The Afghan Taliban’s control of Kabul and most of Afghanistan within five weeks has left many analysts and international mainstream media perplexed in how the complete collapse and surrender by the Afghan Government under Ashraf Ghani and Afghan National Army occurred so quickly. However, many experts on the region predicted this back in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks and the later U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.
Furthermore, the Afghanistan Papers reported upon by Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock on December 9, 2019, reveals the futility of the Afghanistan war. The Papers include two sets of documents: about 1,900 pages of notes and transcripts of interviews with more than 400 U.S. and other policymakers conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) between 2014 and 2018, and around 190 short memos (referred to as “snowflakes”) from former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, dating from 2001 to 2004.
The Afghanistan Papers disclose that U.S. political and military leadership starting from the George W. Bush administration to the Trump administration generally held the opinion that the war was unwinnable while continually misleading the public on the success of the war. And sadly, the mainstream media in the U.S. and around the world continued to project these lies without critically examining the leadership and policymakers. I suppose it’s easier to scapegoat others like Pakistan than to look inwards for the U.S. failure in Afghanistan.
I wonder if Twitter or Facebook will shut down the accounts of George W. Bush, Barrack Obama, Joe Biden, the U.S. Defense Department, and other agencies for posting lies and misleading information on the Afghanistan war for twenty years as they do with other accounts for the same reasons. But I guess if you lie on behalf of the establishment, there are never any consequences to face.
Let’s remember that there were no Afghans or Pakistanis involved in the 9/11 attacks but the U.S. under then-President George W. Bush decided to invade Afghanistan to eliminate Al-Qaeda and topple the Taliban government. Also, the Bush administration categorized Taliban leaders as terrorists for giving sanctuary to Al-Qaeda and refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden (OBL) without showing any evidence of bin Laden’s complicity in 9/11. However, the Taliban agreed to extradite bin Laden to a third country for trial but the U.S. refused and decided to invade Afghanistan. This appears to indicate that the U.S. government was never interested in capturing/killing OBL but more interested in entering Afghanistan. Maybe for the lithium?
Within six months of the U.S. invasion, the leaders of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were dead, apprehended, or gone into hiding. This was the ideal time for U.S. forces to withdraw but the U.S. government began to distort its strategic objectives and remained in Afghanistan for another nineteen years. It seems that continued American presence wasn’t to help the Afghan people but to financially feed the beast called the military-industrial complex.
The U.S. government spent approximately US$2.26 trillion over twenty years in Afghanistan or US$300 million per day. The Afghan people weren’t beneficiaries of this largesse except for the political elite but the major recipients of this spending are the various U.S. defense contractors. If an investor held US$10,000 in stocks of some of the major U.S. defense contractors back in 2001, the investment value would have surged by 4 to 13 times as of today. I guess the renowned U.S. Marine Corps Major-General Smedly Butler was correct when he said that “WAR is a racket.”
To see how crazy this war was, the Afghanistan Papers contain a 2015 interview of Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as a war czar for Afghanistan under the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations quoting him as saying, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing.” Lute also added, “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking. If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction.” This clearly shows the no one in the U.S. government or military knew what the mission was in Afghanistan. Imagine, the strongest modern-day military force in the world didn’t know what it was doing, this is truly unbelievable.
The interviews conducted by SIGAR; reveal that the U.S. military deliberately altered statistics to hoodwink the American public into believing that America was winning the war. “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” said Bob Crowley, an army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to US military commanders in 2013 and 2014. Simply, this acknowledges that the U.S. government and military leadership were deceitful so that trillions of dollars could continue to feed the military-industrial complex.
SIGAR in its Lessons Learned Report of May 2018 points out the overestimation of the U.S. government’s ability to build and reform government institutions in Afghanistan as part of its stabilization strategy. “We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians.”
A classic quote in the Afghanistan Papers from James Dobbins, former US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan: “We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich. We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.” I guess the U.S. action plan to bring peace to a country is just dropping bombs.
The billions of dollars of aid that the U.S. government pumped into Afghanistan resulted in the rise of historical levels of corruption and the Afghan government becoming a kleptocracy. Ryan Crocker, the former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan in 2002 and again from 2011-12 admitted to this in one of the SIGAR interviews, “Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, may have been the development of mass corruption. Once it gets to the level I saw when I was there, it is somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix”. The American people should be outraged that their government wasted tax money in Afghanistan instead of paying down student loans and providing homes for the homeless and poor families.
Describing Afghan security forces as inept, no US military trainer expressed confidence that they fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. Special Forces teams called Afghan police “the bottom of the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel.” Another officer estimated a third of them were either drug addicts or the Taliban. If this is the quality of the Afghan security forces then no wonder a vast number surrendered to the Taliban without firing a shot.
A National Security Council official admitted there was constant pressure from the Obama Whitehouse and Pentagon to produce numbers to show that the 2009-11 troop surge was successful contrary to the reality. “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 senior NSC official told government interviewers in 2016. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war.”
What is surreal was the way the U.S. military described suicide attacks in Kabul as a sign of Taliban desperation and reluctance to engage in direct combat while spinning the rising U.S. troop deaths as proof that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.
Given the above revelations from the Afghanistan Papers, any objective observer or journalist could see that the reclaiming of Kabul and Afghanistan by the Taliban was predictable no matter when the U.S. withdrew. The Afghanistan war teaches us that you can’t fight wars based on lies and when the government lies, the truth becomes a traitor.
If the U.S., the West, India, and their establishment media still want to scapegoat Pakistan for the Afghan debacle then they should have the moral integrity to admit that Pakistan is also a “superpower” by defeating the modern world’s greatest powers, the former Soviet Union and now the United States of America.
