[Ending the US military involvement in Afghanistan is a noble goal. But while it was too easy for the United States, in the wake of 9/11, to launch a forever war in the land that previously defied the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and other outsiders, extrication was never going to be smooth and cost-free. History doesn’t lie. And with no honest dialogue about the war, this brutal finish is even more shocking.]
By David
Corn
It was Bush and Dick Cheney who led
the United States into what would be the longest-running quagmire in American
history. And they did so with little strategic thought about what to do after
chasing Osama bin Laden out of Afghanistan and running the al-Qaeda-friendly
Taliban out of power. Most notoriously, before figuring out how to proceed in
Afghanistan after the initial attack, they launched the even more misguided war
in Iraq on the basis of lies and, in similar fashion, without a clear plan for
what would come after the fall of Saddam Hussein. As a result, over 4,400
American soldiers would perish there, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
civilians would die in the years of post-invasion fighting. Meanwhile, nearly
6,300 American GIs and contractors would lose their lives in
Afghanistan. The arrogance and ineptitude of Bush, Cheney, and their henchmen
have led to the horrible images and tales we have seen reported from
Afghanistan in the past few days—which themselves are the continuation of many
years of horrible images and tales from the double-debacle of these two wars.
But the Obama and Trump
administrations were complicit in the Afghanistan catastrophe, particularly for
perpetuating the national security establishment’s delusions—and lies—about the
war. In 2019, the Washington Post obtained access
to a trove of confidential US government documents about the Afghanistan war
that were produced as part of an inspector general’s project that investigated
the root failures of the war by conducting interviews with 400 insiders
involved with the effort, including generals, White House officials, diplomats,
and Afghan officials. The findings were damning. As the Post put
it, “senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in
Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they
knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become
unwinnable.”
That was a helluva secret to keep
from the public. A sharp indictment came from Douglas Lute, a three-star Army
general who was the White House Afghan war czar for Bush and Obama. In 2015, he
told the project’s interviewers, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding
of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing.” The guy in charge
of Afghanistan remarkably added, “We didn’t have the foggiest notion
of what we were undertaking.” Lute also observed, “If the American people knew
the magnitude of this dysfunction.” Yes, imagine if we did—though the vast
corruption that undermined the massive US rebuilding endeavor was well reported
repeatedly over the years. As were the continuous failures within the war
itself. Yet Congress, the media, and the citizenry paid insufficient attention
to this never-ending, going-nowhere conflict.
Several officials interviewed noted
the US government—military HQ in Kabul and the White House—consistently
hoodwinked the public to make it seem the US was winning in Afghanistan when it
was not. Remember the steady stream of assurances the Afghan military was
becoming more capable of beating back the Taliban? That was BS. A senior
National Security Council official said there was pressure from the Obama White
House and the Pentagon to concoct stats showing the American troop surge was
succeeding: “It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers
trained, violence levels, control of territory, and none of it painted an
accurate picture. The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the
war.”
John Sopko, who headed the office
of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which
ran the project, bottom-lined this for the Post: “The American
people have constantly been lied to.”
Think about that. Americans have
paid about $1 trillion for the war in Afghanistan. Thousands have given their
lives; many more have suffered tremendous injuries. And the public was not told
the truth about this venture. It was bamboozled by successive administrations.
The Post had to twice sue SIGAR to force the release of these
papers under the Freedom of Information Act. The Trump administration preferred
to keep this material under wraps.
These documents were somewhat akin
to the Pentagon Papers, the 7,000-page long history of the Vietnam War that was
leaked to the media by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 and showed that the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations had routinely deceived the public about supposed
progress in that war. (The Afghanistan papers, unlike the Vietnam study, were
not classified.) Yet the Post’s big get did not detonate a major
controversy, as the Pentagon Papers did. This holy-shit scoop was duly noted,
and then, as is often the case, we all moved on. The Afghanistan war had long
since become a non-story, relegated to p. A15, if covered at all.
Now we are worried, perhaps
angered, by the fall of Kabul, and we fear for the Afghans—especially the women
and girls, the human rights activists, and those who aided US forces and
Western journalists—who are about to become inhabitants of the Taliban’s
fundamentalist hellscape. But however we reached this point—and whether or not
President Joe Biden committed a grave error with the US troop withdrawal and
its management—one thing is clear: US presidents, military officials, and
policymakers were not straight with the American public about Afghanistan. We
never had an honest debate about what was being done there and what could—and
couldn’t—be accomplished. (For a snapshot of the absurdity of the Afghanistan
war, see this recent thread from
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat.)
As Afghans in Kabul, including
President Ashraf Ghani, fled the incoming Taliban this past weekend, the blame
game kicked in. Who lost Afghanistan? Well, it wasn’t ours to lose in the first
place. But everyone is to blame, for everyone lied or got it wrong: Bush and
Cheney, Obama and Biden, Trump and Pence, and now Biden and Harris. When Trump
in February 2020 signed a “peace deal” with the Taliban obligating the US troop
withdrawal that has just occurred, he told Americans that he expected the
Taliban would act responsibly. He claimed the Taliban was “tired of war.”
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper called it a “hopeful moment.” Months later,
there was intensified fighting. In July, President Joe Biden, who had the
choice of abiding by this deal or confronting an anticipated expansion in
Taliban attacks, presented a false impression of what to expect with the troop
pullout Trump had negotiated: “The jury is still out, but the likelihood
there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole
country is highly unlikely.”
Ending the US military involvement
in Afghanistan is a noble goal. But while it was too easy for the United
States, in the wake of 9/11, to launch a forever war in the land that
previously defied the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and other outsiders,
extrication was never going to be smooth and cost-free. History doesn’t lie.
And with no honest dialogue about the war, this brutal finish is even more
shocking.
The American public has been conned
about Afghanistan for two decades by successive administrations. Did any of
those lies do the Afghan people any good? That’s a tough question to answer
this week. The 20 years of fighting did keep the Taliban at bay, and for many
Afghans that was a true benefit. But the lies certainly were an offense against
the American public and the Constitution. The war in Afghanistan—prosecuted in
ignorance and sold with hubris and falsehoods—has been a scandal of the highest
order, a fundamental violation of the national trust. An awful aspect of this
fiasco is that the perpetrators and protectors of the Afghanistan fraud have
not been held accountable, while the Afghans now suffer. This is their tragedy.
But it was built upon the profound and bipartisan malfeasance of our
government.
