The Afghanistan Papers Confirm America's Longest War Is a Lie

The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers, detailing a true history of the nation’s longest official war, reveals nothing new about the war’s futility or about the fact that it was doomed to failure from almost the beginning. The Post fought a legal battle for three years to obtain the documents from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a federal government watchdog agency that interviewed hundreds of officials about their honest assessments of the war.

What the Afghanistan Papers do offer is a confirmation of what critics had already been asserting for nearly two decades: that there is no clearly defined goal or endpoint to the war to help determine when to stop fighting, and that our efforts have been futile at best and deeply destructive at worst.

More than 10 years ago I wrote, together with James Ingalls, a critical assessment of the Afghanistan war. The title of our book was Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (Seven Stories, 2006). Those last three words, “the Propaganda of Silence,” are a direct reference to poor media coverage and the irresponsible manner in which the press took an uncritical view of the war. The evidence was there for all to see that the U.S. war was doomed to failure once you scratched beneath the surface of officials’ rosy rhetoric.

The most important function of the Afghanistan Papers is to confirm that government officials have been utterly dishonest with the public about U.S. achievements and progress in Afghanistan. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General at SIGAR, admitted to the Post that the documents prove that “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

The picture that emerges of how insiders have viewed the war is startlingly similar to how critics have portrayed it over the years. Earlier this year I wrote a “Brief History” of the Afghanistan war for Truthdig in which I assessed the early years of the conflict:

The Bush plan to build a stable Afghan government as a bulwark against the Taliban and al-Qaida failed for reasons that had as much to do with imperial hubris as it did with the practical shortcuts taken by an outsider to patch together a precarious government—as if that were a sufficient substitute for real democracy.

In comparison, one economist told SIGAR, as revealed in the Afghanistan Papers, that he:

… blamed an array of mistakes committed again and again over 18 years — haphazard planning, misguided policies, bureaucratic feuding. Many said the overall nation-building strategy was further undermined by hubris, impatience, ignorance and a belief that money can fix anything.

In my history of the war, I also wrote: “Obama’s strategy included a temporary increase in troops, as if throwing more American soldiers at the problem would help any one of his goals stick.” But, I continued, “The Taliban appears to have had a ‘wait it out’ strategy with respect to Americans, stringing along the U.S. and the Afghan government over several years of talks until it had the upper hand to return to power.”

By comparison, the Afghanistan Papers revealed that “Obama’s strategy was also destined to fail,” as it relied on “a massive counterinsurgency campaign, backed by 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops.” In the end, I concluded: “Obama tried to set artificial dates for ending the war before it was over. All the Taliban had to do was wait him out.”

In 2015 I wrote in another piece for Truthdig titled “We Have Failed Afghanistan Again and Again,” that:

Despite spending billions of dollars—the U.S. offered its largest share of foreign aid to Afghans last year—there is little to show for it. Nearly $10 billion was spent on arming and training Afghan forces. But as the dismal state of the Afghan National Army shows, that money may as well have been poured down the drain.

By comparison, the Afghanistan Papers reveal that officials privately knew they were fueling corruption, and that “Much of the money … ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt Afghan officials, while U.S.-financed schools, clinics and roads fell into disrepair, if they were built at all.”

The U.S. has also been lining the pockets of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords, who have a long and bloody history going back to the era of Soviet occupation, when the CIA doled out cash to fight its Cold War enemy. In my 2006 book, my co-author and I warned against this practice, devoting a whole chapter to it, titled “Replacing One Brutal Regime With Another.” We suggested that instead of rewarding them with cash and government positions, the U.S. ought to disarm the warlords and help Afghans bring them to justice. The U.S. did the opposite, and the result was entirely predictable.

The Afghanistan Papers confirm that:

According to the interviews, the CIA, the U.S. military, the State Department and other agencies used cash and lucrative contracts to win the allegiance of Afghan warlords in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Intended as a short-term tactic, the practice ended up binding the United States to some of the country’s most notorious figures for years.

One senior government official told SIGAR, “We were giving out contracts to pretty nasty people, empowering people we shouldn’t have empowered, in order to achieve our own goals.” American tax dollars have lined the pockets of mass killers to an unimaginable extent. In my 2015 article, I referred specifically to Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was elevated to the position of vice president even though he had been “implicated in numerous atrocities and mass killings.” Among the few new revelations from The Washington Post’s investigative report is the assertion that “the United States and other sources had been giving Dostum $100,000 a month ‘to not cause trouble.’ ”

Now the Trump administration is hoping to resume peace negotiations with the Taliban with a plan to reinstall the very regime the U.S. claimed was harboring terrorists and harming Afghans. If the point of the war was to go from point A to point B and then back to point A, with an unimaginably high death toll in between, then by that measure alone the U.S. war in Afghanistan has been a success.

What American officials and the mainstream media has consistently failed to do in Afghanistan is actually pay attention to what ordinary Afghans say and want. The biggest toll of the failed American war has been the death and destruction of lives in a country that was already torn apart by years of war in 2001. We may never get a full accounting of how many Afghans have died or been maimed for life as a direct result of a war that insiders knew was a mistake.

But what we do know is all armed forces in Afghanistan are implicated in war crimes. In 2018, in a little-covered story, Afghans submitted a whopping 1.17 million complaints to the International Criminal Court that “include accounts of alleged atrocities, not only by groups like the Taliban and the ISIS, but also Afghan Security Forces and government-affiliated warlords, the U.S.-led coalition, and foreign and domestic spy agencies.”

The Post’s investigative series is a welcome addition to mountains of evidence that the Afghanistan war is a failure. But it was clear to those of us who had been paying attention that U.S. officials were lying about the war for nearly two decades. The important question today is: Will the Afghanistan Papers bring about the end of the longest war?

Sonali Kolhatkar

Columnist

Sonali Kolhatkar is a columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV,…

Neocons Won’t Stop Until They Get Their War With Iran

We've been here before.

by

Sonali Kolhatkar

Trump's national security adviser John Bolton has made it his mission to spark a war against Iran, and he was part of the apparatus of building the false case for the disastrous 2003 U.S. war against Iraq. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Several recent indicators strongly suggest President Donald Trump’s administration appears to be angling for a war with Iran. On Monday, The New York Times reported that the White House has been reviewing military plans against Iran. According to sources, “Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons.”

To no one’s surprise, it was Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton who ordered the updated plan. Bolton has made it his mission to spark a war against Iran, and he was part of the apparatus of building the false case for the disastrous 2003 U.S. war against Iraq. So hawkish is Bolton that in an interview with Foreign Policy in 2007 he said, “Once upon a time, we knew how to do clandestine regime change. We need to reacquire that capability.” As the Times pointed out, Bolton’s new review of military plans to attack Iran is reminiscent of preparations made ahead of the 2003 Iraq war. Clearly Bolton is chomping at the bit a little over a year since he accepted his position at the White House.

Bolton’s war plan for Iran began with the Trump administration abandoning the hard-won Obama-era nuclear deal a year ago and imposing harsh new sanctions on Iran. In mid-April, Trump designated Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard forces a terrorist group. It was the first time a military arm of a foreign nation was placed on the list of terrorist groups. In a statement, Trump said the designation “underscores the fact that Iran’s actions are fundamentally different from those of other governments.” Then in early May, the U.S. military sent an aircraft carrier and bomber task force on course to Iran, which Bolton announced was “in response to a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings.” He also made clear the military threat was intended “to send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.”

Now, Saudi Arabia, whose hatred of Iran mirrors that of Bolton, is claiming that one of its oil pipelines had been attacked by a drone, causing “limited damage.” The claim Tuesday came just a day after the Gulf Arab kingdom and U.S. ally said two of its oil tankers had been “sabotaged” off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, sharing photos of damage to the hull of its vessels. Reports claim the attacks were the work of drones flown by Iranian-supported Houthi rebels in Yemen and were in retaliation for Saudi Arabia’s brutal U.S.-backed war in Yemen. So far it is not clear if Iran had any connection to the drone attacks, but with Bolton in charge of the U.S.’ Iran policy, no direct connection may be required. Even a whiff of Iranian links to aggression could be reason enough to be met with “unrelenting force.”

We’ve been here before. Seventeen years ago President George W. Bush used the infamous term “Axis of Evil,” to describe Iran, Iraq and North Korea. He claimed that Iran wanted to attack Israel with a nuclear weapon and trigger World War III. Reports emerged of the CIA funding a terrorist group in Iran, and media analysts repeatedly warned against the “impending war with Iran.”

Bolton’s last official government position before joining Trump’s White House was as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Bush years. Bolton, Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney were all part of a cohort of war hawks known as the “neo-conservatives.” A 2003 Christian Science Monitor article accurately described their agenda: “‘Neocons believe that the United States should not be ashamed to use its unrivaled power – forcefully if necessary — to promote its values around the world. Some even speak of the need to cultivate a U.S. empire.” Even more ominously, the article stated, “Neoconservatives believe modern threats facing the U.S. can no longer be reliably contained and therefore must be prevented, sometimes through preemptive military action.”

Although Bolton has been angling for regime change in Iran for decades,  there is little appetite elsewhere for war. A poll conducted last July found strong public oppositionwithin the U.S. for a war on Iran. America’s once-trusty allies in Europe are no longer pledging blind allegiance to the United States. Negotiators working tirelessly for years to craft the Iran nuclear deal alongside U.S. representatives are now desperately trying to salvage what’s left of it after Trump withdrew. Ahead of an Iran-centered meeting this week in Brussels, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt warned, “We are very worried about the risk of a conflict happening by accident, with an escalation that is unintended really on either side.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decided at the last minute to attend the meeting uninvited but failed to convince Europe that Iran was deserving of war.

Pompeo had just as little luck in Iraq when, during an impromptu visit to Baghdad last week, he attempted to convince Iraqi leaders that Iran was a threat. Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi retorted, “Iraq is building its relationships with all on the basis of putting Iraq’s interests first,” and that his goal was to maintain balanced relationships with “friends and neighbors, including neighboring Iran.”

The recent deployment of the military carrier toward Iran was purportedly in response to “specific and credible” intelligence that Iran was targeting U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. Yet a British officer stationed in Iraq, who is part of the coalition forces there, told reporters Tuesday during a video news conference at the Pentagon: “No, there’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria.”

Still, none of this seems to deter Bolton or Trump. When asked about potential war with Iran, Trump told reporters, “We’ll see what happens with Iran. If they do anything, it would be a very bad mistake.” His threats are part of a pattern of aggressive language toward Iran since he took office. Joining in the collective sense of imperial hubris are Republicans like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who said in an interview that the U.S. could defeat Iran militarily in just “two strikes, the first strike and the last strike.”

Americans vehemently opposed the 2003 Iraq war, and hundreds of thousands protested in cities around the country in conjunction with millions of others worldwide. But Bush and his neocon allies did not care about public opposition, evidence of a real threat, or much else. They simply wanted war with Iraq, and they waged it willfully, destructively and chaotically, leaving a bloody trail of hundreds of thousands of deaths and political and regional instability.

Logic will not deter the Trump bullies. Neither will a history lesson. With Bolton back in a seat of power and pushing our unhinged president toward war with Iran, we may be on the precipice of yet another deadly military disaster.

Sonali Kolhatkar is a columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. She is the former founder, host and producer of KPFK Pacifica’s popular morning drive-time program “Uprising." She is also the co-director of the Afghan Women's Mission, a U.S.-based non-profit solidarity organization that funds the social, political, and humanitarian projects of RAWA. She is the author, with James Ingalls, of "Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence" (2006).