essay on the war in afghanistan

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Afghanistan War

By: History.com Editors

Published: August 20, 2021

The United States launched the war in Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The conflict lasted two decades and spanned four U.S. presidencies, becoming the longest war in American history.

By August 2021, the war began to come to a close with the Taliban regaining power two weeks before the United States was set to withdraw all troops from the region. Overall, the conflict resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and a $2 trillion price tag . Here's a look at key events from the conflict.

War on Terror Begins

Investigators determined the 9/11 attacks—in which terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes, crashing two into the World Trade Center towers in New York City , one at the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., and one in a Pennsylvania field —were orchestrated by terrorists working from Afghanistan, which was under the control of the Taliban, an extremist Islamic movement. Leading the plot that killed more than 2,700 people was Osama bin Laden , leader of the Islamic militant group al Qaeda . It was believed the Taliban, which seized power in the country in 1996 following an occupation by the Soviet Union , was harboring bin Laden, a Saudi, in Afghanistan.

In an address on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush demanded the Taliban deliver bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders to the United States, or "share in their fate." They refused.

On October 7, 2001, U.S. and British forces launched Operation Enduring Freedom , an airstrike campaign against al Qaeda and Taliban targets including Kandahar, Kabul and Jalalabad that lasted five days. Ground forces followed, and with the help of Northern Alliance forces, the United States quickly overtook Taliban strongholds, including the capital city of Kabul, by mid-November. On December 6, Kandahar fell, signaling the official end of Taliban rule in Afghanistan and causing al Qaeda, and bin Laden, to flee.

Shift to Reconstruction

During a speech on April 17, 2002, Bush called for a Marshall Plan to aid in Afghanistan’s reconstruction, with Congress appropriating more than $38 billion for humanitarian efforts and to train Afghan security forces. In June, Hamid Karzai, head of the Popalzai Durrani tribe, was chosen to lead the transitional government.

While approximately 8,000 American troops remained in Afghanistan as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) overseen by NATO, the U.S. military focus turned to Iraq in 2003, the same year U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared "major combat" operations had come to an end in Afghanistan.

A new constitution was soon enacted and Afghanistan held its first democratic elections since the onset of the war on October 9, 2004, with Karzai, who went on to serve two five-year terms, winning the vote for president. The ISAF’s focus shifted to peacekeeping and reconstruction, but with the United States fighting a war in Iraq, the Taliban regrouped and attacks escalated.

Troop Surge Under Obama

In a written statement released February 17, 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama pledged to send an extra 17,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan by summer to join 36,000 American and 32,000 NATO forces already deployed there. "This increase is necessary to stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires," he stated . American troops reached a peak of approximately 110,000 soldiers in Afghanistan in 2011.

In November 2010, NATO countries agreed to a transition of power to local Afghan security forces by the end of 2014, and, on May 2, 2011, following 10-year manhunt, U.S. Navy SEALs located and killed bin Laden in Pakistan.

Following bin Laden's death, a decade into the war and facing calls from both lawmakers and the public to end the war, Obama released a plan to withdraw 33,000 U.S. troops by summer 2012, and all troops by 2014. NATO transitioned control to Afghan forces in June 2013, and Obama announced a new timeline for troop withdrawal in 2014, which included 9,800 U.S. soldiers remaining in Afghanistan to continue training local forces.

Trump: 'We Will Fight to Win'

In 2015, the Taliban continued to increase its attacks, bombing the parliament building and airport in Kabul and carrying out multiple suicide bombings.

In his first few months of office, President Donald Trump authorized the Pentagon to make combat decisions in Afghanistan, and, on April 13, 2017, the United States dropped its most powerful non-nuclear bomb, called the " mother of all bombs ," on a remote ISIS cave complex.

In August 2017, Trump delivered a speech to American troops vowing " we will fight to win " in Afghanistan. "America's enemies must never know our plans, or believe they can wait us out," he said. "I will not say when we are going to attack, but attack we will."

The Taliban continued to escalate its terrorist attacks, and the United States entered peace talks with the group in February 2019. A deal was reached that included the U.S. and NATO allies pledging a total withdrawal within 14 months if the Taliban vowed to not harbor terrorist groups. But by September, Trump called off the talks after a Taliban attack that left a U.S. soldier and 11 others dead. “If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks, and would even kill 12 innocent people, then they probably don’t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway,” Trump tweeted .

Still, the United States and Taliban signed a peace agreement on February 29, 2020, although Taliban attacks against Afghan forces continued, as did American airstrikes. In September 2020, members of the Afghan government met with the Taliban to resume peace talks and in November Trump announced that he planned to reduce U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 2,500 by January 15, 2021.

Withdrawal of US Troops

The fourth president in power during the war, President Joe Biden , in April 2021, set the symbolic deadline of September 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as the date of full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, with the final withdrawal effort beginning in May.

Facing little resistance, in just 10 days, from August 6-15, 2021, the Taliban swiftly overtook provincial capitals, Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif and, finally, Kabul. As the Afghan government collapsed, President Ashraf Ghani fled to the UAE , the U.S. embassy was evacuated and thousands of citizens rushed to the airport in Kabul to leave the country.

By August 14, Biden had temporarily deployed about 6,000 U.S. troops to assist in evacuation efforts. Facing scrutiny for the Taliban's swift return to power, Biden stated , “I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth.”

During the war in Afghanistan, more than 3,500 allied soldiers were killed, including 2,448 American service members, with 20,000-plus Americans injured. Brown University research shows approximately 69,000 Afghan security forces were killed, along with 51,000 civilians and 51,000 militants. According to the United Nations, some 5 million Afghanis have been displaced by the war since 2012, making Afghanistan the world's third-largest displaced population .

The U.S. War in Afghanistan , Council on Foreign Relations

Costs of the Afghanistan war, in lives and dollars , Associated Press

Who Are the Taliban, and What Do They Want? , The New York Times

Operation Enduring Freedom Fast Facts , CNN

Afghanistan: Why is there a war? , BBC News

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Afghanistan 20/20: The 20-Year War in 20 Documents

Primary sources contradict Pentagon optimism over decades

Pakistan sanctuaries, Afghan corruption enabled Taliban resurgence

Bush nation-building, Obama surge, Trump deal all failed

Washington, D.C., August 19, 2021 –  The U.S. government under four presidents misled the American people for nearly two decades about progress in Afghanistan, while hiding the inconvenient facts about ongoing failures inside confidential channels, according to declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive.   The documents include highest-level “snowflake” memos written by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during the George W. Bush administration, critical cables written by U.S. ambassadors back to Washington under both Bush and Barack Obama, the deeply flawed Pentagon strategy document behind Obama’s “surge” in 2009, and multiple “lessons learned” findings by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) – lessons that were never learned.

Estimates of Taliban controlled districts in Afghanistan as of mid-July 2021 ranged as high as more than half, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Quarterly Report, July 31, 2021, p. 55.  The number had increased from 73 in April to 221 in July, a harbinger of the August takeover in Kabul.

The recent SIGAR report to Congress, from July 31, 2021, just as multiple provincial centers were falling to the Taliban, quotes repeated assurances from top U.S. generals (David Petraeus in 2011, John Campbell in 2015, John Nicholson in 2017, and Pentagon press secretary John Kirby in 2021) about the “increasingly capable” Afghan security forces.  The SIGAR ends that section with the warning: “More than $88 billion has been appropriated to support Afghanistan’s security sector.  The question of whether that money was well spent will ultimately be answered by the outcome of the fighting on the ground, perhaps the purest M&E [monitoring and evaluation] exercise.”  Results are now in with the total collapse of the Afghan government and a looming humanitarian crisis.   The documents detail ongoing problems that bedeviled the American war in Afghanistan from the beginning:  lack of “visibility into who the bad guys are;” Pakistan’s double game of taking U.S. aid while providing a sanctuary to the Taliban; “mission creep” as a counterterror effort against al-Qaeda morphed into a nation-building war against the Taliban; Washington’s attention deficit disorder as the Bush administration pivoted to invading and occupying Iraq; endemic corruption driven in large part by American billions and secret intelligence payments to warlords; fake statistics and gassy metrics not only by the military but also the State Department, US AID, and their many contractors; the mismatch between Afghan realities and American designs for a new centralized government and modernized army; and more.   

Read the Documents

Digital National Security Archive, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit

This is the foundational document for the first phase of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, approved by the National Security Council on October 16, 2001 (just five weeks after the 9/11 attacks). This copy carries Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s personal handwritten edits, with an October 30 cover note to his top policy aide Douglas Feith about crafting a new updated version, emphasizing that "The U.S. should not commit to any post-Taliban military involvement since the U.S. will be heavily engaged in the anti-terrorism effort worldwide." The follow-on peacekeeping force in Afghanistan “could be UN-based or an ad hoc collection of volunteer states … but not the U.S.” Rumsfeld adds the word “military” as in “not the U.S. military.” The strategy emphasizes the destruction of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and is careful not to commit the U.S. to extensive rebuilding activities in post-Taliban Afghanistan. "The USG [U.S. Government] should not agonize over post-Taliban arrangements to the point that it delays success over Al Qaida and the Taliban.” Operationally, the U.S. will "use any and all Afghan tribes and factions to eliminate Al-Qaida and Taliban personnel," while inserting "CIA teams and special forces in country operational detachments (A teams) by any means, both in the North and the South." Diplomacy is important "bilaterally, particularly with Pakistan, but also with Iran and Russia," however "engaging UN diplomacy… beyond intent and general outline could interfere with U.S. military operations and inhibit coalition freedom of action." U.S. bombing began in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the special forces teams arrived October 19, and in the second week of November, in a stunning cascade of Taliban surrenders, all major cities except Kandahar fell to the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance. Taliban leaders took refuge mostly in Pakistan but also around Kandahar, Taliban soldiers melted into the population, and the sequence provided almost a mirror image of the rapid August 2021 implosion of the Afghan government and security forces.

Exhilarated by swift victory over the Taliban in late 2001, the Bush administration quickly switched its attention to Iraq, but by March 2002 Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was worried again about Afghanistan, writing a snowflake to top aides about setting up a weekly meeting because the situation was “drifting.” Later the same day, Rumsfeld would do a long interview with MSNBC, never mentioning his worries about drift, but rather arguing there was no point in negotiating with Taliban remnants – “the only thing you can do is to bomb them and try to kill them. And that’s what we did, and it worked. They’re gone. And the Afghan people are a lot better off.”

On April 17, 2002, President George W. Bush announced new objectives for Afghanistan in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute, including a stable government, a new army, and a new education system for boys and girls. In effect, Bush’s speech revoked the previous Rumsfeld insistence about not committing “to any post-Taliban military involvement.” That same day when the stated U.S. goals moved to nation building, Rumsfeld’s concerns about no clear exit strategy from Afghanistan crystallized in a short snowflake addressed to his top policy aide Douglas Feith and copied to his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and to the chair and vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs. “I know I’m a bit impatient,” he writes, but “We are never going to get the U.S. 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!”

This Rumsfeld memo to his policy aide, Douglas Feith, on June 25, 2002 captures how naïve top American officials were about Pakistani motivations, and how throwing money at any problem came to be the core U.S. modus operandi around Afghanistan. Rumsfeld asks, “If we are going to get the Paks to really fight the war on terror where it is, which is in their country, don’t you think we ought to get a chunk of money, so that we can ease Musharraf’s transition from where he is to where we need him.” Rumsfeld does not see how Pakistan and its intelligence service were playing both sides in Afghanistan, and the net for Pakistani leader Musharraf was some $10 billion in U.S. aid over the following six years.

Obtained through FOIA by the National Security Archive

This 14-page email written between August 11 and August 15, 2002, by a Green Beret member of a commando team hunting “high-value” targets circulated at the highest levels of the Pentagon, not least because of its humor and its candor about actual conditions in Afghanistan, and the author’s previous position as a deputy assistant secretary of defense before his Reserve unit mobilized. Roger Pardo-Maurer opened with his “Greetings from scenic Kandahar” which he went on to describe as “Formerly known as ‘Home of the Taliban.’ Now known as ‘Miserable Rat-Fuck Shithole.” “Kandahar is like sitting in a sauna and having a bag of cement shaken over your head.” To those who call it dry heat, Pardo-Maurer, a member of Yale’s class of 1984, rejoins, “you don’t stay dry for long when you are the Lobster Thermidor inside a carapace of about 50 lbs. of Kevlar and ceramic plate armor, with a sweltering chamber pot on your head.” “If there is a landscape less welcoming to humans anywhere on earth, apart from the Sahara, the Poles, and the cauldrons of Kilauea [Hawaii], I cannot imagine it, and I certainly don’t intend to go there.”

Alluding to the continuing role of Pakistan as a Taliban sanctuary, Pardo-Maurer warned, “The shooting match is still very much on. Along the border provinces, you can’t kick a stone over without Bad Guys swarming out like ants and snakes and scorpions.” He recommends staying with a Special Forces strategy “fighting along the Afghans, rather than against them” – “the number one military mistake we could make here is to ‘go conventional’ in this war.” As for “the number one political mistake,” that would be “to actually believe that this place is a country, and that there is such a thing as an Afghan. It is not, and there is not.” “Afghanistan is the place where the world saw fit to stash all the tribes it could not handle elsewhere.” Rumsfeld specifically asked for a copy of the Pardo-Maurer document in a snowflake on September 13, 2002, included here as the cover memo.

In the ongoing debates inside the U.S. government about nation-building in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld insisted that more troops were not the answer, and blamed agencies like State and U.S. AID for the lack of progress. They in turn blamed Rumsfeld for not cooperating with their reconstruction plans and not providing security. He wrote President Bush on August 20, 2002, arguing, “the critical problem in Afghanistan is not really a security problem. Rather, the problem that needs to be addressed is the slow progress that is being made on the civil side.” More troops would backfire, “we could run the risk of ending up being as hated as the Soviets were,” and “without successful reconstruction, no amount of added security forces would be enough.” Yet, because of the “perception that does exist” about security problems, Rumsfeld has assigned a brigadier general (and future U.S. ambassador), Karl Eikenberry, to serve as security coordinator on the staff of the Embassy.

By the fall of 2002, the White House focus centered on the buildup to invading Iraq, to the point that President Bush didn’t even know who his latest commander was in Kabul. This Rumsfeld snowflake, likely to a secretary whose name is redacted on privacy grounds (b6), recounts seeing Bush in the Oval Office on October 21, 2002, asking if he wanted to meet with General Franks (head of Central Command) and General McNeill, and noticing that Bush was quite puzzled. “He said, ‘Who is General McNeill?’ I said he is the general in charge of Afghanistan. He said, ‘Well, I don’t need to meet with him.”

This September 2003 memo from the Secretary of Defense to his top intelligence aide, Steve Cambone, laments that nearly two years into the Afghan war, they still don’t know the enemy. “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq. I read all the intel from the community and it sounds as thought [sic] we know a great deal, but in fact, when you push at it, you find out we haven’t got anything that is actionable.”

Three years into the U.S. nation building project, the Combined Forces Command Afghanistan sent Washington one of its regular “Security Updates” with a two-page list of “ANP Horror Stories” on pages 41 and 42. Police training at that point was in the hands of the State Department (or more precisely, its contractors), which took over from an early failed attempt led by the Germans. So the Secretary of Defense makes sure to alert the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, about this “serious problem,” claiming that the two pages “were written in as graceful and non-inflammatory a way as is humanly possible.” Illiterate, underequipped, and unprepared, the police force seemingly had gained little from years of training by State Department contractors, perhaps mainly because police pay was so low that they extorted the very people they were supposed to protect. Later in 2005, the U.S. military would take over police training, and still fail to produce a professional force, not least because the whole idea was foreign to rural Afghans, who settled disputes primarily through village elders.

Document 10

Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department

Ronald Neumann arrived in Kabul as the U.S. ambassador in July 2005, with a long history of connection there as the son of a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. He quickly sized up corruption as “a major threat to the country’s future” describing it as a “long tradition [that] grows like Topsy.” Neumann’s cable ascribes the endemic corruption to multiple factors, “privation” in the form of low official salaries, “insecurity” in the form of 35 years of war, “more foreign ‘loot’” especially the billions coming in from the U.S., “exposure to the outside world” of people better off materially, and “universality” in the sense that everyone was doing it. Neumann also acknowledges the reality that the U.S. was working with “some unsavory political figures” out of necessity. Redacted when the cable was declassified in 2011 are the specific names Neumann reported, and the specific actions he was recommending, but the full version released in 2014 revealed that at the top of his list was an untouchable – Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother, whom the CIA had paid for years, along with a number of provincial governors, most on U.S. covert payrolls as well. The cable also flags the second front in the Bush Afghan war – narcotics – reporting “opium could strangle the legitimate Afghanistan state in its cradle;” yet, rural Afghans relied on poppy production as their only lucrative crop.

Document 11

In this cable framed as a personal letter to the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann leads off with an ominous quote from a Taliban leader: "You have all the clocks but we have all the time." Neumann’s plea is for more resources in order to achieve “victory.” He says the U.S. is failing to fund and support fully the activities needed to bolster the Afghan economy, infrastructure, and reconstruction, and that failure is harming the American mission. "We have dared so greatly, and spent so much in blood and money that to try to skimp on what is needed for victory seems to me too risky." The Ambassador notes, "the supplemental decision recommendation to minimize economic assistance and leave out infrastructure plays into the Taliban strategy, not to ours." He warns that Taliban leaders are issuing statements that the U.S. would grow increasingly weary, while they gained momentum.

Document 12

U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann writes Washington again in February 2006 with some prescient warnings. He reports that violence in Afghanistan is on the rise but claims “violence does not indicate a failing policy; on the contrary we need to persevere in what we are doing.” Large unit force-on-force engagements devastated the Taliban in previous years, but “the Taliban now seems to understand the propaganda value of the [suicide] bomb and will use it to maximum advantage.” Ambassador Neumann defends the importance of “our work with the GOA [Government of Afghanistan] to extend and deepen its reach nationwide.” “The Taliban need not be intellectual giants to understand that their long-term strategy depends on keeping the government weak in the provinces.” Neumann says the insurgency is getting stronger largely due to the “four years that the Taliban has had to reorganize and think about their approach in a sanctuary [tribal areas in Pakistan] beyond the reach of either [Kabul or Islamabad].” If this sanctuary is “left unaddressed, it will also lead to the re-emergence of the same strategic threat to the United States that prompted our OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom] intervention over 4 years ago.”

Document 13

During May 2006, U.S. Central Command asked the eminent retired four-star general, Barry McCaffrey, to visit Afghanistan and Pakistan and make an assessment of the war (as he had done several times in Iraq). Gen. McCaffrey had served as the drug czar under President Clinton, commanded the “left hook” in the first Gulf War that destroyed so much of the Iraqi army, and won multiple medals for valor and for wounds during the Vietnam war, so his views had significant credibility. Here Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld recommends McCaffrey to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The McCaffrey document is couched as a report to his department chairs at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) where he was an adjunct professor. The cover “snowflake” from Rumsfeld catches only a couple of points from McCaffrey: the lack of small arms for Afghan forces, and the recommendation for almost doubling the size of the Afghan army.

The full document presents a fascinating on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand story, praising U.S. and allied troops as well as Hamid Karzai while acknowledging rising violence and Taliban regrouping to the level of battalion-size engagements. McCaffrey warns that the Afghan leadership are “collectively terrified that we will tip-toe out of Afghanistan in the coming few years” and do not believe the U.S. is committed “to stay with them for the fifteen years required to create an independent functional nation-state which can survive in this dangerous part of the world.” He recommends almost doubling the size of the Afghan army (whose “courageous” troops “operate like armed mountain goats in the severe terrain”), claiming “[a] well-equipped, multi-ethnic, literate, and trained Afghan National Army is our ticket to be fully out of country in the year 2020.” A different ticket would be punched in 2021, not least because the Army never achieved any of McCaffrey’s four objectives. McCaffrey saw the Afghan police as “disastrous” but could only think of more money plus adding “a thousand jails, a hundred courts, and a dozen prisons.”

McCaffrey provocatively leads his section on Pakistan with this query: “The central question seems to be – are the Pakistanis playing a giant double-cross in which they absorb one billion dollars a year from the U.S. while pretending to support U.S. objectives to create a stable Afghanistan – while in fact actively supporting cross-border operations of the Taliban (that they created) – in order to give themselves a weak rear area threat for their central struggle with the Indians?” He goes on to doubt that Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf was playing a deliberate double game, yet even phrasing the question in this way was striking, compared to Rumsfeld’s repeated public praise for Musharraf. Only two months later, Rumsfeld’s own civilian adviser, Dr. Marin Strmecki, would give him an even more detailed report entitled “Afghanistan at a Crossroads,” in which Strmecki doesn’t even see it as a question: “Since 2002, the Taliban has enjoyed a sanctuary in Pakistan.”

Document 14

U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann warns Washington in this cable that "we are not winning in Afghanistan; although we are far from losing" (that would take another 14 years). Echoing Gen. McCaffrey’s conclusions (Document 13), Neumann says the primary problem is a lack of political will to provide additional resources to bolster current strategy and to match increasing Taliban offensives. "At the present level of resources we can make incremental progress in some parts of the country, cannot be certain of victory, and could face serious slippage if the desperate popular quest for security continues to generate Afghan support for the Taliban .... Our margin for victory in a complex environment is shrinking, and we need to act now." The Taliban believe they are winning. That perception "scares the hell out of Afghans." "We are too slow." Rapidly increasing certain strategic initiatives such as equipping Afghan forces, taking out the Taliban leadership in Pakistan, and investing heavily in infrastructure can help the Americans regain the upper hand, Neumann declares. "We can still win. We are pursuing the right general policies on governance, security and development. But because we have not adjusted resources to the pace of the increased Taliban offensive and loss of internal Afghan support we face escalating risks today."

Document 15

Declassified by Department of Defense, September 2009

This is the key document behind the Obama “surge” in Afghanistan that produced the highest U.S. troop levels in the whole 20-year war. President Obama’s holdover Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, had abruptly fired the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, after only 11 months, and replaced him with a Special Operations general named Stanley McChrystal, a favorite of Central Command head Gen. David Petraeus, and an acolyte of the Petraeus counterinsurgency approach that had apparently succeeded in Iraq (critics said top Iraqi clerics had simply ordered a truce, for their own reasons). This 66-page assessment had a convoluted public history: written in August 2009, it leaked to the Washington Post in September, likely as part of Pentagon pressure on Obama to approve more troops, and the Pentagon declassified it right away. The McChrystal strategy called for a “properly resourced” counterinsurgency campaign, with at least 40,000 and as many as 60,000 more U.S. troops and massive aid, especially to build up the Afghan army. He wrote, “I believe the short-term fight will be decisive. Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) – while Afghan security capacity matures – risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

McChrystal asked for 60,000 troops, Obama gave him 30,000 but with an 18-month deadline before they would start coming home, and neither the surge nor the deadline ever produced any “maturity” in Afghan security capacity. Testifying to the Senate in December 2009, McChrystal flatly declared “the next eighteen months will likely be decisive and ultimately enable success. In fact, we are going to win.” His 66 pages remain a testament to American military hubris, full of questionable assumptions – that most Afghans saw the Taliban as oppressors and would side with a government installed by foreigners, that most Afghans shared a national identity, and that the Pakistan sanctuaries would not keep the Taliban going indefinitely.

Document 16

The New York Times, Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Envoy’s Cables Show Worries on Afghan Plans,” January 25, 2010

During the Obama debate over whether to surge or not in Afghanistan, some of the strongest criticism of the McChrystal and Pentagon proposals for expanding the military footprint came from inside the government in classified channels – specifically from the former general who had served multiple tours in Afghanistan (Rumsfeld’s first “security coordinator”) and now served as Obama’s ambassador, Karl Eikenberry. This highly classified November 6, 2009, cable, captioned NODIS ARIES, is couched as a personal letter from Eikenberry to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, opposing the proposed troop influx, the vastly increased costs, the concomitant need for yet more civilians, and the resulting increase in Afghan dependency. Eikenberry spells out his reasons: first that Hamid Karzai “is not an adequate strategic partner” – “[h]e and much of his circle are only too happy to see us invest further. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending war on terror and for military bases to use against surrounding powers.” Second, “we overestimate the ability of Afghan security forces to take over.” Perhaps most important, “[m]ore troops won’t end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries remain,” and “Pakistan will remain the single greatest source of Afghan instability.”

Document 17

This follow-up cable (see Document 16) by Ambassador Eikenberry to Secretary Clinton, for her “eyes only,” may have undercut his earlier strong argument against the proposed troop surge. It’s possible that Clinton may have pushed back, or Eikenberry got word his opposition was unwelcome – her side of the correspondence is still classified. Here, Eikenberry just asks for more time to deliberate, a more wide-ranging process, looking at more options other than military counterinsurgency, and convening a high-level expert panel. He admits that more troops “will yield more security wherever they deploy, for as long as they stay.” But he points to the previous troop increase in 2008-2009, amounting to 30,000 soldiers, and says “overall violence and instability in Afghanistan intensified.” Neither the Afghan army nor government “has demonstrated the will or ability to take over lead security responsibility,” he continues. There is “scant reason to expect that further increases will further advance our strategic purposes; instead, they will dig us in more deeply.” Eikenberry lost this debate, and the Obama-Gates-McChrystal troop surge produced all-time high levels of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Document 18

Washington Post, The Afghanistan Papers, Freedom of Information lawsuit against SIGAR

Among the hundreds of “lessons learned” interviews undertaken by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and obtained by Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post through two Freedom of Information lawsuits, this one stands out for its long view, its self-critical perspective, and its high policy level. Richard Boucher was the longest-serving State Department spokesman in history, starting under Madeline Albright, continuing under Colin Powell and even Condoleezza Rice, before taking over the South Asia portfolio at State from 2006 through 2009. Boucher candidly told the SIGAR interviewers in October 2015, “Did we know what we were doing – I think the answer is no. First we went in to get al-Qaeda, and to get al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, and even without killing Bin Laden we did that. The Taliban was shooting back at us so we started shooting at them and they became the enemy. Ultimately, we kept expanding the mission.” Boucher confessed, “If there was ever a notion of mission creep it is Afghanistan.” His 12 pages of interview transcript include multiple striking observations worth reading in full, about corruption, about local governance and the lack thereof, about the U.S. military’s can-do attitude and where it leads, about roads not taken. His judgment about Afghanistan comes down to a long view: “The only time this country has worked properly was when it was a floating pool of tribes and warlords presided over by someone who had a certain eminence who was able to centralize them to the extent that they didn’t fight each other too much. I think this idea that we went in with, that this was going to become a state government like a U.S. state or something like that, was just wrong and is what condemned us to fifteen years of war instead of two or three.”

Document 19

SIGAR https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/testimony/SIGAR-20-19-TY.pdf

Congress created the SIGAR office in 2008 to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan, and this statement marked the 22nd time the incumbent, John Sopko, had testified before Congress. The proximate cause of this hearing was the Washington Post publication in December 2019 of “The Afghanistan Papers” series by Craig Whitlock, based in large part on the Post’ s successful lawsuit against SIGAR to obtain copies of the hundreds of “lessons learned” interviews Sopko’s office had done with former policy makers, contractors, and military veterans of Afghanistan. Whitlock also relied on documents the National Security Archive had won through FOIA, notably the Donald Rumsfeld “snowflakes,” and concluded that the U.S. government had systematically misled the public about ostensible progress over nearly two decades in Afghanistan.

Whitlock himself covered this hearing, and his story included even more colorful quotations, apparently from the Q&A period, than can be found in this prepared testimony. For example, “There’s an odor of mendacity throughout the Afghanistan issue … mendacity and hubris.” “The problem is there is a disincentive, really, to tell the truth. We have created an incentive to almost require people to lie.” “When we talk about mendacity, when we talk about lying, it’s not just lying about a particular program. It’s lying by omissions. It turns out that everything that is bad news has been classified for the last few years.” (See Craig Whitlock, “Afghan war plagued by ‘mendacity’ and lies, inspector general tells Congress,” Washington Post , January 15, 2020.)

But the prepared statement is almost as chilling. Sopko told Congress that the system of rotation of U.S. personnel after a year or less in Afghanistan amounted to an “annual lobotomy.” Sopko gave specific examples of fake data and faulty metrics permeating the reconstruction effort: “Unfortunately, many of the claims that State, USAID, and others have made over time simply do not stand up to scrutiny.” Not least, Sopko concluded that “Unchecked corruption in Afghanistan undermined U.S. strategic goals – and we helped to foster that corruption” through “alliances of convenience with warlords” and “flood[ing] a small, weak economy with too much money, too fast.”

Document 20

SIGAR https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/quarterlyreports/2021-07-30qr-section2-security.pdf

This most recent quarterly report from the Special Inspector General provides some noteworthy evidence explaining why Washington would be so surprised by the rapid collapse of Afghan government forces in the two weeks after this was published. The 34-page “security” section leads with the ongoing withdrawal of U.S. and international troops, and the Taliban offensive that “avoided attacking U.S. and Coalition forces.” Maps in the middle of this section (pp. 54-56) show various open-source estimates for Taliban control over Afghani districts, and the report notes that the U.S. military ceased providing any unclassified estimates in 2019. From April to July, apparently, the number of Taliban-controlled districts went from 73 to 221, or more than half the total. Perhaps the most interesting page is page 62, with the sidebar on “the core challenge of properly assessing reconstruction’s effectiveness.” “For years, U.S. taxpayers were told that, although circumstances were difficult, success was achievable.” The document quotes Gen. David Petraeus in 2011, Gen. John Campbell in 2015, Gen. John Nicholson in 2017, and the Pentagon press secretary in 2021 all endorsing the effectiveness of the Afghan security forces. The SIGAR report comments on the $88 billion invested in those forces: “The question of whether that money was well spent will ultimately be answered by the fighting on the ground.”

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The American War in Afghanistan: A History

Special Assistant for Strategy to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (General Joseph Dunford)

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The American War in Afghanistan is a full history of the war in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2020. It covers political, cultural, strategic, and tactical aspects of the war and details the actions and decision-making of the United States, Afghan government, and Taliban. The work follows a narrative format to go through the 2001 US invasion, the state-building of 2002–2005, the Taliban offensive of 2006, the US surge of 2009–2011, the subsequent drawdown, and the peace talks of 2019–2020. The focus is on the overarching questions of the war: Why did the United States fail? What opportunities existed to reach a better outcome? Why did the United States not withdraw from the war?

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‘The Afghanistan Papers’ exposes the U.S.’s shaky Afghanistan strategy

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-afghanistan-papers-exposes-the-u-ss-shaky-afghanistan-strategy

Despite American presidents and military leaders providing years of positive assessments that the U.S. was winning the war in Afghanistan, behind the scenes there were clear warnings of an unsuccessful end. Those stories of failure, corruption and lack of strategy are the focus of Craig Whitlock's discussion with Judy Woodruff and his new book "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War."

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Judy Woodruff:

Despite American presidents and military leaders providing years of positive assessments that the U.S. was winning the war in Afghanistan, behind the scenes, there were clear warnings that things were headed in another direction.

Those harbingers, stories of failure, corruption and lack of a clear strategy, are the focus of Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock's new book, "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War."

And Craig joins us now.

Thank you so much for being here. Congratulations. This is a definitive book.

Craig Whitlock, you interviewed over 1,000 people and you had access to documents that your newspaper, The Washington Post, had to sue to get. And they tell a very different story in many cases from what the public has been told over the last 20 years, don't they?

Craig Whitlock, The Washington Post:

Yes, these documents were interviews with — the core of them, with more than 400 officials who played a key role in the war.

And this is from White House officials, to generals, diplomats, aid workers, and also Afghans. And they really — they thought these were confidential interviews the government had conducted, and they thought that — their assessments were brutal.

They said that the U.S. government didn't know what it was doing in Afghanistan, it didn't have a strategy, and it misled the American people of how the war was going for 20 years. So, it was a complete opposite of the message that was being delivered in public year after year, that the U.S. was making progress, that victory was around the corner.

And this goes back to the very beginning.

President Bush goes into the U.S. goes into Afghanistan initially to get Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks, but it very quickly changes to nation-building. And you have a lot of behind-the-scenes information from then on about what was going on and how what was being assessed was different from what people were being told.

Craig Whitlock:

Well, and one of earliest examples of this is, President Bush gave a speech in April of 2002 to the Virginia Military Institute.

At that time, the Taliban had been defeated, al-Qaida was on the run. But Bush was addressing concerns already that Afghanistan could turn into a quagmire, like Vietnam, or like what had happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan or the British in the 19th century. And he was dismissing these concerns, saying, don't worry, we won't get bogged down. This isn't going to happen to us.

On that very same day Bush gave the speech, his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, dictated a memo to several of his generals and top aides at the Pentagon. And he said the exact opposite. He expressed his real fear that we could get bogged down. He said, if we don't come up with a plan to stabilize Afghanistan, we will never get the troops out.

And he ended the memo with one word. It said, "Help!" on the very same day.

And that was Donald — the late Donald Rumsfeld.

But you write about a number of instances during the Obama administration, then, of course, into Trump, and just this new administration.

That's right. I mean, this happened with all the presidents.

People may recall, back in 2014, President Obama said that the war was coming to a conclusion. There was actually a ceremony in Kabul at NATO headquarters, in which the U.S. officials said that the combat mission for U.S. troops was over. And yet, behind the scenes, the Pentagon and Obama all knew that U.S. troops were still going to be in harm's way and people were still dying in combat for the duration of the war.

More than 100 people died in Afghanistan, U.S. troops, after Obama said that mission was coming to an end.

And, Craig Whitlock, you cite one military leader after another. I'm thinking of General David Petraeus, who's been out very critical lately of President Biden, saying that he should have realized that the Afghan military was helping fight off ISIS and al-Qaida.

But you cite him and other military leaders telling Congress again, as you're saying now, that things were going well, when they weren't.

That's right.

We heard this month after month, year after year under Bush, Obama and Trump, that the Afghan army and police forces were capable of defending their own country, that they no longer needed U.S. troops to fight the Taliban in ground combat. And yet, in these interviews in "The Afghanistan papers," U.S. military trainers and other officials were sending up highly critical reports of the Afghan forces.

They said they couldn't shoot straight, they were illiterate, their leaders were corrupt. And they expressed real doubt that they could stand up in a fight to the Taliban.

So the Pentagon has known this for many years. And yet, again, as you said, in public, they kept telling the American people that this — everything was going according to plan.

And when people try to understand what went wrong over all these years, I mean, you have got a chapter on corruption. You have got another chapter on the opium trade, the poppies that so many the farmers were growing, and again on the military that — the Afghan military, how hard it was, with change in leadership after change, how hard it was to get the results that Americans were looking for.

And I think most Americans, they knew the war wasn't going well. But they always assumed there was a plan, that there was a strategy that was in place that was maybe just tough to carry out.

But in these interviews in "The Afghanistan Papers," generals, ambassadors, other people, they were very blunt. They said, we didn't know what we were doing in Afghanistan. They literally would say this. We never understood the country. In their early years, there was no strategy.

So it really was worse than people thought.

And what about the role of Pakistan next door? It's been hard for many Americans to understand what that has been really all about, the connection between Pakistan and the Taliban.

And this is something the U.S. government has never really figured out what to do.

It took the Bush administration several years to really come to the realization that the government of Pakistan was — on one hand, it was fighting al-Qaida, but it was lending support secretly to the Taliban. It took them a while to sort of accept that Pakistan was playing a double game.

During the Obama administration, I think they recognized that, but they were really dependent on Pakistan for supply routes to U.S. troops in Afghanistan. So they really couldn't get that tough on the Pakistanis. Same under Trump. There was all this tough talk about getting the Pakistan to clamp down on the Taliban. But we never really had an effective strategy to deal with that.

And when we hear President Biden today saying, among other things, that he really had no choice, that President Trump had negotiated this withdrawal date, and he really couldn't change it, and that the alternative was to escalate, is that the whole story here?

I don't think it's the whole story.

I mean, certainly, President Biden was not obligated to accept Trump's deal with the Taliban. He could have tried to modify it or take a different approach.

But I think he's right in one respect, that this was not a winnable war, and the Taliban had held off on attacking U.S. troops since Trump cut his deal with them in February 2020. So I think he's right.

If we were going to try and have a military victory over the Taliban, which was highly dubious, we would have had to commit more troops and double down on the fighting there. And that was something that Biden didn't want to do.

Can you come away with all this research and reporting you have done, Craig Whitlock, with lessons for future American leaders, when we are tempted to go into another country to fix a problem, to fight an enemy?

Well, and that's right. And the parallels to Vietnam are very strong.

But the irony here is, we don't learn these lessons from history. At the beginning of the war, Bush and Rumsfeld and others, again, they said, we learned our lesson from Vietnam. We're not going to do that again.

So they knew about it, but it still happened. And I think, sometimes, we turn a blind eye to history, and we forget. And we had a lot of hubris in Afghanistan, that we thought we could do something that clearly, in retrospect, failed.

Were there particular truth-tellers who stood out to you in all your research?

I think, in these interviews, which the government tried to keep a secret from the American people, there were truth-tellers.

People admitted that the strategy was a failure and…

After the fact.

After — and not too many. I wish there have been more people that spoke up.

There was one in particular. General David McKiernan was the war commander during the end of Bush's term and the beginning of Obama's. And he was the one general who said in public that the war wasn't going well, that things were going south. He was fired in the Obama administration.

And there was really no concrete reason given, but he the first war commander relief since Douglas MacArthur in Korea. In the documents we obtained, there are military officials who said McKiernan knew that he was getting in trouble for telling the truth about how things weren't going well, and that was the reason.

And, finally, based on what you have learned about the Taliban, what is your expectation about what's going to happen now in Afghanistan?

Well, this is really fascinating.

We fought this war on the assumption that the Taliban was the enemy. Right now, the Taliban, they have gotten everything they wanted to kick out the foreign forces, but they crave diplomatic recognition from the United States. They want humanitarian aid and other assistance to flow in.

I think the Biden administration is going to be slow to recognize a diplomatic — give diplomatic recognition to the Taliban, but they have already started to do business with them militarily. And you may recall that the CIA director, Bill Burns, made a visit to Kabul recently to meet with the Taliban leadership.

So I think, on counterterrorism operations against groups like the Islamic State, I think the U.S. and the Taliban will probably work together fairly closely. They just may keep it hidden from the public.

Which is what so much of the book is about, just a remarkable book, as we say, I — definitive, in my view, "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War."

Craig Whitlock, thank you very much.

Thank you, Judy.

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Afghanistan

Visualising the impact of 20 years of war

Here's what 20 years of war has done to the Afghan people. As the US withdraws its troops, we look at the latest figures on human suffering.

The human cost of war

An estimated 241,000 people have died as a direct result of the war since the US invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US, according to the most recent figures from Brown University’s Costs of War . Hundreds of thousands more, mostly civilians, have died due to hunger, disease and injury caused by the devastating war.

Of the people killed, 71,344 were civilians who died on both sides of Afghanistan’s long, porous border with Pakistan. At least 47,245 civilians have died in Afghanistan and 24,099 in Pakistan.

Afghanistan shares a 2,670km (1,659-mile) largely mountainous border with Pakistan that has seen frequent cross-border clashes and US drone attacks.

The Afghan military and police, who have fought alongside the US, are estimated to have lost between 66,000 and 69,000 soldiers. The US and its NATO allies have brought home 3,586 coffins, and at least six times as many wounded veterans, according to a tally kept by iCasualties.org . The number of rebels, including Taliban fighters, killed is estimated to be 84,191.

Afghanistan continues to be one of the deadliest places in the world to be a child. In the past decade alone, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan ( UNAMA ), has recorded at least 7,792 children killed and 18,662 injured. Many of the wounded children have lost limbs to improvised roadside bombs and air attacks.

Women have paid a heavy price too, with more than 3,000 deaths due to the war and 7,000 injuries since 2010. Last year has been the deadliest for women in Afghanistan in the past decade, with 390 deaths recorded.

At least 2.7 million of Afghanistan’s population of 38 million has been forced to flee due to the war, becoming refugees in neighbouring Pakistan, Iran and beyond. An additional four million are internally displaced according to the UN [ PDF ].

2001-2021: How does Afghanistan compare?

Since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the country has seen modest gains in education, health and women’s rights. Today, life expectancy has improved, maternal mortality rates have been halved, and 27 percent of the seats in the lower house of parliament are reserved for women.

Despite these improvements, Afghanistan still ranks second to last in the world, just ahead of Yemen, in the Women Peace and Security Index measuring women's wellbeing across a multitude of indicators. On education, a 2019 report by UNICEF found that 3.7 million children were out of school with 60 percent of them girls.

In addition, most Afghans continue to live in poverty. And despite the US spending over $9bn on counter-narcotics, Afghanistan is producing record quantities of illicit opium, used to create the drug heroin.

Since 2017, The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project ( ACLED ) have recorded 1,705 violent incidents against civilians. According to their data, for five straight years, Afghan civilians have been attacked on more days throughout the year than not. In 2020, 424 attacks spanning 235 days were recorded across the country.

In February 2020, the US and the Taliban reached a bilateral agreement and in September, the Afghanistan Peace Negotiations formally commenced.

Despite this, attacks on civilians are on the rise. During the first four months of this year, 245 attacks were recorded over 95 days - more than two attacks recorded nearly every single day.

Afghanistan has been ravaged by four decades of war. In 1979, the then-Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support the embattled pro-Soviet leaders who had just seized power in Kabul. Over the next decade, the country was a stage for one of the Cold War’s last battles as Soviet troops fought a bloody guerrilla war against the Afghan mujahideen supported by the US and other countries. The Soviets withdrew in 1989 but the civil war they left behind continued.

For the next decade, the county struggled on. Just 12 years after the Soviet withdrawal, Afghanistan would find itself invaded again, this time by the US.

The US and NATO's longest war

The US under President George W Bush invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, less than a month after the September 11 attacks in the US. The coalition he led accused the ruling Taliban regime of harbouring Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who claimed responsibility for the attacks.

The war in Afghanistan spanned nearly 20 years and four US presidents.

Over the 20-year war, 50 NATO and partner nations contributed forces to the missions in Afghanistan. At its peak in 2011, nearly 140,000 US and allied forces were in the country.

Who controls what in Afghanistan?

Afghanistan is a largely mountainous country, land-locked between Iran to the west and Pakistan to the east.

Since the Taliban was toppled in 2001, who controls what territory has changed daily.

When the US and NATO forces announced their withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years, the Taliban moved fast, expanding its control.

In less than 10 days, it swept across every province and all the way to the presidential palace in Kabul.

This animated map shows how and when the Taliban captured 26 of the country’s 34 provincial capitals.

US military presence in the region

While the US and its allies have pulled out nearly all of their troops on the ground, the US is expected to use its comprehensive air force, drones and long-range weapons for targeted operations across the country.

Several countries in the Middle East are home to US air and naval bases that are within striking distance of Afghanistan. In addition, the US still has around 2,500 soldiers on the ground in Iraq - down from a peak of 165,000 in 2007 - and thousands more in bases across the Middle East and North Africa.

According to the US Air Force [ PDF ], from 2013 to 2019 it conducted nearly 70,000 manned strike aircraft sorties over Afghanistan and dropped nearly 27,000 bombs from manned and remotely piloted aircraft.

The economic cost of war

The war in Afghanistan is estimated to have cost the US $2.26 trillion to date, according to the Cost of War project. The bulk of the spending, $933bn, was allocated to the US Department of Defense war budget, later supplemented by another $443bn.

The rest of the money includes $296bn for veterans’ medical and disability care and $59bn towards the Department of State’s war budget. The US has also paid some $530bn in interest for its heavy borrowing throughout the war. The US has spent $144bn on Afghanistan reconstruction initiatives.

These figures do not include the lifetime care for veterans nor future interest payments, which means even after the US leaves Afghanistan it will continue to pay for the war.

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At war with the truth

U.s. officials constantly said they were making progress. they were not, and they knew it, an exclusive post investigation found..

Konar province, 2010 (Moises Saman/Magnum Photos)

The Pentagon, 2003 (David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

Fort Campbell, KY., 2014 (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post 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.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

More stories

The Afghanistan Papers

Part 1: At war with the truth

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

Click any underlined text in the story to see the statement in the original document

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

This series is the basis for a book, “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” by Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock. The book can be ordered here.

The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.

See the documents More than 2,000 pages of interviews and memos reveal a secret history of the war.

Part 2: Stranded without a strategy Conflicting objectives dogged the war from the start.

Responses to The Post from people named in The Afghanistan Papers

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.

(Video by Joyce Lee/The Washington Post)

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

AFGHANISTAN

TURKMENISTAN

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.

In 2014, at Sopko’s direction, SIGAR departed from its usual mission of performing audits and launched a side venture. Titled “Lessons Learned,” the $11 million project was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one.

The Lessons Learned staff interviewed more than 600 people with firsthand experience in the war. Most were Americans, but SIGAR analysts also traveled to London, Brussels and Berlin to interview NATO allies. In addition, they interviewed about 20 Afghan officials, discussing reconstruction and development programs.

Drawing partly on the interviews, as well as other government records and statistics, SIGAR has published seven Lessons Learned reports since 2016 that highlight problems in Afghanistan and recommend changes to stabilize the country.

But the reports, written in dense bureaucratic prose and focused on an alphabet soup of government initiatives, left out the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews.

“We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians,” read the introduction to one report released in May 2018.

The reports also omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people who were interviewed for the project. While a few officials agreed to speak on the record to SIGAR, the agency said it promised anonymity to everyone else it interviewed to avoid controversy over politically sensitive matters.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, The Post began seeking Lessons Learned interview records in August 2016. SIGAR refused, arguing that the documents were privileged and that the public had no right to see them.

The Post had to sue SIGAR in federal court — twice — to compel it to release the documents.

“We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich. We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”

— James Dobbins, former U.S. diplomat Listen

The agency eventually disclosed more than 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and transcripts from 428 of the interviews, as well as several audio recordings.

The documents identify 62 of the people who were interviewed, but SIGAR blacked out the names of 366 others. In legal briefs, the agency contended that those individuals should be seen as whistleblowers and informants who might face humiliation, harassment, retaliation or physical harm if their names became public.

By cross-referencing dates and other details from the documents, The Post independently identified 33 other people who were interviewed, including several former ambassadors, generals and White House officials.

The Post has asked a federal judge to force SIGAR to disclose the names of everyone else interviewed, arguing that the public has a right to know which officials criticized the war and asserted that the government had misled the American people. The Post also argued the officials were not whistleblowers or informants, because they were not interviewed as part of an investigation.

A decision by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington has been pending since late September.

The Post is publishing the documents now, instead of waiting for a final ruling, to inform the public while the Trump administration is negotiating with the Taliban and considering whether to withdraw the 13,000 U.S. troops who remain in Afghanistan.

The Post attempted to contact for comment everyone whom it was able to identify as having given an interview to SIGAR. Their responses are compiled in a separate article .

Sopko, the inspector general, told The Post that he did not suppress the blistering criticisms and doubts about the war that officials raised in the Lessons Learned interviews. He said it took his office three years to release the records because he has a small staff and because other federal agencies had to review the documents to prevent government secrets from being disclosed.

“We didn’t sit on it,” he said. “We’re firm believers in openness and transparency, but we’ve got to follow the law. . . . I think of any inspector general, I’ve probably been the most forthcoming on information.”

The interview records are raw and unedited, and SIGAR’s Lessons Learned staff did not stitch them into a unified narrative. But they are packed with tough judgments from people who shaped or carried out U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

From left, Gen. David H. Petraeus, Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki and Defense Secretary Robert Gates at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., in 2009 as President Barack Obama publicly outlined his plans for a troop surge in Afghanistan. (Christopher Morris/VII/Redux)

To augment the Lessons Learned interviews, The Post obtained hundreds of pages of previously classified memos about the Afghan war that were dictated by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006.

Dubbed “snowflakes” by Rumsfeld and his staff, the memos are brief instructions or comments that the Pentagon boss dictated to his underlings, often several times a day.

Rumsfeld made a select number of his snowflakes public in 2011, posting them online in conjunction with his memoir, “Known and Unknown.” But most of his snowflake collection — an estimated 59,000 pages — remained secret.

In 2017, in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive , a nonprofit research institute based at George Washington University, the Defense Department began reviewing and releasing the remainder of Rumsfeld’s snowflakes on a rolling basis. The Archive shared them with The Post.

Together, the SIGAR interviews and the Rumsfeld memos pertaining to Afghanistan constitute a secret history of the war and an unsparing appraisal of 18 years of conflict.

Worded in Rumsfeld’s brusque style, many of the snowflakes foreshadow problems that continue to haunt the U.S. military more than a decade later.

The memo was dated April 17, 2002 — six months after the war started.

What they said in public April 17, 2002

“The history of military conflict in Afghanistan [has] been one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We’re not going to repeat that mistake.”

— President George W. Bush, in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute

With their forthright descriptions of how the United States became stuck in a faraway war, as well as the government's determination to conceal them from the public, the Lessons Learned interviews broadly resemble the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's top-secret history of the Vietnam War.

When they were leaked in 1971, the Pentagon Papers caused a sensation by revealing the government had long misled the public about how the United States came to be embroiled in Vietnam.

Bound into 47 volumes, the 7,000-page study was based entirely on internal government documents — diplomatic cables, decision-making memos, intelligence reports. To preserve secrecy, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara issued an order prohibiting the authors from interviewing anyone.

SIGAR’s Lessons Learned project faced no such restrictions. Staffers carried out the interviews between 2014 and 2018, mostly with officials who served during the Bush and Obama years.

About 30 of the interview records are transcribed, word-for-word accounts. The rest are typed summaries of conversations: pages of notes and quotes from people with different vantage points in the conflict, from provincial outposts to the highest circles of power.

Some of the interviews are inexplicably short. The interview record with John Allen, the Marine general who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2013, consists of five paragraphs.

In contrast, records of interviews with other influential figures are much more extensive. Former U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker sat for two interviews that yielded 95 transcribed pages.

Unlike the Pentagon Papers, none of the Lessons Learned documents were originally classified as a government secret. Once The Post pushed to make them public, however, other federal agencies intervened and classified some material after the fact.

The State Department, for instance, asserted that releasing portions of certain interviews could jeopardize negotiations with the Taliban to end the war. The Defense Department and Drug Enforcement Administration also classified some interview excerpts.

The Lessons Learned interviews contain few revelations about military operations. But running throughout are torrents of criticism that refute the official narrative of the war, from its earliest days through the start of the Trump administration.

At the outset, for instance, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had a clear, stated objective — to retaliate against al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

A joint artillery training session at a combat outpost in Jaghatu, in Wardak province, in 2012. (Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post)

Yet the interviews show that as the war dragged on, the goals and mission kept changing and a lack of faith in the U.S. strategy took root inside the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department.

Fundamental disagreements went unresolved. Some U.S. officials wanted to use the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Others wanted to transform Afghan culture and elevate women’s rights. Still others wanted to reshape the regional balance of power among Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia.

The Lessons Learned interviews also reveal how U.S. military commanders struggled to articulate who they were fighting, let alone why.

Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll? According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an answer.

As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn’t tell friend from foe.

The view wasn’t any clearer from the Pentagon.

What they said in public Dec. 1, 2009

“The days of providing a blank check are over. . . . It must be clear that Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security and that America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan.”

— President Barack Obama, in a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the same thing. They would avoid falling into the trap of "nation-building" in Afghanistan.

On that score, the presidents failed miserably. The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan — more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.

The Lessons Learned interviews show the grandiose nation-building project was marred from the start.

U.S. officials tried to create — from scratch — a democratic government in Kabul modeled after their own in Washington. It was a foreign concept to the Afghans, who were accustomed to tribalism, monarchism, communism and Islamic law.

Meanwhile, the United States flooded the fragile country with far more aid than it could possibly absorb.

During the peak of the fighting, from 2009 to 2012, U.S. lawmakers and military commanders believed the more they spent on schools, bridges, canals and other civil-works projects, the faster security would improve. Aid workers told government interviewers it was a colossal misjudgment, akin to pumping kerosene on a dying campfire just to keep the flame alive.

U.S. soldiers wounded by an IED are transported by medevac in Kandahar province in 2010. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Many aid workers blamed Congress for what they saw as a mindless rush to spend.

The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption.

In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers — allies of Washington — plundered with impunity.

A banner depicting President Hamid Karzai in Kabul shortly after the country’s 2004 election. (Emilio Morenatti/AP)

By allowing corruption to fester, U.S. officials told interviewers, they helped destroy the popular legitimacy of the wobbly Afghan government they were fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs and bureaucrats extorting bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce order.

What they said in public Sept. 4, 2013

“This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day. And I think that’s an important story to be told across the board.”

— Then-Army Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley, praising the Afghan security forces during a press briefing from Kabul. Milley is now a four-star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Year after year, U.S. generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central plank of their strategy: to train a robust Afghan army and national police force that can defend the country without foreign help.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries — paid by U.S. taxpayers — for tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.”

None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable.

Afghan army recruits in Kabul in 2009. (Emilio Morenatti/AP)

Meanwhile, as U.S. hopes for the Afghan security forces failed to materialize, Afghanistan became the world’s leading source of a growing scourge: opium.

The United States has spent about $9 billion to fight the problem over the past 18 years, but Afghan farmers are cultivating more opium poppies than ever. Last year, Afghanistan was responsible for 82 percent of global opium production, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, former officials said almost everything they did to constrain opium farming backfired.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel speaks to U.S. troops in 2013 at Camp Bastion, in Helmand province. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

From the beginning, Washington never really figured out how to incorporate a war on drugs into its war against al-Qaeda. By 2006, U.S. officials feared that narco-traffickers had become stronger than the Afghan government and that money from the drug trade was powering the insurgency.

No single agency or country was in charge of the Afghan drug strategy for the entirety of the war, so the State Department, the DEA, the U.S. military, NATO allies and the Afghan government butted heads constantly.

The agencies and allies made things worse by embracing a dysfunctional muddle of programs, according to the interviews.

At first, Afghan poppy farmers were paid by the British to destroy their crops — which only encouraged them to grow more the next season. Later, the U.S. government eradicated poppy fields without compensation — which only infuriated farmers and encouraged them to side with the Taliban.

What they said in public Sept. 8, 2008

“Are we losing this war? Absolutely no way. Can the enemy win it? Absolutely no way.”

— Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, in a news briefing from Afghanistan

The specter of Vietnam has hovered over Afghanistan from the start.

On Oct. 11, 2001, a few days after the United States started bombing the Taliban, a reporter asked Bush: “Can you avoid being drawn into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan?”

“We learned some very important lessons in Vietnam,” Bush replied confidently. “People often ask me, ‘How long will this last?’ 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.”

In those early days, other U.S. leaders mocked the notion that the nightmare of Vietnam might repeat itself in Afghanistan.

“All together now — quagmire!” Rumsfeld joked at a news conference on Nov. 27, 2001.

But throughout the Afghan war, documents show that U.S. military officials have resorted to an old tactic from Vietnam — manipulating public opinion.

In news conferences and other public appearances, those in charge of the war have followed the same talking points for 18 years. No matter how the war is going — and especially when it is going badly — they emphasize how they are making progress.

For example, some snowflakes that Rumsfeld released with his memoir show he had received a string of unusually dire warnings from the war zone in 2006.

After returning from a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan, Barry McCaffrey, a retired Army general, reported the Taliban had made an impressive comeback and predicted that “we will encounter some very unpleasant surprises in the coming 24 months.”

“The Afghan national leadership are collectively terrified that we will tip-toe out of Afghanistan in the coming few years — leaving NATO holding the bag — and the whole thing will collapse again into mayhem,” McCaffrey wrote in June 2006.

Two months later, Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, gave the Pentagon chief a classified, 40-page report loaded with more bad news. It said “enormous popular discontent is building” against the Afghan government because of its corruption and incompetence. It also said that the Taliban was growing stronger, thanks to support from Pakistan, a U.S. ally.

Yet with Rumsfeld’s personal blessing, the Pentagon buried the bleak warnings and told the public a very different story.

Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, left, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in March 2002. (Robert A. Reeder/The Washington Post)

In October 2006, Rumsfeld’s speechwriters delivered a paper titled “Afghanistan: Five Years Later.” Brimming with optimism, it highlighted more than 50 promising facts and figures, from the number of Afghan women trained in “improved poultry management” (more than 19,000) to the “average speed on most roads” (up 300 percent).

“Five years on, there is a multitude of good news,” it read. “While it has become fashionable in some circles to call Afghanistan a forgotten war, or to say the United States has lost its focus, the facts belie the myths.”

Rumsfeld thought it was brilliant.

“This paper,” he wrote in a memo, “is an excellent piece. How do we use it? Should it be an article? An Op-ed piece? A handout? A press briefing? All of the above? I think it ought to get it to a lot of people.”

His staffers made sure it did. They circulated a version to reporters and posted it on Pentagon websites.

Since then, U.S. generals have almost always preached that the war is progressing well, no matter the reality on the battlefield.

“We’re making some steady progress,” Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, told reporters in September 2008, even as he and other U.S. commanders in Kabul were urgently requesting reinforcements to cope with a rising tide of Taliban fighters.

Two years later, as the casualty rate among U.S. and NATO troops climbed to another high, Army Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez held a news conference in Kabul.

“First, we are steadily making deliberate progress,” he said.

“And this includes the State Department, ambassadors, you know, down at the local level. Everybody did a great job. We’re all doing a great job. Really? So if we’re doing such a great job, why does it feel like we’re losing?”

— Michael Flynn, a retired three-star Army general Listen

In March 2011, during congressional hearings, skeptical lawmakers pelted Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, with doubts that the U.S. strategy was working.

“The past eight months have seen important but hard-fought progress,” Petraeus responded.

One year later, during a visit to Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stuck to the same script — even though he had just personally dodged a suicide attack.

“The campaign, as I’ve pointed out before, I think has made significant progress,” Panetta told reporters.

In July 2016, after a surge in Taliban attacks on major cities, Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan at the time, repeated the refrain.

“We are seeing some progress,” he told reporters.

What they said in public March 27, 2009

“Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course. Instead, we will set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable.”

— Obama, in remarks from the White House

During Vietnam, U.S. military commanders relied on dubious measurements to persuade Americans that they were winning.

Most notoriously, the Pentagon highlighted “body counts,” or the number of enemy fighters killed, and inflated the figures as a measurement of success.

In Afghanistan, with occasional exceptions, the U.S. military has generally avoided publicizing body counts. But the Lessons Learned interviews contain numerous admissions that the government routinely touted statistics that officials knew were distorted, spurious or downright false.

The toll of war

Since 2001, an estimated 157,000 people have been killed in the war in Afghanistan.

Afghan security forces

Afghan civilians

Taliban fighters and other insurgents

U.S. contractors

U.S. military personnel

NATO and coalition troops

Humanitarian aid workers

Journalists and media workers

Note: U.S. military number is current through November 2019. The other figures and estimates are current as of October 2019.

Sources: Defense Department; Costs of War Project, Brown University; U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan; Committee to Protect Journalists

Journalists and media

Note: U.S. military number is current through November 2019.

The other figures and estimates are current as of October 2019.

Note: U.S. military number is current through November 2019. The other figures and

estimates are current as of October 2019.

Note: U.S. military number is current through November 2019. The other figures and estimates are current

as of October 2019.

A person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said there was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary.

Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the senior NSC official said, the White House and Pentagon would spin them to the point of absurdity. Suicide bombings in Kabul were portrayed as a sign of the Taliban’s desperation, that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat. Meanwhile, a rise in U.S. troop deaths was cited as proof that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.

The remains of Army Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene, 55, arrive at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware in August 2014. Greene was the first U.S. general killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

“It was their explanations,” the senior NSC official said. “For example, attacks are getting worse? ‘That’s because there are more targets for them to fire at, so more attacks are a false indicator of instability.’ Then, three months later, attacks are still getting worse? ‘It’s because the Taliban are getting desperate, so it’s actually an indicator that we’re winning.’ ”

“And this went on and on for two reasons,” the senior NSC official said, “to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate.”

In other field reports sent up the chain of command, military officers and diplomats took the same line. Regardless of conditions on the ground, they claimed they were making progress.

Upon arrival in Afghanistan, U.S. Army brigade and battalion commanders were given the same basic mission: to protect the population and defeat the enemy, according to Flynn, who served multiple tours in Afghanistan as an intelligence officer.

Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez arrives at Forward Operating Base Pasab in Kandahar province for a transfer-of-authority ceremony in 2011. (Mikhail Galustov for The Washington Post)

John Garofano, a Naval War College strategist who advised Marines in Helmand province in 2011, said military officials in the field devoted an inordinate amount of resources to churning out color-coded charts that heralded positive results.

But Garofano said nobody dared to question whether the charts and numbers were credible or meaningful.

Other senior officials said they placed great importance on one statistic in particular, albeit one the U.S. government rarely likes to discuss in public.

“I do think the key benchmark is the one I’ve suggested, which is how many Afghans are getting killed,” James Dobbins, the former U.S. diplomat, told a Senate panel in 2009. “If the number’s going up, you’re losing. If the number’s going down, you’re winning. It’s as simple as that.”

Last year, 3,804 Afghan civilians were killed in the war, according to the United Nations.

That is the most in one year since the United Nations began tracking casualties a decade ago.

Craig Whitlock

Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter who specializes in national security issues. He has covered the Pentagon, served as the Berlin bureau chief and reported from more than 60 countries. He joined The Washington Post in 1998.

About this story

Design and development by Jake Crump, Armand Emamdjomeh and Matt Callahan. Editing by David Fallis and Jeff Leen. Photo editing, research and document illustration by Nick Kirkpatrick. Graphics by Laris Karklis and Leslie Shapiro. Copy editing by J.J. Evans. Video by Joyce Lee. Senior video production by Tom LeGro. Audio editing by Ted Muldoon. Digital operations by María Sánchez Díez. Audience engagement by Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn and Ric Sanchez. Project management by Julie Vitkovskaya.

I started covering Afghanistan in 2004. I’m still trying to figure out if the war was worth the sacrifices and costs.

Longtime correspondent Kevin Maurer returns to the region and asks: What did America get right, what did we get wrong — and what were the consequences?

The past three months in Afghanistan have been the deadliest for civilians in a decade

The United Nations says more civilians have died between July and September this year than during any other three-month period in the last 10 years.

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Realism in Afghanistan: Rethinking an Uncertain Case for the War

Commentary by Anthony H. Cordesman

Published June 16, 2010

There is nothing more tragic than watching beautiful theories being assaulted by gangs of ugly facts. It is time, however, to be far more realistic about the war in Afghanistan.  It may well still be winnable, but it is not going to be won by denying the risks, the complexity, and the time that any real hope of victory will take. It is not going to be won by “spin” or artificial news stories, and it can easily be lost by exaggerating solvable short-term problems.

The Strategic Importance of Afghanistan and the Case for Staying in the War

Two critical questions dominate any realistic discussion of the conflict. The first is whether the war is worth fighting. The second is whether it can be won. The answers to both questions are uncertain. The US has no enduring reason to maintain a strategic presence in Afghanistan or Central Asia. It has far more important strategic priorities in virtually every other part of the world, and inserting itself into Russia’s “near abroad,” China’s sphere of influence, and India’s ambitions makes no real sense. Geography, demographics, logistics, and economics all favor other nations, and no amount of academic hubris can realistically model American reform of the “Stans” in ways that are cost-effective relative to other uses of US resources.

The carefully spun good news story about Afghan minerals may or may not prove to be economically realistic. It is all too typical of a long series of “breadbasket” arguments that take problem countries and argue that their natural resources can make them wealthy or that they can become major exporters of agricultural products. In practice, it will be at least half a decade before Afghanistan’s mineral resources will pay off, and the key outside investors are likely to be Chinese, Russian, and local. It is very unlikely that firms can compete without bribes and incentives as the cost of doing business, and even if US registered companies do invest, they are likely to operate as non–US entities in ways than minimize any economic benefits to the US.

The key reasons for the war remain Al Qa’ida and the threat of a sanctuary and base for international terrorism, and the fact the conflict now involves Pakistan’s future stability. One should have no illusion about today’s insurgents. The leading cadres are far more international in character, far better linked to Al Qa’ida and other international extremist groups, and much closer tied to extremists in Pakistan.  If they “join” an Afghan government while they are still winning (or feel they are winning), they are likely to become such a sanctuary and a symbol of victory that will empower similar extremists all over the world.

Experts disagree sharply about Pakistan’s instability and vulnerability in the face of a US and ISAF defeat in Afghanistan. There is no way to predict how well Pakistan can secure its border and deal with its own Islamic extremists, and Pakistan is both a nuclear state and a far more serious potential source of support to other extremist movements than Afghanistan. A hardline， Deobandi-dominated Pakistan would be a serious strategic threat to the US and its friends and allies, and would sharply increase the risk of another major Indo-Pakistani conflict.

It should be noted, however, that the US may be forced into leaving Afghanistan regardless of its intentions to stay, or face conditions that make any stable form of victory impossible. Containment from the outside may be the only choice, and having to leave Afghanistan does not mean having to abandon Pakistan. Maintaining a major civil and military aid effort to Pakistan, and keeping US capabilities to work with Pakistan in UCAV and other strikes on insurgent networks is also an option. So is working with Russia to support a rebirth of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and to pin down the Taliban and other insurgents as much as possible.

Moreover, it is time to stop demonizing Bin Laden and Al Qa’ida and focus on the broader threat. Massive population increases, poverty, decaying educational and social infrastructure, culture shock and alienation, and failed secularism affect far too much of the Islamic world. Yemen and Somalia are only the two worst cases, and some form of extremist and terrorist threat is likely to be a regional constant for the next two decades –regardless of whether the US and its allies win or lose in Afghanistan. Moreover, the trade-offs involved do raise serious questions about whether the same – or a much lower – investment in helping key allies like Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco would do far more to provide overall security.

The fact is, the strategic case for staying in Afghanistan is uncertain and essentially too close to call. The main reason is instead tactical. We are already there. We have major capabilities in place. If we can demonstrate that the war can be won at reasonable additional cost in dollars and blood, it makes sense to persist. But, only if we can demonstrate we can win and show that the additional cost has reasonable limits . Containment and alternative uses of the same resources are very real options, and would probably be more attractive ones if we could somehow “zero base” history. The reality is, however, that nations rarely get to choose the ideal ground in making strategic decisions. They are prisoners of their past actions, and so are we.

Can This Mission Be Successful? Can We Win?

These uncertainties would be less important if it were possible to argue convincingly that the war can either clearly be won, or must be lost. No one can do this on the basis of the current evidence and indicators.

 “Afghan Good Enough” Versus “Afghan Impossible”

The definition of victory is as much at issue as the question of whether victory is possible. One thing seems clear: The impossible goals and dreams of rapid political and economic development, creation of a Western-style rule of law, and quick progress in human rights was never going to take place even if the challenge had really been post-conflict reconstruction and the insurgency had not been allowed to fester without serious opposition for half a decade. The Afghan Compact, a badly drafted Western constitution, and the Afghan National Development Plan were little more than idealistic dreams decoupled from Afghan realities and Afghan desires.

More than eight years into the war, the last Presidential election is still a political nightmare, the legislative election is in limbo, and Afghan power brokers have become far stronger while Afghan capacity in governance has made limited progress Nearly 40% of the population is partially dependent on UN food aid for basic subsistence, and most Afghans have to do anything they can to survive – whether this involves opium or what the West calls corruption. It is the Taliban that established the real rule of law in many areas, and the civil authorities and police remain largely corrupt and ineffective in much of the country. As for human rights, traditional Afghans remain traditional Afghans, and issues like the rights of women make token progress at best outside the areas where such rights already existed before the Taliban took over.

The case is very different, however, if victory is defined in the way that General McChrystal and other have done in ISAF. They are talking about a much less ambitious end state that would offer most Afghans major benefits as well as achieve a meaningful form of victory. The ISAF command brief defines both the campaign goals and this endstate as follows:

• Assist GIRoA in defeating the insurgency.
• Protect the Afghan population and separate insurgent influence.
• Gain popular support for the government. 
• Allow sustainable progress and promote legitimacy. 
• Prevent the return of transnational terrorists and eliminate potential safe havens.
• Conduct the operation in three stages: A) Gain the Initiative; B) Achieve Strategic Consolidation; and C) Sustain Security.
• Gain the initiative and stop insurgent momentum in the next 12-18 months.
• Establish closer cooperation with the International Community.
• Achieve improved integration and CIV-MIL operational cohesion.
• Insurgency defeated to within GIRoA’s capacity.
• Legitimate governance extends to local levels.
• Socio-economic programs benefit the majority of Afghan people.
• GIRoA, with ISAF support, is capable of assuming the lead for security.

The campaign design and desired end state for Afghanistan is shown in more detail in the chart below, and it effectively limits the goal to effective governance and justice as perceived by Afghans, a stable society free of significant insurgent violence and threats, and a suitable condition for development by Afghans on Afghan terms.

This may fall far short of the goals that the US and other nations set in 2002 and the years that followed, but it is credible and would serve US strategic interests by denying Al Qa’ida, the Taliban, or other insurgents control of the country or major operational areas and sanctuaries.  In short, it is “Afghan good enough,” and not “Afghan impossible,” and is at least a pragmatic definition of the mission and a set of conditions that the US and its allies have some hope of achieving.

This does not, however, alter the fact that even this much more modest definition of the mission -- and of victory -- may still prove to be beyond our ability to achieve. There are several major areas of risk and uncertainty where there simply are not enough facts or precedents to make a credible prediction.

Estimating the Enemy

One key area lies in estimating the enemy and predicting its behavior. The metrics on the Taliban and other insurgents remain ambiguous. General McChrystal seems to be correct in saying that their momentum has been halted, but he has been careful not to say that it has been reversed. ISAF reporting shows the ambiguities in these patterns in considerable detail. It is far from clear that ISAF and the US have as yet won any tactical victories they can exploit in ways that bring lasting stability and transition to capable Afghan governance and security forces. It is equally unclear, however, that the insurgents can hold out against any concentrated offensive, or either take or hold ground in areas where they have limited or no ethnic and religious support.

US and ISAF intelligence estimates raise as many questions as they answer:

• On the one hand, we are still dealing with a relatively small, extreme, and largely unpopular enemy that a number of intelligence experts argue has increasingly divided leadership and whose fighters are tired of the conflict and absentee direction.
• One the other hand, these arguments are uncertain and often made out of any historical context. Most of the successful insurgencies of modern times have been won by groups that suffered major reversals on the battlefield (and were often said to have been defeated), that proved to be far more resilient and adaptable over time than experts calculated, and essentially won the war of political attrition by outlasting their opponents in spite of continuing tactical defeats.

The fact is that this is a duel in strategic endurance, in which it is not possible to predict the level of Taliban capability inside either Afghanistan or Pakistan, Al Qa’ida’s endurance, the level of lasting Afghan and GIRoA support for the war, allied support, Pakistani support, or the support of Congress and the American people. There are also cases of sudden, unpredictable and catalytic collapse on the part of both governments and insurgents. The only way to know is to actually fight the war.

Deadlines and Expectations

One thing is clear: The war will be lost if 2011 is treated as a deadline, and/or if the GIRoA and the Afghan people, the Pakistani government and people, and our allies perceive it as a deadline. The same will be true if the timing of the campaign, and the impact of US and allied actions, are defined in terms of unrealistic expectations. No amount of planning, discussion, and analysis can set clear deadlines for this war.

The current situation is the product of more than eight years of chronic under-resourcing, under-reaction, spin, self-delusion and neglect. It is the result of one of the worst examples of wartime leadership in American history. There is no magic route out of this situation, and the timing of an effective campaign has been complicated by a wide range of factors:

• Karzai, who appeared to have already rigged the election in the summer of 2009, did not rely on power brokering to give him a majority. The controversy following the election consumed 4-6 months, divided Karzai from the US, has led to the resignation of key officials, and left GIRoA with far more uncertain legitimacy while sharply undermining US influence. This has affected every aspect of GIRoA and ANSF support for the war.
• President Obama’s review consumed 4 months of critical time in a 12-18 month campaign plan. The plans for the civilian surge were never credible and led to inevitable delays. Military movements had their own delays, and key elements of operational plans were too conceptual from the start and assumed far more rapid and easy progress in the hold and build phases than proved possible in test areas like Marja.
• President Obama attempted to qualify the deadline he set in his speech for the beginning of US withdrawal in August 2011, but this message has failed to get across in spite of repeated efforts by senior US commanders and officials. Many Afghan officials and officers, and allied officers and diplomats, are at best confused and at worst privately believe that we will leave. Any visitor to Afghanistan also sees efforts at every level to rush operations in time to meet November 2010 and July 2011 reporting deadlines. The end result is that a vague de facto deadline exists. This deadline inevitably affects goals and expectations that have long been set at unrealistically high levels for both civil and military operations. The end result is often that operations and actions that have a far better chance of succeeding over six months to a year longer are being rushed in ways that sharply increase the risk of failure. Moreover, far too little tangible planning is being carried out for the period beyond August 2011, with a sharp decoupling of civil and military plans that separate the military campaign and transition to increasing ANSF responsibility from aid plans that often are far too conceptual and stovepiped and that effectively mark a premature return to “post-conflict reconstruction.”
• Allied war fatigue compounds the problem. Canadian and Netherlands’ withdrawal in 2011, and recent Polish calls for withdrawal, are symbols of the fact that the legislatures and population of many ISAF countries no longer believe in this war. Some of this is unavoidable, given the length and cost of the conflict and the fact that the US obtained much of its present allied support by describing the mission as peacekeeping and post conflict reconstruction, and failed to show effective leadership between 2002 and 2008.
• Much – perhaps a majority – of the foreign aid effort is still directed towards programs and goals that were set before the insurgency cast Afghanistan into a state of war. This effort remains decoupled from the real world security situation and the needs and perceptions of ordinary Afghans. Far too much aid planning and spending exists in a “bubble” that effectively tries to ignore the fact that the nation is at war. It is time that the entire civil effort, and all foreign aid, dealt with the reality that Afghanistan is at war and that aid in governance, economics, and the rule of law must be tailored to this fact, and be transparently accountable in the process.
• Goals have been set for the development of the Afghan National Security Forces that emphasis force quantity over force quality. These goals may well rush a force into the field that is used up in the process, therefore denying a basis for transition from US and allied forces. The end result may well also delay operations and transition by using up key elements of the army and paramilitary ANCOP police force, or risk serious reversals if ISAF tries to rely on the force. The Army is effectively being pushed towards its present short-term force goal two years early, and the ANCOP force is still under so much stress that it has 80% attrition. Moreover, ISAF had only deployed 23% of the required trainers as of early May 2010. Giving NTM-A and the partnering effort even an additional year, and time to put more emphasis on quality and transition over quantity and immediate employment, could make the difference between strategic success and strategic failure.

ISAF has shown considerable realism in adjusting its campaign plans to these facts, but they could still cost the US and its allies the war if a major shift does not take place from the present climate of “over-promise and under-perform” to an acceptance that deadlines do more to undercut support than to motivate, that plans must reflect real world time scales and realistic expectations and goals, and that credibility and leadership depend on “under-promising and over-performing.”

No one can guarantee victory even in the form of the end state described earlier. One can guarantee that it is better to have a credible chance of victory in 2012-2013 than it is to rush to defeat in 2010-2011. Moreover, it is fairly easy to predict the political cost of pretending that the aftermath will not require serious aid expenditures, and US and allied military advisory and support efforts, well beyond 2015. One cannot ask for money through 2015 in DoD and State Department budget documents for FY2012 and simultaneously pretend that the transition to Afghan governance, the ANSF, and Afghan self-financing will be relatively quick. In fact, even the most optimistic estimate of any mining and agricultural development effort indicates that major financial support is likely to be needed through 2020. It is time to be honest about this. Vietnam is a warning of what concealment and denial will do to any lasting political support.

Accepting Afghans as Afghans

The war is not going to be won by treating the power structure of Afghanistan as if it did not exist or as if it could be radically changed in the course of the next few years. The central government is not going to be empowered at the expense of key regional, geographic, ethnic, and sectarian divisions; or suddenly eliminate the role of tribalism and key families. Efforts to reshape governance to create a modern Western structure of “effective governance” that somehow transform all of Afghanistan are simply not going to work. The challenge is to co-opt the power structure, and control its worst elements and behavior, in ways that the Afghan people can accept as a better option than the Taliban. As one experienced aid worker put it, “it is to find their worst grievances, deal with them, and create conditions where they can move forward if they choose to do so.”

This means setting far less ambitious goals for reform and government capacity. It means accepting a major role for existing power brokers, if for no other reason than that there is no credible alternative. The issue is not Western concepts of governance, but what will make GIRoA “good enough” by Afghan popular standards.

The US, its allies, and all aid donors need to take responsibility for much of what is called “corruption.” They failed to understand that Afghans accept informal payments as part of the cost of normal life. They did not consider the real world motivations of people involved in some 30 years of war and turmoil and who had no way to know if any given job or position would last more than a few months.

They failed to see the importance of preserving the Afghan civil service and instead hired many Afghans away from the government. They created a virtually uncontrolled flood of money that could be grabbed by Afghans who had not had any similar opportunities in 30 years, who had limited loyalty or no abstract concept of governance, and who had the resulting ability to take that money to become wealthy and buy power in the process. Organizations like UNAMA and AID have been massively corrupting forces in Afghanistan. So have the US and ISAF military who have given massive amounts of money to poorly supervised contractors and others, who in turn not only buy power with that money, but often pay a tax to insurgents in the process.

These problems have been compounded by an emphasis on anticorruption drives that have had a predictable lack of effect. Rather than threaten the power structure, they lead to hollow investigations, finding scapegoats, shuffling officials from one post to another, and predictable resistance from any Afghan with the clout and wealth to avoid becoming a successful target.

Moreover, all these problems interacted with a past emphasis on building a formal justice system whose resources and timescales were impossibly long and limited in near-term coverage, decoupled from credible policing and detention, and ignored the hopelessly low pay and poor security for judges and prosecutors. The end result bypassed the kind of less formal justice Afghans wanted and needed, left much of the country without effective justice, and empowered the Taliban to the point where it had enough presence to create its own “prompt” justice system. Anticorruption efforts cannot function at the local and regional levels under such circumstances, and creating local police becomes impossible when there is no real justice system for them to support and virtually any power broker or successful criminal can buy their way to the result they want.

In short, winning requires a major adjustment in US, ISAF, and donor acceptance of Afghanistan as it is. It means accelerating efforts to provide full accountability for all aid and military expenditures, tightly controlling the flow of money to power brokers and contractors in ways where the recipients see the incentive to support the war and to limit their abuses, and carefully targeting money to effective and relatively honest Afghan officials at the federal, provincial, district, and local levels in ways where it is clear that the end result benefits the Afghan people and wins support for the government over the Taliban. It means dealing with the real power structure in Afghanistan, not with the formal construct of government.

The Civil-Military Side of the War

All of these challenges combine to add another dimension to the cost-benefit assessment of continuing the war. They all highlight the fact that the war has not one but six centers of gravity,  and they all highlight the fact that the primary risks are civil and not military. As is seen throughout this analysis, the Taliban and insurgents are only one center of gravity. The rest range from GIRoA to ISAF, aid donors, and the lack of unity within the US effort. They include:

• Defeating the insurgency not only in tactical terms, but also by eliminating its control and influence over the population.
• Creating an effective and well resourced NATO/ISAF and US response to defeating the insurgency and securing the population.
• Building up a much larger and more effective (and enduring base for transition) mix of Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).
• Giving the Afghan government the necessary capacity and legitimacy at the national, regional/provincial, district, and local levels.
• Creating an effective, integrated, and truly operational civil-military effort.
• Coordinating NATO/ISAF, UN, member countries, NGOs, and the international community
• Efforts to focus on winning the war, meeting Afghan needs according to Afghan perceptions, and reducing waste, corruption, and their corrupting impact on Afghans.
• Dealing with a center of gravity outside Afghanistan and NATO/ISAF’s formal mission: The situation in Pakistan, and the actions of Iran and others.

There is little doubt that the US and ISAF can continue to win open tactical clashes. The risks lie primarily in the creation of an ANSF that can actually transition to the point of largely eliminating the role of the US and other ISAF forces in combat, and – above all – creating the effective civil side of a US/ISAF effort that can convince the Afghan people that fighting the war will be worth the cost, that a mix of government capabilities will come to exist that are far better than living under the Taliban, that their basic economic needs can be met, and they have a credible path to economic development.

It was all too easy to formulate a new strategy based on “shape, clear, hold, build, and transition” as long as the civil side of “hold, build, and transition” was conceptual, and did not have to be implemented in rural areas like Marjah and the far more challenging conditions of a largely urban area like Kandahar. It was clear from the start, however, that any practical application of this strategy lacked operational definition on the civil side, that the aid community was not ready to implement it and any civilian “surge” would still leave civil activity highly dependent on the US military, and that building Afghan capabilities would be a slow effort that had to occur at every level from local to central government. It short, implementation was never a military-driven exercise in finding the right troop to task ratio, but always a politico-economic exercise in resource to experiment ratio.

General McChrystal and ISAF deserve praise, not criticism, for accepting these realities. There is a clear need to slow the campaign in Kandahar, to correct the problems that occurred in Marjah, to avoid major combat of the kind that took place in Fallujah, to realistically build government services while finding viable compromises with power brokers, and to move forward on a pace dictated by Afghan acceptance and not US/allied impatience. There are acute limits to any civilian surge, which can only act at the pace that the number of capable US and allied civilians and military personnel with civil-military expertise permits. To paraphrase a lesson from Iraq, the campaign can only succeed if it operates according to Afghan and not US time. As noted earlier, this means that determining whether the war can be won or lost almost certainly should slip from 2010-2011 to 2011-2012. If it does not, it may be a sheer lack of strategic patience – not the other difficulties we face – that loses the war.

At the same time, the fact that the scale of the civil challenge, and ANSF development, are both higher than previously estimated may require more attention to a potential weakness in the overall strategy and campaign plan. Focusing on Kandahar as the greatest challenge makes sense if that challenge can be quickly met. If delays are as inevitable as now seems likely, more attention may well be needed to the less demanding challenges of pushing a much more limited insurgent presence out of the north, west, center, and parts of the east. Reversing insurgent momentum would be much easer to accomplish and would put greater and earlier pressure on the overall mix of insurgents.

The Reality of Continuing Risk

These are not likely to be popular conclusions. They require considerable leadership on the part of the US, as well as close and frank coordination with our allies. Moreover, they require acceptance of the fact that the case for the war is not based on some certainty of victory, but odds that may well be even -- or worse. It is time, however, to come to grips with the sheer scale of the US mistakes that led to the rise of the insurgency in Afghanistan, and to start addressing the reality that we may face many wars in the future against extremists that exploit the weakest and most divided states, fight similar wars of political attrition, and force the US to commit forces and money to weak governments and nations that do not meet many Western expectations.

This is not likely to be a century of confrontations between Western powers fighting conventional wars on their own territory. It is almost certain to be a century where the US must learn to fight irregular wars and exercises in armed nation building whether it likes it or not. If nothing else, the case for the war in Afghanistan may be that it is the prelude to an almost inevitable future.

Anthony H. Cordesman

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Afghanistan papers reveal US public were misled about unwinnable war

Interviews with key insiders reveal damning verdict on conflict that cost 2,300 US lives

Hundreds of confidential interviews with key figures involved in prosecuting the 18-year US war in Afghanistan have revealed that the US public has been consistently misled about an unwinnable conflict.

Transcripts of the interviews, published by the Washington Post after a three-year legal battle, were collected for a Lessons Learned project by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), a federal agency whose main task is eliminating corruption and inefficiency in the US war effort.

The 2,000 pages of documents reveal the bleak and unvarnished views of many insiders in a war that has cost $1tn (£760bn) and killed more than 2,300 US servicemen and women, with more than 20,000 injured. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have died in the conflict.

The documents have echoes of the Pentagon Papers – the US military’s secret history of the Vietnam war that were leaked in 1971 and told a similarly troubling story of the cover-up of military failure.

Negotiations are taking place between the Trump administration and the Taliban as the US debates whether to withdraw 13,000 troops who remain in Afghanistan.

The interviews were collected, beginning in 2014, in addition to Sigar’s regular audits to identify what could be learned from successive policy failures in Afghanistan.

While many of the failures of the war in Afghanistan have been exposed by Sigar’s work, often in highly technical reports, the cache of interviews offers an easily accessible fly-on-the-wall account.

In his own damning intervention John Sopko, the head of Sigar, told the paper the assessments contained in the project suggested that “the American people have constantly been lied to”.

Two major claims in the documents are that US officials manipulated statistics to suggest to the American public that the war was being won and that successive administrations turned a blind eye to widespread corruption among Afghan officials, allowing the theft of US aid with impunity.

The long-term nature of the manipulation of statistics was detailed in an interview with an individual identified only as a senior “National Security Council official”.

“It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture,” the official told interviewers in 2016. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war.”

The papers depict the view of many people of a conflict with vague and unachievable war aims, pursued under three US presidents, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, whose alleged successes were presented repeatedly in inflated terms.

In one scathing assessment Douglas Lute, a lieutenant general who served as the White House Afghan war tsar during the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations, told interviewers in 2015: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan – we didn’t know what we were doing.”

Speaking frankly, like other interviewees, on the understanding that what he was saying at the time was confidential, he added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … 2,400 lives lost.”

In another interview Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy Seal and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, said: “What did we get for this $1tn effort? Was it worth $1tn?

“After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”

Some of those interviewed by the Sigar project went even further, suggesting a deliberate effort to alter statistics on the war to suggest to the American public that it was being won.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” said Bob Crowley, an army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to US military commanders in 2013 and 2014.

“Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice-cream cone.”

The documents, obtained after the Washington Post twice went to federal courts to ask for the interview transcripts, identify only 62 of the people interviewed. A total of 366 other names were redacted after Sigar insisted they should be treated as whistleblowers and informants.

Commentators and foreign policy experts were quick to point to the importance of the documents, with many drawing a link with the Pentagon Papers.

The veteran US documentary-maker Ken Burns, who recently chronicled the Vietnam War, remarked on Twitter: “Mark Twain often said that ‘history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.’ ‘The Afghanistan Papers’ and ‘The Pentagon Papers’ certainly rhyme in that sense.”

Mark Twain often said that "history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes." "The Afghanistan Papers" and "The Pentagon Papers" certainly rhyme in that sense. Incredible reporting by @CraigMWhitlock of @washingtonpost . https://t.co/XCbErrYBxo https://t.co/Z7eHerNE6H — Ken Burns (@KenBurns) December 9, 2019

The NPR host Lulu Garcia-Navarro tweeted: “Stunning. The new Pentagon Papers describe explicit and sustained efforts by the US government to deliberately mislead the public.”.

Stunning. The new Pentagon papers describe ‘ explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public...to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.’ https://t.co/uAFTRXgNUj — Lulu Garcia-Navarro (@lourdesgnavarro) December 9, 2019

Some were even more succinct. “Wars breed lies,” tweeted Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher of the progressive magazine the Nation.

Wars breed lies, The Afghanistan Papers—Confidential documents reveal U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan https://t.co/Jt1K2tSUMZ — Katrina vandenHeuvel (@KatrinaNation) December 9, 2019

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Army whistleblower who exposed alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan is sentenced to prison

MELBOURNE, Australia — An Australian judge sentenced a former army lawyer to almost six years in prison on Tuesday for leaking to the media classified information that exposed allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan .

David McBride, 60, was sentenced in a court in the capital, Canberra, to five years and eight months in prison after pleading guilty to three charges including theft and sharing with members of the media documents classified as secret. He had faced a potential life sentence.

Justice David Mossop ordered McBride to serve 27 months in prison before he can be considered for release on parole.

Rights advocates argue that McBride’s conviction and sentencing before any alleged war criminal he helped expose reflect a lack of whistleblower protections in Australia.

McBride’s lawyer Mark Davis said he planned to file an appeal against the severity of the sentence.

McBride addressed his supporters as he walked his dog to the front door of the Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court to be sentenced.

“I’ve never been so proud to be an Australian as today. I may have broken the law, but I did not break my oath to the people of Australia and the soldiers that keep us safe,” McBride told the cheering crowd.

McBride’s documents formed the basis of an Australian Broadcasting Corp. seven-part television series in 2017 that contained war crime allegations including Australian Special Air Service Regiment soldiers killing unarmed Afghan men and children in 2013.

Police raided the ABC’s Sydney headquarters in 2019 in search of evidence of a leak, but decided against charging the two reporters responsible for the investigation.

In sentencing, Mossop said he did not accept McBride’s explanation that he thought a court would vindicate him for acting in the public interest.

McBride’s argument that his suspicions that the higher echelons of the Australian Defense Force were engaged in criminal activity obliged him to disclose classified papers “didn’t reflect reality,” Mossop said.

An Australian military report released in 2020 found evidence that Australian troops unlawfully killed 39 Afghan prisoners, farmers and civilians. The report recommended 19 current and former soldiers face criminal investigation.

Police are working with the Office of the Special Investigator, an Australian investigation agency established in 2021, to build cases against elite SAS and Commando Regiments troops who served in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2016.

Former SAS trooper Oliver Schulz last year became the first of these veterans to be charged with a war crime. He is accused of shooting and killing a noncombatant man in a wheat field in Uruzgan province in 2012.

Also last year, a civil court found Australia’s most decorated living war veteran,  Ben Roberts-Smith , had most likely unlawfully killed four Afghans. He has not been criminally charged.

Human Rights Watch’s Australia director, Daniela Gavshon, said McBride’s sentencing was evidence that Australia’s whistleblowing laws needed exemptions in the public interest.

“It is a stain on Australia’s reputation that some of its soldiers have been accused of war crimes in Afghanistan, and yet the first person convicted in relation to these crimes is a whistleblower not the abusers,” Gavshon said in a statement.

“David McBride’s jail sentence reinforces that whistleblowers are not protected by Australian law. It will create a chilling effect on those taking risks to push for transparency and accountability — cornerstones of democracy,” she added.

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Army whistleblower who exposed alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan is sentenced to prison

A former Australian army lawyer has been sentenced to almost six years in prison for leaking classified information that exposed allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan. David McBride, 60, was sentenced after pleading guilty to three charges including theft and sharing with members of the press documents classified as secret.

Whistleblower David McBride arrives at the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory in Canberra, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. McBride, 60, was sentenced to five years and eight months in prison after pleading guilty to three charges including theft and sharing with members of the press documents classified as secret.( Mick Tsikas/AAP Image via AP)

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MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — An Australian judge sentenced a former army lawyer to almost six years in prison on Tuesday for leaking to the media classified information that exposed allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.

David McBride , 60, was sentenced in a court in the capital, Canberra, to five years and eight months in prison after pleading guilty to three charges including theft and sharing with members of the press documents classified as secret. He had faced a potential life sentence.

Justice David Mossop ordered McBride to serve 27 months in prison before he can be considered for release on parole.

Rights advocates argue that McBride’s conviction and sentencing before any alleged war criminal he helped expose reflected a lack of whistleblower protections in Australia.

McBride addressed his supporters as he walked his dog to the front door of the Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court to be sentenced.

“I’ve never been so proud to be an Australian as today. I may have broken the law, but I did not break my oath to the people of Australia and the soldiers that keep us safe,” McBride told the cheering crowd.

AP AUDIO: Army whistleblower who exposed alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan is sentenced to prison

AP correspondent Charles de Ledesma reports an Army whistleblower who exposed alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan has been sentenced to prison.

A lawyer for McBride, Mark Davis, said that his legal team would appeal a ruling that prevented McBride from mounting a defense. Mossop ruled in November last year that McBride had no duty as an army officer beyond following orders.

“We know that the Australian military teach a much broader notion of what the duty of an officer is in a battle field than to follow orders,” Davis said.

Davis said the severity of the sentence also created grounds for appeal, but their effort would focus on the earlier ruling.

McBride’s documents formed the basis of an Australian Broadcasting Corp. seven-part television series in 2017 that contained war crime allegations including Australian Special Air Service Regiment soldiers killing unarmed Afghan men and children in 2013.

Police raided the ABC’s Sydney headquarters in 2019 in search of evidence of a leak, but decided against charging the two reporters responsible for the investigation.

In sentencing, Mossop said he did not accept McBride’s explanation that he thought a court would vindicate him for acting in the public interest.

McBride’s argument that his suspicions that the higher echelons of the Australian Defense Force were engaged in criminal activity obliged him to disclose classified papers “didn’t reflect reality,” Mossop said.

An Australian military report released in 2020 found evidence that Australian troops unlawfully killed 39 Afghan prisoners, farmers and civilians. The report recommended 19 current and former soldiers face criminal investigation.

Police are working with the Office of the Special Investigator, an Australian investigation agency established in 2021, to build cases against elite SAS and Commando Regiments troops who served in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.

Former SAS trooper Oliver Schulz last year became the first of these veterans to be charged with a war crime. He is accused of shooting dead a noncombatant man in a wheat field in Uruzgan province in 2012

Also last year, a civil court found Australia’s most decorated living war veteran Ben Roberts-Smith had likely unlawfully killed four Afghans. He has not been criminally charged.

Human Rights Watch’s Australia director Daniela Gavshon said McBride’s sentencing was evidence an Australia’s whistleblowing laws needed exemptions in the public interest.

“It is a stain on Australia’s reputation that some of its soldiers have been accused of war crimes in Afghanistan, and yet the first person convicted in relation to these crimes is a whistleblower not the abusers,” Gavshon said in a statement.

“David McBride’s jail sentence reinforces that whistleblowers are not protected by Australian law. It will create a chilling effect on those taking risks to push for transparency and accountability – cornerstones of democracy,” she added.

Some lawmakers from minor parties and independents raised McBride’s sentencing in Parliament on Tuesday.

Greens lawmaker Elizabeth Watson-Brown told Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that McBride had been imprisoned for the “crime of telling the truth about war crimes.”

“Why won’t your government admit that our whistleblower laws are broken and commit to urgent reform to keep whistleblowers like Mr. McBride out of jail?” Watson-Brown asked the prime minister.

Albanese declined to answer, saying it might prejudice McBride’s appeal.

“I’m not going to say anything here that interferes with a matter that is quite clearly going to continue to be before the courts,” Albanese told Parliament.

Andrew Wilkie , a former government intelligence analyst whistleblower who’s now an independent lawmaker, said Australian governments “hate whistleblowers.”

“The government wanted to punish David McBride and to send a signal to other insiders to stay on the inside and to stay silent,” Wilkie said.

Wilkie quit his intelligence job in Australia’s Office of National Assessments days before Australian troops joined U.S. and British forces in the 2003 Iraq invasion. He publicly argued that Iraq didn’t pose enough of a threat to warrant invasion and that there was no evidence linking Iraq’s government to al-Qaida.

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The Morning

A hidden history.

A Times investigation uncovered a brutal campaign enacted by U.S.-backed forces during the war in Afghanistan.

By Azam Ahmed

I covered the war in Afghanistan and went back after the Taliban took over.

General Abdul Raziq was one of America’s fiercest allies in the fight against the Taliban. He was young and charismatic — a courageous warrior who commanded the loyalty and respect of his men. He helped beat back the Taliban in the crucial battlefield of Kandahar, even as the insurgents advanced across Afghanistan.

But his success, until his 2018 assassination, was built on torture, extrajudicial killing and abduction. In the name of security, he transformed the Kandahar police into a combat force without constraints. His officers, who were trained, armed and paid by the United States, took no note of human rights or due process, according to a New York Times investigation into thousands of cases that published this morning . Most of his victims were never seen again.

Washington’s strategy in Afghanistan aimed to beat the Taliban by winning the hearts and minds of the people it was supposedly fighting for. But Raziq embodied a flaw in that plan. The Americans empowered warlords, corrupt politicians and outright criminals in the name of military expediency. It picked proxies for whom the ends often justified the means.

I’ll explain in today’s newsletter how using men like Raziq drove many Afghans toward the Taliban. And it persuaded others, including those who might have been sympathetic to U.S. goals, that the U.S.-backed central government could not be trusted to fix Afghanistan. If there was ever any chance that the United States could uproot the Taliban, the war strategy made it much harder.

A savage campaign

My colleague Matthieu Aikins and I have covered Afghanistan for years. After America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, we were suddenly able to visit people and places that were off-limits during the fighting. We traveled there, hoping to learn what really happened during America’s longest war.

Alongside a team of Afghan researchers, we combed through more than 50,000 handwritten complaints kept in ledgers by the former U.S.-backed government of Kandahar. In them, we found the details of almost 2,200 cases of suspected disappearances. From there, we went to hundreds of homes across Kandahar.

We tracked down nearly 1,000 people who said their loved ones had been taken or killed by government security forces. We corroborated nearly 400 cases, often with eyewitnesses to the abductions. We also substantiated their claims with Afghan police reports, affidavits and other government records they had filed. In each of the forced disappearances, the person is still missing.

Even at the time, U.S. officials grasped Raziq’s malevolence. “Sometimes we asked Raziq about incidents of alleged human rights abuses, and when we got answers we would be like, ‘Whoa, I hope we didn’t implicate ourselves in a war crime just by hearing about it,’” recalled Henry Ensher, a State Department official who held multiple posts on Afghanistan. “We knew what we were doing, but we didn’t think we had a choice,” Ensher said.

It would be too simple to say that Raziq’s tactics were entirely in vain. They worked in some respects, reasserting government control in Kandahar and pushing insurgents into the hinterlands. Raziq earned the admiration of many who opposed the Taliban. More than a dozen U.S. officials said that without him the Taliban would have advanced much faster.

But Raziq’s methods took a toll. They stirred such enmity among his victims that the Taliban turned his cruelty into a recruiting tool. Taliban officials posted videos about him on WhatsApp to attract new fighters.

Many Afghans came to revile the U.S.-backed government and everything it represented. “None of us supported the Taliban, at least not at first,” said Fazul Rahman, whose brother was abducted in front of witnesses during Raziq’s reign. “But when the government collapsed, I ran through the streets, rejoicing.”

Even some who cheered Raziq’s ruthlessness lamented the corruption and criminality he engendered — a key part of why the Afghan government collapsed in 2021. After Raziq’s death, his commanders went further. They extorted ordinary people and stole from their own men’s wages and supplies. “What they brought under the name of democracy was a system in the hands of a few mafia groups,” said one resident of Kandahar who initially supported the government. “The people came to hate democracy.”

Historians and scholars will spend years arguing whether the United States could have ever succeeded. The world’s wealthiest nation had invaded one of its poorest and attempted to remake it by installing a new government. Such efforts elsewhere have failed.

But U.S. mistakes — empowering ruthless killers, turning allies into enemies, enabling rampant corruption — made the loss of its longest war at least partly self-inflicted. This is a story Matthieu and I will spend the coming months telling, from across Afghanistan.

Read Azam’s investigation , and watch him explain how it came together.

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N.F.L.: Aaron Rodgers returned to Jets practice for the first time since tearing an Achilles’ tendon four plays into last season.

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A new sushi experience is on the rise in mainstream American restaurant culture: the “bromakase.” Unlike the tranquil traditional ritual of Japanese omakase dining, these restaurants feature cocktail lounges and hip-hop soundtracks. Bromakases borrow from aspects of high-end American steakhouses — with their excessive tabs, copious consumption and masculine energy — but give them a worldly sheen. Read Brett Anderson’s story .

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THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Try chicken Vesuvio , a classic Chicago dish with potatoes and a white wine sauce.

Make the most of a small outdoor space .

Buy a fast charger .

Clean your grill ahead of Memorial Day.

Here is today’s Spelling Bee . Yesterday’s pangrams were bluefin and unbelief .

And here are today’s Mini Crossword , Wordle , Sudoku , Connections and Strands .

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. New York Times Cooking will publish a cookbook — “ Easy Weeknight Dinners ” — this fall.

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox . Reach our team at [email protected] .

Azam Ahmed is international investigative correspondent for The Times. He has reported on Wall Street scandals, the War in Afghanistan and violence and corruption in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. More about Azam Ahmed