'Afghanistan ’11' and the Forever Wargame

The challenge facing Afghanistan ’11 is that long, indecisive struggles are difficult to dramatize at a strategic level. It’s far-enough removed from the people fighting it that the human drama of warfare disappears into a bloodless intellectual exercise, yet there is no vision of corresponding Clausewitzian grandeur to make up for it.

There is no moment where you will break your enemy and their capacity to resist. In Afghanistan ’11 there is only procedural minutiae as you attempt to arrest the negative momentum that constantly works against you, grinding your way to some kind of acceptable resolution.

A game of convoys and IEDs on the roads to far-flung outposts, playing Afghanistan ’11 often feels less like being a general waging modern warfare and more like being a district manager for an under-funded courier and parcel service.

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But maybe that’s what a wargame about “Operation Enduring Freedom” should feel like, because the only indelible stories and images this war of over fifteen years are those that involve the stamina required to sustain such a conflict. When I think of Afghanistan, two things spring to mind: American soldiers standing watch over lonely mountaintop outposts, and twin-rotored Chinook helicopters rising out of dusty valleys, hauling with them the tools and warriors of modern combat. When we hear about the war there, it is usually because something has gone wrong inside one of those two images: the distant outpost or the labored supply line that feeds it. Afghanistan ’11 is about that half-remembered war playing out in the margins of our national consciousness.

Afghanistan ’11 is at its best in its early stages, when its workings remain a bit of a mystery despite the manual’s admirable explanation of how the pieces fit together.

In each scenario, you come to the battlefield with a single headquarters on the edge of a vast and hostile countryside. Several far-flung villages must be won over to your cause with visits from security forces, aid shipments, and infrastructure construction; your progress is measured by a “hearts and minds” score. Vehicle-impassable mountains carve the country into a warren of valleys and narrow roadways. Enemy militia and Taliban are out there somewhere, and they will appear in great numbers if you start to lose your grip on the district. It will get more dangerous every time you send a unit out past the wire.

To fight back, you’ll construct and manage a network of forward operating base (FOBs), supply vehicles, and combat troops. You’ll chip away at the borders of the unknown territory, via one painstaking expedition after another. In these early stages, Afghanistan ’11 does feel like a game about warfare instead of administration.

But eventually, each turn begins to unfold almost by rote: mine-sweeping vehicles cruise the same roads ahead of supply and troop convoys, infantry units settle into ambush positions from which their line-of-sight is extended to catch any passing Taliban or militia, and helicopters go racing across the map to rush troops or supplies wherever they’re most urgently needed. It unfolds according to a strict order-of-operations that minimizes the risk of friendly units stumbling onto an IED or a Taliban ambush, and maximizes the chance of exposing and then destroying hostile forces.

It’s challenging, but after a point it each turn is like a very similar jigsaw puzzle. Your most dangerous enemy becomes impatience. Move a unit two hexes without sweeping for mines first, and chances are you’ll watch it roll straight over an IED. Rush a helicopter without making sure it sticks to scouted hexes and it will probably stumble into some Taliban rockets.

Now do this for 60 turns.

There are some clever dynamics at work in Afghanistan ’11. For one thing, your war effort runs on political points: Every move incurs a slight cost, and recruiting fresh troops incurs even more. The best source of political points is the destruction of Taliban and militia units, so the more you smash the enemy, the more political capital you have to bring reinforcements onto the battlefield. But ironically, this also means that you can’t really get too far ahead of the Taliban problem. Your war is going to be chronically under-resourced until all hell breaks loose, at which point you’ll be able to bring in the firepower you need to start peeling-back the Taliban onslaught.

playing Afghanistan ’11 often feels less like being a general waging modern warfare and more like being a district manager for an under-funded courier and parcel service.

On the other hand, once the map is infested with Taliban troops, the odds are also significantly higher that you’ll start absorbing losses, which will chip away at your political points. It’s also worth noting that the battle against militants in the hills is in many ways tangential to the battle for “hearts and minds.”

It’s very easy to wind up in a defensive crouch around roads and bases, dropping bombs and artillery over every Taliban unit that comes into view. But you have to remember that even when you’re under siege, you still have to be making those rounds to the local village, showing the flag and getting intel on where the Taliban are at. Unfortunately, the villages are actively alienated by the destruction of poppy fields, which is a core part of your mission and nets you a lot of political points, at the expense of your hearts and minds score.

Perhaps the best twist of all is the last one: Late in a standard game (it doesn’t happen in every scenario), the American units all go away and the mission continues under the auspices of the Afghan National Army, whose units are all markedly less capable than their American counterparts. Suddenly you’re fighting a war with equipment that is a little bit outdated and less damage resistant, fielding troops who aren’t quite as well-trained and deadly, and stripped of the ability to requisition additional forces at-will.

In some ways, this is exactly the kind of stuff I want to see from more wargames: designs that tackle some of the contradictions and obstacles of unconventional warfare. Having just spent much of the winter playing more traditional wargames—a genre that too often defaults to same handful of well-known battles and campaigns— Afghanistan ’11 is refreshing for how different it is from many of its peers.

It attempts to engage with a conflict’s political context, and connect the experience of those soldiers in this distant warzone to the overall objectives of America’s efforts there. It’s imperfect, but I’m glad to have spent time with this attempt to model a conflict that defies easy summary.

Yet I found myself getting bored with Afghanistan ’11 in a way that I never did with Vietnam ’65 , the last game by developer Every Single Soldier. Vietnam ’65 was bite-sized. It may also have been a bit less sophisticated in how it modeled its brand of counterinsurgency warfare, but it maintained a terrific pace of play from the start to the end of each scenario. Just as you were getting bored, you were staring at the score screen. But every scenario in Afghanistan goes on for ages, and each is dangerously similar to the last. The major exception is a mission where you go kill bin Laden—which is laughably ill-advised given how inadequate this game is for modeling a squad-level mission like that. It’s like trying to do Omaha Beach in Axis & Allies.

There’s also the fact that Afghanistan ’11 implies decisive results in a conflict that has resisted all manner of resolution. Afghanistan ’11 judges success by how well you reach-out to Afghan villagers and train Afghan troops to fight the Taliban, but is that really a reasonable picture of the war there and its challenges? If this is the dynamic of the war, why haven’t fifteen years of air-strikes, village meetings, and training for the Afghan National Army produced an exit strategy? What caused a wave of “insider attacks” by Afghan soldiers on their coalition allies?

Afghanistan ’11 is a wargame about executing a strategy that, to date, has not resulted in any kind of recognizable victory or settlement. It does a good job of bringing some aspects of that strategy to life: the difficulty of the countryside, the way it resists the tools of modern warfare, and the impossibility of securing anything more than isolated pockets in a hostile land.

But a game of sparse combat and ceaseless fuel and food deliveries is bound to get tiresome, especially when it’s increasingly unclear whether you are fighting the right kind of war. Afghanistan ’11 offers some victory conditions that sound execution of your strategy can achieve, but the tell is right there in the title. It’s 2017 and the war goes on much as before, half-forgotten in a country that long ago tired of hearing about besieged outposts and ambushed convoys.