Six on History: Afghanistan
panaritisp
Welcome back to Six on History (Summer Edition - coupla posts a week).
PS: If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts.
Click here for Detailed Search Help Thanks John Elfrank
.JPG?part=0.7&view=1)
1) As Kabul Is Retaken, Papers Look Back in Erasure, FAIRNESS & ACCURACY
"Corporate media coverage of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the country’s US-backed government has offered audiences more mystification than illumination. I looked at editorials in five major US dailies following the Taliban’s retaking of Kabul: the Boston Globe, LA Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. The editorial boards of these papers consistently trivialized South Asian lives, erased US responsibility for lethal violence, and made untenable assertions about Washington’s supposedly righteous motives in the war.
Uncounted civilian costThe New York Times (8/15/21) ran the next best thing to a photo of a helicopter taking off from the Kabul embassy roof: a photo of a helicopter flying over the embassy roof.
The editorials evince a callous indifference to the toll of the war on civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the war has also been fought. The New York Times (8/15/21) referred to “at least 2,448 American service members’ lives lost in Afghanistan,” and to “Afghan casualties so huge—60,000 killed since 2001, by one estimate—that the government kept them a secret.” The link makes clear that the authors are talking about deaths among Afghan police and soldiers. Yet, as of April, more than 71,000 civilians—over 47,000 Afghans and more than 24,000 Pakistanis—have been directly killed in the US-initiated war.
The Boston Globe’s piece (8/16/21) described “two decades of the United States propping up Afghan forces to keep the Taliban at bay at the cost of more than $2 trillion and more than 2,400 lost military service members.” Tens of thousands of dead Afghan and Pakistani civilians evidently aren’t significant enough to factor into “the cost” of the war.
“The war in Afghanistan took the lives of more than 2,400 American troops,” said the Los Angeles Times editorial (8/16/21), which went on to add, “For decades to come, America will be paying the medical bills of veterans suffering from the emotional and physical toll of their trauma and injuries.” The authors ignored dead, wounded and psychologically scarred South Asian civilians, though the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) logged 3,524 civilian injuries in the first half of 2021 alone, and 5,785 in 2020.
The Wall Street Journal (8/15/21, 8/16/21), meanwhile, didn’t mention any deaths that took place during the war.
“Some 66,000 Afghan fighters have given their lives in this war during the past 20 years, alongside 2,448 US service members,” the Washington Post (8/16/21) pointed out, declining to spare a word for noncombatants. US troops, the article assured readers, “endured very modest casualties, since 2014,” without noting that the US inflicted a great many on Afghan civilians in that period: For instance, a 2019 Human Rights Watch report noted that, in the first six months of that year, the US and its partners in what was then the Afghan government killed more civilians than the Taliban did.
Forever war > withdrawalThe “Afghan debacle” was “avoidable,” the Washington Post (8/16/21) argued, if only Biden had been willing to commit to an indefinite military occupation.
Two of the editorials were clear that they would prefer continuous US war against Afghanistan to withdrawal. The Washington Post (8/16/21) claimed that
a small US and allied military presence—capable of working with Afghan forces to deny power to the Taliban and its Al Qaeda terrorist allies, while diplomats and nongovernmental organizations nurtured a fledgling civil society—not only would have been affordable, but also could have paid for itself in US security and global credibility.
Costs such as the harm the “US and allied military presence” does to Afghans did not enter into the Post’s accounting for “affordability.” No explanation is offered as to why Afghans should endure the lack of “security” entailed in “US and allied” bombs falling on their heads. Nor did the authors clarify why the US’s “global credibility” is a higher priority than, say, stopping the US from killing Afghan children, as it did last October.
The Wall Street Journal (8/15/21) professed concern for the “thousands of translators, their families, and other officials who are in peril from Taliban rule and didn’t get out in time,” and said that what it sees as the impending “murder of these innocents” will be a “stain on the Biden presidency.” Yet the authors argued that the US should continue bombing Afghanistan indefinitely, asserting that
Afghans were willing to fight and take casualties with the support of the US and its NATO allies, especially airpower. A few thousand troops and contractors could have done the job and prevented this rout.
Over the course of the war, that airpower tended to mean the mass death of Afghan civilians: In 2019, for example, US airstrikes killed 546 of them (Washington Post, 9/4/21). In advocating the continued American bombing of Afghanistan to stop the “murder of these innocents,” the authors are calling for the “murder of…innocents,” just by the US rather than the Taliban.
The ‘American dream’The Los Angeles Times (8/16/21) praised the US”s noble hopes to build a multiparty democracy,” insisting that “the people of Afghanistan were failed by their leaders.”
The New York Times’ editorial board (8/15/21) gushed about the purity of US values, saying that the Taliban’s return to power is
unutterably tragic. Tragic because the American dream of being the “indispensable nation” in shaping a world where the values of civil rights, women’s empowerment and religious tolerance rule proved to be just that: a dream.
The editors did nothing to explain how they square their view that the US’s “dream” entails worldwide “civil rights” and “women’s empowerment” with the US’s carrying out torture in Afghanistan or its propensity for killing Afghan women (Guardian, 7/11/08).
The board went on:
How [the war] evolved into a two-decade nation-building project in which as many as 140,000 troops under American command were deployed at one time is a story of mission creep and hubris, but also of the enduring American faith in the values of freedom and democracy.
That faith in “freedom” was manifest by such practices as training warlords who killed and abused civilians, and propping up an Afghan state that included officials who sexually assaulted children—actions that US troops were told to ignore,
as the New York Times (9/21/15) itself reported.Similarly, the Los Angeles Times (8/16/21) claimed that
the US and its Western allies had noble hopes to build a multiparty democracy—with respect for the rights of women and minorities, an independent judiciary and a new constitution—but nation-building was not an appropriate goal.
It’s anyone’s guess how the paper reconciles the US and its partners’ “noble hopes” for such things as “respect for the rights of women” with the US working with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to finance and arm extremely conservative forces in Afghanistan, so as to undermine progressives in the country while strengthening reactionary elements, a history (described in Robert Dreyfuss’ book Devil’s Game) that all of the editorials obscure.
Swallowing official justificationsThe Wall Street Journal (8/15/21) argued that Mr. Trump’s withdrawal deadline was a mistake, but Mr. Biden could have maneuvered around it”—meaning he could have ignored it.
Indeed, the editorials suffered from a basic failure to question the official justifications offered for the war and occupation. The New York Times editorial board (8/15/21) wrote that
the war in Afghanistan began in response by the United States and its NATO allies to the attacks of September 11, 2001, as an operation to deny Al Qaeda sanctuary in a country run by the Taliban.
There’s no place in that narrative for the fact that eight days into the war, in October 2001, the Taliban offered to discuss turning over Osama Bin Laden (Guardian, 10/14/01).
The Journal characterized the Taliban as “the jihadists the US toppled 20 years ago for sheltering Osama bin Laden.” But it was in mid-November 2001 (Guardian, 11/17/01) that the US toppled the Taliban, a month after they had said they were willing to talk about extraditing bin Laden.In the same vein, the Los Angeles Times editorial (8/16/21) said that
after the US ousted the Taliban—which had hosted the Al Qaeda terrorist network and refused to turn over terrorists such as Osama bin Laden — the George W. Bush administration expanded the goals of the mission in ways that in hindsight were never realistic.
This phrasing implies that the US overthrew the Taliban because they “refused to turn over terrorists such as Osama bin Laden.” However, in addition to the Taliban signaling that it could be open to extraditing the Al Qaeda leader in October 2001, according to a former head of Saudi intelligence (LA Times, 11/4/01), the Taliban said in 1998 that it would hand over bin Laden to Saudi Arabia, the US’s close ally; the Saudi intelligence official says that the Taliban backed off after the US fired cruise missiles at an apparent bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, following attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania attributed to Al Qaeda.
The outlets thus failed to inform their readers that, had the US pursued negotiations for bin Laden’s extradition, Afghans may have been spared 20 years of devastating war. That US planners might have drawn up their Afghanistan policies with a view to the country’s vast resource wealth and strategic position—and there’s evidence that they did (In These Times, 8/1/18)—is not a perspective that the editorials opted to share with their readers. Neither is the idea that the US doesn’t have the right to decide who governs other countries.
Engineering forgetfulness about America’s Afghan war, if left unchallenged, will make it easier to wage the next one."
"IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of 9/11, Americans were braying for war. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 90 percent of Americans approved of the United States attacking Afghanistan, while 65 percent of the public was comfortable with the prospect of Afghan civilians being killed. Only 22 percent thought that the war would last more than two years.
Americans wanted blood, and they got it. The United States invaded Afghanistan and spent the next 20 years making war there and beyond: in Burkina Faso; Cameroon; Iraq; Libya; Niger; the Philippines; Somalia; Syria; Tunisia; and Yemen, among other places. More than 770,000 people have since died violent deaths in America’s wars and interventions, including more than 312,000 civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Of the 10 percent of Americans who thought that war was not the answer, a small number demonstrated against the impending conflict. They marched in Austin, Texas; New York City; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; and elsewhere. It took courage to speak out against “indiscriminate retribution,” to assert that it was ludicrous to attack a country for a crime carried out by a small group of terrorists, and to suggest that the repercussions might echo for decades. They were mocked, screamed at, called scum and traitors, and worse.
Synthesizing more than 1,000 interviews and 10,000 pages of documents, Whitlock provides a stunning study of failure and mendacity, an irrefutable account of the U.S.’s ignoble defeat in the words of those who — from the battlefield to NATO headquarters in Kabul and from the Pentagon to the White House — got it so wrong for so long, papered their failures over with falsehoods, and sought to avoid even an ounce of accountability.
“People often ask me, ‘How long will this last?’” President George W. Bush said on October 11, 2001, a few days after the United States started bombing Afghanistan. “This particular battlefront will last as long as it takes to bring Al Qaeda to justice. It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two. But we will prevail.”
More than a decade later, the U.S. still hadn’t won the war, and an obscure government agency, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, sought to figure out why. The result was more than 400 “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted with mostly American (but also Afghan and NATO) officials as well as other experts, aid workers, and consultants. Their assessments were candid, often damning, and the government sought to keep them under wraps.
But the indefatigable Whitlock and his employer, the Washington Post, via two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, forced the government to turn over the files. These records became the foundation of an award-winning series for the Post; now, combined with several troves of documents from various public collections, these files make “The Afghanistan Papers” the most comprehensive American accounting of the conflict and help explain, better than any book yet, why so many of those who planned, guided, and fought the war failed so spectacularly.
“We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” recalled Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House war czar under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
“We did not know what we were doing,” said Richard Boucher, the Bush administration’s top diplomat for South and Central Asia.
“There was a tremendous … dysfunctionality in unity of command inside of Afghanistan, inside the military,” recalled Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, an early Afghanistan War commander.
“There was no campaign plan,” confessed Army Gen. Dan McNeill, who twice served as the top commander in Afghanistan under Bush. “I tried to get someone to define for me what winning meant, even before I went over, and nobody could.”
These and hundreds of other officials, military officers, diplomats, and analysts could have leveled with the American people immediately or at any time in the last 20 years. Had they done so, perhaps the war in Afghanistan could have been shortened by a decade or more; perhaps following conflicts wouldn’t have been so easy to start or proved so difficult to end; perhaps more than 770,000 people wouldn’t be dead and up to 59 million forced from their homes by America’s post-9/11 wars.
Instead, Americans muddled through the conflict in Afghanistan, unsure what they were there to accomplish, why they were doing it, who they were fighting, and what they were fighting for. “What were we actually doing in that country?” asked a U.S. official who served with the NATO senior civilian representative to Afghanistan. “We went in after 9/11 to defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but the mission became blurred.”
To call it confusion is the kindest possible assessment. Another is that, as Whitlock writes, the government was peddling pablum “so unwarranted and baseless that their statements amounted to a disinformation campaign.”
WHITLOCK DOES A masterful job of mining the hard-won SIGAR synopses and archived interviews to juxtapose private judgments with public comments. Bush’s first secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, recently died of multiple myeloma, but Whitlock ably demonstrates that shame ought to have taken him years earlier. Of all the craven war managers who take their star turn in “The Afghanistan Papers,” Rumsfeld may come off worst. “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” the late defense secretary wrote in an internal memo almost two years into the war. “We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.”
Opium is another key overlap. During the Vietnam War, as heroin use among U.S. troops soared, Air America, a company run by the CIA, transported opium harvested by farmers in Laos who were also serving as soldiers in the agency’s secret army. Following its defeat in Southeast Asia, the United States sought to entangle the Soviet Union in its own “Vietnam” in Afghanistan, where, as the New York Times reported, “opium production flourished … with the involvement of some of the mujahedeen, rebels who were supported by the Central Intelligence Agency.” By the time Americans were fighting against some of those same mujahideen and their sons in the 2000s, the United States had turned against drug production and devoted billions to eradicating poppies, but Afghanistan nonetheless became the world’s top narco-state.
Whitlock offers Operation River Dance, a two-month joint U.S.-Afghan invasion of poppy fields in southern Afghanistan, as an object lesson. John Walters, the Bush administration’s drug czar, told reporters that the effort was “making enormous progress,” but in reality, everything went wrong. Bulldozers broke down; tractors got stuck in ditches; a State Department-leased plane filled with U.S. drug enforcement officials crashed into a group of houses, killing civilians; Afghans involved in the effort went AWOL; local farmers were angered and alienated; Afghan power brokers began using the operation to strike at rivals; and a previously tranquil region became a militant hotbed.
“They say it was very successful,” then-Lt. Col. Michael Slusher, an adviser during the operation, told an Army interviewer. “I think that’s just plain B.S.”
“Just plain B.S.” is a fitting epitaph, not just for River Dance or the American drive to eradicate opium poppies, but for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan writ large. Just as in Vietnam, the military cooked the books at every level of command — lying about the war to itself, to Congress, and to the American people. “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” said Army Col. Bob Crowley, a senior counterinsurgency adviser in 2013 and 2014.
In the SIGAR interviews, Whitlock notes, “U.S. military officials and advisors described explicit and sustained efforts to deliberately mislead the public” from the battlefield on up to the White House, skewing data to make it appear that the U.S. was winning the war.
IF A SMALL LIBRARY of Vietnam War books is any guide, hawkish historians, revisionist reprobates, and aggrieved war makers will pick up this mantle and try to recast the war in Afghanistan in favorable terms, excusing yet another American military defeat and casting blame on the usual suspects.
Before Kabul fell to the Taliban, a coterie of U.S. ambassadors issued a demand: “Don’t lose Afghanistan.” This August 6 post on the Atlantic Council’s blog by five men, all of whom played key roles in America’s long march to defeat, ended with a plea for more war premised on the final fallback position of intellectually and morally bankrupt war hawks. The United States, they insisted, “can, and must, act forcefully in Afghanistan with air and defense support along with robust diplomacy. The country’s future — as well as Washington’s global credibility — is at stake.” It harkens back to a formerly classified 1965 breakdown of U.S. objectives in Vietnam by Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton: “70% — To avoid a humiliating US defeat,” compared with 10 percent for the publicly stated goal of allowing “the people of [South Vietnam] to enjoy a better, freer way of life.” Credibility was the overwhelming (and secret) reason to prolong the war another 10 years at a cost of millions of lives in Southeast Asia.
H.R. McMaster — a retired lieutenant general, national security adviser to President Donald Trump, Vietnam War historian, and one of the Americans who lost the war in Afghanistan — also entered the fray. The same man who wrote that “the war in Vietnam was not lost … on the front pages of the New York Times, or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C.” recently tweeted, prior to the fall of Kabul, “US media is finally reporting on the transformation of Afghanistan after their disinterest and defeatism helped set conditions for capitulation and a humanitarian catastrophe.”
Thankfully, we have “The Afghanistan Papers” to inoculate the body politic against such delusion and abject kookery. “With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict,” writes Whitlock. It’s a diplomatic way of saying that when faced with the opportunity to tell the truth and limit the amount of blood on their hands, America’s war managers consistently doubled down on violence.
“The Afghanistan Papers” helps provide some small measure of justice, forcing leaders to live with their now-public lies, and provides a convenient list of those who should be shunned by cable news producers, White House and Pentagon hiring committees, book publishers, and newspaper opinion-page editors.
In the wake of this week’s Taliban takeover, many are asking a question that will be repeated by future generations: “Who lost Afghanistan?” Whitlock’s “The Afghanistan Papers” offers the definitive answer."
5) Crocodile Fears, by Matt Lubchansky, The NIB
(click on link below for full cartoon)
https://thenib.com/crocodile-fears/
