In a master stroke of timing, Craig Whitlock (Washington Post reporter, winner of three Pulitzers) has a new book about the war released as the last U.S. troops depart Kabul. My view of the war was that it was a quagmire, and we should have left years ago…and OMG reading The Afghanistan Papers made me realize that things were even worse than I imagined.
After 9/11, there was near-universal support for military action to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent any more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. It didn’t take long for the U.S. to remove the Taliban forces from power…but then no one seemed to know what to do next. And once bin Laden was gone, what was the reason to stay?
President Bush was the first of four Presidents in charge of the efforts in Afghanistan. But he soon became so involved in Iraq that Afghanistan was little more than a distraction. Reading about this period was shocking. I remember hearing that Bush didn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims — but even worse, he didn’t know the name of his Afghanistan war commander—and didn’t want to make time to meet with him.
The U.S. “jumped into the war with only a hazy idea of whom it was fighting — a fundamental blunder from which it would never recover.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose notes were a huge resource for the author, admitted he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are” The “military drew little distinction between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, categorizing them all as bad guys…Just because someone carried an AK-47 didn’t automatically make them a combatant.” Seriously, no one wore uniforms, everyone looked the same, and everyone kept trying to determine who the bad guys were. Rumsfeld’s successor, Robert Gates, said: “We didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda.” YIKES!
The military leaders had no specifics or benchmarks for achieving lofty goals that were unclear to everyone and constantly shifting. The only constant was the flow of money that was poured into the country, but seemed to all go to corrupt leaders, drug lords, and/or contractors.
Once the war was really rolling, no President wanted to be the one to admit it was a failure. After all, it had begun as a just cause, right? So there we were, in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country we did not understand. The Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they KNEW there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory.
The book presents stunning details from people in the White House and the Pentagon, journalists, and many soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. Universally, they all say that any “strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government.” More than 1,000 people (all of whom knew that the government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground) contributed to this book, both through interviews and notes from the time as well as tons of documents unearthed by the author as he investigated and pursued facts via FOIA requests.
SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, has a “Lessons Learned” Program (LLP), which “identifies and preserves lessons from the U.S. reconstruction experience in Afghanistan, and makes recommendations to Congress and executive agencies on ways to improve efforts in current and future operations. To date, LLP has issued 13 reports, including 11 full lessons learned reports. To produce these reports, LLP staff conduct hundreds of interviews—in Afghanistan, Europe, and throughout the United States—and review thousands of documents. These reports have identified over 195 specific findings and lessons and made over 146 recommendations to Congress, executive branch agencies, and the Afghan government.” So yeah, it is thorough with tons of sources cited.
I was pleasantly surprised at how readable it was — seriously, this could have been a deadly dull book. I hope the U.S. really takes a hard look at the “Lessons Learned,” and that they have an impact similar to The Pentagon Papers… I also hope that MANY people read this epic book. Five stars, with thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley, who provided a copy in exchange for this honest review.