Iqbal Khan
WASHINGTON Post’s “Afghanistan Papers”—A secret history of the war— were released on December 09 by Washington Post’s investigative reporter Craig Whitlock, mainly compiled out of reports of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Excerpts of SIGAR reports have frequently been quoted by the US media. Though SIGAR is an entity of the US Defence Department it would more often than not cherry pick the portions of quarterly SIGAR findings suiting its narrative and distance from the portions that reflected poorly on Pentagon. In describing in detail how the US found itself stuck in a quagmire and kept truth from the public, Afghanistan Papers appear similar in importance to the Pentagon Papers, the history of the Vietnam War that the US Defence Department tried to keep ‘top-secret.’
Afghanistan Papers”, have been compiled from hundreds of interviews with national security leaders as part of an internal Pentagon review, these include statements by top leadership in the Pentagon and Afghanistan ¯ including current Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, as a three-star general ¯ lamenting the lack of clear strategy in the country and the moving goal posts for metrics of success. The interviews of more than 400 insiders describe everything that went wrong with the US effort in Afghanistan with unrestrained bluntness. Interviewees said that the strategy ping-ponged from retribution for 9/11 and a take-down of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban organization that allowed them to train and plan in Afghanistan, to full-blown nation building. “Our policy was to create a strong central government which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government. The timeframe for creating a strong central government is 100 years, which we didn’t have.” a former State Department official said in 2015.
War metrics that have been used to push positive public sentiment and stay the course in a war, have been acknowledged as unwinnable, were manipulated to tout successes and emphasize particular strategies were moving in the right direction. Obama Administration and Pentagon pushed metrics that portrayed the 2009 decision to surge 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in an inaccurately positive light. The US officials would even find ways to stretch bad metrics in a positive light to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate. A lot of effort was put into producing color-coded charts that showed the war was moving in the right direction, and no one questioned the credibility of the information or whether it was helpful. Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible. To support the Lessons Learned interviews, The Post also released hundreds of pages of previously classified memos about the Afghan war dictated by former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “I may be impatient. In fact I know I’m a bit impatient,” he wrote in one memo to several Generals and senior aides. “We are never going to get the US military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave.” “Help!” he wrote in another issued six months after the war started.
The interviews also reveal how the US flooded Afghanistan with more aid than it could manage without any clear vision. One unnamed USAID Executive said 90 % of what they spent was overkill: “We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason.” An unidentified contractor added that he was expected to dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district. John Garofano, a strategist who advised US Marines in Helmand in 2011, pointed out “There was not a willingness to answer questions. Even under Obama, a person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said there was constant pressure to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary. Instead of leading to development, aid from Washington instead allowed corruption in Afghanistan to rise to unprecedented levels. “By 2006, the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai had self-organised into a kleptocracy,” said US Army Colonel Christopher Kolenda. “Kleptocracy… is like brain cancer; it’s fatal.” His assessment was endorsed by a top US diplomat in Kabul, Ryan Crocker. “Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption,” he said.
In the regional context, the US said on 05 December that it supported continued Indian involvement in Afghanistan, even as President Donald Trump looks to withdraw troops. “The United States welcomes India’s substantial investment in and assistance to Afghanistan,” said Nancy Izzo Jackson, a State Department official in charge of Afghanistan. America’s longest war continues to drag on. The US has ramped up its air campaign in Afghanistan to highest level in nine years. The US dropped more munitions in Afghanistan in September 2019 than any other month since October 2010 when America had nearly 100,000 troops on the ground. The single thing bothering the US strategic mind the most is retarding and or preventing of peaceful rise of China as successor superpower to the US. For this it wants to employ India as a carrier donkey—hence the urge for permanent role for India in Afghanistan. India is sucking Americans maximum on this account but once the chips are down it is likely to American bidding. As long as the US does not reorient its strategic thinking, the Afghan conflict is here to stay — it’s not going anywhere.
—The writer is a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.
