “No, no, no,” we were told. That would trigger a pile of lawsuits under the ADA. We got nowhere on that issue.

In any case, once the newcomers arrived at Embassy Kabul, we would organize briefings for them––usually in groups on their first or second day. I would lead the briefing, with several other embassy staff members also making presentations. These took place in a big tent, usually with thirty or forty newcomers participating. We provided a general orientation about what they could expect, as well as some basics on the relationship between the U.S. embassy in Kabul and PRTs out in the field. New recruits were going into widely varying situations and environments, so the details of work assignments had to wait until they reached their final destinations. As in any organization, some of these individuals ended up fitting in quite well, others not so much. 

I remember one really nice guy who had been working for the California State government in Sacramento. He was a solid guy, maybe in his mid-forties. He came to Afghanistan and ended up being placed at the end of the road in one of the most primitive military outposts. I went to visit him soon after his arrival and saw that his bed was basically just a sleeping bag on a wooden plank. He had to go out to a well to shower; his clothes were in a duffle bag over in the corner of a semi-enclosed area, not even in a real private room. This didn’t happen very often. But when I saw this, I made a big ruckus back at the embassy, telling our admin office that we had to get this guy more. Most people had much better conditions than that. In any case, the whole intake process was quite an experience. 

Q: How did he do? Was he a trooper or did he want to go home?

KILNER: I really admired him. He stuck with it. We improved his situation and he stuck out the assignment. He became one of my favorites because of the grace with which he took this abominable treatment at the beginning. 

***

Q: It is March 24, 2023. Today is our second interview with Scott Kilner as part of our Afghanistan project. Scott, in our last interview, you were talking about your year in Kabul. I thought it might be useful to explain the working environment in Bagram, which people in the States hear the name a lot, but it’s hard to know exactly what that was like, and then also in Kabul. 

KILNER: Thank you. I’m happy to continue. That would probably be a good place to start. So let me try to compare and contrast two very different working environments I experienced and how I fit into each one. 

When I arrived in Afghanistan in July of 2009, I had been a career Foreign Service officer for twenty-eight years. I had the rank of minister counselor, the equivalent of a two-star general. This meant that at Bagram, as a foreign policy advisor to the commanding general, I was far and away the most senior ranking civilian on that large base of nearly twenty thousand soldiers. Apart from contract support employees, there were fewer than ten civilian professionals on the base.

When I moved to Kabul, I became the director of the most complex office in the U.S. embassy, which was also numerically the second largest. USAID was bigger but didn’t have the complex interagency structure that we, IPA, did.

I thought of myself as being at the top of the middle section of the embassy, having a lot of responsibility to make the machinery run, to make sure that people got what they needed and that information flowed as it was supposed to. I was not really in a policy-making position, but I participated in many meetings at which policy priorities and strategies were discussed and worked through. 

Yesterday I talked about how I had integrated into the command group of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division at Bagram. I have to say, I was very highly impressed by the people I worked with there every day, first and foremost with the Commanding General Mike Scaparrotti. But it was not only Scap. His two deputies, Bill Mayville and Kurt Fuller [both brigadier generals], were also very impressive. There were also several colonels in the command group. All were highly intelligent, very dedicated, and personally warm. Their esprit de corps was something that I had never encountered before. It was patriotism and a willingness to make large personal and family sacrifices for the nation. I was very impressed by it. 

I traveled regularly to remote parts of Regional Command––East with General Scaparrotti, to the command outposts and forward operating bases. And from what I could see, there was the same kind of dedication in those places. 

Very memorably, after I had left Bagram and been at the embassy for a couple of months, General Scaparrotti invited me to accompany him on Christmas Day battlefield circulation in 2009. On Christmas morning, he was flown to Kabul in his helicopter, where I joined Scap and a small group of about five staff. We spent the whole day hopping around to nine different bases and outposts in the eastern sector of Afghanistan so that the commander could wish as many of his troops as possible a Merry Christmas and show his support for them. It was very, very moving. It was one of the most incredible days I’ve ever experienced. That was the environment there. 

At Bagram, I was also deeply moved by the respect and dignity shown to the remains of soldiers who had been killed in action. Whenever that happened, the coffin of the deceased soldier was loaded on a transport plane to be carried back to the United States. Each time there was a ceremony, usually in the middle of the night, out on the runway. I was very much a part of that, accompanying General Scaparrotti as the leading civilian on the base. Every week I would be awakened once or twice to join the commander and a small group of others to see the caskets loaded onto the plane, a small band playing taps, prayers read, and so forth. It was very, very moving. 

When I transferred to the American embassy in Kabul, I found a completely different working environment. In material terms, my standard of living improved greatly because, apart from being dramatically overcrowded, Embassy Kabul was a pretty nice place physically. There was good, relatively new housing––if you were lucky enough to get one of the real apartments. The embassy compound was far quieter and cleaner than Bagram. From a physical comfort standpoint, it was a lot easier than being at the base. 

The embassy was also staffed overwhelmingly with good people––capable people who were trying their best, working very hard in a very tough, demanding situation. The Front Office leaders––four, sometimes five, ambassador-rank diplomats, as we’ve discussed––were also extremely smart, dedicated, and experienced. 

That said, I have to stress that Embassy Kabul, during my nine months there, was easily the most unhappy place I ever worked in my career. There was great unhappiness, frustration, and even resentment at how the embassy was being run. This came from the very top––I’ll leave it there. Many Foreign Service officers were basically in survival mode––just trying to get through the year. There was not the positive esprit de corps––thinking you were going to accomplish something––that I saw at Bagram. So in terms of the working environment, for me, the embassy was dramatically worse. That’s the general contrast I would draw. 

Q: That leads to a question I think you’ve thought a lot about. The reason we had––that year and in the years following––so many ambassadors was that you needed to match the military’s ranks in order to be able to cooperate well. Since there were so many generals in Kabul, they would pay more attention to diplomats with ambassadorial rank than to officers of lower rank. It sounds like they also tried to apply this approach to the field as well. 

In any case, I know you want to talk about civilian-military cooperation and how it went.

KILNER: I would like to talk about that because civilian-military cooperation was given so much emphasis at the time. As I mentioned yesterday, there was a view that one of the things that we could have done better in Iraq would have been to have the civilian perspective integrated more forcefully and clearly into the policymaking process. There was a desire to achieve that as much as we could in Afghanistan. 

Civilian-military cooperation and integration were really the watchwords for so much that we were doing. But as I mentioned in our conversation yesterday, there were differences in perspective. The most dramatic difference came out in the context of the strategic review over whether to surge the military in 2010–2011. We talked about the cable that Ambassador Eikenberry and Ambassador Ricciardone sent in and then leaked almost immediately in Washington. The divergent views between the U.S. military and the U.S. embassy were very clear in that case. 

Again to recap, on development issues, the military generally wanted to complete projects quickly and then move on to the next one, with perhaps less regard for long-term sustainability. USAID generally wanted to proceed more slowly, laying groundwork more carefully for long-term sustainability. 

There were lots of reasons to try to integrate civilian and military perspectives. And from what I could see, both the military and civilians understood this goal and tried to make it work. Neither side consistently tried to outmaneuver the other. We wanted to form a unified team and in many ways it was. 

At all of the big staff meetings, there were civilians and military around the table. I regularly went over to ISAF Headquarters to attend meetings there. At the embassy, we had unending, high-level visitors from Washington: senators, cabinet officials, and congressmen. Anytime there was a briefing for such visitors, both Ambassador Eikenberry and ISAF Commander General McChrystal, as well as their deputies, were around the table. It was very much a joint operation most of the time. 

I think there was a lot of desire to make civilian-military integration work. But the problem, as I saw it, was that despite the big increase in the number of civilians, there remained a huge disparity of numbers and resources. The sheer number of military personnel was far, far greater than the civilians, even though we had a very large embassy. 

My perception was that the military was always intent on moving forward. Any movement was better than no movement. It was just perpetual motion. You might not know exactly where you were going, but you had to go forward in one direction or another. 

On issues large and small, the U.S. military was always moving, working nearly around the clock from early in the morning until late in the evening. We, civilians, would get a notification that military meetings were being held and that we were invited. The door was open. We were always welcome. But oftentimes, we literally did not have the bodies to be everywhere where they were. The door was open, but if we weren’t there, they would just roll on without us. And if we couldn’t keep up, sorry, we invited you, but that’s just the way it is. That was one problem. 

Another reality was that despite this commitment to sharing information and discussing issues, if lower-level military officers had received clear marching orders from above, they were going to follow them, no matter what we civilians said. Say, for example, if there was a governance or development issue we were working on, and General “Rod” [Rodriguez] had already given his marching orders, our military colleagues were going to proceed no matter what the civilians said. General Rodriguez––a three-star general and basically number two in the U.S. military hierarchy––had a lot of impact on what we at the embassy were doing. If General Rod had given orders, military officers under him would tell us, “Sorry, General Rod wants this,” and that was it. End of discussion. 

Here is one example of how this played out: My office, IPA, dealt regularly with one central government ministry that had responsibility for working with Afghan provincial and district offices. It was the national government’s interface with the governors and sub-governors around the country. Their focus was purely on development and governance capacity building. There was no military angle to what this Afghan office did, and we in IPA dealt with them all the time. The head of that ministry was one of my most important official Afghan contacts.

Then we found out that one day the U.S. military had placed two military advisors permanently on the staff of this ministry without any consultation with us. We asked how our military would feel if our office started placing people in the Afghan Ministry of Defense without any consultation. Their answer was simply that this was the way General Rod wanted to do it. So we had a big argument. But they had the bodies and they could do something like that if they wanted to. 

Q: Your office was handling certain things and then USAID was handling certain things. In Washington, at that period, USAID was chafing a bit about this idea, not being in charge of the development, but only one part of it of that coordination the State Department was doing. Did you have that kind of tension in the embassy that year?

KILNER: Yes, I think so. There were some tensions between the USAID officers that were seconded to our office and those working in the main USAID office. But then USAID also had their concerns about what the military was doing as well. I had less visibility into that, but I knew it was there. 

Q: That’s not that important in this case.

KILNER: Nation building is something we can talk about.

Q: It’s a really big issue after twenty years. After we left in 2021, there was a whole lot of debate going on. How did it look to you at the time and since?

KILNER: I think the point I made yesterday is worth repeating. It seemed to me that if we focused sufficient resources on any given limited area, we could achieve the goals that we were working towards in terms of governance, development, and security. 

But I began to perceive pretty quickly––even before I left Bagram and then ever more strongly while I was at the embassy––that this process was not scalable across the whole of Afghanistan. It would require too much time and too many resources––whether to maintain security in a problematic area or continue building infrastructure or train individuals to run an office competently. It was all very expensive and took a lot of time. And very often, as soon as Coalition support structures were removed, things would start to unravel. 

Q: Do you mean as soon as the military wasn’t there? You couldn’t sustain that because you didn’t have security?

KILNER: That was a big part of it. And to train people, to develop the human capabilities to run things, it’s a long slow process. It’s not something that you can switch on and off. 

In terms of capacity building, from what I could see, the biggest effort and the most resources were put into building and strengthening the Afghan Army. We talked a little bit about this yesterday. I would say we achieved the most progress in that area, even though I wasn’t directly involved in those efforts. 

As it turned out, as we saw what happened during our final withdrawal, it looks in hindsight like we built the wrong kind of army. A lot of structures that we built were almost permanently dependent upon U.S. and Coalition support––including contractors, including our air force that we had in the country. Even though Afghan capacity was strengthening, in some ways, it still remained very dependent on the U.S. still being there up until the very end. 

The police we never seemed to get right. I can’t say that I understand the problems with the Afghan police very deeply. But there were always big issues with corruption, recruitment, retention. It was a perpetual source of frustration. 

In the areas of governance and development, the areas where my office was working, it was more than obvious to us that achieving our goals would require a very long-term commitment. A commitment to achieve essentially generational change in Afghanistan––helping them educate, train, develop a new generation of Afghan professionals. This was very much tied into the educational system. 

But even while we saw this reality, the embassy, including my office, was being asked to show “demonstrable progress” within eighteen months. These were the parameters that President Obama had set. Washington was saying, “Okay, we’re going to surge both military and civilians, but within eighteen months, we’ll have to see that this is working or we’re going to reverse course.” That just did not make sense to a lot of us. 

My doubts were there by the time I arrived at the embassy and just got stronger the longer I was there. I think this skepticism was widely shared among the people I was working with. But we were given our marching orders, so we tried our best to do what we were asked to do. We said to ourselves that it was for others to decide if this is the right strategy or not. That’s how we approached it.

Q: If you were asked whether or not we should have been involved in such a generational, maybe decades-long nation building effort or if we should have had more modest goals, do you have an opinion?

KILNER: That is probably a good segue to our withdrawal in August of 2021. I have thought a lot about that, and I would try to summarize it this way. I felt, and I think virtually all of my colleagues in Afghanistan agreed, that the United States’ intervention in Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, was a fully legitimate response to the attacks that we had suffered. 

People might have had different views about Iraq. It wasn’t a subject we discussed much, but I think many people, including myself, looked at our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan very differently. Having said that, I think we lost our way in Afghanistan after not too many years in terms of what we were trying to achieve.

After expending so much blood and treasure in Afghanistan, a lot of which I saw close up for those months, it was painful to see all that go up in smoke or down the tubes, whatever metaphor you want to use. Nevertheless, I would give President Biden high marks for finally cutting the cord where his three predecessors had failed to do so. I think, as messy as it was, it was the right decision. 

To dig more deeply into that, regarding the execution of our withdrawal in the final weeks and days, no one wanted to see it play out the way it did. Of course, I wish it had gone more smoothly. But I wasn’t there, and I have no doubt that there were factors I’m not aware of. So I would hesitate to second guess that we should have done this or we should have done that. 

Why didn’t we foresee the collapse of the Afghan Army almost overnight? Why weren’t we better prepared to help Afghans who had supported us and were now in jeopardy under the Taliban regime? Why weren’t we better prepared to get them out? Those are certainly fair questions, but I don’t think I’m positioned to give a fair and full answer. 

Overall, I do think it was the right decision to leave. The argument is made by Ryan Crocker and others that it would have been sustainable to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely at a much lower level. They say it would have been affordable in terms of both financial cost and risk to our limited forces there. 

Undoubtedly we could have stayed, I think, but I don’t believe that the price would have been worth it. Even with a much more modest footprint, mainly to continue counterterrorism operations and training of Afghans, which would have been the two purposes for a long-term commitment. 

Such a commitment would have had absolutely no end in sight. A forever commitment. That is problematic right there, but also I think the cost would not have been negligible. It’s very expensive to maintain even smaller military commitments overseas for a long time. If we were involved in counterterrorism and training, undoubtedly, that work would have involved continued casualties, not only among the Afghan military but among Afghan civilians, with all of the bad blood and the human trauma that goes with that. We would never have separated ourselves from all the unhappiness and resentment that accompanies civilian casualties.

Also, even if our commitment was more limited, Washington, as big as the U.S. government is, has only limited bandwidth. Look at all of the issues the Biden administration has to deal with simultaneously in different parts of the globe. Continuing to have Afghanistan in the mix didn’t strike me as a good way forward. 

Another counterargument to withdrawal was that if the United States withdrew, we would leave a vacuum for China, Russia, Iran, and Pakistan to fill. My response would be to ask, “To do what?” Well, have at it. Try your luck. Just because we are no longer there doesn’t mean somebody else will seriously jeopardize our interests. In fact, I suspect just the opposite––that our adversaries in the region wanted to see us stay tied down, continuing to bleed as we had for the previous twenty years. 

There’s also the question of our moral obligation. I’m thinking especially of our moral obligation to Afghan women, which to me, is the most difficult and painful aspect of our withdrawal. Because women’s education and women’s access to professional life was one area where we really did make a difference in Afghanistan. There really were some very big, positive changes, and it is very painful to see how that’s gone into reverse since we left. 

But can one really say that it is the obligation of the United States government to protect oppressed women everywhere around the globe? It would be wonderful if we could, but is it realistic? The difference with Afghanistan is that we had a substantial “sunk cost” there. We had done something very good and we had raised women’s expectations. But did that mean we had an obligation to stay indefinitely to protect that progress? You can argue this in different ways. 

Q: It wasn’t just women. There was also the raised education and literacy throughout the country tremendously, and also health improved and a lot of infrastructure improved. Perhaps feeling abandoned is obviously natural.

I wanted to ask about a couple of things that you mentioned just in passing. 

KILNER: Let me say one more thing regarding our withdrawal. I was personally hoping that Taliban 2.0 might be more different from the 1990s Taliban than they have turned out to be so far. It seemed an open question. I’m sure there are divisions within the Afghan leadership, but so far, the hardliners and the retrogrades in the government clearly have had the upper hand. 

However, I’m not persuaded that we’ve seen the end of the story. We’ve trained and educated enough people and created, perhaps not a huge class, but at least a significant class that did not exist before. You see this bubbling up from time to time with stories of heroic, clandestine schools and the hunger for continuing education. We may not have seen the end of the story yet.

Q: I can tell that you worked closely with Frank Ricciardone because he said almost the same thing in almost the same words in my interview with him. 

KILNER: I’ve heard Karl Eikenberry say the same thing, but I think we each arrived at that conclusion by independent thought processes. I really did think this before I heard either of them say it. 

Q: I understand. It’s interesting that many people worked so hard to come up with different points of view. I want to ask you about two things. You took a lot of photography when you were in Afghanistan.

KILNER: I did.

Q: Tell us what you saw, what you recorded, what you treasure now that you look at it.

KILNER: Afghanistan is a photographer’s paradise in every way. I’ve never been much into the technical side of development of photographs or exhibiting photos professionally. But since I was a kid, I’ve always liked to take pictures––from my first Brownie or Kodak Instamatic cameras––and the hobby lent itself very well to a Foreign Service life and career. Everywhere I’ve been, I’ve taken photographs. I wish I had converted to digital sooner than I did because I have way too many boxes of slides sitting around my home. 

From 2006 onward, I took digital photographs. I brought two cameras with me to Afghanistan. One was a very good small pocket camera. This is before iPhones or other smartphones were an option in that kind of environment. Then I also had a bigger 35-millimeter camera. I always had one or the other with me wherever I went. In conjunction with this project, I’d be happy to make any of them available if they would help tell the story. 

I’ve gone through and organized them all. There are more than three thousand photos from Afghanistan. I was allowed to photograph whatever I wanted, wherever I went because I was trusted to handle them appropriately. And I didn’t breach that understanding. 

No matter what I was doing with General Scaparrotti, I’d take my camera. I treasure my photographs from that Christmas Day battlefield circulation, with Scap addressing the troops surrounded by Christmas decorations or around a barbecue out on the border with Pakistan. The dramatic, rugged terrain in so many places in Afghanistan was visually just so impressive! I took photographs of Bagram Base from the air. I took them inside the Joint Operations Center during a promotion or farewell ceremonies. For example, one of Scap’s deputies left Bagram for a higher-level assignment working for General McChrystal at ISAF Headquarters. Scap organized a very touching send-off ceremony that I photographed.

When we were out and about, I took lots of photos of military bases and soldiers, as well of civilians at PRTs. I have many photos of life at the U.S. embassy. In Kabul, for example, in connection with the new year’s “Nowruz” holiday each spring, the embassy organized a big kite-flying festival within the compound. Kites are an Afghan tradition––you may remember the book titled The Kite Runner. I took lots of pictures of these colorful kites. Then in the few places where I was able to get out and about, I took more “normal” shots of people and places. There weren’t many such places, but in Panjshir Province, for example, it was safe, and we spent a couple of days there without the huge security and envelope. Herat was also relatively safe, with some fantastic Persian/Afghan monuments, mosques, and other buildings––historically recognized by UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization]. Life in Bamiyan, where the enormous rock-carved Buddhist statues were tragically destroyed by the Taliban in their final days, was another safe area. I was able to get some very good photographs of just local Afghan life, as well as of the beautiful countryside.

In Kabul, I never walked around outside of the compound. But I would be transported somewhere by car once every week or two. When I went to a ministry or did something in the city, I always had my camera at the window. Whenever we passed a crowd or got stuck in traffic, an incredibly colorful life on the street would pass in front of me. That worked, too. I would say I ended up with a pretty good collection of every dimension of my existence there. 

Q: On a sadder note, you mentioned civilian casualties. This was a major preoccupation for Karzai and for the Afghans. There were things called night raids that were particularly upsetting. There were aerial bombings or drone bombings that were mistakes. Were you aware of that during your year there?

KILNER: I was certainly aware that there were these incidents. It was the ugly reality of counter-terrorism operations. This is difficult stuff, which was never going to be perfect, especially those night raids. 

I rubbed up against that world a couple of ways, although I had no direct involvement in it. While I was still out in Bagram, I was interested to see how such operations worked, even though I didn’t really have a need to know. Scap’s deputy in charge of operations and intimately involved in such efforts said, “Come over to our center one night; you can stay as long as you want to watch and see how this works.” So I did, and on a screen, I viewed a live video feed of a compound under surveillance and observed people moving in and out and around it. Those controlling the surveillance had to decide what to do or not to do, when to intervene, and when not to. It was an interesting visual demonstration of how these operations were seen from headquarters. 

Then at the embassy, my office had two Afghan employees. They were in a physically separate location, not in the main room with the rest of us. But they were part of the Office of Interagency Provincial Affairs and helped with things as local employees regularly do. 

We found out one morning that one of them had been suspected of being an agent, if you will, for the Taliban. That he was thought to be sort of a mole inside the embassy. His house had been raided the previous night, and he was taken into custody. We knew nothing about it before it happened. We were given no warning, just woke up one day and told that he had been taken into custody. And that operation had been conducted without the embassy Front Office knowing about it either. 

We went up first to Deputy Ambassador Ricciardone. When he told Ambassador Eikenberry, Eikenberry wanted the details right away. It was a serious deal for an embassy staff member to get caught up in one of these night raids. So it got a lot of attention at the top of the embassy.

Q: Was the U.S. military deliberate in this? They knew they went to raid because they thought he was a mole?

KILNER: Yes, they thought our employee had been associating with bad actors who were supposedly very problematic. As I recall, there were some others caught up in the raid as well. They were higher-value targets, but the Afghan who worked for our section was closely associated with individuals who were almost assuredly bad actors, so he became a suspect through association. 

There was a flurry of high-level conversations between the ambassador’s office and the military on what the hell was going on, and I saw some of that. Then we lost visibility. To be honest, I don’t know how it played out. It’s ugly stuff. It’s going to happen and such operations were a huge part of why the U.S. was resented over time in Afghanistan. 

We haven’t talked about Carter Malkasian’s recent book, The American War in Afghanistan. He does a good job of exploring Afghanistan’s long tradition of visceral, deep, cultural hostility toward outside occupying forces. 

Immediately after our invasion of Afghanistan in early 2002, after we overthrew the wretched Taliban regime, we enjoyed a relatively brief honeymoon period when there was some gratitude towards us. But the longer we stayed, and the more we became associated with civilian casualties and the like, the more we came to be seen as just another outside occupying force. Especially out in the villages and the remoter parts of the country, our image got worse and worse. 

Q: I want to thank you for your generous time. 

KILNER: One final word, if I may.

Q: Yes, please. Were there any other things you wanted to say?

KILNER: My parting shot on Afghanistan, and my main personal take-away, is that the experience made me a very big skeptic on the subject of nation building. Period. More precisely, I now believe that the capacity of any country––the United States or anyone else––to go into another society, another culture, that doesn’t want us there and then change the internal dynamics of that country in a predictable manner, is extremely limited. We can intervene, we can stir things up, we can mess around. But to think that we’re going in for this period of time to move this society in this direction is just not realistic and it’s not going to work––especially if that society does not want you to be there for any significant period of time and doesn’t welcome you at the popular level, which of course is almost always the case. 

I think we’ve demonstrated twice now that if we can’t do it over a twenty-year period––expending the resources that we did with all the strengths that we as a nation still have––no outside force is going to be able to build a new nation in an environment like Afghanistan or Iraq. And no comparisons please with Germany or Japan, please! There are so many differences in the circumstances. They’re ridiculous analogies to make. I won’t waste any breath on them there. 

The final thing I would like to say is that, going forward, our elected political leaders truly need to be far more prudent, cautious, and thoughtful about when and where we ask young men and women to put themselves in harm’s way. The costs are high, and there should be very compelling reasons for doing it, not just a hope and a prayer that things will turn out right. Because they might not.