How the Pineapple Express saved 1,000 Afghans from the Taliban

The withdrawal of the remaining U.S. armed forces from Afghanistan last year ended America’s longest war and ignited a frenzied evacuation as the Taliban reclaimed power. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans – civilians, government officials, members of the security forces – converged on the airport in Kabul in a desperate attempt to flee.

Scott Mann watched the wrenching scenes on TV at his home in Tampa, Florida, with a mix of despair and frustration. The retired Green Beret, who ended his 23-year Army career as a lieutenant colonel in 2012, had trained Afghan special forces commandos during multiple deployments to the country. When one of them, Nezamuddin Nezami, known to friends as Nezam, asked for his help to get out, Mr. Mann chose to funnel his despair into action.

As recounted in “Operation Pineapple Express: The Incredible Story of a Group of Americans Who Undertook One Last Mission and Honored a Promise in Afghanistan,” he drew from a deep well of military and civilian contacts to assemble a network of like-minded volunteers scattered around the world. Working primarily through a Signal chat room, the group coordinated with U.S. troops on the ground in Kabul to evacuate more than 1,000 Afghans. The first was Mr. Nezami, whose use of the code word “pineapple” clinched his escape and inspired the group’s moniker, Task Force Pineapple.

Mr. Mann spoke to the Monitor from his home in Tampa, where Mr. Nezami is now his neighbor. He discussed the devotion of volunteers to the Afghan cause, the U.S. government’s inertia during the evacuation, Afghanistan’s future, and the prospects for fostering cooperative, public-private efforts to mend rifts in American civic life. 

As the chaos unfolded in Kabul last year, what went through your mind as you weighed getting involved?

When Nezam was initially reaching out to me, I felt isolated in the sense of, “What in the world am I going to be able to do? I cannot believe nobody’s trying to help.” I called the USASOC [United States Army Special Operations Command] and asked the commanding general’s aide, “What are we doing?” And they’re like, “We’re handling it.” But they didn’t.

I had retired from the military because I didn’t like where things were going with the careerism, with Afghanistan, and it took me a long time to put that behind me. I knew that if I did this, it would be very hard to extricate myself, and my family would be sucked back in. But at some point, it just comes down to: This is my friend.

Task Force Pineapple included veterans, service members, and civilians. There were Democrats and Republicans. Some people you had known for decades, others you had never met. At a time of extreme division in America, what did it say to you that such a diverse coalition mobilized to aid Afghans?

It’s easy to be jaded about what happened with the withdrawal. But as I was doing research on this book and interviewing people, the spirit of friendship and loyalty of those who had fought and bled together, and of perfect strangers who jumped into the fray and started helping – that was so uplifting. I sometimes would finish interviews and put my head down and weep because it was such a beautiful display of humanity.

I went through Pineapple’s Signal chat room and reviewed tens of thousands of messages, and President Biden was mentioned once and former President Trump zero. I thought, “These men and women are showing us exactly what leadership looks like. They’re showing us exactly how we need to behave as a nation.” What if we tackled all of the issues in our country that way?

But as you write, the emergence of your group and others underscored the relative inaction of political and military leaders.

There were two questions that I asked myself on the other side of this: What does a promise mean to you? And how far would you go to honor it? As I started looking at how those questions were answered, boy, was there a contrast between the volunteers and the institutional leaders.

At a diplomatic level, the State Department issued – through the National Security Council – a memorandum of priority for evacuation on Aug. 14 [one day before Kabul fell to the Taliban]. That’s ridiculous, and it shows how hasty everything was. The fact that there was not a single Special Forces team on the ground in the several months leading up to the withdrawal is egregious. That’s not on the teams; that’s on senior leadership. It was wholesale abandonment of our Afghan partners.

You name names in your criticism of military leadership, including Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. How have top officers reacted?

I’ve lost friends over it. A lot of senior leaders who mentored me don’t talk to me anymore.

You write that escaping Kabul was only the first step in the arduous, ongoing journey for Afghan refugees. How are Nezam and his family adjusting to America?

When it was time for them to come out of the refugee camp at Fort Dix [in New Jersey], I asked the team, “Would you be willing to help me sponsor them?” So we went out into the community and asked for help, and we had donations come in that allowed us to put him and his family in a three-bedroom, two-bathroom rental house down the road from me. People donated all the furniture, a car. And Nezam came in like a true commando. He got his kids enrolled in school, he got his driver’s license within weeks, he finished his GED, and it looks like he’s now landed a really good job with an aircraft company.

All that said, it has been very difficult. He gets phone calls every day from his commando brothers in Afghanistan asking for help. Some of them are angry that he’s in a book and they’re starving and dying. He’s racked by that. So we’re trying to go slow. For most Afghans in resettlement, unless they have a sponsor living right next to them, it’s a safe bet they’re struggling.

The West appears resigned to the Taliban ruling Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. How do you view the country’s future given what U.S. troops – including yourself – fought for there?

I wouldn’t count out the Afghan people at all. That’s what I tell anybody who asks, “Was the war worth it?” Look, 8 million boys and girls went to school. Women had the opportunity to step into their power like never before. There was relative democracy for 20 years and an unprecedented level of civil society engagement, particularly in urban areas. I think the Taliban’s hold on power is tenuous at best, and I think you’ll see women, educated youth, and former special operators who we trained playing a very big role in the resistance. The question is, what role is the United States going to play?

Task Force Pineapple and similar groups formed to help people on the other side of the world. Is there any chance of nurturing that kind of cooperation to benefit our own communities?

A component of the work we did that really heartens me is this privatized approach to solving hard problems, where people look around and say, “OK, nobody’s coming. I’ll lead.” I do believe we’re overdue for the upswing that Robert Putnam talks about in his book “Bowling Alone” that happened in the early 1900s – an increase in social capital, bottom-up leadership, and privatized efforts. Alcoholics Anonymous, the NAACP, and the Rotary Club all formed during that time. Pineapple is some version of that, and there is a real opportunity for us to build on that here at home, based on the volunteer spirit I saw. But the government is also going to have to wake up.