Afghanistan review could lead to change in promotions for NCOs, officers

Jeff Schogol

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The Pentagon’s ongoing review into the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could prompt the Defense Department to “reform the way that we evaluate and promote young noncommissioned officers and young officers,” Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell told reporters recently.

“If you think back to my time in Afghanistan as a young commander, giving battle update briefs as a captain to my battalion commander, if I were constantly saying that my area of operations was a disaster, it didn’t have the ammo or troops that I needed to accomplish the mission, the likelihood of me getting promoted was probably not great,” Parnell said Wednesday Pentagon news conference. “So, how do we set the conditions in the [Defense] Department to create a sense of honesty where our officers are reporting what they believe to be accuracy — they’re concerned about maybe their area of operations; they’re concerned about the truth and, maybe, less about their careers.”

Parnell added that his comments were not meant as an indictment of officers who served in Afghanistan. “It’s just the way that our system is constructed,” he said.

In January 2020, John Sopko, then serving as special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told lawmakers that the U.S. government had “created an incentive to almost require people to lie” about progress in Afghanistan.

“I’m not going to name names, but I think everybody has that incentive to give happy talk — to show success,” Sopko told Task & Purpose at the time. “Maybe it’s human nature to do that. I mean most of the lying is lying to ourselves. We want to show success.”

More than a year later, the Taliban captured Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, marking the start of a chaotic evacuation of American citizens and Afghans who had worked for the U.S. government. Over two weeks, U.S. troops rescued more than 124,000 people.

Thirteen service members and about 170 Afghans were killed in an Aug. 26, 2021, suicide bomb attack at Abbey Gate outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.