The Plywood Army
America has always had one foot out the door in Afghanistan.
A decade after U.S. forces arrived in Afghanistan, the headquarters of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force was still made of plywood, as were most of the other buildings that housed American troops. Resources existed to build out of concrete, but why would we do that? At any given point in our 20-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. At a remote outpost near the Iranian border where
