Part 1The fact that the Pentagon and the US government - through three presidents, Republican and Democrat - intentionally and deliberately lied, constantly, for nearly two decades, cannot come as much of a surprise to anyone who possesses an open mind and a knowledge of history, but it's still worthwhile to see "a mountain of previously secret documentary evidence [from] within the military" laid out in the harsh light of day.
At war with the truth
U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.
Part 2
Stranded without a strategy
Bush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail.
Part 3
Built to fail
Despite vows the U.S. wouldn't get mired in "nation-building," it has wasted billions doing just that.
Part 4
Consumed by corruption
The U.S. flooded the country with money — then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled.
Part 5
Unguarded nation
Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption.
Part 6
Overwhelmed by opium
The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn.
Interviews and Memos
Explore the documents
Key insiders speak bluntly about the failures of the longest conflict in U.S. history.
Post Reports
'We didn't know what the task was'
Hear candid interviews with former ambassador Ryan Crocker and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
The Fight for the Documents
About the investigation
It took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview records.
MORE STORIES
A visual timeline of the war
Interviewees respond
The US military refused to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests for three years until ordered to turn over the documents by a U.S. district judge. This could certainly be a limited hangout, but it's still pretty damning.
Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House's Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015:
We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn't know what we were doing. ... We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.In the same interview, Lute says:
We are a rich country and can pour money down a hole and it doesn't bust the bank. But should we? Can't we get a bit more rational here? ... One poignant example of this is a ribbon-cutting ceremony complete with the giant scissors I attended for the district police chief in some Godforsaken province. [The US Army Corps of Engineers had overseen the design and construction of a police headquarters that featured a glass facade and an atrium.] The police chief couldn't even open the door. He had never seen a doorknob like this. To me, this encapsulates the whole experience in Afghanistan.Michael Callen, an economist with the University of California at San Diego and a specialist in the Afghan public sector: "We spent so much money and there is so little to show for it."
Much of the money ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt Afghan officials. There is copious evidence of "ghost projects" into which millions of dollars were dumped. For example, the US had signed $8 million in contracts to build an industrial park near Kandahar for 48 businesses. Tim Graczewski, a Navy Reserve officer who oversaw economic development projects in southern Afghanistan from 2009-10, could not find the 37-acre project. It appeared to exist only on paper. While Graczewski eventually found the property, there were no buildings, only empty streets and some sewer pipes.
It blew my mind how much we didn't know about the park in the first place when we embarked on this project. It was impossible to get info on it, even where it was located. It was that much of a blank spot. Nobody knew anything about anything.However, the people who got extremely rich from those contracts would not call what was going on (and what is still going on) in Afghanistan a failure in any way, shape, or form. To them, and many others, those millions and billions were not "wasted".
Numerous people said the chaotic outcome in Afghanistan was foreseeable, citing US military interventions in other countries in the last 25 years, such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Haiti, Somalia. Stephen Hadley, who served as White House national security adviser under Bush: "We just don't have a post-conflict stabilization model that works."
Three comments.
1. The US is a "rich country" only if you are rich. And "the bank" has most assuredly been broken, for a long time.Jacob Hornberger, Counterpunch:
2. What looks like a failure to a normal human being may not be a failure to a defense contractor with a suddenly-overflowing bank account or to government officials who have wanted to control an oil-rich area for decades. Indeed, despite the inevitable hiccups along the way, the various invasions since 2001 have been a resounding and towering success for the people who planned them.
3. The majority of US military officials do not give a shit what happens to a country once it has been destabilized and/or destroyed.
More than 2,300 American soldiers killed for nothing. Thousands more injured, mentally, spiritually, or physically. Tens of thousands of Afghans killed, maimed, incarcerated, or tortured. The entire country destroyed. ...Craig Whitlock, Washington Post:
Americans have ended up with the loss of both freedom and security, with a massive toll in terms of death and suffering, with a mountain of federal debt, and with one great big pack of lies. ...
[I]t's also worth mentioning that the Pentagon waged its war on Afghanistan without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war. That makes the Afghan war, and all of the death and destruction that have come with it, illegal under our form of government. ...
[T]he Pentagon has succeeded in turning [Afghanistan] into one gigantic hellhole of violence, official corruption, and opium production.
The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.
Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans. ...
Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case. ...
[I]n the field, U.S. troops often couldn't tell friend from foe.
"They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live," an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special Forces team told government interviewers in 2017. ...
"I have no visibility into who the bad guys are," [Donald] Rumsfeld complained in a Sept. 8, 2003 [memo]. "We are woefully deficient in human intelligence." ...
"Our policy was to create a strong central government which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government," an unidentified former State Department official told government interviewers in 2015. "The timeframe for creating a strong central government is 100 years, which we didn't have." ... [I would not be surprised if the United States is still in Afghanistan in 2103.]
One unnamed executive with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) guessed that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill: "We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason." ...
The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption. ... One unidentified contractor told government interviewers he was expected to dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly the size of a U.S. county. ...
In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers — allies of Washington — plundered with impunity. ...
"We stated that our goal is to establish a 'flourishing market economy,'" said Douglas Lute, the White House's Afghan war czar from 2007 to 2013. "I thought we should have specified a flourishing drug trade — this is the only part of the market that's working. It's really much worse than you think." ...
A person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said there was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary. ...
John Garofano, a Naval War College strategist who advised Marines in Helmand province in 2011, said military officials in the field devoted an inordinate amount of resources to churning out color-coded charts that heralded positive results.
"They had a really expensive machine that would print the really large pieces of paper like in a print shop," he told government interviewers. "There would be a caveat that these are not actually scientific figures ..." But Garofano said nobody dared to question whether the charts and numbers were credible or meaningful. ...
Other senior officials said they placed great importance on one statistic in particular, albeit one the U.S. government rarely likes to discuss in public.
"I do think the key benchmark is the one I've suggested, which is how many Afghans are getting killed," James Dobbins, the former U.S. diplomat, told a Senate panel in 2009. "If the number's going up, you're losing. ... It's as simple as that."
Last year, 3,804 Afghan civilians were killed in the war, according to the United Nations.
That is the most in one year since the United Nations began tracking casualties a decade ago.
1 comment:
This was the same in Vietnam.
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