Two years later, Miller was serving in Iraq, fighting an insurgency that the Defense Department didn’t yet acknowledge, when his vehicle was ambushed near Baghdad, and he was shot and wounded. He later returned to Iraq as Delta Force’s deputy commander and commander several times, taking part in the successful hunt for archterrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and running Special Operations Forces in brutal fighting in western Anbar Province, where terrorists were infiltrating from Syria. That operation was part of the largely successful U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq, and the “Anbar Miracle” that seemed to herald another victory—until the 2011 U.S. troop withdrawal allowed al Qaeda in Iraq to reconstitute itself as the fearsome Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Miller returned to Afghanistan during the 2010-11 “surge,” when U.S. forces numbered more than 100,000, and returned yet again in 2013-14 to serve as commanding general of the Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan. He would command across both theaters of war during 2016-18 as head of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, operational headquarters for America’s elite commandos such as Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team Six.

His career has been built, in part, on his understanding of the on-the-ground dynamics of conflict. But by the eve of his departure from Afghanistan earlier this week, Miller and NATO’s Resolute Support Command had withdrawn its liaison officers in the field, and thus lost visibility into what is happening with the Afghan security forces trying to hold off the Taliban. Recent reports suggest the Taliban now control more than 160 of the country’s 407 districts—up from about 61 in 2018—with whole garrisons of Afghan troops surrendering, in some cases without a fight. The Afghan defense minister has ordered a “strategic consolidation” of his troops, concentrating them in the major cities while surrendering much of the countryside to the Taliban. In what some experts interpret as a sign of desperation, the Afghan government is even forming alliances again with independent armed militias with a history of animosity toward the Taliban, in a bid for survival if it comes to all-out civil war.

In a recent discussion with Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the seasoned diplomat who has led U.S. peace talks with the Taliban, Miller discussed the recent negative trend lines inside Afghanistan. The two Americans most personally identified with recent efforts to end the war agreed that Afghanistan was a peculiar country, where events can take a sharp turn very quickly. Miller acknowledged some pessimism in our interviews: There’s every possibility, he said, that Afghan Security Forces won’t be able to hold.

“The Afghan Security Forces almost to a unit are less confident, and its leaders are obviously worried, because a big part of this business is about confidence—and in the face of the Taliban’s aggressive offensive and the surrender of some ASF garrisons, that’s in short supply right now,” he told me.

The Ministry of Defense’s strategic consolidations of forces into the major cities is sound tactically, he said. “But the question is, will that be enough?”

Miller took command of Operation Resolute Support believing that commanders can learn more from the aspects of operations that are going badly than those that are going well. In 2018, that meant the 14,000 U.S. and 6,500 NATO troops and their leaders in Afghanistan as the bulwark of Resolute Support were learning a lot, and in a hurry.

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