Six on Afghanistan: a Pentagon Paradise Built on Lies; Democrats’ Afghan Strategy Sounds Familiar; All Americans Are to Blame for the Failed Afghanistan War; “Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the developme
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"The Pentagon cannot be pleased with the Washington Post. That’s because the Post has just disclosed a mountain of previously secret documentary evidence within the military showing that the Pentagon has been intentionally lying for years about the “progress” that it was making with its forever war in Afghanistan. While the Pentagon has been publicly assuring the American people that its war has been going swimmingly well, the truth is that it’s been the exact opposite.
The documents consist of brutally candid interviews with military insiders, who believed that their statements would forever remain secret. After three years of refusing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, the Pentagon finally decided to comply with an order of a U.S. district judge to turn over the documents to the Post.
While the Pentagon is still refusing to divulge the identities of most of the people who were interviewed, one of the interviewees, Dougas Lute, a three-star army general who served in Afghanistan, is quoted as saying:
We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing. What are we doing here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.
Another interviewee, Col. Bob Crowley, stated,
Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible. Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.
According to the Post,
John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.” The interviews are the byproduct of a project led by Sopko’s agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Known as SIGAR, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.
So, there you have it. A one-trillion-dollar war built on intentional, deliberate, and knowing lies, just like the Vietnam War was. 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.
And for what? For nothing! Those U.S. soldiers killed and died for nothing, just as we at The Future of Freedom Foundation were maintaining would happen even before the invasion of Afghanistan started, when interventionists were accusing of us “hating America.”
Moreover, just think about how they have destroyed our freedom and privacy here at home, in the name of protecting us from the “terrorists” who they have been generating with their “war on terrorism” in both Afghanistan and the Middle East. 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."
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The 2020 Democratic candidates have one major goal for Afghanistan: Get out. They are struggling to differentiate themselves from a president they say has a feckless, isolationist view of American power.
"For 18 years and four presidential elections, Democrats running for president have felt compelled to lay out comprehensive plans for the future of Afghanistan, vowing to never again let the country become a breeding ground for terrorists who could strike the United States as they did on Sept. 11, 2001.
Now, the candidates are racing one another — and President Trump — to demonstrate how quickly they would end the long-running conflict. In the debate on Thursday night, there was almost no discussion of American goals for the country, like building a democracy or protecting the rights of women — objectives that were staples of past Democratic campaigns.
It is a striking change. Even while deeply opposing President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Democrats saw Afghanistan as the good war, prompted by a direct attack on the United States. President Barack Obama ordered a surge in American forces by the end of his first year in office. But as the years went by, he had growing doubts, and now Democrats have fully embraced those misgivings and want out.
Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. are so eager for the United States to depart that they say they would pull out combat troops even in the absence of an agreement with the Taliban."
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The Afghanistan Papers effectively catalogue the deeply dysfunctional nature of the war, from its continuously flawed strategy to its bungled execution. Upon release of the papers, certain members of Congress noisily expressed their outrage, as though learning for the first time of our history of failed policies in Afghanistan. This included Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Vietnam-era veteran, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He took to Twitter, immediately calling for hearings and writing, “We must end the vicious, lethal cycle of misinformation & unspecified, unsupported strategies.”
With the war well into its second decade, such sudden indignation rings a bit hollow. Did we, the American people, really need an elaborate unearthing of thousands of previously classified documents to tell us that our efforts in Afghanistan aren’t going well? Anyone paying the slightest modicum of attention to the war can see how it has festered on for eighteen years—that number alone tells you it’s been a disastrous undertaking. As does this number: 2,401 American dead. As well as a bill that comes to over $2 trillion. The Washington Post opens its story with the following, “A confidential trove of government documents . . . reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”
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"THE BIG IDEA: A toxic mix of U.S. government policies, under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, directly contributed to Afghanistan’s descent into one of the world’s most corrupt countries.
U.S. leaders said publicly that they had no tolerance for corruption in Afghanistan, but that was one of several topics related to the war effort on which they systematically misled the public, according to a trove of confidential government interviews obtained by The Washington Post.
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American representatives often looked the other way at egregious and brazen graft, so long as the offenders were considered allies. Congress appropriated vast sums of money, which was handed out with little oversight or recordkeeping. The ensuing greed and corruption undermined the legitimacy of the nascent government and helped make the ground more fertile for the Taliban’s resurgence.
“The basic assumption was that corruption is an Afghan problem and we are the solution. But there is one indispensable ingredient for corruption — money — and we were the ones who had the money,” said Barnett Rubin, a former senior State Department adviser and a New York University professor.
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“Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption,” said Ryan Crocker, who twice served as the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul, in 2002 and again from 2011 to 2012. “Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, it’s somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it. … The corruption was so entrenched and so much a part of the lifestyle of the establishment writ broadly…”
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-- The comments from Crocker and Rubin are included among more than 2,000 pages of previously private notes from research conducted by U.S. government investigators. More than 400 people who played a direct role in the war, from generals to diplomats and aid workers, were questioned about what went wrong. The interviews were conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction between 2014 and 2018 for a “Lessons Learned” project. A report outlined the conclusions in broad brushstrokes in 2016, but a lot of the most noteworthy material was held back. The Post has fought a three-year legal battle, which is ongoing, to get these documents out under the Freedom of Information Act so that the American people can see for themselves what’s been going on.
John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged in an interview with Craig Whitlock that the records show “the American people have constantly been lied to.” Whitlock has written a six-part series dissecting all the documents. (You can start with Part One here.)
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"Off the Record, U.S. Officials Acknowledge our Strategy in Afghanistan Is “Fatally flawed”
For the past few years, I’ve periodically checked in with the office of the special inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction, as several times a year they unveil a massive, in-depth review or study that generally uncovers bad news: major problems in the Afghan government’s ability to pay for basic services, the Afghan military’s ability to operate and maintain U.S.-provided equipment, efforts to control opium production and the drug trade, and any ability to utilize the country’s natural resources. Over in that faraway, deeply troubled country, the American taxpayer has paid for soybeans that won’t grow, weapons that Afghan military forces lost, a $2.9 million farming-storage facility that was never used, and a $456,000 training center that “disintegrated” within four months. An Afghan power plant that the U.S. helped build was operating at just 2.2 percent of power production capacity. The SIGAR office round that significant portion of the U.S.-built buildings for the Afghan military are more flammable than international building codes permit. (Hey, why would you need to worry about burning buildings in a country at war, right?)
Inspector General John Sopko and his staff operate separately from the Pentagon and have the authority to review and audit any Afghan reconstruction activity performed by the U.S. government — the Department of Defense, the U.S. State Department, and the U.S. Agency for International Development and its contractors. Whenever possible, SIGAR staff go into Afghanistan, but because of the security situation, they can’t always get access to all the sites they want. But year after year, they’ve uncovered waste, mismanagement, corruption, and all kinds of problems that no one wants to see, whatever their view of the war in Afghanistan.
Sopko has been attempting to sound the alarm on these problems for years. In 2016, he gave a largely-ignored speech, declaring, “Afghanistan has had the lead responsibility for its own security for more than a year now, and is struggling with a four-season insurgency, high attrition, and capability challenges. Heavy losses in the poppy-growing province of Helmand have required rebuilding an Afghan army corps and replacing its commander and some other officers as a result, a U.S. general said, of ‘a combination of incompetence, corruption, and ineffectiveness.’”
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Afghanistan is far and away the world’s largest opium producer and has been for the entire period since the US invaded and occupied the country in late 2001. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) 2018 Afghan Opium Survey, Afghan farmers were cultivating about 60,700 hectares of opium poppies in the late 1990s, but around 121,400 hectares a year in the mid-2000s.
As the US occupation dragged on, opium cultivation generally climbed throughout the 2010s, peaking at more than 323,700 hectares in 2017. That equates to about 9 tons of raw opium produced that year, with the heroin produced from it going into the veins of addicts from Lahore to London.
The SIGAR report also noted that although drought had caused poppy cultivation to drop by 20% last year, “it remained at the second-highest level since the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) began monitoring it in 1994.”
So, despite spending nearly $9 billion, the US war on Afghan opium has not only not succeeded but has seen the poppy foe steadily gain ground. And even though drought struck the crop in 2018, opium still exceeded the value of all of Afghanistan’s licit exports combined and accounted for between 6% and 11% of its gross domestic product."
