From last post’s homage to Integrity, we turn to the consequences of its absence.
I love my country more than words can say, but why, oh why, can’t we get our exits right? There is nothing sweet about the sorrow with which we part our engagements.
These were the kinds of thoughts washing over me while viewing our exit from Afghanistan last year and the ending of what is dubbed “America’s Longest War”. They have since been supplemented by many other impressions and reflections that demanded a post. And, do I have a book for you to read!
Beyond the Bad Optics
President Biden should have known it would be trouble to comply with the Afghan exit agreement in place. This is especially so since the prior administration had negotiated withdrawal, in typical fashion, only with the forces it was US policy to oppose, to the deliberate and pointed exclusion of the government it was US policy to support. This, you understand, is the Art of the Deal.
That it would be a bad deal was almost a foregone conclusion. Joe Biden should have understood that better than anyone. Most criticism of him is not for leaving, but for not insisting on doing it well, or at least competently. For some reason, he seemed to feel obligated to adhere strictly to a given timetable.
Those thinking our exit from Afghanistan was the worst part of this 20-year misadventure are terribly mistaken, however.
One of the “Must-Read” Books of 2021
Any doubts on that point are obliterated throughout The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock (Simon and Shuster, 2021. Page numbers from the book appear in parentheses below.)
Timely publication of such a book is beneficial. By way of comparison, the Pentagon Papers came out four years after Robert McNamara commissioned the report on America’s involvement in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg leaked the top secret report to the New York Times. Their publishing of installments led to litigation of one of the most important prior-restraint First Amendment cases in Supreme Court history. Since the report already existed, the hardest part of informing the public was obtaining the landmark 6-3 decision clearing the Times to resume publishing.
With the precedent of the Pentagon Papers case established, Whitlock’s task was to assemble the vast amount of information under-girding his book. With six years as a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post writing about al-Qaeda and affiliates, followed by seven years as a beat reporter covering the Pentagon, he “knew Afghanistan was a mess.” (xiii) He sought the big picture that was being missed: What went wrong?
The Source Material
Understanding the sources is crucial to grasping the book’s significance. The Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR; there can be no discussion involving federal government without acronyms – hang in there) had undertaken a project called Lessons Learned. They interviewed hundreds of officials and war participants, hoping to identify mistakes for future avoidedance. Those interviewed spoke with remarkable candor, apparently assuming no public access.
SIGAR issued some dull reports from the Lessons Learned interviews, but Whitlock and the Post sued for the source material – notes, audio and transcripts. After a three-year Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) battle, the author hit the jackpot.
His second major source was George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, famous for dictating memos so numerous as to be nicknamed “snowflakes”. George Washington University’s National Security Archive sued under FOIA for the snowflakes relating to Afghanistan, which they shared with Whitlock.
A third source was a series of interviews of U.S. Embassy officials who had served in Kabul by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. The Foreign Service officers were also blunt.
Fourth are hundreds of interviews conducted by the US Army for historical research; that stated goal again spurred the troops into raw, straightforward sharing.
Finally, the University of Virginia’s Miller Center undertook an oral-history project on the presidency of George W. Bush. Whitlock obtained transcripts of interviews with military commanders, cabinet members, and other senior officials.
This combination of documents and interviews is what Whitlock calls a secret, but unflinching, history of the war.
Beyond Mere Griping
Now, those who carry out orders often question whether people giving them know what they’re doing – sometimes with good reason. What we have here, however, is very different than any generic complaining. The charges here are specific, detailed, and damning. Further, they are leveled by an extraordinarily wide range of individuals, from famous names atop organizational charts to unnamed eyewitnesses. Some are admissions by those giving the orders.
The accounts spare no one, and it is a rough ride indeed for each of the three administrations prior to Joe Biden’s. Partisan types will find some chapters much more fun than others. Cynics will revel in them all. For the rest of us, it’s eye-opening, infuriating, and heart-breaking.
A mind boggling array of mistakes, wrong-doing and failures was enabled by the nature of the information shared as events unfolded. Reports too often comprised a stream of spin, wishful thinking, exaggeration, omission of bad news, and outright lying. A combination of misfeasance and malfeasance spread over two decades and three administrations. Along with good intentions gone awry, it was born of fear, ignorance, arrogance, hubris, illogic, stubbornness, and dishonesty.
Initial Support
Before delving into a few of the details, it’s worth noting an interesting point made by Whitlock in the Forward:
Unlike the Vietnam War, or what would happen in Iraq in 2003, support for moving against Afghanistan following 9/11 was nearly unanimous. Widespread international sympathy over that day’s carnage brought support from outside America, as well. (Whitlock wryly notes that in Iran, “hardliners stopped shouting ‘Death to America’ at weekly prayers for the first time in twenty-two years”. xii)
We knew who hijacked the planes, and where Osama bin Laden had found safe harbor. This stood in stark contrast to the supposed grounds for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution – or to the lack of tie-in between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.
When the bombing of Taliban targets began in October of 2000, it was hardly controversial, then. What unfolded in the ensuing years is hard to comprehend, even in retrospect.
Early “Success”
Initial forays in October met with stiff resistance. With a new war strategy drafted by three men in four hours, however, US officials were surprised when the tide of battle suddenly turned in their favor in November. US and Northern Alliance forces seized major cities in a matter of days. Referring to October’s slow starting phase, Rumsfeld mocked references to Vietnam: “It looked like nothing was happening. Indeed, it looked like we were in a – all together now! – quagmire.” (11)
The US wasn’t sure how to take its unexpectedly quick success. Military brass favored limiting US presence both as to time and scope, given the impression that there was little left to do. Meanwhile, President Bush and his policy advisors found an ambitious program introducing American-style democracy irresistible. As White House security advisor Stephen Hadley put it, “once the Taliban was flushed, we did not want to throw that progress away.” (14) Sloppy practices, wishful thinking, objectives at cross purposes, and self-delusion crept into the mix, never to leave.
Not explicitly stated in the book, but apparent in the narrative, is that the Taliban deftly employed against US and Alliance forces a tactic roughly akin to Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope in boxing. It worked.
Missed Opportunities
Two chances for genuine success were missed in December of 2001. The more famous arose from intelligence placing Osama bin Laden in the caves and tunnels of Tora Bora, 30 miles southeast of Jalalabad. A two-week bombing campaign commenced on December 3. About 100 US commandos and CIA operatives were on the ground, with some militiamen having ties to Afghan warlords.
Why such a small force? Because Central Command had denied urgent requests for more from CIA and Army commanders who feared bin Laden would escape with al Qaeda survivors to Pakistan. Which is exactly what happened. (23-5) It would be another decade before the US would find bin Laden again.
The other opportunity was diplomatic (25-7). The United Nations facilitated a meeting in Bonn in which Afghan factions met with diplomats from the US, Europe, and Central Asia to discuss ending hostilities and Afghanistan’s future. Among the two dozen Afghan delegates were no representatives of the Taliban. That’s right: the group with whom hostilities needed to end weren’t there. This was the opposite of the mistake made nearly two decades later by Trump negotiating only with the Taliban, ending whatever hope remained for the government’s viability.
Exclusion of the Taliban doomed the accord reached in Bonn (naming Hamid Karzai interim leader and providing for a constitution and elections) on December 5 to failure. “A major mistake we made was treating the Taliban the same as al Qaeda,” according to Barnett Rubin, an American expert on Afghanistan serving the UN at Bonn. “Key Taliban leaders were interested in giving the new system a chance, but we didn’t give them a chance.” (26) Whitlock cites other experts who considered the dismissal of Taliban as inconsequential foes, needing simply to be punished, an enormous mistake.
Once the US made its move in Iraq, Afghanistan became a relative afterthought. This made righting the course even less likely. Hours before President Bush’s infamous “mission accomplished” speech about Iraq aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, Rumsfeld publicly claimed major combat had ended in Afghanistan. Even with some hedging about pockets of resistance, his statements were beyond misleading. If only. 95% of eventual casualties hadn’t yet occurred. (43-4)
Happy Talk
As the going in Afghanistan gradually got much tougher in the ensuing months and years, sunny reports of progress flowed. They came from all sides, spokespersons to presidents. Some pronouncements were carefully worded to mislead; others dripped with swagger. At times, setbacks were omitted and data altered. These practices continued unabated, sometimes veering into the absurd.
Even while staying because things got worse, then, we had a steady stream of turning the corner; degrading the insurgency; turning the tide; and being on the right road. One whopper in particular saw repeated use over the years: Heavy resistance and even increased casualties were signs of progress, actually. They were the result of our having the enemy on the run.
The commander of US and NATO forces, Army Gen. David McKiernan, may have been the first general in Afghanistan to admit publicly there were aspects of the war not going well. Defense Secretary Robert Gates sacked him in May of 2009. (114, 145-6)
The “Bad Guys”
Despite multiple significant provocations, like attacks on East African US embassies in 1998 and on the USS Cole in 2000, the US knew virtually nothing about al-Qaeda on 9/11. In a University of Virginia oral-history interview, Gates said “the fact is that we’d just been attacked by a group we didn’t know anything about.” (19) Gates was CIA director in the early ‘90s and replaced Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary in 2006. This permitted a blurring of the lines between al-Qaeda and the Taliban from the outset.
Lumping the two groups together as “bad guys” would typify a simplistic approach that plagued the American effort for its duration. (20)
Perhaps the most striking document reproduced in the book follows page 108. It’s a snowflake memo from Rumsfeld dated September 3, 2003. Its entire contents:
“I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq. I read all the intel from the community and it sounds as though we know a great deal but in fact, when you push at it, you find out we haven’t got anything that is actionable.
We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.
Let’s discuss it.”
So, after four months of hostilities in Iraq and nearly two full years in Afghanistan, the US Secretary of Defense was distressed to realize he didn’t even know who the bad guys were. Let’s discuss it?
The Taliban were Afghans with local objectives. Al Qaeda, on the other hand, was an international terrorist group of Arabs whose leader, bin Laden, was in Afghanistan because he’d been expelled elsewhere. There were some similarities in extremist religious beliefs, and bin Laden’s permitted presence justified action against the Taliban, but the two groups’ goals otherwise varied. The Taliban had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, for example.
Considering the Taliban a homogeneous group was also a mistake. When Brig. Gen, James Terry asked an Afghan general to tell him about the Taliban, the reply was “Which Taliban?” Puzzled, Terry asked to learn about all types. There were three: (1) “radical terrorists”; (2) those “in it just for themselves”; and (3) “the poor and ignorant, who are simply influenced by the other two groups”. (101-2)
All along, we remained deficient in something at least as important as knowing who the enemy was: what motivated them to fight.
Oh, Whatever
The simplistic approach went well beyond conflating al Qaeda with the Taliban. It seems almost no one deployed to Afghanistan had even a basic introduction to the culture, language, norms or practices of the people.
When field artillery officer Maj. Daniel Lovett reported for Afghan training in 2005, an instructor (in cultural awareness, no less) started by saying “When you get to Iraq…” When Lovett corrected him, the reply was “Oh, Iraq, Afghanistan. It’s the same thing.” (70)
By way of unconventional warfare, the US military sometimes seeks to influence the thinking and emotions of people where the action is, by employing psychological operations, or “psy-ops”. Maj. Louis Frias deployed to Afghanistan in 2003 to lead the psy-ops effort, and prepared by reading Islam For Dummies on the plane ride.
One of the projects Frias led was to develop a comic book to convey the concept of voting. The project bogged down when diplomats at the US Embassy and military commanders all insisted on having their say on the content. Frias’s six-month tour of duty was over before anything was produced. He heard that something went into production, but had no idea about any effect. (67-8)
A couple years later, another psy-ops crew widely distributed soccer balls adorned with several images, including a verse from the Koran. Since placing holy words on a ball to be struck by foot was a sacrilegious insult, the military found itself publicly apologizing. (69)
Futile Attempts to Maintain an Army and Police
Any hope America had of ever extricating itself from Afghanistan in a manner considered successful depended on leaving behind a country that could defend itself and maintain reasonable order. This required establishment of both an army and police.
All attempts failed, with gory details of how and why throughout the book. That they would collapse at the first sign of America leaving was such a foregone conclusion that Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson demanded of Biden’s critics a detailed explanation of how the exit could have been managed without chaos and confusion.
“Please be specific”, he wrote on 8/26/21. “Did you see the Taliban waiting patiently while the US-trained Afghan army escorted U.S. citizens, other NATO nationals and our Afghan collaborators to the airport for evacuation?”
Pakistan
Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan is 1500 miles of mostly rough, mountainous terrain. Controlling it was undoable. Add to that the Pakistanis’ remarkable skill in playing both sides, and you had a puzzle the US never solved in two decades.
Most dramatically, it was Pakistan where Osama bin Laden fled upon escaping Tora Bora, and where the US found and killed him years later. But fighters and the supplies they needed were back and forth in ways reminiscent of Cambodia and Vietnam, only more so.
Pakistan military ruler Pervez Musharraf appeared to cut ties with the Taliban at the behest of the US after 9/11, and positioned himself as an ally. Pakistan not only allowed America to use their land, airspace and seaports, but also turned over a number of al Qaeda figures. Some were as significant as 9/11 plotters Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. (82)
US opinion differed on whether Pakistan could not, or rather would not, help similarly to stem the Taliban’s cross-border insurgency. A discussion recounted in the book sheds some light. US ambassador to Pakistan Ryan Crocker one day got Ashfaq Kayani (the head of Pakistan’s spy agency, ISI) to explain: “one day you’ll be gone again…you’ll be done with us, but we’re still going to be here, because we can’t actually move our country. And the last thing we want with all of our other problems is to have turned the Taliban into a mortal enemy, so, yes, we’re hedging our bets.” (86-7)
Among the “Good Guys”
The only actors who may have been worse than the Bad Guys were some of the supposed Good Guys. Chapter ten of The Afghanistan Papers is The Warlords. In renewing relationships begun as far back as CIA assistance to mujahedin fighting the Soviets in the ‘80s, the US found itself aligned with warlords so despicable as to be almost cartoonish. The stories of Addul Rashid Dostum, Sher Mohammad Akhundzada (“SMA”), and Fahim Khan, among others, must be read to be believed. (115-127)
Despite their brutality, corruption, opium production and trafficking, murder, and other mayhem, such individuals played key roles in the battle against the Taliban. So vile were they, however, that many Afghans regarded the cruel and oppressive Taliban as the lesser of two evils.
Creeps
Many kinds of creep are featured in The Afghanistan Papers. One of the most damaging is “mission creep”. Every chapter highlights another instance in a repeating cycle over the 20 years of three administrations drifting from one ill-defined objective of sorts to another.
The mission had little choice but to creep, though, because it was never adequately defined. A chapter in the book is “An Incoherent Strategy”. The quotes, relating to the later Bush years, are among the most trenchant in the book, but apply to every phase of the 20-year operation.
Indeed, we were there so long that wrong-headed policies and tactical mistakes were recycled more than once, often by officials oblivious to the prior failures.
British Lt. Gen. David Richards, who led NATO forces in 2006, said flatly in a Lessons Learned interview, “There was no coherent long-term strategy…instead we got a lot of tactics.” (105) His successor, US Army Gen. Dan McNeill also found no plan in 2007. His instructions? Kill terrorists, build the Afghan army, and don’t fracture the alliance. “I tried to get someone to define for me what winning meant, even before I went over, and nobody could,” he related to Lessons Learned. (109)
In an effort to coordinate policy and strategy for Afghanistan and Iraq, President Bush appointed Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute his “war czar”. His Lessons Learned interview yielded this: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan – we didn’t know what we were doing. What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” (110)
Those who served bravely and well, and who paid for it with their lives, their limbs, or other aspects of their physical or mental health, deserved far better. At every phase of the conflict, straight and sensible answers to questions about what they were doing, and why, were lacking. It was a frustration they shared with the superiors they asked.
The Obama Years – Showing Them the Money
A recently-elected President Obama announced a large Increase in troops to carry out counter-insurgency, but with an odd twist. There would be a strict timetable for the mission of 18 months. This attempt to appease critics of the quagmire was seen widely as an obvious mistake, benefiting the Taliban.
Accompanying the troop surge was a massive effort to strengthen the Afghan economy and government. Even while denying nation-building, the administration sent unimaginable scads of money for any conceivable kind of project, whether wanted by Afghans or not. There were so many projects, and so much money, officials struggled to keep track. Even among projects completed, many were useless for being in areas our forces could not, or would not, secure.
Anyone looking for the stereotypical “throwing money at a problem” could hardly do better than this. The harm here goes beyond just waste. The main impact was to ratchet up Afghanistan’s already-pervasive corruption by orders of magnitude.
Among the many mind-boggling stories (unused new schools becoming Taliban bomb-making factories, etc.), one in particular lingers long after reading. After the Taliban destroyed a bridge in Laghman, eager US officials hired a local construction firm to replace it. That firm’s owner had a brother in the Taliban. “Together, they had built a thriving business: the Taliban brother blew up US projects and then unwitting Americans paid his sibling to rebuild them.” (165)
Joseph Heller had to employ creative genius in Catch 22 to satirize the insanity that can occur during war; Whitlock achieves similar effect here simply presenting what actually happened.
Amid it all, reports to the press and public remained a steady stream of happy talk, deception, flawed data, and misleading statistics. There was even a bizarre ceremony in Kabul celebrating the “end” of the war on December 28, 2014. Not only was the war not over; it wasn’t going well at all. In truth, the perfect opportunity to end it had occurred over three years earlier, when bin Laden was eliminated on May 1, 2011.
Then There Was Trump – Bombs Away
After Donald Trump took the reins, he said some things that sounded familiar – the country’s weariness with the war, a resolve to win – but he did make some changes. Most dramatic was rescinding Obama’s restrictions on airstrikes in Afghanistan. With that, the amount of munitions dropped more than tripled and the number of airstrikes doubled.
Civilian deaths had resulted from awful mistakes during prior administrations, and we’d been slow at times to acknowledge the truth and express suitable remorse. Many analyses, not just in this book, identify these episodes as a major impediment to winning Afghan hearts and minds. Trump’s barrage was at a whole new level, however. According to Brown University’s Cost of War project, Trump’s first three years doubled average annual civilian deaths from airstrikes. (246)
This approach was the greatest recruitment tool ever handed to the Taliban; their fighting numbers swelled accordingly. (247) At that point, many Afghans now considered the Taliban the least of three evils – warlords, Taliban, and Americans (and the US-supported Afghan government).
Lessons Learned?
Is there a more painful irony than the title for the interviews conducted to prevent future mistakes? Anyone old enough had to recall desperate people clinging to US helicopters leaving Vietnam. We better learn some lessons this time.
The takeaway is not the wisdom of isolationism. Ever wonder what might have happened had the Japanese not attacked Pearl Harbor? No, the world is a worse and more dangerous place when America abdicates its leadership role, especially to bad actors. Somewhere between isolationism and running helter-skelter into conflicts we don’t understand, with no idea what to do, there is plenty of room for a properly engaged United States.
An even worse takeaway would be “Whatever you do, don’t speak candidly about your public service!” Security has its place, and appropriate use of classification can protect vital interests . A recurring theme of Other Aspects, however, is this: Any public policy needing to be defended with dishonesty is fatally flawed. Any public servant lying to the public without hesitation is no public servant, and needs to find another line of work. America works best when officials behave knowing that informed citizens are interested and paying attention.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of comprehensive, high quality intelligence. Success in a complex, dangerous world demands nothing short of excellence in the field. An anti-intelligence stance, like that of the last administration, must disqualify anyone seeking the presidency.
A Stab at Some Specifics
If we are going to send soldiers off to war, or any facsimile of it where life and limb are in jeopardy, at the very least we must be willing and able to:
– identify the bad guys
– be on the side of the good guys (which requires that there be good guys, and enough of them to have any chance of sustaining after we’ve left)
– articulate a coherent objective
– set benchmarks
– have some idea what will constitute victory
– think enough of our position and conduct as to permit honest appraisal and reporting
– know what we are doing
– know enough about the people, the region, and the cultures to understand what the conflict is about
– notice, and successfully adapt to, changing conditions
A Misadventure… and Yet…
There is a generation of Afghan girls who became young women having experienced some level of education. They know they deserved it, hopefully, and yearn to put that education to good use.
Similarly, it’s too soon to say that attempts to plant seeds among Afghans aspiring to another way of life – of whatever age, gender, or background – were futile.
This brings us to the dread topic of nation building. The twenty years saw frenzies of nation-building denial interspersed with frenzies of attempted nation building. Sometimes, they overlapped. It’s easy to see a toxic mix of hubris, arrogance and ignorance in the many, sometimes spectacular failures. To be sure, all three were involved.
Yet, there was something else, too. In the face of grinding poverty and relentless hardship, there is a desire based in human decency to share what we cherish of our American lifestyle. For that, we need not apologize. Yet, all is for naught unless we are effective. If we care as much as we’d like to think we do, it’s worth investing the time, energy and resources to understand people whose life experiences differ so drastically from our own.
Never Easy
None of this is to suggest that Afghanistan should have been easy. The place and its people are as different from the US and Americans as any on the planet. Climate and terrain are harsh and unyielding. The society is still largely tribal, with the very notion of a central government (or voting, or taxes, or anything other than local authority and tribal customs) utterly foreign to most. (38-9) In many areas, warlords rule. Anywhere but in the (relatively) sizable cities, life is a hardscrabble struggle to survive. Agrarian practices can be centuries old, and poppies are the leading crop. Poverty abounds.
Even the concept of time is different in Afghanistan compared to impatient Westerners. In 2006, US Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann reported on a Taliban leader warning “You have all the clocks, but we have all the time.” (95) As the headline of a piece by Karen DeYoung in the 9/4/21 Washington Post put it, “As in the battlefield, the Taliban outlasted the U.S. at the negotiating table.”
Such striking differences made it more vital, not less, to carefully study the situation, to confront and convey reality, to respect the task at hand, and to proceed with thoughtful, strategic care. Reassess, think, and if nothing else, say “Hold it! What the hell are we doing here?” if we can’t even tell who the bad guys are.
All Americans, regardless of political inclination, have much to gain from pondering the issues raised in The Afghanistan Papers – and much to lose from ignoring them. Lessons learned? We owe it to ourselves and each other, even as Vladimir Putin now prepares to do what thuggish dictators so often do to divert attention from their failures.
Ken Bossong
© 2022 Kenneth J. Bossong
