New Delhi: The 18-year-old Afghan War, in which the US lost a huge amount of money and soldiers, has often been likened to the Vietnam War. The revelation was made in ‘The Afghanistan Papers’, an investigative report published by The Washington Post Monday.
The Vietnam War is considered to be a dark chapter in American history during which the US forces faced a crushing defeat at the hands of a much smaller Vietnamese army.
One of the key architects of the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara, who was the secretary of defense under former US presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, had once stated that America had been “terribly wrong” to intervene in Vietnam.
“The specter of Vietnam has hovered over Afghanistan from the start,” The Post said.
It also stated that Bush may have realised soon about “similar mistakes” in the Afghan War but refused to acknowledge it publicly.
“We learned some very important lessons in Vietnam,” Bush told a reporter on 11 October 2001, when asked if the US can avoid being drawn into a Vietnam-like “quagmire” in Afghanistan.
Also read: 18 years, 2,300 deaths & $978 bn later, why America’s Afghan war is being called a failure
‘A quagmire’
US officials have also called the Afghan War a disaster that was akin to the Vietnam debacle. On 27 November 2001, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who served under Bush from 2001 to 2006, had jokingly called the Afghan War, “All together now – quagmire!”
The Post’s findings also stated: “Throughout the Afghan War, documents show that US military officials have resorted to an old tactic from Vietnam — manipulating public opinion.”
The newspaper also highlighted how successive American governments and those in charge of the war had followed the “same talking points”, claiming the nation was making progress even when it wasn’t.
Barry McCaffrey, a retired US Army general, had even written a note in June 2006 — after coming back from a fact-finding mission — that the Taliban has made a comeback and the Afghan leadership is worried the US government will “tip-toe out of Afghanistan”.
A 40-page warning note was also shot off by Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, stating that “enormous popular discontent is building” against the Afghan government and the Taliban was “growing stronger, thanks to support from Pakistan, a US ally”.
But all these warnings were buried by the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US’ Department of Defense, under Rumsfeld’s “watchful eyes”.
The Post also added how the US government had inflated “figures (of enemy fighters killed) as a measurement of success” during the Afghan War just like they did during the Vietnam War.
“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,” a senior NSC (National Security Council) official told government interviewers in 2016. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war.”
After years of painstaking probe, The Post has come out with these papers on the US’ so-called ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan that began 18 years ago in 2001. It was the Bush administration’s answer to the devastating 9/11 twin-tower attacks. Subsequent presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump have continued the war.
These startling revelations came after The 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.
Also read: ‘Dark money sloshed all around’ — how US helped fuel corruption in Afghanistan
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