In the heart of Columbus, Ohio, a group of veterans gathered earlier this month, their voices carrying the weight of two decades spent in Afghanistan. What emerged from that meeting was not a celebration of valor or victory, but a chorus of frustration, disillusionment, and raw honesty. The occasion was a discussion session convened by the bipartisan Afghanistan War Commission, a body tasked with dissecting the United States’ longest war and drawing out its lessons for Congress and, perhaps, the nation at large.
The commission’s second interim report, released on August 19, 2025, doesn’t offer conclusions—at least not yet. Instead, it identifies themes that have surfaced from thousands of pages of government documents, approximately 160 interviews with high-level officials, and direct testimony from those who served on the ground. According to reporting from the Associated Press, the commission’s work spans the entirety of the conflict, reviewing decisions from June 2001 through the harrowing withdrawal in August 2021, and aims to deliver a final report to Congress by August 2026.
For many veterans, the war was not just a distant foreign policy endeavor; it was a personal crucible. At the August 12 discussion, four of the commission’s 16 members listened as dozens of veterans recounted their experiences. The mood was somber, reflective, and at times, searingly critical. Not a single story offered a positive take, and most were saturated in disappointment. Marine veteran Brittany Dymond, who served in Afghanistan in 2012, put it bluntly: “I think the best way to describe that experience was awful.”
Navy veteran Florence Welch went further, expressing deep shame over the war’s chaotic end. “It turned us into a Vietnam, a Vietnam that none of us worked for,” she told the commission, referencing the 2021 withdrawal that many saw as a painful echo of America’s exit from Southeast Asia decades earlier. The comparison to Vietnam wasn’t merely rhetorical; it underscored a sense of futility and abandonment that has haunted those who served.
The Afghanistan War Commission itself is a product of this reckoning. Created by Congress several months after the withdrawal, the commission was born out of bipartisan frustration and a desire to grapple with the conflict’s legacy. According to the Associated Press, the war spanned four presidential administrations and cost more than 2,400 American lives, not to mention the untold toll on Afghan civilians and U.S. allies. The commission’s mandate is broad: to analyze strategic, diplomatic, military, and operational decisions, and to understand not just what happened, but why—and at what cost.
Dr. Colin Jackson, the commission’s co-chair, explained the group’s approach in an interview in Columbus. “So we’re interested in looking hard at the end of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan, but we’re equally interested in understanding the beginning, the middle and the end,” he said. The commission is determined that its final report “should be representative of every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine experience,” Jackson added. In other words, the commission wants its work to resonate with those who lived the war, not just those who studied it from afar.
Co-chair Shamila Chaudhary emphasized that the commission’s work goes beyond Afghanistan. “So our work is not just about what the U.S. did in Afghanistan but what the U.S. should be doing in any country where it deems it has a national security interest,” she said. This means wrestling with big, uncomfortable questions: Should the U.S. be intervening abroad? How should it conduct itself when it does? What values should guide its actions, especially in places with cultures and histories vastly different from its own?
The commission’s interim report identifies several emerging themes: strategic drift, interagency incoherence, and the sometimes conflicting aims of fighting a war inside Afghanistan while waging a broader counterterrorism campaign elsewhere. These are not just academic concerns—they reflect real confusion and frustration experienced by those on the ground. As Dymond told the commission, “You cannot exert a democratic agenda, which is our foreign policy, you cannot do that on a culture of people who are not bought into your ideology. What else do we expect the outcome to be? And so we had two decades of service members lost and maimed because we’re trying to change an ideology that they didn’t ask for.”
For Army veteran Steve Orf, who served eight years, the experience was profoundly demoralizing. “Those of us who served generally wanted to believe that we were helping to improve the world, and we carried with us the hopes, values, and principles of the United States — values and principles that also seem to have been casualties of this war,” he told the commissioners. “For many of us, faith with our leaders is broken and trust in our country is broken.”
It’s not just the veterans’ stories that have shaped the commission’s work. According to the Associated Press, the group has conducted some 160 interviews with cabinet-level officials, military commanders, diplomats, and leaders from Afghanistan and Pakistan. The review has also faced bureaucratic hurdles. The Biden administration initially denied requests for White House materials related to the February 2020 Doha Agreement—an accord signed by President Trump’s administration and the Taliban—as well as documents concerning the withdrawal, citing executive confidentiality. The transition to a new administration brought further delays, but after persistent urging from the commission, the flow of critical intelligence and documents has begun to improve.
Tuesday’s report, while stopping short of final judgments, lays out the difficulties of untangling a war that was, in many ways, defined by its contradictions. Was the U.S. fighting for democracy, for security, or for something else entirely? Were the various agencies and branches of government truly working toward the same goals? And perhaps most importantly, was the cost—measured in lives, resources, and trust—worth the outcome?
These questions remain open, but the commission’s work is far from finished. The final report, due in August 2026, is expected to provide not just a historical account, but a set of recommendations for future U.S. engagements. As co-chair Chaudhary put it, the goal is to help the country think more deeply about “how it should behave, what values does it guide itself by, and how does it engage with individuals who are very different from themselves.”
As the United States continues to grapple with the legacy of its longest war, the voices of those who served—and those who led—will be central to any reckoning. The Afghanistan War Commission’s ongoing inquiry, shaped by both policy and personal experience, offers a rare opportunity to confront uncomfortable truths and, perhaps, chart a wiser path forward.
