18 years, 2,300 deaths & $978 bn later, why America’s Afghan war is being called a failure

The figures were revealed in an investigative report, titled The Afghanistan Papers, published by The Washington Post Monday.

A file photo of US soldiers in Afghanistan | Commons

New Delhi: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar, had told government interviewers in 2015. Lute served in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

This was revealed in an investigative report, titled The Afghanistan Papers, published by the The Washington Post Monday.

After years of painstaking probe, The Washington Post has come out with these papers on the US’ so-called ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan that began 18 years ago in 2001 as the Bush administration’s answer to the devastating 9/11 twin-tower attacks. Subsequent Presidents Barack Obama and now Donald Trump have continued the war.

These startling revelations came after The Washington Post got access to confidential documents of the US government following a three-year battle under the Freedom of Information Act. The 2,000-page document shows interviews conducted by government-appointed interviewers. 

They interviewed US Army generals, diplomats, aid workers as well as Afghan government officials — all pointing to one fact on how America hid the fact that “the war had become unwinnable”.

According to Lute, who blamed the deaths of around 2,400 US soldiers on “bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department” also said in an interview to the government interviewers “Who will say this was in vain?”

According to the US State Department, which The Washington Post revealed in its story, more than 7,75,000 US troops have been deployed in Afghanistan, of which many were posted on a repeated basis. Of these, 2,300 troops died, while 20,589 were wounded in action since 2001.

‘Core failings of the war that persist to this day’

The undisclosed interviews also revealed how Bush, Obama and Trump, and their military chiefs, under whom the war began and continue until this day, failed to bring about a positive change in the strife-torn country even as rampant corruption continued, opium trade thrived while the Afghan army and police remained incompetent.

“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,” the report noted.

It also highlighted how the US government failed to even know how its money was being spent in keeping the war alive, the costs of which are “staggering”.

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, the US government is estimated to have spent anywhere between $934 billion and $978 billion since the war started 18 years ago.

“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, had told government interviewers.

“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,” Eggers added, as reported in the article.

Statistics ‘distorted’

The report further noted that the documents accessed by the newspaper, negate the “long chorus of public statements from US Presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting”.

“Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the US 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,” the newspaper noted.

Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counter-insurgency adviser to US military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers that every data obtained had been fudged to portray a rosy picture that justified the war.

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

In a shocking revelation, even one of the federal agency interviewers John Sopko told the newspaper that “the American people have constantly been lied to”.

Sopko had led an agency nicknamed SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction), which was created by the US Congress in 2008 to investigate and audit the war and its outcome.

It was also revealed in one of the interviews that the US was not aiming to make a poor Afghanistan rich, but was only focussed at promoting its own agenda.

“We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich,” James Dobbins, a former senior US diplomat, who served as a special envoy to Afghanistan under Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers. 

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

The ‘AfPak strategy’

The US’ strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan was popularly called the ‘AfPak’ strategy. It was rolled out in 2008 and discontinued abruptly in 2010 due to opposition from both the countries. The strategy was basically aimed at initiating counter-terrorism measures, thereby bringing Afghanistan out of the ill-effects of the war and rebuilding its society.

During one interview conducted in 2015, an unidentified US official told one of the government interviewers, “With the AfPak strategy, there was a present under the Christmas tree for everyone…By the time you were finished you had so many priorities and aspirations it was like no strategy at all.”

A project — Lessons Learned — run by SIGAR conducted many such interviews to understand whom the US was fighting in reality.

Who was the enemy?

“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 US government never settled on an answer…As a result, in the field, US troops often couldn’t tell friend from foe,” the report said.

An unnamed former adviser to an Army Special Forces team told government interviewers in 2017, US military commanders expected him to come up with a map to direct them to their targets.

“It took several conversations for them to understand that I did not have that information in my hands. At first, they just kept asking: ‘But who are the bad guys, where are they?” the former adviser said.

‘US Presidents failed in nation-building in Afghanistan’

According to The Washington Post article, this is one aspect where the “Presidents failed miserably”. It said while America attempted to create a Washington out of Afghanistan, the concepts were alien to Kabul, who only knew “tribalism, monarchism, communism and Islamic law”.

“Our policy was to create a strong central government which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government,” an unidentified former State Department official told government interviewers in 2015. “The time-frame for creating a strong central government is 100 years, which we didn’t have.”

Some of the aid workers interviewed also pointed to the fact that during the peak of the war between 2009-12, the US government’s move to spend money on schools, bridges, canals and other such developmental projects only helped in “pumping kerosene on a dying campfire just to keep the flame alive”.

Many aid workers also blamed the US Congress for this “mindless rush to spend”.

Christopher Kolenda, an Army colonel, who was deployed in Afghanistan several times and advised three US generals in charge of the war, had even accused former Afghan President Hamid Karzai of “kleptocracy” that the US government failed to recognise.

Ryan Crocker, who served as the top US diplomat in Kabul in 2002 and again in 2011-12, told government interviewers, “Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption…Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, it’s somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it.”

‘Incompetent Afghan commanders’

The investigation also revealed how the Afghan commanders were pocketing lump sum salaries under the garb of providing training to their forces.

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

“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 US commanders have called unsustainable,” it noted.