Afghanistan did not have to be Vietnam 2.0, says former intelligence advisor
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 Colorado 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.