The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman

New York: Penguin, 2022
276 pages, $27

Elliot Ackerman’s The Fifth Act may be the first great book about the Afghanistan war. Part memoir, part policy analysis, it uses the nauseating surrender of the United States to the Taliban in 2021 as a point of departure for a series of reflections on the irrationality with which the war was waged and the consequences of that irrationality for American culture. It’s not an uplifting book. But it’s one no reader will soon forget.

Ackerman is a decorated veteran of both Afghanistan and Iraq who left the Marines in 2011. A decade later, he was vacationing with his family in Italy when the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan started. From hotel rooms, airports, and tourist sites, he used his cell phone to coordinate with friends still in the Marine Corps, trying to help Afghans he knew to escape the Taliban’s rapid conquest of the country. These dramatic—often chaotic—efforts form one thread of the book’s narrative; the other is a series of flashbacks in which Ackerman recalls incidents from his own combat service a decade ago. Together, they tell a story of both idealism and cynicism, capped off with details of what Ackerman calls the “exceptional degree of incompetence” with which America’s retreat was managed (238).

Words such as “dramatic” and “narrative” are appropriate in part because Ackerman has designed his book to mimic the traditional structure of classical tragedy, even dividing it into five “acts” and shorter “scenes,” and adding quotations from Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. Some of the scenes are horrifying, as with the 2008 attack in which Ackerman’s company of Marines was ambushed by Taliban forces who destroyed their vehicles and killed a soldier under his command. Ackerman relates the episode in crisp, gripping prose made more touching by its lack of self-pity. Other passages perfectly capture the jarring contrast between war and civilian life, as in the chapter that relates the efforts to retrieve fallen comrades from a 2009 helicopter crash, alongside a football game that the heroic survivors attended years later. The moment is elegiac without being clichéd, and it evinces a sense of patriotism that’s both melancholy and uplifting. This is the work of an outstanding writer.

Ackerman’s use of classical tragedy as the model for his book has one problem: America’s abandonment of Afghanistan was not tragic in the Greek sense. It was merely pathetic. The distinctive quality of ancient Greek tragedy is not loss but the fact that the characters are destined for destruction by the clash between reality and their virtues. The essence of ancient tragedy lies in the poignancy of a great spirit struggling nobly against forces beyond his power. But as Edith Hamilton wrote in The Greek Way, “undeserved suffering is not in itself tragic.” When a drama uses suffering to show that humanity is “devoid of dignity and significance, trivial, mean, and sunk in dreary hopelessness, then the spirit of tragedy departs,” and the result is, instead, pathos.¹ The Afghanistan war—at least as managed by the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations—was a study not in doomed virtue but, as Ackerman shows, in triviality and self-inflicted hopelessness.

The root of this pathos was the fact that “victory has never been based on achieving a positive outcome,” such as defeating a well-defined enemy; instead, successive presidents defined their aims in negative terms—as the indefinite, even meaningless goal of preventing “terrorism” (204). The vagueness of that goal fostered impatience and a sense of temporariness about the entire enterprise—which, in turn, fatally undermined morale. Ackerman describes this with a powerful symbol: plywood.

Nearly a decade after US forces arrived in Afghanistan, its headquarters was still made of plywood. . . . Resources existed to build out of concrete, but why would we do that? At any given point in our twenty-year Afghan odyssey, we were always—in our minds, at least—only a year or two out from a drawdown followed by an eventual withdrawal. Of course, the Afghans noticed this. . . . The lead Afghan contractor who worked alongside my special operations team would always scoff whenever an aircraft brought in pallets of plywood for our construction projects. “Wars,” he would say, “are not won with plywood.” (38)

The plywood mentality deterred the Afghans themselves from developing the political and social foundations necessary to prevent their country, once liberated, from collapsing the instant the Americans departed. Critics of the war frequently cited the corruption and ineptitude of Afghanistan’s political leaders as reasons for leaving. But, Ackerman notes, “our consistent messaging that we were on our way out of Afghanistan encouraged Afghans in positions of power to embrace corruption—specifically the siphoning of resources for personal gain—as the one clear and sure means of survival” (41). There is certainly reason to doubt that America could have elevated Afghanistan above the level of tribalism and ignorance, even if it had aimed at permanently occupying the country. But as long as the United States insisted on the impermanence of its mission, it created incentives for Afghans to view American protection as fleeting and to seek safeguards other than the establishment of a stable post-Taliban nation. “In Afghanistan, there is a saying,” Ackerman remarks. “‘The Americans have the watches, but the Taliban have the time’” (41).

The ambiguities of the war’s aims combined with the plywood mind-set also encouraged American politicians to embrace triviality, meanness, and dreary hopelessness—qualities that reached their dismal climax in the Trump administration’s surrender on February 29, 2020. The agreement the White House signed that day was negotiated directly between the United States and the Taliban without the participation of the Afghan government. And the result is a shameful masterpiece of diplomatic dishonesty. “In paragraph after paragraph, the United States refused to recognize the Taliban, beginning each clause of its agreement with ‘The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban, will . . .’” (147). Yet in substance—and, indeed, by negotiating with them at all—the agreement conceded the legitimacy and sovereignty of the Taliban, even going so far as to acknowledge its authority to issue visas and passports, which only legally recognized states can do. “In the same sentence,” Ackerman concludes, “the United States both denies and acknowledges the prospect of Taliban sovereignty over Afghanistan. Is it any wonder, then, that our Afghan allies believe we are speaking out of both sides of our mouth?” (147).

Those allies became the primary victims of America’s pathetic—or farcical—capitulation. Consider one heartbreaking incident Ackerman describes when detailing his efforts to help the Afghans who had believed our country’s promises. “I find myself on the phone with Sherrie Westin, the president of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street. . . . She’s trying to evacuate twenty-three puppeteers from Baghche-Simsin, the Afghan Sesame Street . . . the most watched TV program among children in Afghanistan” (196). Its makers are targeted for murder by the Taliban precisely because the show offered children, particularly girls, a vision of a better world. When Ackerman gives her the depressing news that the opportunities to flee are vanishing quickly, she responds with a story. An old man walking on the beach encounters a boy throwing starfish into the sea; they had washed up during high tide, the boy explains, and will die unless someone throws them back soon. The man observes that there are thousands of starfish on the shore, and no way he can make much difference. The boy picks up another and tosses it back, answering, “I made a difference for that one” (197).

In the end, Westin succeeded in freeing her colleagues. But, of course, millions of other Afghans were left behind to suffer the effects of what Ackerman rightly calls “our unconditional surrender” (133).

The Fifth Act makes clear that this debacle cannot be blamed solely on the unprincipled acts of a few decades’ worth of politicians. Another element is the acquiescence and indifference of much of the American public, fostered by the fact that the Middle Eastern wars have been fought by an all-volunteer army and paid for by deficit spending—meaning that most ordinary Americans have borne little of the expense of fighting. That, plus technological innovations such as drones, have “anesthetized the American people” to the human and financial costs of war (203). Whereas the Vietnam War brought the battles into people’s living rooms with nightly images of fighting men being shot and blown up, today’s warfare is out of sight, out of mind—or, in today’s military jargon, “over the horizon.”

The human costs in Afghanistan were, relatively speaking, minor—2,448 military deaths in the course of twenty years are about the same number of Americans who died of heat stroke during that time. But in the absence of a draft, those costs have been borne by what Ackerman calls “a military caste,” while civilians lose interest in or even awareness of the fighting (203). A 2018 poll found that 42 percent of Americans were not even aware the country was fighting in Afghanistan. That kind of apathy can only encourage members of the military, who have suffered through the experience and seen friends die, to regard civilians with contempt—a perilous situation any time, let alone when political tempers are running increasingly high. Ackerman is not arguing for conscription—an immoral and impractical policy—but he is right to note that when only one sector of society chooses to fight, it can create genuine problems for the civilian rule of law. “From Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long,” he observes. “The United States today meets both conditions” (204). It is easy to envision a political candidate in the coming years taking advantage of resentment about the Afghanistan surrender—a feeling that many veterans share—and exploiting their support for anti-constitutional purposes. Likewise, Ackerman notes, it seems probable that whoever loses the 2024 presidential election

will cry foul, and . . . that their supporters will fill the streets, with law enforcement or even the military called in to manage those protests. It is not hard to imagine then, with half the country claiming an elected leader is illegitimate, that certain military members who hold their own biases might begin to second-guess their orders. (246)

Perhaps even more worrisome is the way indifference among the many has combined in the past twenty years with an outright effort among a few to sacrifice America’s international standing. President Obama declared in 2013 that “we should not be the world’s policeman”—apparently assuming that if America did not do it, nobody would. Actually, American abdication of that role simply encouraged other countries, notably China, to fill the void, and led our allies to doubt our reliability. Obama said those words in response to the actions of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who used chemical weapons against his opponents in that country’s civil war—an act Obama had earlier said would trigger American intervention. Yet Congress refused to back him up, and he stopped trying. “The United States’ red line had been crossed,” Ackerman writes, “without incident or reprisal” (208).

That did not go unnoticed in Beijing, which has expanded its military, increased its hostility toward the United States, and subjugated Hong Kong with impunity. Now it has set its sights on Taiwan. Yet, as Ackerman notes, “not long before Kabul fell, when Americans were asked in a poll whether the United States should defend Taiwan if it were confronted with an invasion by China, 55 percent of respondents said that it should not” (208–9). With numbers like that, it’s hard to imagine the Chinese being deterred from conquering that island democracy.

This is not to say that the past two decades have seen only failures. In fact, Ackerman notes, the Iraq War can reasonably be described as a mixed success: Iraq’s government “is plenty dysfunctional,” he writes, but it “has now successfully held four consecutive sets of parliamentary elections without any meaningful violence” (134). And if the goals of the “war on terror” were what President Bush specified in September 2001—to deprive terrorists of funding, turn them against each other, and drive them from their refuges—then “the United States has largely achieved” these aims with the killing of Osama bin Laden and his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri (the latter occurring after this book was written), and the partial defeat of ISIS (201). Twenty years after the attacks in New York and Washington, the United States has seen sporadic jihadist strikes, but nothing on the scale some feared in the autumn of 2001.

Yet the costs of the war on terror have been huge—and even today, some of them remain invisible to Americans. Servicemen are still fighting in Iraq, Syria, and in Africa—where, as Ackerman observes, “US combat deaths have held steady with recent combat deaths in Afghanistan” (82). Yet these things are so far out of the public consciousness that President Biden could get away with telling the United Nations in September 2021 that “for the first time in twenty years the United States is not at war” (81).

Such a falsehood is made possible largely by wishful thinking, combined with a public appetite for that pathos-inducing triviality, meanness, and hopelessness. War is a horrendous waste of life and wealth, which leads many people to demand an “end” to what they call “forever wars”—a fundamentally trivial slogan that ignores the fact that wars cannot be simply “ended”; they are either won, lost, or postponed. They may seem to drag on “forever” because they last as long as threats last—and our refusal to terminate those threats only invites the enemy to ramp up aggression. Yet a people whose leaders preach dreary hopelessness instead of a commitment to well-defined victory can be lured into betraying their values and accepting surrender as a substitute for victory—because, after all, surrender is the only absolutely certain means for “ending” any war. That’s the path America chose in Afghanistan, meanly abandoning those to whom we made promises—the translators, the contractors, and the children who watched Baghche-Simsin.

In one of the most celebrated passages of The Aeneid, Virgil’s hero, Aeneas—destined to become forefather of the Romans—leaves his lover, Dido, queen of Carthage, after she has effectively abdicated her throne and given up everything out of devotion to him. When she learns that he has sneaked away in the night, she curses him before committing suicide. “Let him be plagued in war by a nation proud in arms,” she prays. “Once he has bowed down / to an unjust peace, may he never enjoy his realm / and the light he yearns for.” She prophesies “war between all / our peoples, all their children, endless war!”² America will never erase the shame of its infidelity to the Afghan people. Time alone will show whether it can escape Dido’s curse.

“.@elliotackerman’s ‘The Fifth Act’ may be the first great book about the Afghanistan war. It’s not an uplifting book. But it’s one no reader will soon forget.” —@TimothySandefur
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