Why The Afghanistan Papers is Essential Reading

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. 

The Longest War

In the midst of all the impeachment stuff it was easy today to miss a report from the Washington Post about the realities of the war in Afghanistan. What's especially striking is that the information is not classified, it's been out there in plain sight.

The article gets into the massive levels of corruption, the failures to establish a lasting order, and the inability to win the conflict. These are things we have known for quite some time, but have just elected to ignore. I have been hearing inklings of these failures for several years now, rumbling in the background. The report is damning, but we've known the gist for over a decade.

If this century has demonstrated anything, it's the inadequate nature of America's institutions. It's all been laid bare in America's persistence in fighting the longest war in our history. More than eighteen years after invasion the Taliban is still going strong, despite hundreds of billions of dollars being spent and the sacrifice of thousands of lives. It's part of the same institutional breakdown that led to the election of Donald Trump and the inability to prosecute him for his crimes.

On Capitol Hill and in Kandahar the American Colossus has feet of clay. The credibility that was squandered after 9/11 by the failed occupation of Afghanistan, the illegal war in Iraq, and the torture of suspects from shadowy black sites to Guantanamo Bay has erased the United States' post-Cold War claims to moral superiority. We knew they were fraudulent all along, now we have the incontrovertible proof. Obama tried to salvage America's reputation, but with Trump it is now lost and gone forever.

The question the report raises is what exactly is going to happen to the world with the end of Pax Americana. It's entirely appropriate that even with the release of this report, most Americans have forgotten about Afghanistan a long time ago. This is how empires end, not with a bang, but with a whimper.