When the US was attacked on 9/11, the world’s sympathies were entirely with the US. When the US went into Afghanistan a month later, the world was on its side. The Taliban were deposed in a couple of months, faster than anyone had predicted. It was a big win.
Had the US withdrawn its forces in early 2002, the story would have had a happy ending. Unfortunately, that was not how history unfolded. The US had overstayed its welcome by the time it pulled out last month. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The prolonged US presence merely ensured that the Taliban would return.
When the US went into Afghanistan, there was no shortage of academic and military critiques of the Vietnam War. One would have thought that history would not repeat itself. However, we saw the same mistakes being made over and over again. Why?
The answer is contained in the Afghanistan Papers, which were only released when the Washington Post sued the US government. They are even more shocking than the Pentagon papers, since they contain a thousand ‘Lessons Learned’ interviews with civilian officials and military officers that the special inspector general for Afghanistan conducted.
Now Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter with the Washington Post, has published excerpts from the Afghanistan Papers in his eponymous book. The narrative is hair raising and spell binding at the same time. The book shatters all illusions of US competence.
A month after 9/11, President George W. Bush was asked how long would the US stay in Afghanistan. He said for a year or two. Years later, during his Lessons Learned interview, a State Department official said, “We went into the war reflexively, without knowing what we were trying to achieve.” In December 2001, only 2,500 American troops were in Afghanistan. Six months after the war, bin Laden was still on the loose but the US had already begun plans to invade Iraq.
In Afghanistan, mission creep set in. The war against terror evolved into nation building. Whitlock says, “The US never understood what motivated its enemies to fight.” What the US thought was Taliban activity was a tribal fight going back a hundred years. Two years into the war, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had noted, “I have no visibility on who the bad guys are. We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.”
It was clear that the longer the US stayed in Afghanistan, the more enemies it created. Yet president after president kept deluding himself that the US was winning.
As the war progressed, the Lessons Learned interviews revealed, US presidents and senior generals kept on giving false reports to the American public. Their statements amounted to nothing less than perfidy and mendacity.
Generals Petraeus and McChrystal, imported from Iraq, came to Afghanistan, wanting to be seen as “cerebral, multitasking, workaholic supermen.” Yet they fell into the same trap and failed. They understood neither the culture nor the terrain of Afghanistan and failed to bond with the Afghans. It was not even clear whether the US was “fighting a war, engaging in a peacekeeping operation, leading a training mission, or doing something else.”
It was clear that the longer the US stayed in Afghanistan, the more enemies it created. Yet president after president kept deluding himself that the US was winning. In December 2014, Obama promised to end the war, claiming the US was on the verge of winning. Whitlock says that was simply conjuring up an illusion of victory where there was none.
The US spent $143 billion on reconstruction, aid programs and on Afghan security forces. This was the largest amount the US had spent anywhere since the Second World War, even exceeding the money spent on the Marshall Plan.
Where did the money go? It disappeared down the rabbit hole of corruption. For example, if the US paid a million dollars to an Afghan contractor to build a bridge, he would say his brother was in the Taliban and would blow it up unless he was also given a million. The US paid the contractor another million dollars to make sure the Taliban would be kept at bay. It did not bother to check whether the brother existed.
John Campbell, a US commanding general in Afghanistan, claimed the US had extended the average life expectancy in Afghanistan by 21 years. Whitlock says this was ‘the most egregious deception’ during the two-decade war.
The US spent $143 billion on reconstruction, aid programs and on Afghan security forces. This was the largest amount the US had spent anywhere since the Second World War, even exceeding the money spent on the Marshall Plan.
Whitlock says it took the US a long time to figure out Pakistan’s double-dealings. It did not matter how much the US spent in Afghanistan to shore up its defenses. “The flow of insurgents and weapons from Pakistan into the war zone kept on rising.” Richard Holbrooke, who had served in Vietnam, and was fully aware of the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, noted that “If the enemy has a sanctuary in a neighbouring country,” the war becomes unwinnable. A US officer in his Lessons Learned interview complained that whenever the US defeated the Taliban, they would regroup in Pakistan and come back stronger.
The only beneficiaries of the Afghan War were US Defense contractors and their local subcontractors along with the warlords. The US knew the warlords were corrupt but befriended them in the hope they would help destroy the Taliban. This further alienated the US from the Afghans.
The Taliban thrived on the opium trade. The US paid ‘eradicators’ to destroy the opium crops in an effort to stop the drug trade. That did not work because the eradicators soon discovered that they could earn five times as much by working in the opium fields on behalf of the farmers. Furthermore, Afghans blamed the Americans for destroying their livelihood.
The only general who spoke the truth, David McKiernan, was fired. He admitted the US was in a tough fight and said the “idea that that it might get worse before it gets better is certainly a possibility.”
I wish Whitlock had written a few pages on why mendacity had become institutionalised in the US establishment. So much treasure and so many lives could have been saved if the US had exited in August 2002 rather than August 2021.