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Gail Nelson, a career intelligence officer and CU Boulder alumnus, advised Afghan military intelligence leaders after the United States drove the Taliban from power

It’s been almost three years since the Afghanistan government fell to the Taliban, and with the passage of time some have come to believe that America’s efforts to install and support a government that was democratic and friendly to the West were doomed from the start.

Gail Nelson is not  one of them.

“It didn’t have to be that way,” he says. “If there was more respect and authority given to the Afghan leaders to take responsibility for combating the Taliban, things might have been different. I can’t say for sure the outcome would have changed, but at least the responsibility would have been more on the Afghans and less on the U.S. and NATO.”

Nelson speaks from experience. A University of babyֱ��app Boulder graduate with master’s and doctorate degrees in political science and a U.S. Civil Service and Air Force intelligence career , Nelson served as a military advisor to top Afghan intelligence officials for two years during the early 2000s and for three years during the early 2010s.

Gail Nelson is pictured in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2013, with the tomb of the late king, Mohammad Nadir Shaw, in the background. Nelson says he was optimistic about the country’s chances during his first deployment to the country as a senior intelligence advisor from 2003 to 2005 but grew increasingly concerned about its prospects during his second deployment, from 2010 to 2013.

Those first years in Afghanistan—after the Taliban had been driven from power by U.S. and coalition forces following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on American soil—were promising, according to Nelson.

Promising early years

In December 2003, Nelson was one of about two dozen U.S. advisors—all military veterans  of senior military ranks —who were hired by a U.S. military contractor to work in Afghanistan. Representing different military branches and experienced in different fields, all were hired to advise top Afghan defense and intelligence officials.

“ We and the Afghans had radically different cultural backgrounds” Nelson says, “But we all had the common goal in getting Afghans out from under their experience of Soviet occupation and civil war. They had a clear determination  of moving Westward as was mine. It was a positive approach but there was much work to do in institutionalizing the change.”

Afghan intelligence leaders he worked with were Soviet-trained from the 1980s, when the Soviet Union occupied the country, so they already knew intelligence strategies and doctrine, but they wanted to embrace  U.S. and NATO methods as quickly as possible, according to Nelson.

“Afghanistan’s top intelligence official personally asked me: Help us develop an organization that is Western-oriented in organization and doctrine,” he says. “They wanted our help learning to run a defense and intelligence organization aligned with the West. They saw it as important for Afghanistan to be part of  the West.”

In Afghanistan, the culture grants respect to people based on their age, honoring the experiences of life they must share, according to Nelson, so the fact that he and many of his fellow advisors were older  was an asset used for maximum effect.

“They decide how old you are, and then they decide if they should listen to you,” he says. “So, my fellow advisors and I had the advantage of age in our favor when offering advice to younger Afghan leaders.”

Nelson says his daily duties at the time typically involved meeting with top defense and intelligence officials to exchange ideas on military intelligence theory and practice, and to develop papers on intelligence production, collection, and counterintelligence. These matters included doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, and facilities.

Plenty of expertise to share

Nelson had extensive strategic intelligence knowledge based upon his 26 years in Western Europe, where he was responsible for Soviet/Warsaw Pact and Post-Soviet political intelligence estimates. His master’s and doctorate degrees in political science earned at CU Boulder specializing in German and Soviet studies were invaluable reinforcements to the challenges that lay ahead.

He took mandatory retirement from the Air Force in 2001, at the age of 57, retiring as a colonel and retired from the U.S. Civil Service as well. However, after 9/11, military contractors were looking for individuals with specialized expertise, and Nelson says he believed he could put his skills to good use in Afghanistan, where national leaders were seeking to create a country free of the Taliban’s harsh rule.

Nelson is pictured recently in his library in his Boulder home. The framed photo on the bookshelf is the late CU political science professor Edward J. Rozek, who was a mentor. Nelson says what he learned in his German and Soviet area studies courses while obtaining a master’s degree and PhD from CU Boulder were invaluable to him in his job as an Air Force intelligence officer.

Although Nelson worked in Afghanistan as a private contractor, he had plenty of opportunities to observe the interactions of U.S. and NATO active-duty military leaders with their Afghan counterparts. He believes Afghans were willing to give those Western military representatives the benefit of the doubt for the first year or so that he was in the country, but things changed over time.

“U.S./NATO officers found great difficulty in adapting to Afghan culture and were not inclined to do so. They had no background in South Asian area studies, making it difficult for them to understand the political, psychological and leadership styles of Afghan military leaders,” Nelson says. For their part, Afghan officers generally found it difficult to embrace the primacy of computer technologies within their institutions preferring instead the affinity of direct human discourse.

Complicating matters, Nelson says the decision to limit U.S./NATO military personnel deployments in Afghanistan to one year limited how effective those officers could be working with representatives of the Afghan defense ministry and general staff leadership.  

“Institution-building is not easy; it takes time,” he says. “And in a culture like Afghanistan, you’re not going to make changes quickly.”

What’s more, it was always clear to both U.S. military officials and their Afghan counterparts that Iraq—which the United States invaded in 2003 to remove Saddam Hussein from power and search for weapons of mass destruction—would take precedence over Afghanistan, Nelson says.

Despite these obstacles—and many others associated with attempting to assist governing a country with eight major tribal groups and more than 15 subcultures—Nelson says he still felt reasonably optimistic about the country’s prospects when he departed in December 2005.

He went on to take consulting assignments as a military advisor in the Philippines and Iraq.

Signs of a downward spiral

In September 2010, Nelson returned to Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, and he says it was immediately clear things had changed for the worse, in part because the security situation had deteriorated.

Threats to Afghanistan leaders including NATO officers were visible throughout Kabul with the construction of barriers on major roads and thoroughfares. One assassin attempted to kill the chief of military Intelligence in 2011 but failed to reach his target. Safehouses for advisors were primary targets as well, in which two guards were killed at Nelson’s residence, followed by at least two advisors killed in car bombs in 2012. Three Afghan children known to Nelson were also killed at the Gate to Camp Eggers by a suicide bomber. 

Kabul had become a more dangerous place.

Meanwhile, Nelson says he was disheartened to realize that he and other military contractors were increasingly being sidelined by U.S./NATO active-duty military members,  despite their deep connections with their Afghan counterparts. He says Western leaders also increasingly bypassed Afghan leaders as they took the lead on Afghan-NATO missions against the Taliban—a decision that had negative repercussions for the country’s security when Western forces drastically scaled down their presence in the country while Afghans felt disempowered to fill the vacuum   

At the same time, years into the operation in Afghanistan, Nelson says U.S./NATO military planners still had not done their homework when it came to teaching U.S. military personnel about Afghan history, culture, and geopolitics.

Outside of the capital, most of Afghanistan’s population live in small, rural villages, many without electricity, that adhere to tribalism and Islamic traditions. Most of the Afghans who live in those communities never leave them, which creates a provincial attitude reinforced by  complete indifference to events in Kabul, according to Nelson.

“So, a young U.S. military officer from Kansas telling a village chieftain how to run things is not going to go over well,” he says. “You can’t just march into a country like Afghanistan and think they are going to embrace a modern, computer, business-oriented model  when 10 miles outside of Kabul they don’t have lightbulbs.”

For their part, the Taliban were successful in their propaganda efforts to get those villagers to see Western troops not just as foreigners, but as alien outsiders with no respect for the country’s deep cultural and religious traditions, Nelson says.

When he left Afghanistan for the last time in September 2013, he was deeply ambivalent about the country’s prospects. When the country fell to the Taliban in September 2021, it did not surprise him, Nelson says.

“We lost traction on the Afghan defense side,” he says. “They were no longer responsible for what was happening in the field. It was too late; they were not engaged. That had morphed over to NATO and the U.S. taking the lead in combatting the Taliban.”

What’s more, the Trump administration’s decision in February 2020 to negotiate directly with the Taliban—and to exclude the Afghan government—for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country “effectively surrendered Afghan sovereignty,” Nelson says.

Lessons not learned

Today, three years after the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, Nelson says he is worried that America has not learned two vital lessons from its longest war.

The first is not standing by Afghans leaders who stood with the United States after the Taliban was driven from power in 2001. Specifically, Nelson says he is deeply troubled that the U.S. and NATO have made no concerted efforts to evacuate and provide asylum for top Afghan political and military leaders before or after the country fell to the Taliban in August 2021.

Of the Afghan intelligence leaders he worked with, Nelson says one was killed  in the aftermath of the Taliban’s retaking of the country, at least one is in hiding in Afghanistan and one is in neighboring Tajikistan but is in limbo there, unable to gain U.S. assistance. Nelson says he is unsure about the fate is  to several other top Afghan intelligence officials he knew from his time in the country.

Leaving those Afghan leaders behind was not right and sends a bad signal to U.S. allies and potential allies, Nelson notes. He says he has contacted the U.S. State Department, the White House and other government agencies advocating for asylum for those Afghan leaders but has received no response.

Meanwhile, Nelson says he believes many of the problems the United States faced in Afghanistan arose because military planners were not experts in area studies for the region, and he says part of that blame goes to universities, which he says typically do not offer master’s degrees and PhDs in area studies.

“If universities aren’t graduating MA/PhDs in area studies for various regions of the world, we are going to continue to produce people who know nothing about regional histories, cultures and geopolitics that dictate whether U.S. national security policies are a success or a failure,” he says. “We blew it in Vietnam, and we blew it in Afghanistan. I believe one of the key issues was there was a failure among the Pentagon planners, who were coming out of a background that was functional and not area-studies related.”

Reflecting on America’s war in Afghanistan, Nelson says, “Marching into an area we had no real knowledge of, you see the lesson now for what it is once it collapsed in 2021, and we’re back to a Taliban regime.”

Top image: a view of Kabul, Afghanistan (Photo: iStock)

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