Final Engagement

Final Engagement is a firsthand account of the closing months of a Marine advisory mission in southern Afghanistan. Christopher Izant, a Marine Corps veteran who served as a lieutenant, tells the story of the last team of Marine combat advisors at Combat Outpost Taghaz in Helmand Province, near the Afghan border. The year was 2012, during Operation Enduring Freedom, and the team's task was to sustain the gains won by earlier infantry units.

Izant and his fellow Marines volunteered to train the Afghan National Security Forces and to fight the Taliban alongside them. They knew the risks, and they also knew the mission looked futile. They came to call it advise and abandon, because policymakers far away had fixed base-closure and troop-withdrawal dates that left only six months to prepare the Afghan Border Police to stand on their own. The terrain and the people added further dangers: hidden minefields, cultural clashes, green-on-blue insider attacks, and an enemy that was patient and relentless.

Before Border Advisor Team 1 stood down, it fought one last deadly battle with a devastating aftermath. Written in light of the fall of Kabul nearly a decade later, the book presents this clash on the Afghan borderlands as a warning of the countrywide collapse to come. While senior commanders told Congress, the press, and the public that the effort was succeeding, Izant and the others on the front line saw understaffed, poorly equipped Afghan forces weakening under tribal infighting, incompetent leadership, and growing Taliban attacks.

The account moves from foot patrols, firefights, and insider attacks to shared meals and conversations with the men of the Afghan Border Police. It shows how this experience turned a generation of American and Afghan fighters from idealistic volunteers in a just war into disillusioned veterans of a lost cause.