Afghanistan has never had a peaceful transfer of power between legitimate governments. That, not tribalism, not geography, is the country's greatest political failure.

Five years after Kabul fell, the debate is still centered on one question: Who will replace the Taliban? It is the wrong question. Afghanistan's future depends not on replacing one regime with another, but on ending the century-long tradition of governments born through conquest, revolution, or elite bargains.

Since 2021, resistance has taken many forms. Armed groups continue to challenge Taliban rule, while women have built underground classrooms, journalists document the country from exile, and former soldiers refuse to surrender the idea of a constitutional Afghanistan. The resistance exists, but it remains politically fragmented. 

The lesson of 2001

I served twelve years inside Afghanistan's military institutions. The Republic did not collapse because Afghan soldiers lacked courage. It collapsed because too many citizens believed the state belonged to political elites rather than to themselves.

That lesson matters today.

If the resistance enters Kabul only to divide ministries among commanders and politicians, Afghanistan will repeat 2001 under a different flag. A government negotiated by factions may change rulers, but it will not change the political culture that repeatedly produces collapse.

A republic built from the people

The next government should begin with institutions, not personalities: a representative transitional council, a genuinely elected Loya Jirga, an open constitutional process, and elections that give every Afghan an equal voice regardless of ethnicity, gender, or political history.

The resistance should help build that system.

It should never own it.

The real victory

The Taliban proved that force can capture a state. The Republic proved that elections alone cannot sustain one. Afghanistan's next chapter must prove something different: that legitimacy comes from citizens who can freely choose, criticize, and peacefully replace their leaders.

The success of the resistance will not be measured by the day it enters Kabul. It will be measured by the day an Afghan child believes that changing a government requires a ballot, not a battlefield.

Yaser Yarghal is the author of Unsabotaged, a memoir about war, leadership, and rebuilding a life after conflict and displacement. He served as an officer in the Afghan National Army, graduated from U.S. Army Ranger School and Airborne training, and now lives in Canada.

People like the idea of rebuilding. They like it a lot less when they see what it actually looks like.

In 2022, I was about $120,000 in debt. My first construction business had collapsed after a partnership fell apart, and I had sold everything I owned to close it out clean.

I was working full-time framing for someone else’s company. Most nights, I drove Uber too—just to keep the loan payments moving and stay ahead of bankruptcy.

Rebuilding didn’t start with a business plan.

It started with a truck.

I found an old, rusted Ford through a roofing contractor who was getting out of the business. He wanted $2,200 for it. It came with a compressor and some hoses because he just wanted it gone.

I wasn’t buying a symbol of anything.

I needed a way to carry tools to small job sites without putting more wear on the car I needed for Uber.

That truck became part of my life.

I worked my regular job during the week. I drove Uber at night. On weekends, I picked up whatever small work I could find, a concrete pad, some asphalt, landscaping, and did much of it myself.

When a job was too big for me to finish alone, I’d call my friend Ambrose. He had the crew and the time. He would take the job, finish it, and pay me a ten percent commission for bringing him the work.

It wasn’t glamorous.

There was no big breakthrough. No investor. No perfect plan.

Just work.

Slowly, the debt began to come down.

Then came a Facebook post.

A Toronto contractor named Richard was urgently looking for framers. I told him I had the crew and the experience to finish his project.

He trusted me.

Over the next eight months, we built 49 units in an apartment building.

By the time the project was finished, nearly 70 percent of that debt was gone.

I still think about that truck.

Not because it was special. It wasn’t.

I think about it because it reminds me of what rebuilding actually looks like.

Sometimes, you don’t get a second chance wrapped in a perfect opportunity.

Sometimes, you get an old truck for $2,200.

You get tired.

You work another shift.

You take the small job.

You make the phone call.

You show up again.

And somehow, week by week, you start moving forward.

Yaser Yarghal is the author of Unsabotaged, a memoir about war, leadership, and rebuilding a life after conflict and displacement. He served as an officer in the Afghan National Army, graduated from U.S. Army Ranger School and Airborne training, and now lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

I’ve written before, in an article for the Irregular Warfare Initiative, about the corruption that hollowed out the Afghan Army: ghost soldiers on payrolls, bought promotions, fuel that disappeared before it reached a checkpoint. Every word of that was true.

But I’ve come to believe corruption was never the disease itself.

It was the fever, the visible sign that something deeper had already gone wrong.

That deeper problem was the gap between the Afghan state and Afghan society. For twenty years, they ran alongside each other without ever fully becoming one. In that space, where a soldier should have felt the army was his, and a citizen should have felt the government was hers, corruption found room to grow.

When institutions lose legitimacy, relationships become currency. People fall back on the systems they trust.

I saw this most clearly inside my own family.

In 2007, a close relative of mine was widowed in eastern Afghanistan. Her husband’s employer had left her an insurance payout, and her father-in-law tried to take control of it, pressuring her to return to his household.

She went to the police.

A summons was issued. He ignored it and warned the police chief, a man from our own village, that there would be consequences if anything happened to him or the money.

The police chief backed down.

He called it a family matter.

The state had reached the edge of what it could actually do.

So the dispute went to a jirga instead. I sat with the elders as they worked through the case. The money remained under the father’s control, but conditions were imposed to protect the children and prevent her from being forced back into the household.

I don’t tell this story to romanticize the jirga or endorse any government. I tell it because it reveals something fundamental about Afghanistan: people have always lived inside more than one system of authority.

The state is one.

Family, community, elders, religion, and local relationships are others.

The question was never simply which system had more guns or paperwork. It was which one people believed would protect them when it mattered.

When the formal state could not provide that protection, people turned to the relationships and institutions they trusted. That same pattern would eventually shape the behavior of the state itself.

It was never a shortage of courage.

I’ve watched soldiers walk into caves they knew almost nothing about because they chose to. I’ve watched commanders defend outposts as though they were defending their own homes.

Afghanistan did not lack people willing to risk their lives for something they believed was theirs.

What it lacked was a reliable way to turn that courage into something durable.

The same problem appeared in the people tasked with connecting Afghanistan to the outside world.

After 2001, educated and internationally connected Afghans became essential to building the new state: officers, technocrats, diplomats, administrators, and professionals who could move between Afghan institutions and the international system.

That mattered.

But knowing how to navigate the international system was not the same as being trusted by the people at home.

Some of the people who should have become bridges, carrying Afghan concerns outward while explaining the modern state back to Afghan communities, became something narrower.

They became conduits.

A bridge connects two sides.

A conduit simply carries something through.

The distinction mattered. A bridge carries the concerns of one side to the other and brings understanding back. A conduit can move money, policy, and expectations without necessarily creating trust.

I watched the consequences inside institutions as well.

When a friend was promoted to a senior position at the Ministry of Interior, people who barely knew me suddenly wanted introductions. They wanted access to a relationship that might help their careers.

The quiet question shifted from:

How well do I do my job?

to:

Who do I know?

That is not an inherent flaw in Afghan culture. It is what happens when personal relationships begin doing the work institutions are supposed to do.

And once that happens, corruption becomes easier to sustain.

By 2021, the state had built real things: schools, universities, professional institutions, ministries, and security forces containing people capable of extraordinary skill and sacrifice.

But it had built expansion faster than ownership.

Some communities genuinely saw themselves in the Republic. Others never did.

The institutions became more sophisticated on paper while their connection to parts of society remained fragile.

The outside system had also helped build enormous capacity, funding, logistics, intelligence, training, contractors, and airpower. But capacity was not the same as ownership.

When that support changed, weaknesses that had been covered for years became visible almost overnight.

That is why I reject the simple explanation that Afghan soldiers simply lost the will to fight.

An army is not only its soldiers.

It is leadership, logistics, intelligence, command, and whether those wearing the uniform believe the political order behind them is worth defending and belongs to them.

When that connection is weak, courage alone cannot hold the line.

Corruption was real. It was corrosive and deserving of every bit of scrutiny it has received, including the scrutiny I gave it in my previous article.

But I now see it differently.

It was the wound we could see.

The deeper condition was a state and a society that never fully recognized each other as parts of the same political project.

That matters because a wound can be treated while the underlying condition remains. Governments can arrest corrupt officials, rewrite procurement rules, and create new oversight bodies. None of that is enough if the state still feels external to the society it governs.

The problem is larger than corruption.

It is legitimacy.

A durable Afghan state was never going to come from choosing one part of the country over another, or forcing society into a blueprint designed somewhere else.

It requires institutions in which different parts of Afghan society can recognize themselves, institutions that connect local trust to national structures, treat religious communities as citizens rather than obstacles, and hold internationally connected Afghans accountable to their own society as much as to the institutions that empowered them.

It does not mean rejecting modern institutions.

It means making them Afghan institutions.

It does not mean abandoning the state for local structures.

It means building a state that can connect with them.

The question was never whether Afghanistan could build a state.

Afghans have built states before.

The harder question is whether Afghanistan can finally build a state its own people recognize as theirs.

Yaser Yarghal is the author of Unsabotaged, a memoir about war, leadership, and rebuilding a life after conflict and displacement. He served as an officer in the Afghan National Army, graduated from U.S. Army Ranger School and Airborne training, and now lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

It was not August 2021.

It was not the images from the airport. Not the crowds pressing against the gates. Not the aircraft lifting off with people clinging to them.

I understood something was already broken long before any of that.

I knew because I was in the room where I saw the warning signs.

In july 2017, our commando unit arrived at a garrison in northern Afghanistan after eleven days on the front line. We had been pushing back Enemy positions, trying to restore government control over territory that seemed to change hands with exhausting regularity. When the operation ended, we withdrew to the provincial capital to regroup.

There were about sixty of us, commandos, logistics officers, support personnel, and two Afghan Air Force Black Hawk pilots assigned to support our operations.

That evening, several of us met with the garrison commander, a colonel responsible for the installation and every soldier inside it. We needed his help arranging accommodations and equipment for our men. It was an ordinary coordination meeting.

Around the room sat the company commander, the fire support officer, the Air Force liaison, the logistics officer, the two pilots, and me.

Then the colonel turned to one of the Black Hawk pilots.

“Pilot,” he said, “you know the situation here is not good. If things get worse, don’t leave without me. Make sure you take me with you.”

He said it calmly, in front of all of us.

No one laughed.

No one responded.

I was a platoon commander, and I remember sitting there in silence.

For years, I had worked toward serving in a unit like this. At the National Military Academy, I ran for hours every day to prepare myself for the commandos. Later, I crossed an ocean to attend U.S. Army Ranger School and Airborne training, returning to Afghanistan convinced that leadership meant sharing danger with your soldiers, not avoiding it.

Yet here was a senior officer, one of the men responsible for defending this area, already thinking about how he would survive if everything collapsed.

That was the moment I understood something had changed.

His words reminded me of something I had witnessed the year before.

In 2015, while I was in the swamp phase of Ranger School in Florida, one of our instructors told us that Kunduz had fallen to the Taliban. It was the first provincial capital captured by the Taliban since 2001.

What followed was painful in a way I cannot fully describe, images of desperate evacuations, confusion among leaders, and soldiers fighting while the command structure around them was collapsing.

Eventually, Afghan Special Forces retook the city.

The difference between those two moments stayed with me.

One group was trying to find a way out.

The other was fighting its way back in.

The gap between them was not simply one of courage. It reflected something deeper: a difference in leadership, responsibility, and belief in the mission.

The colonel in that garrison had already made his choice. He simply had not needed to act on it yet.

A few days after the meeting with the colonel, I walked into the small convenience store inside the compound.

“I need one phone card,” I said.

The shopkeeper looked at me and shook his head.

“Officer, don’t buy just one. Buy ten. Buy twenty.”

I asked him why.

“Because the day will come when a phone card that costs fifty afghanis today will cost five hundred. You can’t trust this region. It will happen again. Make sure you have enough.”

I bought only one card.

But I never forgot what he told me.

The shopkeeper expected the system to fail.

So did the colonel.

One was preparing for shortages.

The other was preparing for evacuation.

Neither believed the institution they served would endure.

Two people. Two different positions. The same conclusion.

That was not a coincidence.

That was a pattern.

That was never the fault of the ordinary Afghan soldier.

For twenty years, Afghan soldiers fought under conditions most people will never experience. Tens of thousands were wounded. Tens of thousands never returned home. They fought in remote valleys, mountain outposts, deserts, and cities, often with limited support and enormous sacrifice.

The failure was not a lack of courage.

The failure was an institution that too often placed leaders in positions of responsibility who had already lost faith in the mission, the people, and the outcome they were supposed to fight for.

When people ask me why Afghanistan collapsed so quickly in August 2021, I do not think first about the final days in Kabul.

I think about that meeting in a quiet office in northern Afghanistan years earlier.

I think about a colonel who was already planning for the possibility of leaving before the battle had even been decided.

I think about Kunduz, and the men who went back in to retake it, and what it meant that the lesson of that moment never reached the people who needed it most.

Institutions rarely collapse in a single week. By the time the world notices the final collapse, the decisions that made it possible have often been unfolding for years.

I knew Kabul would fall.

Not because I was a prophet.

Not because I had intelligence no one else had.

Because I sat in that room in 2017 and heard a colonel ask a pilot not to leave without him.

Afghanistan did not fall because its soldiers stopped fighting.

It fell because too many of the people responsible for leading them had already chosen their seat on the helicopter.

Yaser Yarghal is the author of Unsabotaged, a memoir about war, leadership, and rebuilding a life after conflict and displacement. He served as an officer in the Afghan National Army, graduated from U.S. Army Ranger School and Airborne training, and now lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

I served for twelve years under the government that collapsed. For the past five years, I have watched the government that replaced it from outside the country while remaining closely connected to the people living under it.

That has given me a perspective few people have. I experienced one system from the inside and have observed the other from a distance through the lives of family, friends, and former colleagues. Neither matches the simple story most people tell about Afghanistan.

From where I stood, the Republic did not collapse because of a single offensive or a single decision made somewhere far away. It had been weakening from within for years,  quietly, in ways that never made headlines.

I did not learn that from reports or briefings written by people watching from a distance. I learned it by serving inside the institution itself, year after year.

I saw units report troop numbers that had little to do with the soldiers actually present for duty. Names remained on payrolls long after the men were gone. I was investigated because of a false report filed by someone in my own unit,  not by the enemy. During one operation, fifty of us waited seven days in the rubble for support that should have arrived within hours. When we finally made it home, we were praised for completing the mission.

Nobody asked the question that mattered:

Why did the support never come?

Those were not the enemy’s failures. They were ours.

Corruption. Dishonesty. Bureaucracy. And, beneath all of it, a culture that gradually learned to reward appearances over accountability.

It did not happen all at once.

It happened slowly enough that, by the time anyone might have named the problem, doing so would have meant admitting how far the system had already deteriorated. Year after year, it grew weaker while those with the authority to fix it either could not,  or chose not to.

By August 2021, the military’s collapse did not come as a surprise to many of us who had served within it. What looked to the world like a sudden failure had, from where we stood, been unfolding for years.

The world simply recognized it on the day it became impossible to ignore.

Five years have passed.

Afghanistan has different rulers, a different flag, different uniforms, and a different political system. But beneath those visible changes, the question that matters most has not changed:

Who is accountable?

I do not believe any government,  whatever it calls itself or whatever ideology it claims,  can build something lasting without an answer to that question.

Governments change.

Flags change.

Uniforms change.

But when those who hold power are never required to answer for their decisions, it is always ordinary people who pay the price.

I want to be clear about what this essay is, and what it is not.

It is not an argument for one government over another. It is a reflection on what I witnessed serving under one system and what I have observed since its collapse.

I watched one government weaken under the weight of its own failures. Five years later, I still believe Afghanistan’s future depends on more than who governs it.

It depends on whether anyone who holds power is ever truly held accountable.

Because until accountability exists, changing the flag will never be enough.

Thank you for reading.

If this essay resonated with you, please share it with someone who cares about Afghanistan, or about how governments succeed and fail. Independent writing grows one thoughtful reader at a time.

Yaser Yarghal

Former Afghan Army Major | U.S. Army Ranger and Airborne Graduate

Author of Unsabotaged

unsabotaged.substack.com

In June 2020, a soldier appeared at my office door. “Sir,” he said, “someone is calling for you. It’s your home.” I remember the specific dread of that phrase, your home, because in my unit, no one used it unless something was wrong. The signal there never worked, so I got in my vehicle and drove to the other side of the hill, hands tight on the wheel, running through every person I loved and hoping it wasn’t them.

It was my cousin Zamin, a young army officer, killed in live combat fire.

My brother told me over a phone line that kept cutting out. He wasn’t supposed to be the one to call, my whole family had agreed to wait, to find some gentler way to tell me once I was home. He decided against it. “You’re going to know eventually,” he said. “It’s better to know on time.” I’ve thought about that sentence more than almost anything else from that year. He was a military student himself. He understood something the rest of my family, in their instinct to protect me, hadn’t fully worked out: that not knowing is its own kind of cruelty.

I don’t remember what I felt in the seconds after. I remember going quiet inside, the way you do when a decision makes itself before your mind catches up. There was only one thing left to do, bring him home with the dignity a body deserves.

What followed were two of the strangest, most exhausting days of my life.

We requested a helicopter to move him from the hospital in Kabul back to our home province. It was delayed for weather. Delayed again. Mid-flight on the day it finally came, one of the two aircraft developed a door that wouldn’t close, forcing an emergency landing near Kabul while a village three provinces away sat waiting with an open grave. When we finally resumed, the pilots tried twice more to abandon the plan, first to cancel the last leg outright, then to drop us in the provincial capital instead, a crossing I knew was more dangerous than anywhere we’d already been. I refused both times. Eventually they agreed, on the condition that I help guide the landing myself, which I did.

And in the middle of all of it, a small moment that has stayed with me longer than the danger did: a provincial governor boarded our aircraft for part of the trip. He worked the tarmac like a man at a reception, greeting one group, then another, spending real time with each of them, and never once turned toward the four of us standing beside a body bag. He never said he was sorry. He may not have even registered that we were there.

When we finally landed in our district and unloaded my cousin’s body to his family, I expected the worst of the day to be behind me. Instead, my uncle met me with fury. Not relief, fury. At the government. At the delay. At me, specifically, for paperwork I had never managed to push through that might have transferred his son to a safer post years earlier. He wasn’t entirely wrong. I’d had the connections to move it faster and hadn’t, partly because I was busy, partly because I didn’t want anyone to think I was using my position for my own family. In hindsight, that hesitation cost something I can’t get back. I stood there and absorbed his anger because I didn’t have the words, or the right, to defend myself. I was grieving too, and there wasn’t room for both of our grief at once.

We buried him. And then I began the journey back to Kabul, from Host. Waiting there was the Minister of Defense, a man I had served under directly for months before joining special forces. We ended up traveling together, Host to Kabul, on the same aircraft. We shook hands. He knew exactly what had just happened, what I had just carried across three provinces and buried hours earlier. He said nothing about it. Not one word, the whole flight.

At my cousin’s funeral, villagers who had watched all of this unfold said something to me plainly, without much anger, almost like they were stating a fact of weather: your government is not loyal to you the way you are loyal to it.

I already knew. I’d felt it in a handshake that happened hours after I buried him, and in a silence that lasted the whole flight home.

I think about that contrast a lot now, the instinctive loyalty of a nineteen-year-old brother who decided I deserved the truth over comfort, against the practiced silence of a minister who couldn’t spare a sentence even with the grave still fresh. One of those men had nothing to gain by calling me. The other had every reason to say something and chose not to. That gap is, in a lot of ways, the story of what happened to my country a year later. Not a single dramatic betrayal, just years of small, accumulated silences from people who owed something and gave nothing.

I still think about Zamin often. He was a good friend before he was a cousin, and I never got to tell him that properly.

Unsabotaged is my memoir of service, brotherhood, loss, resilience, and rebuilding. It is a story about the human cost of devotion—and about finding the strength to build a new life after everything changes.

He Was Not Defeated. He Was Left Behind.

My brother sent me a three-minute video at 4 AM.

I watched it alone from a bedroom in Canada.

When it ended, I got up, washed my face, performed wudu, and prayed.

I didn’t know what else to do.

Then I woke my business partner.

“Can you watch this?”

A few minutes later, he looked at me and quietly said,

“This is very, very sad.”

The video showed my brother’s final moments at his military unit on August 15, 2021.

My brother had spent ten years in the Afghan Army. He graduated from the military academy and wore the uniform with pride. For him, it was never just a job. It was a commitment.

Over those ten years, he watched classmates leave for missions and never come home. More than ten of the young men he graduated beside lost their lives serving the same institution they believed in.

They were more than fellow officers.

They were friends.

They were brothers.

In the video, the unit had been ordered to hand over everything under its responsibility—its weapons, vehicles, equipment, and supplies.

Then a young man walked through the gate.

He couldn’t have been more than eighteen or twenty years old.

He wore white clothes, a white cap, and a black vest. He carried no weapon. No notebook. No papers.

Yet he walked with complete certainty.

Not because of what he carried.

Because he already knew why he was there.

Standing across from him were officers who had spent years training, serving, sacrificing, and burying friends.

Men like my brother.

They laid everything they had protected on the ground.

The young man looked over the equipment.

Then he said only a few words.

“You can leave.”

And they did.

My brother was one of them.

Watching that moment from thousands of miles away, I expected to remember the young man’s face.

Instead, I remembered my brother’s.

Because I had seen that expression before.

I had seen it in the mirror.

Not in the same circumstances.

But in the quiet moments when you realize that life is changing in ways you cannot stop. When everything you invested your heart in suddenly belongs to yesterday.

It is a look that doesn’t come from fear.

It comes from acceptance.

People often think the hardest part of service is danger.

Sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes the hardest part is carrying the weight of years that cannot be measured by medals or rank.

It is remembering the friends who never came home.

It is remembering birthdays that were missed, families who waited, promises that were made, and sacrifices that few people will ever know.

My brother did not walk away because he lacked courage.

If anything, courage had defined the previous ten years of his life.

He walked away carrying memories that no one could take from him.

Watching that video, I wasn’t grieving the loss of weapons or vehicles.

I was grieving the quiet ending of a chapter that had cost so many people so much.

The next morning, I went back to work.

I filled a wheelbarrow with gravel.

The sun rose as it always does.

Cars drove past.

People drank their coffee.

The world kept moving.

That is something history rarely tells us.

History remembers dates.

People remember faces.

When I think about that morning, I don’t remember headlines.

I remember my brother.

I remember the young officer who graduated with hope, served for ten years, buried more than ten classmates, and walked away with nothing except his dignity and his memories.

That is the face that has stayed with me.

And that is why I called this story He Was Not Defeated. He Was Left Behind.

Because sometimes the greatest losses are not measured by what a person surrenders.

They are measured by what they gave long before anyone was watching.

Unsabotaged is my memoir of service, brotherhood, loss, resilience, and rebuilding. It is a story about the human cost of devotion—and about finding the strength to build a new life after everything changes.

I arrived at the National Military Academy of Afghanistan on February 21, 2009, carrying everything I owned in a bag and a notebook with Ahmad Shah Massood’s face on the cover.

I had put that photo there myself.

In high school I had admired Massood deeply, the Lion of Panjshir, the commander who held the line when others collapsed, the man who fought with something that looked like principle in a country mostly governed by power. To me he was not a Tajik hero. He was an Afghan one. I carried his face on my notebook the way you carry something you believe in, openly, without apology.

I did not understand yet what that image meant inside those walls.

The first thing I noticed was the language.

During the entrance exams I had heard Dari everywhere around me. I told myself that when the real cadets arrived, when the Pashtun students from the provinces came, the balance would shift. I would not be the outsider.

I was wrong.

Inside the academy, Dari was the language of everything, the hallways, the chow hall, the spaces between formations where people laughed and argued and became friends. I watched Pashtun students who spoke Dari fluently switch languages the moment they crossed through the gate, as if Pashto was something to be left outside. Something that marked you as coming from somewhere lesser.

And then there was the matter of who belonged.

The cadets from the northern provinces carried themselves with a particular confidence.

Massood was their hero. Their family’s sacrifice. Their claim on the new Afghanistan. They had lost people in the fight against the Taliban. They had paid with blood and they knew it and they carried that knowledge visibly, as pride, and sometimes as a way of measuring the distance between themselves and everyone else.

We were Pashtun. From the south, from the east, from the provinces near the Pakistani border. In the history they carried, we were not the liberators.

No one said this directly. They did not need to. You feel these things in the silences between sentences. In the way conversations stop when you walk up. In the way certain people look at you and then look away.

One evening I went back to my cabinet and looked at the notebook.

The photo I had carried there as an expression of something I believed, something above tribe, something national, I understood now what it looked like from the other side of the compound.

It did not look like admiration.

It looked like someone reaching for something that didn’t belong to them.

I put the notebook in the cabinet and did not take it out again.

Not because I stopped believing in what Massood represented. But because I understood that inside these walls his image had already been claimed. It was not a symbol of Afghanistan. It was a symbol of a particular Afghanistan.

And I was not part of that particular Afghanistan.

I closed the cabinet door and went back to my bunk.

That was my first lesson at the military academy.

Not a single class had started yet.

Unsabotaged is the memoir of building a life no one can take from you, from a village in Khost to the Afghan Military Academy to US Army Ranger School. Subscribe to follow the journey before the book arrives in 2027.

Welcome back to Unsabotaged.

Every week one story. One lesson. One truth earned the hard way.

This week an analysis.

Most people frame starting over as a loss.

You had something. You lost it. Now you are starting again from nothing.

That framing is understandable.

It is also wrong.

Starting over is not starting from nothing.

It is starting from everything you learned while building the thing you lost.

When I arrived in Canada I brought almost nothing.

But here is what I brought that nobody could take.

The standard my father built in me on a dirt road in Khost province.

The discipline that ran alone every morning while my village called it mental illness.

The refusal that said no to ghost soldiers in my first week of service.

The integrity that got me removed from the supply chain for refusing to participate in corruption.

None of that was in Afghanistan.

It was never in the rank or the uniform or the institution.

It was in me.

When the institution collapsed it stayed exactly where it had always been.

Here is what building from nothing actually taught me.

You find out what was actually yours.

The rank was borrowed. The title was borrowed. The position was borrowed.

The standard was mine.

Starting over strips away everything borrowed and leaves you with only what is genuinely yours.

That is painful.

It is also the most clarifying experience a person can have.

The foundation matters more than the structure.

When I picked up the wheelbarrow I was not building a construction company.

I was testing the foundation.

Seeing whether what I brought from Afghanistan was strong enough to build on in a completely different environment.

Most people who start over focus entirely on the new structure.

Starting over forces you to test the foundation first.

You build differently when you have nothing to protect.

When I arrived with almost nothing I had no reputation to defend. No status to maintain. No accumulated position to risk.

That freedom, the freedom of having nothing to lose, is one of the most powerful building conditions available to any person.

I picked up a wheelbarrow without embarrassment because I had no ego investment in not picking up a wheelbarrow.

What you build after loss is always more intentional.

The first version of anything is built from ambition and opportunity.

The second version is built from intention.

You know what you are building and why.

You know what you are willing to sacrifice and what you are not.

That intentionality produces something more genuinely yours.

More likely to survive the next collapse because it was built with the lessons of the last one already inside it.

Starting over does not teach you how to rebuild what you lost.

It teaches you what was worth building in the first place.

That is the lesson.

Everything else follows from it.

What did you discover was genuinely yours when everything else was stripped away?

See you next week with another story.

If this issue reached something real in you forward it to one person who needs to read it today.

That is how we grow this community one story at a time.

Yaser Yarghal Former Afghan Army Major | US Army Ranger and Airborne Graduate Author:Unsabotaged

unsabotaged.substack.com

Someone asked me a question this week that I haven’t stopped thinking about.

“Why didn’t you ask these questions while you were still fighting them?”

It was in response to my last piece, the one about what the Taliban understood that we didn’t. A fair question. A hard one. The kind that sits with you longer than you want it to.

I gave an answer about timing. About distance. About how clarity tends to arrive only after the war is already lost, because that’s when it finally becomes safe to look.

That answer was true.

But it wasn’t the whole truth.

The part I left out

For twelve years, doubt wasn’t something I was allowed to feel. Not officially. Not out loud. Not even, most days, to myself.

Doubt looked like weakness. And weakness, in the world I lived in, got people killed, yours or someone else’s. So you learn to push it down before it has the chance to surface. You learn to function without it. You learn to call that discipline.

I called it discipline for twelve years.

Ask any soldier and they’ll tell you the same thing in different words. You don’t have the luxury of sitting with uncertainty mid-mission. You move. You execute. You ask the hard questions later, if there is a later.

The problem is, “later” has a way of never arriving. Not until everything has already collapsed and the question can no longer change anything.

What a stranger taught me

A reader pushed back on something I wrote, and he was right to.

He said doubt and fear are part of life, and that they shouldn’t be buried, but used. That pushing them aside doesn’t make them disappear. It only delays them. And they come back, he said, usually at the worst possible moment.

He wasn’t talking about Afghanistan specifically. But he might as well have been.

Because that’s exactly what August 2021 was.

The doubt didn’t disappear. It just went underground.

We didn’t lack doubt as an institution. We had a system that was extraordinarily good at suppressing it.

It lived in the officer who suspected the structure beneath him was hollow, but kept executing the mission anyway because that’s what officers do.

It lived in the soldier who felt the widening gap between what he was told and what he saw with his own eyes on the ground, but had no channel to say so without it being read as defeatism.

It lived in the report that got filed, and filed again, and never acted on, because acting on it would have meant admitting the foundation was already cracked.

None of that doubt vanished. It just waited. Quietly, for years, in places no one was checking.

And then one week in August, it all surfaced at once, in a form none of us could control anymore.

The promise that became a trap

I think often about a boy on a riverbank in Khost, making himself a promise: I will not be lazy.

That promise carried me through a childhood with no school. Through twelve years of military service. Through Ranger School and Airborne School and a command I was proud to hold.

But somewhere along the way, I let that promise get twisted into something it was never meant to be. Not being lazy became not allowing myself to feel uncertain. Discipline became suppression wearing a uniform.

I kept that promise faithfully for twelve years, in a system that asked me to mistake silence for strength, and mistook my silence for loyalty.

I am done making that mistake.

This newsletter is doubt, finally allowed to speak.

Not as weakness. Not as defeat. As information, the kind that should have had somewhere to go a long time before it did.

If you’re carrying something you’ve been told to push down, in a uniform or out of one, I’d gently ask you to consider what that stranger asked me to consider.

What if the doubt isn’t the enemy.

What if the silence is.

Still Unsabotaged.

Yaser Yarghal

Former Afghan Army Major | US Army Ranger & Airborne Graduate

Author: Unsabotaged (forthcoming, January 2027)

I fought against the Taliban for twelve years.

I want to be clear about that before I say what I am about to say.

I am not writing this to honor them.

I am writing this because the truth of why Afghanistan collapsed cannot be told without it.

And someone who was inside the system has to say it.

They hired for commitment. We hired for connection.

The Taliban had one question when they brought someone into their ranks:

Are you committed to this?

Not, who do you know?

Not, how much can you pay?

Not, will you follow orders without asking why?

Are you committed?

And then they explained the mission. Clearly. Simply. In one sentence that every fighter understood from the first day to the last.

The Afghan government asked different questions.

Who sent you?

Who vouches for you?

What can you offer?

Positions were bought. Ranks were sold. Generals were appointed by politicians who needed loyalty not competence. Some senior officers could not read or write. Some had never commanded men in battle. They had simply paid the right price or known the right person.

The Taliban built an army of believers.

We built a bureaucracy of connections.

They went to the real elders. We went to the ones the government appointed.

The Taliban understood something that twenty years of Western-supported governance never grasped.

Afghanistan does not run on institutions.

Afghanistan runs on relationships. On elders. On tribal loyalty. On the respect that is earned through presence not paperwork.

The Taliban sat with the actual community leaders. The ones the village had chosen long before any government existed. The ones who settled disputes and blessed marriages and buried the dead.

The Afghan government, and the international community that supported it, created their own parallel structure. They appointed their own elders. Funded their own councils. Built their own relationships with people who had institutional titles but no community roots.

The real elders watched from the outside.

The Taliban sat with them.

When the moment came, the community knew who had actually been present.

They brought justice. We brought process.

This is the hardest thing to say.

In Taliban controlled areas, there was a court.

It was brutal. It was harsh. It operated without mercy in many cases.

But it was fast. It was consistent. And it was not for sale.

If you had a dispute, you got a decision. Today. Not in six months after paying three officials and waiting for a judge who owed his position to someone’s cousin.

The Afghan government had a process.

That process had a price.

A farmer who needed justice had to navigate a system designed to extract money from people who had none. A widow who needed her land rights protected had to find someone who knew someone who could move the file forward.

The Taliban offered something the government could not.

Predictability.

Not freedom. Not rights. Not dignity.

But a decision that stuck.

In a country exhausted by decades of uncertainty, that was enough for some people to tolerate everything else that came with it.

They had the authority to act. We had the authority to delay.

The Taliban could execute a decision.

Not just make it. Execute it. Immediately. With finality.

The Afghan government had committees. Approvals. Chains of command that existed on paper but functioned through personal relationships and financial arrangements.

By the time a decision traveled from the commander to the soldier, it had been filtered, modified, delayed, and sometimes sold.

The Taliban’s command was direct. Brutal. But direct.

Our command was institutional. Legitimate. But compromised at every level by the same corruption it was supposed to prevent.

What this means, and what it doesn’t mean:

I am not saying the Taliban were right.

They were not.

What they built is a nightmare for every Afghan woman. For every Afghan child who wants to learn. For every Afghan who believed in something different.

But understanding why their approach worked on the ground is not the same as endorsing it.

It is the most important military and political lesson of the twenty year war.

You cannot defeat an enemy you refuse to honestly understand.

You cannot build an alternative that people choose if that alternative is more corrupt than what it replaced.

The Taliban did not win because they were stronger.

They won because they were more trusted, in the specific, transactional, ground-level way that people in survival situations choose who to trust.

That truth is uncomfortable.

But it is the truth.

And it is exactly why I am still writing.

Still Unsabotaged.

Yaser Yarghal

Former Afghan Army Major | US Army Ranger & Airborne Graduate

Author: Unsabotaged

📖 https://unsabotaged.substack.com

You will not read this.

Most of you are gone.

Some of you are hiding.

Some of you are trying to survive in a country that forgot what you gave it.

But I am writing this anyway.

Because someone has to.

I knew you.

Not as a statistic. Not as a headline. Not as the punchline of a narrative that said you ran when it got hard.

I knew you as the man who showed up every morning when showing up meant risking everything.

I knew you as the father who put on a uniform knowing his children might grow up without him.

I knew you as the soldier who fought for a country that was being decided without him in rooms he was never invited into.

I knew you as the man who kept fighting long after the people who were supposed to stand with you had already made other plans.

The world said you didn’t want freedom badly enough.

I was there.

I watched you want it so badly you bled for it for twenty years.

The world said you were not trained well enough.

I was there.

I watched you fight with less equipment, less support, and less certainty than any soldier should ever have to endure, and fight anyway.

The world said you collapsed.

I was there.

What collapsed was not your courage.

What collapsed was everything that was supposed to be holding you up.

I think about the morning of August 15, 2021 often.

I think about what you must have felt when you realized that the plan had already been made.

That the decision had already been taken.

That the rooms where your future was decided had been full of important people saying important things, and none of those things were about you.

I think about what it means to fight for something your whole life and watch it disappear in a single afternoon.

I have no words for that.

Only silence.

And this letter.

I left Afghanistan on October 10, 2020.

I have rebuilt my life in Canada.

I have a construction company. I am writing a book. I am building a platform so your story is never buried under someone else’s version of what happened.

Every word I write carries your name even when I don’t say it.

Every stage I stand on I stand on for you.

Every time someone asks me what really happened in Afghanistan I think of your face before I speak.

You were not perfect.

Neither was I.

Neither was the institution we served.

But you showed up.

Every morning in a country that was on fire you showed up.

And the world owes you an acknowledgment it has never given.

So I am giving it.

You were brave.

You were real.

You mattered.

And as long as I am still standing and still speaking,

You will not be forgotten.

Still Unsabotaged.

Yaser Yarghal

Former Afghan Army Major | US Army Ranger & Airborne Graduate

Author: Unsabotaged

📖 https://unsabotaged.substack.com

Unsabotaged, Issue No. 8

I want to tell you about this photograph.

Five soldiers sitting together in the dark. Tired faces. Combat gear. The kind of exhaustion that does not show in muscles, it shows in eyes.

Two of them are no longer with us.

I will not use their names. Their families are still in Afghanistan. Some things must be protected even in honesty.

But I want you to know who they were.

Who They Were?

They were the ones who always volunteered.

Every time a mission was announced, dangerous, uncertain, understaffed, they stepped forward before anyone asked. Not because they were ordered to. Not because someone was watching. Because that was simply who they were.

They were not special forces legends. They were not celebrated officers. They had no medals that the world knew about. No ceremonies. No speeches.

They were ordinary men who chose an extraordinary standard every single day.

And they did it quietly. Without recognition. Without guarantee.

The Last Message

A few weeks before one of them died, he sent me a message.

He wrote about what he was seeing around him. The uncertainty. The lack of clear direction from above. The feeling that nobody at the top had a real plan, that soldiers were being asked to hold a line that the leadership had quietly already abandoned in their hearts.

He said he and some of the brothers had made a decision.

They were going to open a gym in Kabul.

Something small. Something honest. Something that would let them stay alive long enough to be present for their children.

He was not giving up on Afghanistan.

He was trying to survive it.

He was gone within weeks.

The Promise I Could Not Keep

I had made him a promise.

I will not say what it was. Some things belong only to the people involved.

What I will say is this, the deadline of that promise arrived. And he was no longer there to receive it.

I think about that often.

Not with guilt, though it is there. But with a specific kind of grief that comes from watching someone reach for something better and not making it.

He deserved better. They all did.

What They Were Never Given

They served without reliable pay.

They fought without consistent ammunition.

They followed orders from commanders who filed false reports to protect themselves.

They held positions that leadership had already written off.

They showed up, day after day, to a system that had long since stopped showing up for them.

And when it all collapsed, the world looked at them and said: they did not want to fight.

I was there.

That is not what happened.

What I Owe Them

I made it out.

October 2020, I left Afghanistan. I rebuilt in Canada. I started a business. I began writing.

They did not get that chance.

So every week when I sit down to write, I think about the photograph. The five faces in the dark. The two who are gone.

I write because they cannot.

I write because the world moved on and someone needs to make sure the record reflects who they actually were, not the convenient version that lets everyone else off the hook.

They were not cowards.

They were not failures.

They were soldiers who deserved a system worthy of their sacrifice.

And they never got one.

History should honor them.

Not judge them.

Still unsabotaged.

Yaser Yarghal

Former Afghan Army Major | US Army Ranger & Airborne Graduate

Founder, Unsabotaged

For those who cannot speak for themselves.

→ unsabotaged.substack.com

Every week one story. One lesson. One truth earned the hard way.

This week something different.

Not a lesson.

Not a framework.

Just a letter.

To the country that made me everything I am.

And then asked me to leave before I was ready.

Dear Afghanistan.

I do not know how to start this letter.

I have written versions of it in my head for years.

On the plane out of Kabul.

In the first apartment in Edmonton.

On the construction site before the crew arrives.

On the mornings when the distance between where I am and where you are feels impossible to measure.

I keep starting.

I keep stopping.

So this time I am just going to say what is true.

I miss you.

Not the Afghanistan that the world argues about.

Not the Afghanistan of policy papers and news cycles and twenty year assessments.

My Afghanistan.

The one that smelled like dust and bread and early morning.

The one where the mountains turned a specific color at sunset that I have not found anywhere else in the world.

The one where my father walked two kilometers to work every day and came home every night and sat with his sons in a room lit by propane and taught us everything he knew.

That Afghanistan.

The one that existed before it became a symbol of everything that went wrong.

I miss it every day.

I want to tell you something I have never said publicly.

I did not want to leave.

People assume I left because I gave up.

Or because I chose comfort over service.

Or because I saw what was coming and saved myself.

None of those are the complete truth.

The complete truth is that I left because I had given everything I had to give.

To an institution that had stopped being worth giving to.

Not to you.

Never to you.

To the system that wore your uniform while betraying everything the uniform was supposed to represent.

I left the system.

I have never left you.

I think about the people still there.

My siblings.

The officers I served with who tried to do the right thing.

The communities that cooperated and were left exposed.

The girls who were in school and are not anymore.

The young men who grew up in the twenty years of possibility and are now waiting.

For what they are not sure.

But waiting.

Because people who have tasted a different future do not forget it.

Even when the present tries to make them.

I think about what was built.

Not the institutions.

Those failed.

I watched them fail from the inside.

I know exactly how and why.

But something else was built.

A generation that knows what school feels like.

That knows what it means to have a choice.

That has sat in a classroom and understood that the world is larger than the village.

That generation is still there.

Waiting.

And I believe, I have to believe, that what was planted in them

does not die just because the system that planted it collapsed.

Seeds do not need the farmer to still be standing

to eventually become something.

I want to tell you what Canada is like.

It is cold in ways I was not prepared for.

Not just the weather.

The particular coldness of a place that does not yet know your name.

That looks at you and sees a category before it sees a person.

Refugee. Immigrant. Afghan.

Before it sees, officer. Ranger. Father. Builder.

That coldness takes time to thaw.

It is thawing.

Slowly.

One conversation at a time.

One post at a time.

One story told honestly at a time.

I am building something here.

A construction company.

A book.

A platform.

A life that my children can inherit without shame.

I am doing it for them.

But I am also doing it for you.

Because every Afghan who builds something real in the world

adds something to what you actually are

beyond what the headlines say you are.

We are your diaspora.

Your proof of concept.

Your argument that the people are not the government.

That the culture is not the collapse.

That what was planted in us survived what tried to uproot it.

I do not know when I will see you again.

Or if.

That uncertainty is its own kind of grief.

The grief of not knowing whether the place you are from

will ever again be a place you can return to.

I carry that grief carefully.

Not loudly.

Not publicly.

In the quiet moments.

Before the crew arrives.

After the children are asleep.

In the space between the life I am building

and the life I left behind.

But I want you to know something.

Whatever happens.

Whatever the next chapter of your story looks like.

The boy who ran alone on a path his village named after his madness

is still running.

In Edmonton now.

In the cold.

Before sunrise.

Still carrying everything you gave him.

Still building.

Still pointing.

Still yours.

With everything I have.

Yaser

Canada. 2026.

I do not know if Afghanistan can hear this letter.

But I know some of you reading it can.

The ones who left something behind that mattered.

The ones carrying a grief that does not have a simple name.

The ones building a new life while never fully leaving the old one.

This letter is for you too.

You are not alone in the space between.

See you next week with another story.

If this letter reached something real in you forward it to one person who needs to read it today.

That is how we grow this community one story at a time.

Yaser Yarghal

Former Afghan Army Major | US Army Ranger and Airborne Graduate

Author: Unsabotaged

unsabotaged.substack.com

Subscribe

Welcome back to Unsabotaged.

Every week one story. One lesson. One truth earned the hard way.

This week something different.

Not one story.

Seven honest observations from someone who started over from nothing in a country that did not know his name.

1. The hardest part is not the poverty.

People assume starting over is hardest when you have no money.

It is not.

Money is practical. You can solve practical problems one step at a time.

The hardest part is the invisibility.

Walking into a room where nobody knows what you have done or who you are or what it cost you to get there.

Being seen as a basic laborer when you graduated Ranger School.

Being handed a wheelbarrow when you used to command soldiers.

The poverty you can survive.

The invisibility takes longer.

2. Your credentials travel with you but your credibility does not.

I brought my rank. My tab. My years of service.

Nobody in Canada cared.

Not because they were unkind.

Because credentials without context are just words on a piece of paper in a country that has never heard of the institution that issued them.

You have to rebuild credibility from scratch.

In the new language. In the new culture. In the new context.

That rebuilding takes years not months.

Plan for years.

3. The loneliness is not what you expect.

I expected to miss Afghanistan.

I did not expect to feel lonely in a room full of people.

The loneliness of starting over is not the absence of people.

It is the absence of people who knew you before.

Who knew what you were capable of.

Who did not need you to explain yourself.

That kind of loneliness does not go away quickly.

It goes away slowly as you build new people who know the new version of you.

But the old loneliness and the new connections exist simultaneously for a long time.

Nobody tells you that.

4. Your family will see things in you that you are trying to hide.

I thought I was hiding the weight of it.

The debt. The uncertainty. The Saturday mornings when I had nothing left.

My wife saw everything.

She did not say much.

But she saw.

Your family always sees.

The question is not whether they will notice.

The question is whether you will let them help carry it when they do.

5. The work that feels beneath you is always training for something.

I picked up a wheelbarrow.

I moved dirt.

I learned construction from the ground up.

Every day I told myself the same thing.

This is not beneath me.

This is preparation.

For what I did not always know.

But preparation for something.

That belief,  that the work in front of you is always training for what comes next, is the only thing that makes the wheelbarrow bearable.

And eventually it makes it meaningful.

6. The country that did not know your name will eventually say it.

Not immediately.

Not in the first year.

Not when you are picking up the tools at the end of a 12 hour shift.

But eventually.

If you keep doing the work.

If you keep showing up.

If you keep building even when nobody is watching.

The country that handed you a wheelbarrow will one day ask you to speak.

To write.

To lead.

To represent something it needs that only you can offer.

You just have to be still building when that moment arrives.

7. You do not start over.

This is the most important one.

You do not start over.

You start differently.

Everything you built before, the discipline, the standard, the promise made on a riverbank at eight years old, that came with you.

It was never in Afghanistan.

It was never in the rank or the tab or the uniform.

It was in you.

You cannot leave it behind because it is not a place or a position or a credential.

It is a decision you made a long time ago that nobody can take away regardless of what country you are standing in.

You did not start over.

You started differently.

With everything that actually mattered already in your pocket.

Seven things.

From someone who arrived in Canada with almost nothing and is still building.

What would you add to this list?

See you next Tuesday with another story.

If this issue reached something real in you forward it to one person who needs to read it today.

That is how we grow this community one story at a time.

   Yaser Yarghal

Former Afghan Army Major | US Army Ranger and Airborne Graduate

Author: Unsabotaged

unsabotaged.substack.com

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Unsabotaged

It was 2020.

The world was folding in Afghanistan. COVID had changed everything, the way we moved, the way we worked, the way we met. Even in a war zone, the protocols were the same. Masks. Distance. No formal settings. No ceremony.

The unit I was assigned to was working in very specific areas alongside NATO partners. One day we received an invitation, a joint meeting to discuss how to establish communication and coordination between our Afghan units and the NATO partner team.

Three of us went from the Afghan side.

I was the most junior person in the room.

 The Room Was Wrong

When we arrived the NATO partners greeted us warmly. They apologized immediately for the setting. There was no furnished conference room. No proper table. No chairs arranged in a way that honored the occasion. No tea. No formality.

It was COVID. They explained this. Patiently. Genuinely. They were not trying to disrespect anyone. They were working within the same constraints the entire world was working within at the time.

I understood immediately why the Afghan leaders I was accompanying were troubled by this.

In Afghan culture, and this is something I want to be clear about, hospitality and ceremony are not superficial. They are not about ego or vanity. They are how respect is communicated. How partnership is established. How trust is built before the work begins. The form of a meeting carries meaning. A furnished room, a proper welcome, the offering of tea, these things say:  I see you. You matter. This conversation matters.

That is not a weakness in Afghan culture. It is one of its profound strengths.

But COVID had taken all of that away. Not by choice. Not by disrespect. By circumstance.

The NATO partners apologized again. And again. Each time with patience and sincerity. They genuinely felt the gap. They understood something important was missing, they just could not provide it under the circumstances.

 What I Noticed

I stood quietly and watched both sides.

And I noticed something that troubled me deeply.

The Afghan leaders had no agenda.

No plan. No preparation. No list of questions. No structure for what we were actually there to discuss. They had strong opinions about how the meeting should feel, what it should communicate about the seriousness of the partnership and the dignity of the Afghan leaders present.

But they had not prepared for what the meeting was supposed to accomplish.

The NATO partners had come with something to discuss. A framework. Ideas. Genuine questions they wanted to work through together.

The Afghan leaders had come with expectations about the room.

The meeting ended without a result.

No agreement. No plan. No next steps. Nothing that either side could take back and act on.

On the drive back I sat quietly and thought about what I had just witnessed.

 Two Different Understandings of Respect

Both groups had shown up to the same physical space.

But they had not attended the same meeting.

The NATO partners had come to solve a problem. To build something functional. To establish a channel of communication that would make both sides more effective in the field. For them, respect was demonstrated through preparation. Through having something substantive to contribute. Through using the time well.

The Afghan leaders had come to establish the relationship first,  which in Afghan culture is not a formality but a foundation. You do not do business with someone you have not properly received. You do not build a partnership without first building the human connection that makes partnership meaningful.

Both approaches carry wisdom.

Both reflect something real about how trust is built.

But on that day, in that COVID setting,  neither side could give the other what they needed.

The NATO partners could not provide the ceremony that would have opened the Afghan leaders’ hearts to the conversation.

And the Afghan leaders, without that ceremony, could not shift their attention to the substance.

The mission left the room untouched.

 The Deeper Lesson

I have thought about that meeting many times since 2020.

And what I have come to understand is this:

The failure in that room was not cultural. It was not about one side being right and the other being wrong.

It was a failure of adaptation.

In extraordinary circumstances, a global pandemic, a war, a setting stripped of everything familiar, the question becomes:

What do I hold onto and what do I let go of?

Some things must be held. Values. Standards. The commitment to partnership itself.

But some things, even meaningful things,  must sometimes be set aside when the mission demands it.

The ceremony matters. And sometimes the mission cannot wait for the ceremony.

The most effective leaders I have ever encountered, Afghan and international alike, were the ones who could hold both. Who could honor the relationship AND advance the work. Who understood that respect is demonstrated not only in how you receive someone but in how seriously you take what you came to do together.

That is not a Western idea or an Afghan idea.

That is just what good leadership looks like.

 What I Carry From That Day

I left the Afghan Army in 2020. I left Afghanistan not long after.

I rebuilt my life in Canada. I started a construction business. I began writing Unsabotaged. I began telling the story of what I saw from the inside , not to assign blame, but to understand.

And one of the things I understand most clearly now is this:

The strongest partnerships, in any culture, in any language, in any circumstance, are built by people who know why they are in the room.

Not just what the room should look like.

But what they came to build before they leave it.

That clarity, that shared sense of purpose, is what holds when the ceremony cannot be provided. When the room is wrong. When the circumstances are not what anyone planned for.

It is what holds when everything else is taken away.

And it is what Unsabotaged is about.

Not the room.

The mission.

Still unsabotaged.

Yaser Yarghal

Former Afghan Army Major | US Army Ranger & Airborne Graduate

Founder, Unsabotaged

If this resonated, forward it to one person who needs to hear it this week.

  → unsabotaged.substack.com

Welcome back to Unsabotaged.

Every week one story. One lesson. One truth earned the hard way.

This week I want to tell you about a night at Ranger School when someone handed me a piece of paper in the rain.

It was 3am.

We had been in the field for days.

No real sleep. No real food. Cold mud everywhere.

I was kneeling on the ground trying to find something left inside me to keep going.

Not physically. I had trained for the physical part my entire life. Running alone while my village called it mental illness. Pushing through every standard the system told me I could not meet.

The physical I could handle.

What I was not prepared for was what I heard next.

A comment.

Made within earshot.

Loud enough that everyone around me could hear.

Something about terrorists.

Something about where I was from.

I did not look up.

I did not respond.

I just stayed in the mud and kept going.

Because that is what you do when you have come too far to stop.

I want you to understand what it meant to be there.

I was the only Afghan officer at Ranger School.

One of the most demanding military leadership courses in the world.

I had left my family. My country. Everything familiar.

I had scored a perfect 300 at Fort Benning to earn the right to be in that mud.

I had already refused to mark ghost soldiers present in my first week of service.

I had already challenged corrupt supply arrangements and been removed from my position for doing so.

I had already watched the system punish every honest thing I tried to do.

And now I was kneeling in cold mud at 3am in Georgia while someone nearby reminded me that some people in that field had already decided what I was before I had said a single word.

That is a specific kind of alone.

Not the alone of being far from home.

The alone of being in a room full of people and understanding that some of them see a label before they see a person.

A few hours later a fellow Ranger student approached me quietly.

He was American.

Muslim.

He had heard the comment.

He did not make a speech about it.

He did not confront anyone.

He just reached into his pocket and handed me a small folded piece of paper.

It was a verse from the Quran.

His wife had given it to him before he left for Ranger School.

He said.

I want you to know that not everyone thinks that way.

That was it.

He walked away.

I still have that piece of paper.

I graduated Ranger School 62 days later.

Without a single recycle.

The man who made the comment did not define that experience.

The man who handed me a piece of paper did.

I have thought about that moment many times since then.

Not because of the pain of what was said.

Because of what it taught me about where real strength actually comes from.

Most people think strength comes from inside yourself.

From discipline. From training. From the decision you make in the dark to keep going when everything around you says stop.

That is true.

But it is not the complete truth.

Sometimes strength comes from an unexpected person who shows up quietly in the mud at 3am and says.

I see you.

You belong here.

Keep going.

That man did not give me his strength.

He reminded me of mine.

There is a difference.

Giving someone your strength implies they did not have enough of their own.

Reminding someone of their strength means you saw it when they temporarily could not.

That is what the piece of paper did.

It did not tell me I could finish Ranger School.

It reminded me that I had already decided to finish Ranger School long before that night.

The comment had not changed that decision.

It had just made it harder to feel in the moment.

The paper gave the feeling back.

Here is what I want you to take from this story.

You will have a moment in the mud.

Maybe you have already had one.

The moment when someone says something that tries to reduce you to a label before you have had the chance to show them who you actually are.

And in that moment the temptation will be to respond.

To argue. To prove. To fight back in the way that feels most immediate.

Do not.

Stay in the mud.

Keep going.

Because the person in the mud finishing the course is always a more powerful answer than any words spoken in the rain at 3am.

But also.

Look for the person who will fold a piece of paper and hand it to you quietly.

They are almost always there.

Not announcing themselves.

Not making speeches.

Just present.

Just human.

Just reminding you of what you already know.

And if you cannot find that person in your life right now.

Be that person for someone else.

Because somewhere near you right now there is someone kneeling in mud at 3am who needs a piece of paper more than they need anything else in the world.

You might be the only one who sees them.

Before I close I want to say something directly to you.

You subscribed to this newsletter because something in my story resonated with something in yours.

Maybe you have been the person in the mud.

Maybe you have been the person who handed someone a piece of paper.

Maybe you have been both.

Whatever brought you here, I want you to know that writing these stories every week is my version of handing you that piece of paper.

I see you.

You belong here.

Keep going.

See you next Tuesday with another story.

If this issue reached something real in you forward it to one person who needs to read it right now.

That is how we grow this community one story at a time.

Yaser Yarghal

Former Afghan Army Major | US Army Ranger and Airborne Graduate

Author: Unsabotaged

unsabotaged.substack.com

Welcome back to Unsabotaged.

Every week one story. One lesson. One truth earned the hard way.

This week I want to tell you about a Saturday morning in a truck in Canada when I had nothing left.

I need to tell you something I have never told anyone publicly before.

There was a morning when I was not strong.

Not tired. Not stressed. Not having a difficult day.

Genuinely empty.

The kind of empty that comes when a person has given everything they had to everything around them for so long that one morning they wake up and reach for what they normally reach for , the discipline, the standard, the promise made on a riverbank at eight years old , and it is not there.

That was the Saturday morning.

I was getting ready to laud the equipment and get in the truck to go to  a construction site.

Former Afghan Army Major.

US Army Ranger and Airborne Graduate.

A man who had sent coordinates into silence for seven nights in rubble.

A man who had graduated Ranger School in 62 days without a single recycle.

A man who had watched his country collapse and chosen to rebuild anyway.

Lauding his truck in Canada.

With nothing left in his eyes.

My wife looked at me.

She saw it immediately.

Not tiredness. Not stress.

Weakness.

Real weakness.

The kind that strong people are not supposed to show. The kind that Afghan men are especially not supposed to admit. The kind that I had spent my entire life building walls around so nobody would ever see it.

She saw it anyway.

And she did not look away.

She did not tell me it would be okay.

She did not remind me of everything I had survived.

She just looked at me and said this sentence.

“We will not die, if you don’t go to work today.”

That was it.

One sentence.

I got in the truck and shifted the gear.

I drove to the job site.

I worked.

I want to be honest with you about why I am sharing this story.

Not because I want you to see my vulnerability.

Because I want you to understand something about resilience that nobody tells you.

Resilience is not the absence of the breaking point.

It is the decision you make when you have reached it.

The Saturday morning truck was not a story about strength.

It was a story about what happens after strength runs out.

About a woman who looked at her husband’s empty eyes and did not flinch.

About one sentence that were not inspiring or motivational or powerful in any conventional sense.

Just true.

“We will not die, if you don’t go to work today.”

And about a gear that got shifted anyway.

Not because I felt ready.

Not because the strength had returned.

Not because anything had changed between the moment she spoke and the moment I put the truck in drive.

Just because  getting in the truck and shifting the gear was the next thing.

And I did the next thing.

Here is what I want you to take from this story.

You will have a Saturday morning.

Maybe you have already had one.

Maybe you are in one right now.

The moment when everything you normally reach for is not there. When the discipline feels hollow and the purpose feels distant and the promise you made to yourself feels like something a different person made in a different life.

That moment is not the end of your story.

It is the most important chapter of it.

Because what you do in that moment , not when you are strong, not when you are motivated, not when everything is working , but in that specific moment when you have nothing left — that is who you actually are.

I got in the truck and  shifted the gear.

Not because I was strong.

Because my wife said one sentence.

And because the job site was waiting.

And because somewhere underneath the emptiness the promise was still there.

Still keeping.

Still mine.

Before I close I want to ask you something honest.

What is your Saturday morning truck?

The moment you are avoiding. The gear you are not shifting. The job site you are not driving to.

And is there someone in your life who will look at your empty eyes and say one sentence, that are not inspiring but are true?

If there is , tell them what those eyes look like before the Saturday morning arrives.

Do not wait until they have to see it on their own.

See you next Tuesday with another story.

If this issue reached something real in you forward it to one person who needs to read it.

That is how we grow this community one story at a time.

 Yaser Yarghal

Former Afghan Army Major | US Army Ranger and Airborne Graduate

Author : Unsabotaged

unsabotaged.substack.com

Every week one story. One lesson. One truth earned the hard way.

This week I want to tell you about the morning my father turned back from work , and what he said that changed everything.

I was studying in Kabul while my family lived in Khost hours away.

We were not a wealthy family.

My father worked every day of his life saving every coin, every penny, rationing everything he had to keep my education going. He was spending fifty percent of his entire income on me alone. The other fifty percent kept the rest of the family alive.

My dad standing 3rd from the right with blue clothes in his clinic with his colleagues.

But even fifty percent was not enough.

I was in grade 12th right on the edge to graduate high school. Living away from home. Working weekends as a laborer to cover what his sacrifice could not. Studying mathematics and physics and chemistry on a body and mind that had nothing left to give.

One night I broke completely.

Not from laziness.

From exhaustion.

I told my mother I was not going back to Kabul. I was going to find work instead. Help the family economy. Stop being a burden on a father who was already giving everything he had.

Quitting felt like relief.

Not comfort. Relief.

And that is an important distinction. Because you can fight comfort with discipline. But when you genuinely have nothing left , when your body and your mind are both telling you that what you are asking of yourself exceeds what you can give , the arguments against stopping feel hollow.

My mother said nothing to me.

But she sent word to my father.

He was already on his way to work when the message reached him.

Halfway there.

He turned around.

He came all the way back home. Sat down with me. And said something I was not expecting.

No lecture. No guilt. No reminder of the fifty percent or the sacrifice or everything he had given up for the bet he had placed on me.

Just this.

Yaser. I will do whatever it takes to send you to university. You ask me whatever I can do and I will do it. That is my responsibility to you. In return I want nothing from you , nothing , when you stand on your own feet.

I understood in that moment what I had almost done.

I had been about to quit not because I was weak but because I was genuinely at my limit.

And my father was telling me something that changed the weight of that limit completely.

He was not adding to what I was carrying.

He was lifting some of it himself.

I looked at my father and made him a promise.

Not a speech. Not a plan.

Four words.

Dad! I will never let you down.

I went back to Kabul.

Here is what I want you to take from this story.

The most dangerous moment is not when you are lazy.

It is when you are genuinely exhausted and stopping feels like the responsible choice.

That version of quitting is the hardest to fight because it looks like sacrifice. It looks like wisdom. It looks like being realistic about your limitations.

But underneath all of those disguises the result is the same.

You stop. You shrink. The version of you that was supposed to exist never gets the chance to show up.

What saved me was not discipline.

It was a father who turned around from his walk to work.

Who said , you do not have to carry this alone.

Think about the dream you have been exhausted enough to consider abandoning.

Not the dream you are too lazy to pursue.

The one you have been working toward so hard and for so long that stopping has started to feel like relief rather than weakness.

Is there someone in your life who would turn back from their walk to work for you?

And more importantly , are you being that person for someone else?

See you next week with another story.

If this issue resonated with you forward it to one person who needs to read it. That is how we grow this community one story at a time.

Yaser Yarghal

Former Afghan Army Major | US Army Ranger and Airborne Graduate

Author : Unsabotaged