Airstrikes were called in on December 11, as Taliban attempted to breach Bagram Air Base, considered as the ultimate bastion of American military power in Afghanistan. After 18 years and over $1 trillion dollars in US taxpayer money spent on the war, the Taliban are now at their strongest and control or hold sway at least over half the country. President Trump had visited Bagram Air Base on Thanksgiving and announced that the coalition forces in Afghanistan had killed a large number of Daesh fighters in the country. Shawn Snow reported for Flash points that a series of airstrikes were called in following a failed attempt by the Taliban to breach Bagram Air Base, according to a Resolute Support spokesman. Military Times reported that the US and Afghan forces were pulled into a nine to 10 hour firefight after the attempt. Bagram attack came as the US has just restarted peace negotiations with the Taliban. Earlier, President Donald Trump had ended the talks with the Taliban in September on the pretext of an attack by the Taliban that killed a US service member. These flip flop positions confirms the credibility of Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” A secret history of the war.
Released on December 09 by Washington Post’s investigative reporter Craig Whit lock, document is mainly compiled out of reports of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Excerpts of SIGAR reports have frequently been quoted by the US media. Though SIGAR is an entity of the US Defence Department it would more often than not cherry pick the portions of quarterly SIGAR findings suiting its narrative and distance from the portions that reflected poorly on Pentagon. Major source of the Washington Post’s current document, Project Lessons Learned, was also an internal undertaking of the Defence Department. The quoted comments by the US officials were made as part of a project led by John Sopko known as “Lesson Learned” about the war in Afghanistan. Sopko is the lead inspector general for a government watchdog SIGAR, mandated to produces reports on reconstruction aid and the conflict in Afghanistan.
Washington Post has reported that government officials for years misled the public about failures in the Afghanistan war. “Afghanistan papers”, have been compiled from hundreds of interviews with national security leaders as part of an internal Pentagon review, these include statements by top leadership in the Pentagon and Afghanistan including current Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, as a three star general lamenting the lack of clear strategy in the country and the moving goal posts for metrics of success. The interviews of more than 400 insiders describe everything that went wrong with the US effort in Afghanistan with unrestrained bluntness. However SIGAR omitted more than 90 percent of interviewees’ names.
John Sopko told the Washington Post that the documents it obtained showed “the American people have constantly been lied to” about the state and progress of the conflict. Sopko added that his watchdog group found “no single person, agency, military service, or country responsible for overseeing all of the US and international activities to develop the Afghan security forces.”
Interviewees of Afghanistan Papers said that the strategy ping-ponged from retribution for 9/11 and a take down of al-Qaida and the Taliban organization that allowed them to train and plan in Afghanistan, to full blown nation building. “Our policy was to create a strong central government which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government. The time frame for creating a strong central government is 100 years, which we didn’t have.” a former State Department official said in 2015.
In a statement on November 05, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) responded to the report, urging Americans to recognize the difference between the troops on the ground and the national security establishment that has moulded the outcomes in Afghanistan. “The post-9/11 generation of veterans cannot be subject to the same mistreatment that Vietnam War veterans experienced upon their return from service,” IAVA CEO Jeremy Butler said. “Veterans of the War in Afghanistan have done everything this country asked of them they put their heads down and worked hard to achieve the missions they were assigned. Public perception of veterans must be kept separate from the political blame game.”
The opposite perspectives illustrate the vast difference between the somewhat compartmentalized mission that lower ranking troops carry out during any given deployment and the larger strategy cobbled together by top officials throughout the Pentagon, White House, State Department and intelligence community. The Post quoted John Sopko, whose agency conducted the interviews, as admitting that the documents show the American people have constantly been lied to.
But in the backdrop, war metrics that have been used to push positive public sentiment and stay the course in a war, have been acknowledged as unwinnable, were manipulated to tout successes and emphasize particular strategies were moving in the right direction. A senior National Security Council official said the Obama administration and Pentagon pushed metrics that portrayed the 2009 decision to surge 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in an inaccurately positive light. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war,” the NSC official said.
The NSC official in the 2016 government interview said US officials would even find ways to stretch bad metrics in a positive light. “It was their explanations,” the NSC official said, “For example, attacks are getting worse? ‘That’s because there are more targets for them to fire at, so more attacks are a false indicator of instability.’ Then, three months later, attacks are still getting worse? ‘It’s because the Taliban are getting desperate, so it’s actually an indicator that we’re winning.’ ” “And this went on and on for two reasons,” the NSC official said, “to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate.”
John Garofano, who advised Marines in Helmand in 2011, said during a 2015 government interview that a lot of effort was put into producing color coded charts that showed the war was moving in the right direction, and no one questioned the credibility of the information or whether it was helpful. “They had a really expensive machine that would print the really large pieces of paper like in a print shop,” “There would be a caveat that these are not actually scientific figures, or this is not a scientific process behind this”, Garofano said. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan we didn’t know what we were doing,” said Douglas Lute, the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama years, in one of the interviews. “If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction 2,400 lives lost Who will say this was in vain?” “What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” said Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House official under the Bush and Obama administration, in another interview, “Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent.”
Many officials described a sustained effort by the US government to hide the truth from the American public. “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” said Bob Crowley, a US Army colonel who served as a counterinsurgency adviser to American military commanders.
To support the Lessons Learned interviews, The Post also released hundreds of pages of previously classified memos about the Afghan war dictated by former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “I may be impatient. In fact I know I’m a bit impatient,” he wrote in one memo to several generals and senior aides. “We are never going to get the US military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave.” “Help!” he wrote in another issued six months after the war started.
Meanwhile, American commanders struggled to define who they were fighting. “They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live,” said an unnamed former adviser to a US Army Special Forces team. Rumsfeld’s memos revealed the view from Pentagon was not any clearer. “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” he wrote in a September 2003 memo. “We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.”
In 2018, US officials began publicizing Taliban and Islamic State fighter body counts to shore up support in the White House to remain in the conflict, according to the New York Times. Body count metrics were widely used during the Vietnam War. The Pentagon stopped pushing the body count figures following questions from the New York Times.
The interviews also reveal how the US flooded Afghanistan with more aid than it could manage without any clear vision. One unnamed USAID executive said 90 per cent of what they spent was overkill: “We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason.” An unidentified contractor added that he was expected to dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district. John Garofano, a strategist who advised US Marines in Helm and in 2011, pointed out “There was not a willingness to answer questions such as, what is the meaning of this number of schools that you have built? How has that progressed you towards your goal? How do you show this as evidence of success and not just evidence of effort or evidence of just doing a good thing?”
Instead of leading to development, aid from Washington instead allowed corruption in Afghanistan to rise to unprecedented levels. “By 2006, the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai had self-organised into a kleptocracy,” said US Army Colonel Christopher Kolenda. “Kleptocracy is like brain cancer; it’s fatal.” His assessment was endorsed by a top US diplomat in Kabul, Ryan Crocker. “Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption,” he said.
As festering corruption soured Afghan people toward democracy and pushed them towards the Taliban to enforce order, American attempts to prop up Afghan military and law enforcement never really appeared to take off. Describing Afghan security forces as incompetent, no US military trainer expressed confidence that they fend off, much less defeat, Taliban on their own. One unidentified US soldier said 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.
Rumsfeld’s memos, meanwhile, reveal he ignored dire warnings in 2006. After returning from a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan, Barry McCaffrey, a retired Army general, reported the Taliban had made an impressive comeback. Two months later, civilian adviser Marin Strmecki told the Pentagon chief that “enormous popular discontent is building” against the Afghan government because of its corruption and incompetence. Yet with Rumsfeld’s personal blessing, the Pentagon buried the warnings and told the public a very different story. His speechwriters delivered a paper highlighting 50 ‘promising’ facts and figures about the war-torn nation. “This paper is an excellent piece. How do we use it? Should it be an article? An Oped piece? A handout? A press briefing? All of the above? I think it ought to get it to a lot of people,” Rumsfeld wrote in a memo.
Even under Obama, a person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said there was constant pressure to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary. “We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture,” the senior NSC official said. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war.” When casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the senior NSC official said, the White House and Pentagon would spin them ‘to the point of absurdity’. Suicide bombings in Kabul were framed as ‘Taliban desperation’ and the rise in US troop deaths was put forth as ‘proof’ that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy. “This went on and on for two reasons,” the senior NSC official said, “to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate.” Colonel (Retd) Crowley, said “truth was rarely welcome” at military headquarters in Kabul. “When we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn’t welcome.” “It was sad to see so many people behave so stupidly,” one US official told government interviewers.
Kathy Gannon reported for Associated Press on December 10 under the caption “Afghanistan’s Karzai says American cash fed corruption”. Responding to Afghanistan Papers, Karzai argued that Washington helped fuel corruption in his nation by spending hundreds of millions of dollars over the past two decades without accountability. Karzai said the WP document confirm his long-running complaints about US spending. The documents also describe Karzai, Afghanistan’s president for 14 years, as having headed a government that “self-organized into a kleptocracy.” Karzai has denied wrong doing but hasn’t denied involvement in corruption by officials in his government. “What could we do? It was US money coming here and used by them and used for means that did not help Afghanistan,” Karzai said. “I’m glad this report is out, and I hope this becomes an eye-opener to the American people and that the US government begins to change its attitude now toward Afghanistan,” he said, describing America’s fostering of corruption as a “tool” to impose their game plan.
Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the US based Wilson Centre, assessed Karzai’s comments by saying: “I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that the US used corruption as a tool, but it has long been suspected and these new documents make quite clear that US officials have thrown huge amounts of money at Afghanistan knowing full well that this would lead to more corruption than development or peace.”
In the regional context, the US said on December 05 that it supported continued Indian involvement in Afghanistan, even as President Donald Trump looks to withdraw troops. India is one of the most enthusiastic backer of Afghanistan’s government, contributing more than $3 billion since the 2001. “The United States welcomes India’s substantial investment in and assistance to Afghanistan,” said Nancy Izzo Jackson, a State Department official in charge of Afghanistan. “And we will continue to support efforts to achieve an honourable and enduring outcome in Afghanistan that preserves our investment in Afghanistan’s future,” she told a conference on India’s role in Afghanistan at the Hudson Institute. Harsh Vardhan Shringla, the Indian ambassador in Washington, said that any settlement in Afghanistan needed to ensure that “there is no room for any terrorist elements to create a foothold.” “It is also important to deliver the message to terrorists that democracies do not surrender to terrorism and in the ideological battle of the ’emirate’ versus the ‘republic,’ the latter prevails,” he said.
America’s longest war continues to drag on as US forces are amid one of its heaviest bombing campaigns since the start of the conflict 18 years ago as Washington seeks to force the Taliban into a settled peace. The US has ramped up its air campaign in Afghanistan to highest level in nine years. The US dropped more munitions in Afghanistan in September 2019, than any other month since October 2010 when America had nearly 100,000 troops on the ground.
Now, Pentagon is considering several options to reduce the number of troops in Afghanistan, including one that would shift to a narrower counterterrorism mission, General Milley, informed the Congress on December 11. He did not tabulate any contour of future contingent but appeared glued down to earlier magic figure of 5000 troops for counterterrorism missions. Members of the House Armed Services Committee pressed Milley and Defence Secretary Mark Esper on a number of issues during the hearing, including whether the Pentagon deceived the American people about military progress during the war. Esper told the committee that the US military must remain focused on the counterterrorism mission even as efforts are made to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban. “We have an important counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan,” he said. “That means we’ve got to make sure Afghanistan never becomes again a safe haven for terrorists that can strike the United States.” He said commanders have told him and Milley that the US can reduce its presence in Afghanistan and still perform the counterterrorism mission. “I’m interested in reducing our force presence,” Esper said, so that some portion of the troops now based in Afghanistan can be reallocated to other parts of the world to bolster US preparedness for potential conflict with China or Russia. Esper has said he is reviewing US military missions worldwide to determine how many can be reallocated in that manner.
A congressional hearing by the Armed Services Committee on Afghanistan Papers is in the offing. The committee chairman, said hearings would be appropriate. “I do think it’s something that we should take a look at,” he said.
Associated Press has reported that some lawmakers are worried about the Trump administration’s handling of peace negotiations with the Taliban. Their concern is that the Taliban may simply wait until after the last US soldier leaves Afghanistan and then “try to run roughshod over everything.
In describing in detail how the US found itself stuck in a quagmire and kept truth from the public, the Lessons Learned interviews appear similar in importance to the Pentagon Papers, the history of the Vietnam War that the US Defence Department tried to keep ‘top-secret.’
Serving as well as former top Defence Department officials have largely stayed indifferent to the questions about Afghanistan Papers. It’s unlikely that the documents would change the administration’s approach to the conflict. Report has largely been sidestepped by defence officials when speaking to lawmakers and the media. “I haven’t read all the stories frankly but the stories spanned multiple administrations, multiple uniformed and civilian officials and I think it’s good to look back. I think at this point where I’m looking is forward,” Defence Secretary Mark Esper said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on December 11. Former Defence Secretary James Mattis also appeared indifferent saying that he did not consider them to be particularly “revelatory” while defending US efforts to rebuild the war-torn country. “The Taliban’s goal is to take over this country and they’ve been stopped in that at great cost”, he added.
Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman, when asked what assurances the department can give that it will provide accurate information about the war going forward, told reporters that he would “quibble with the idea that we weren’t providing it in the past.” “I think what we see from the report from The Washington Post is, looking at individuals giving retrospectives years later on what they may have believed at the time,” Hoffman added. “The Taliban’s goal is to take over this country and they’ve been stopped in that at great cost to the Afghan people, at great cost to the Afghan army,” he said. “If you read [the articles], you’d almost think it’s a total disaster, and it’s not that at all. It’s been hard as hell but it’s not just one undistinguished defeat after another. They are the ones on the back foot.”
The single thing bothering the US strategic mind the most is retarding and or preventing of peaceful rise of China as successor super power to the US. For this it wants to employ India as a carrier donkey hence the urge for permanent role for India in Afghanistan. India is sucking Americans maximum on this account but once the chips are down it is likely to American bidding. As long as the US does not reorient its strategic thinking, the Afghan conflict is here to stay it’s not going anywhere.
