Hi, everybody. Good evening. Thank you all so much for coming tonight. Im carrie robb. Im the author, Events Coordinator for Saint Louis County library. And on behalf of the library, im very pleased to welcome you to tonights westfall politics and history series event with acclaimed author walker correspondent and decorated veteran elliott. In conversation with journalist kathy gilsenan. So tonights event is presented by the associate authors at the j, which is a new partnership between the library and the jcc. As you may know, our library on lindbergh is now under construction and i think the wrecking ball comes for it next week. So during the time that our new building is being built, the jcc has offered us the use of this gorgeous facility here for our author event. So many of our events be here for the next year and a half. I you guys will join us a lots more. I also want to let you know that cspan is here tonight recording for book tv, which i think is so cool. So you guys can watch this again on book tv in a couple of weeks. I also want to recognize our bookseller Left Bank Books saint louis is the oldest and premier independent bookstore. Left bank has eliots books for sale in the back of the room, and he will sign back there as well after the talk. So on the event our author this evening, Eliot Ackerman, served five tours of duty in iraq and afghanistan in both the infantry and as a Marine Corps SpecialOperations Officer for his military service. He is a recipient of a silver star, a bronze star and a purple heart. Elliott holds a masters degree in International Affairs from the Fletcher School of law and diplomacy and served as a white house fellow under president obama following his military service, elliott worked as a war correspondent covering syria and afghanistan. His reporting was featured in the new yorker, the atlantic, the new republic and elsewhere. Eliots literary writing includes the novels green on blue, dark at the crossing, waiting for ian and 2030 for garnering comparisons to the work of Graham Greene and earnest hemingway, andre debuts the third described green on blue as one of the finest literary debuts i have ever witnessed. His second novel, dark of the crossing, was one of the first major works of fiction to address the Syrian Civil War and was nominated for a National Book award. So i always say that eliot has the best bio of anyone i ever introduced. Its awesome, though. Incredible. So tonight, eliot is here to discuss his new book, the fifth act a history of the American Invasion and occupation of afghanistan, as well as personal reflections on his own efforts to aid in the evacuation efforts of former colleagues and other afghan nationals during the fall of kabul. Our conversation partner this evening, kathy gilsenan, is a st louis based contributor for the atlantic, where she often reports on national security. She previously served as an at World Politics review and she is the author of the book the helpers profiles from the frontlines of the pandemic. So now, please help me welcome Eliot Ackerman and kathy gilsenan. Hello. Hello, how are you doing, eliot . Good, thank you. Welcome to saint louis. Were glad to have you. Very good to be here. So you happen to be here on the one Year Anniversary of the fall of kabul to the taliban. Were you surprised when this happened and why. First of all, thanks so much for having me, kari. Thank you so much hosting me again. Its great to be back in saint louis. This city always gives me a very warm welcome, which i really appreciate as we sort of transition back into doing inperson events. So its really nice to be with you all tonight and it was not planned that we would actually do this on the one year. So i think its sort of serendipitous that were here tonight. And i was thinking about what i was doing last year and i was actually, of all places in my mother in laws kitchen with my wife. And i just sort of turned on the tv and was catching the headlines as kabul was was falling. And my mother lives in florida and i was heading back up to washington to grab my kids because we were going to go on a long planned family holiday to to europe. So did i think at that point that kabul was going to fall . Yes, its it seemed as though it was trending that way, but that was only after like the preceding 2 to 3 weeks of every city, major city in afghanistan, falling to the taliban. And you knew things that. Yeah. And you knew things that other people didnt know having been there. But but from our perspective, i think news consumers, for instance, in saint louis, missouri, the numbers didnt make sense because wed been told you know, there were 350,000 plus wellequipped Afghan Forces compared to 75,000 taliban. Right. Then in april 2021, when biden announces hell be out of there by september of afghanistans 400 districts, the taliban controls 77. The government controls 129, and the remainder are contested by june. Intelligence officials are warning newspapers that the government might have only six months to hang on after having said, you know, they have two years to hang on. By july, the taliban controls 195 districts. By august, well, im wondering, based on your experience training and working with Afghan Forces, you know, you didnt you expected the fall of kabul by the time it happened. But were you expecting it that quickly . And what do you think accounted for it . So war is a science, but it is also an art. And like since i left the military, sometimes people will say to me, like elliott, its so odd that like youre and youre a novelist and a writer. Now, that seems like a strange pursuit for someone whod been a soldier to to engage in and actually, i think its very intuitive because when you are in the military, you spend much of your time preoccupied with the psychology of the person that youre fighting against, because that psychology really matters. And so as a, you know, as a novelist, you spend a lot of time preoccupied with the psychology of your characters, like imagining your way into other peoples heads. So i only bring this up in response to your question, because sometimes we get too fixated on the scientific aspects of war. How many tanks, how many troops you know, how much ammunition they have, like all of the things, how many how many districts are controlled and what is it . Whereas war is political and its political. Its psychological, you know, exists in peoples and their spirits in the nepal. I and this is not like news, right . I mean, you know, clausewitz said politics is war. Our war is politics by other means. Napoleon said in war the material is to the or sorry the moral is to the material as three is to one. So moral factors count for three times what material factors count as so when we sit there and we see all these numbers trotted out in from other stories like, oh my god, how did this afghan army sort of melt away . Its important to keep them. They melted because of the psychology of the war, the politics of the war, the fact that they collect there was a collective belief that they were not going to be able to hold together front of the taliban. And so it didnt matter how many guns, troops you had, it all just melted away. What did you make at the at the time of the. And then well to the actual book but of military commanders explanation that the afghans had lost the will to was that convincing to you based on your experiences or did you feel that perhaps there was a little bit of buck passing going on there . I think sort of both. I mean, there was there was buck passing going on there. You know, that it if you just take one step back, its sort of, you know, its sort of tough to take it seriously when americans as were as leaving the country, are telling the afghans that they lost their will to fight as we ourselves have lost our will to fight. So everyone sort of lost their to fight. So i think, yes it is true that i think in a macro sense, the afghan army and the afghan Political Class sort of lost its ability to cohere, is what i would say. And because they could not cohere anymore without america, they lost their will to fight. But if you go down to the individual level, i mean, there are many, many examples of afghan units like basically fighting to the last man, particularly Afghan Special operations units, their commando units. You know, it also saying they lost their will to fight elides the fact that when we said we were pulling out, we pulled out all of our enablers so like their aircraft there close air support, their medical evacuations, the helicopters they relied on the logistics. They relied on their ability to maintain any of that vanished because when they brought those aircraft back to air bases, the contra who were helping them, you know, fuel them and turn wrenches on them, you know, were western contractors are now being told that they were going to leave. So i dont feel like to say, oh, they just lost the will to fight and theres nothing else to see here is is an overly simplistic answer. But the will to fight certainly matters. Something that i think has been you know, if we look at this thats been so fascinating is to afghanistan and juxtaposition, you know, with ukraine. And thats a place you do see a society that has cohered and does have this very deep will to fight. And when we talk about numbers, you know, particularly in the early days of ukraine and the popular analysis was, it was, well, this small Ukrainian Army can just not hold against this massive russian juggernaut coming across its border. But actually, when you look in ukraine now the number, the numerical advantage, ukraine does not lay with the russians, it lays with the ukrainians, like the russians right now are struggling to meet conscription goals like they do not have enough troops. And putin cant do National Conscription without. Declaring his special military operation actual war. Whereas ukrainians yes, they dont have a big army, but they have a nation of Million People that is completely mobilized. So they basically have a 40 million person strong army against the russians. So i just bring that up as an aside is again how you think about the numbers really matters. Yeah, this brings us to the opening scene of your book, the fall of kabul. I believe your book opens about five days after the fall of kabul. Youre on vacation in italy with your family and your phone is blowing up with desperate folks trying to get out of kabul to the airport and out of the country. Youre touring the roman ruins. Your kids are complaining about all the walking and youre in real time via whatsapp, trying to pluck people from the ruins of this american experiment. Were you trying to evoke a theme of fallen empire. Or was this just kind of where you happen to be when this is happening. First of all, if chevy chase is watching, im sort of hoping they might optioned this book for like one of the national lampoon, european vacation movies sometimes because sometimes certainly i certainly felt like that. But in the we have cspan. Yeah, exactly. I it was so as i mentioned, kabul fell as i was taking my kids, our sort of end of Summer Vacation as it fell and my experience, i think, is in no way unique know its not unique. My entire network was just lighting up with people who needed help or were working to get folks out but you know i was also trying to be a you know, a father and a husband and be present for my kids. So to me, you know, if you pick up the book, youll see it kind of juxtaposes between episodes of my of my past and time that i spent in afghanistan on and in the present am i present is evacuation is happening couldnt be further from afghanistan. It is this very nice that we are taking in rome of all places. And i you know, yes, it difficult not to recognize the fact that im, you know, walking through the baths of caracalla or the with my son, you know, kind of ambling through these ruins of an expired empire. Im watching what, you know, when i look at my country i would say seems like episode of very late empire behavior as we watch the end of a 20 year war. And its impossible not to put those two in juxtaposition with each other and its also you know, it was important to me to have that in the book because i think for many veterans, it was so jarring to be i mean, i left the wars in thousand 11 and to be sucked back into it in this way where youre kind of trying to live your postwar life. But all these relationships and all these places that had such resonance you ten years before are suddenly immediately in your life again. And the people youre close with, i speak, i say in the book, you know, that i met my wife after the war, so she didnt know me during wars and my kids didnt know me during the wars. And theyre sort of getting this into kind of tads past life. Thats thats an interesting question, too. Its like you use the phrase just now, postwar life for you and you write in here, youve written elsewhere about how these wars have shaped you. Is there any such thing as a postwar life . Well, trying to. Yes and no. Like because youre going back to war as war correspondent. Yeah, yes. Yeah but it is different to be to write about war than to be a participant in war. I mean, i feel like the stakes are a little bit different. And and what i do is certainly less risky than what i used to. But you know, people have sometimes asked me how, you know, like eliot, how did the war change you . And i think for anyone who sends someone off to war, theres always this sort of fear that they will come back change, which is an understandable fear when i sort of reflect on that question, how did the war change you . I actually dont even know how to answer that question anymore because the war didnt really change me. I think the war made me like its braided. So deeply into who i am that like i cant untangle who i am from the war. Its kind of like asking someone like, how did your mother change . You go, my mother, me, like, you know, i am of i am of my mother, i am of my brother and my family like, you know, so, so, you know, i went off, i kind of got on this path to go to war when i was 17 years old. I mean, im 42 today, so so i cant tease it apart. So maybe thats because i guess you dont completely have a postwar life because i cant have a postmetoo life. But the really acute of it, it did feel like i was being being pulled back to that and having to look at this thing one last time where i thought i kind of had closure. Yeah. And its interesting, you use the word braided because the book is very the book is braided between your your present and your past. And it takes place in five acts interspersed, your work on the evac you on the evacuation with your work in country, both with the marines and with the cia. Why did you choose to lay the book out to structure the book in that way in five acts specifically to write so. So the title of the book is the fifth act the spy what amazon will tell you. Its not in the dramatic arts category, but it is available for purchase in the back. But you know, so thats the title of the book came was actually not not long after i was sitting in my mother in laws kitchen, florida, i got a i got a phone call from a friend of mine. She runs like a very like a very substack and she was like doing something, you know, she was putting together something. Shes scrambling to cover. Yeah, very. Guevara called me and and and she said, hey, elliot, im getting together like five or six people to just sort of write short essays about what is happening in afghanistan. You know, could you give me 500 words . And i was im like, feel i feel overwhelmed. I dont want to write 500 words about this right now. I like i dont think i can do it. And she was like, yeah. And so we were kind of going back and forth. Shes like, come on, i would do it. Like, listen, its, its im like, what do you even want me to write . And shes like, well, i mean, you know, people just havent been following this, theyre watching this. And they just dont understand how we got here in this whole thing is a tragic and it was her use of the word tragic that just sort of made me think of, you know the daunting task of trying to summarize 20 years of war in 500 words which you know just tough but that idea of tragedy i was like you know if you look at classic dramatic structures from like shakespeare to horace, you know, the the epigraph for the book is horace, you know, tragedies typically told in five acts. And so the short piece i wrote from her was like, okay, im going to write, you know, a little bit about each of the president s know bush, obama, trump, biden in the fifth act is going to be what comes next to the taliban, the sort of, you know, the tragic denouement. And so that gave me sort of a frame to start to start to thinking just thinking about what was happening over these 20 years. And i actually hadnt planned to write a book i wrote by her 500 words and thought nothing else of it. And then i got a a phone call from my book agent, my editor and they sort of said, hey same thing, like people are watching this, you know, maybe this is a chance to, like, do a short paperback, original, you know, just some, you know, ive written a lot on the topic and yeah, will we get it out quickly and i said, okay, good, we can do it in the fall and left for this. The two weeks that are basically chronicled this book. And then i came back after kind of being involved. And so, you know, the five acts of the president , theres also a really five set piece of accusations are in the book. And after being involved with and i called my book here and said like, i think this needs to be a really different book. I think it needs to talk about what happened these last two weeks, which is like frankly for me it was like nothing i had ever seen before in my life. Yeah, lets, lets get into that a little more because its not over. Its an its in a different maybe its in a different act right now. But the evacuation is not over. And you have organization so so no one left behind is an Advocacy Organization that works on these evacuations. Theyve been tweeting out that say there are over 160,000 special immigrant visa afghans. So that means theyre eligible for special visas for having worked translators, etc. U. S. Forces, eligible afghans still left behind 74,000 already in the pipeline i believe that means that theyve already applied, but they cant but they cant get out. I guess just talk to me about what this has been