“The Afghanistan Papers” shows the U.S. blunder was far worse than the public knew. Over the past four weeks, Americans have been horrified by the images from Kabul. Afghans desperate to flee the country after the rapid takeover by the Taliban have hung onto the landing gears of planes taking off.
The book by Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers, meticulously details how the entire U.S. occupation was a series of fiascos almost since its beginning. This was depicted from the failure to capture Osama Bin Laden at Tora Bora in 2001 to Donald Trump’s bizarre brainstorm to invite the Taliban to Camp David in 2019. Whitlock and the Post obtained a trove of government documents from an internal study of the war. Whitlock writes that the book is not “an exhaustive record of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.” Instead, “it is an attempt to explain what went wrong,” and how U.S. officials spanning four administrations consistently lied about the war’s progress to the American people over two decades.
The list of U.S. failures in the country ranges from the depressing to the absurd:
- Approximately $19 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars fell into the hands of the Taliban and allied groups, according to a study of Defence Department contracts in the country.
- The head of a construction firm had a brother in the Taliban. One brother would build infrastructure projects, and the other would destroy them, so the first would get the U.S. contract to rebuild.
- Ryan Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to the country, said bluntly of the Afghan police force that the U.S. trained and funded: “They are useless as a security force … because they are corrupt down to a patrol level.”
- As the Taliban gained ground in 2018, the U.S. stopped keeping track of how much territory both the Afghan government and Taliban controlled. It was too embarrassing.
- Americans were deeply ignorant of Afghanistan’s culture, leading to scenes out of some dark comedy. Afghans mistook urinals on military bases for drinking fountains, according to one U.S. military official.
These are just a handful of the grim examples in a book that at times seems to be one endless chronicle of failure in a war where over 2,300 American soldiers and at least 64,000 members of the Afghan security forces were killed, as well as 47,000 civilians. The consistent theme throughout is that the U.S. never quite knew what it was doing in Afghanistan. Were soldiers there to combat Al Qaeda or turn Afghanistan into a modern Western-style democracy? The mission seems to have never been set, allowing U.S policy to drift for decades, and without a clear goal, the tactics changed as well. Troops were surged into the country and then pulled out.
Looking back at the interviews chronicled by Whitlock, U.S. officials bemoaned “the mission creep” and lack of clear objectives. In July, President Biden attempted to define American goals in Afghanistan as “to get the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and to deliver justice to Osama Bin Laden,” and to prevent Afghanistan from becoming another launching pad for terror attacks against the U.S. “We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build,” Biden said, though that’s precisely what the American military had been doing in Afghanistan for at least a decade.
But what more could be said about the key causes of failure?
- Corruption at all levels;
- Cultural differences;
- Will power;
- Intelligence failures;
- Lack of clear objectives;
- No adequate support on military hardware – i.e. the “software” was not developed to fly the planes or helicopters;
- Leadership deficit at both American and Afghan forces;
- Not neutralising the safe havens of Pakistan and Iran (for the Taliban); and
- Clear determination of who re-armed and trained the Taliban?
Source:https://www.usatoday.com
These and other reasons may explain the colossal failure at a cost of USD2.2 trillion. But all four administrations (since George Bush) are responsible for its failure, not just Biden. One thing is sure, it will be studied in military academies and business schools in years to come on how best to avoid repeating this tragic mistake.
References:
The shocking new book that exposes U.S. lies about Afghanistan, Ben Jacobs (https://nymag.com)
“Intelligence failure of the highest order” – how Afghanistan fell to the Taliban so quickly, Natasha Turak, Abigail Ng, Amanda Macias, www.cnbc.com, Aug 16, 2021
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