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,…

Life, death and legacy of U.S. ally turned foe Haqqani

By: Syed Zafar Mehdi

TEHRAN - The death of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the patriarch of the dreaded militant group Haqqani Network, has generated a palpable buzz and made international headlines. The announcement was made by the Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid on Tuesday, hailing him as a “religious scholar and exemplary warrior”, even though Afghan officials insist that he had been dead for at least four years.

What does Haqqani’s death mean to the Taliban insurgency and the war in Afghanistan? If he was already dead, then why did the group disclose the news now? The debate is getting intense in media and intelligentsia circles.

Haqqani, 71, who founded the Haqqani network in 1970s, relinquished operational leadership of the group some years ago to his son Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is now the deputy leader of the Afghan Taliban. Many seasoned observers believe his death, following a prolonged illness, will not have any major impact on the group’s operations since he mattered very little towards the end of his life.

Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammad Radmanish said the announcement of his death was not expected to mean any major change for the Haqqani Network, since his son has been spearheading the group’s operations since many years. “Operationally, his death will not have an impact on the group,” he stressed, adding that the senior Haqqani’s role in recent years was more ideological.

Rahmatullah Nabil, the former chief of Afghan intelligence agency, agrees with that assumption. He said his death will not have any effect on the “devious activities” of the group, adding that the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, has already “trained his successors to be more ruthless than him”, most notably  Siraj Haqqani, Ibrahim Haqqani, Khalil Haqqani, Hamza Haqqani, Yahya Haqqani and others, suggesting that the Haqqani Network was backed by Pakistan’s intelligence agency.
Nabil said the news about his death is directly linked to the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to Pakistan, and thus the U.S. State Department and Pakistan were “playing as usual”.

The timing of the announcement of his death is interesting since many believe he had died years ago. Tawab Ghorzang, Director at Afghanistan’s National Security Council, said Haqqani died back in 2007 and the news is made public now as “part of (Taliban’s) psychological warfare tactics”.

His death may or may not be relevant, but in the broader scheme of things, his legacy is important: introducing suicide bombings in Afghanistan and providing a platform to Arab fighters in the Af-Pak region. The rise of groups like ISIS in Afghanistan can partly be attributed to the radical ideology he so aggressively propounded.

Haqqani, a former U.S. ally, was once hailed as a “freedom fighter” by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and praised by the late U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson as “goodness personified”. He was among the ‘mujahideen’ Americans backed in 1980s to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

Haqqani was also a close friend of former Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, who often stayed with him in his traditional bastion of southeast Afghanistan.

His association with Pakistan, from where his group operated since 2001, dates back to his young days as a religious seminary student. According to unclassified U.S. documents, during 1970s, the senior Haqqani returned to Afghanistan following the completion of his seminary education to organize a movement against then Afghan ruler Zahir Shah. But he was soon thrown out of the country. He went back to Pakistan and established a madrassa in North Waziristan.

In 1980s, he allied with the U.S. forces to fight the communist government in Kabul backed by Russia, and that shot him to prominence in militant circles. He was supplied with both money and arms by the U.S. during that period and became the darling of the U.S., Pakistan and Arab states including Saudi Arabia and Egypt. A former CIA chief was quoted by AP saying that he personally delivered suitcases full of money to Haqqani, whom he described as “one of the good ones.”

During the war against Soviets in Afghanistan, Haqqani and Bin Laden became close confidants, as both had signed up to fight for the CIA. The head of Al-Qaeda Ayman al-Zawahiri was also one of the fighters, now being sheltered and funded by the Haqqani Network in Pakistan’s tribal region.

During the 1980s Soviet war, Haqqani developed close connections with Pakistan’s formidable intelligence agency ISI. The connection, according to many strategic affairs experts, has grown stronger over the years. After the communist government in Kabul was overthrown by the U.S.-backed ‘mujahideen’, Haqqani served as justice minister in ‘mujahideen government’, albeit briefly.

Then a group emerged by the name of Taliban, comprising fighters who had fought for the U.S. against Soviet forces. The group took power in Afghanistan in 1996, and according to a declassified cable from the U.S. Embassy, Haqqani was welcomed into the group for his unmatched military prowess. When the Taliban regime was toppled in 2001 by the U.S.-led coalition, Haqqani shifted base to Pakistan’s tribal areas and reorganized his group for a new mission – war against old friends.

Since then, Haqqani Network, an integral part of the Afghan Taliban, has been doggedly fighting against the U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. After the death of Taliban founder Mullah Omar, Haqqani, who was a key member of the Taliban’s Quetta Shura, had played an instrumental role in keeping the group’s flock together. He was considered an ideological godfather by many Taliban commanders.

In 2012, the U.S. government declared the group a terrorist organization, because the equation had changed and now the group was not serving America’s interests.

For some years now, he had been bed-ridden, and his son Sirajuddin Haqqani, who was appointed deputy head of the Afghan Taliban last year, has been actively running the day-to-day operations of the group. According to Afghan officials, Haqqani Network has been responsible for most of the complex terror attacks in Afghanistan, especially in major cities.

Considering that the senior Haqqani had stepped aside some years ago and was not anymore involved in Haqqani Network’s day-to-day operations, his death is less likely to have any impact on the group’s activities. With or without senior Haqqani, the murky war is likely to continue.