As the United States finally left Afghanistan, America's news media acted as if President Biden had prematurely ended a successful occupation. I had followed the conflict for all of its twenty years, and this framing seemed as mendacious to me as the "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" water-carrying the same media did back in 2003.
This framing emerged from the fact that the military and political leadership of this country has been obsessed with claiming victory despite reality, and the establishment's media stenographers are incapable of admitting that they traded access for the truth. If you want the truth, read Craig Whitlock's The Afghanistan Papers.
It is not a long book and every page is a revelation, but it has taken me time to finish. Each chapter is so full of horrific revelations that I just have to put the book down. Based on what I've read, the war was already lost in 2002. Al Qaeda was neutralized but bin Laden was still on the loose. The US shifted to a nation building mission with little to no understanding of the country, and deprived that mission of resources as it ramped up preparations to invade Iraq.
All the while the CIA had war criminal warlords on its payroll, men who murdered prisoners and raped civilians and had been so horrible in the 1990s that Afghans welcomed the Taliban as the lesser of two evils. The US military kept killing civilians, making permanent enemies of the population by doing things like blowing up wedding parties then initially claiming the dead were all terrorists. To claim to bring "democracy" and peace under these circumstances was a sick joke and the relatives of the dead weren't laughing, or willing to see the United States as their friend.
Under Bush as well as Obama and Trump the Defense Department attempted to build an Afghan army in America's image in little time, a wild social experiment that was doomed to failure. The way that army melted away at the end of the war tells the tale. Insane amounts of money were misspent on development. The infrastructure failed to meet the actual needs of the Afghan people and resulted in rampant corruption that undermined the very government the United States was propping up.
It is impossible to read this book and conclude that the Afghanistan adventure was anything other than a bloody farce. Whitlock is able to draw on primary sources from the government where public officials and military figures are being candid, instead of feeding pablum to the press. It's obvious they thought this was a failure years ago.
Much like in the aftermath of Vietnam, the people responsible for the failure are trying very hard to deflect the blame. To avoid a repeat of the misbegotten war in Afghanistan, that must be stopped. Read the book, and recommend it to others.
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