The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

“Having overthrown the Taliban somewhat unexpectedly, US military commanders were unprepared for the aftermath and unsure what to do. They worried Afghanistan would fall into chaos, but they also feared that if they sent more US ground forces to fill the vacuum, they might be saddled with responsibility for the country’s many problems. As a result, the Pentagon dispatched a few extra troops to assist with the hunt for bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders but limited their visibility and tasks as much as possible.”

From the beginning, the US was torn between its strong reluctance to become enmeshed in the internal politics of Afghanistan and also recognizing that an abrupt departure could ultimately put them right back where they started. Throughout, the solution to this dilemma was to split the difference, allocating just enough resources to claim that a problem was being seriously addressed while never giving it the time, resources, or nuance that could even plausibly address the problem in a substantive way.

“‘Much of what we call Taliban activity was really tribal or it was rivalry or it was old feuding,’ [Michael Metrinko] said. ‘I’d had this explained to me over and over and over again by tribal elders, you know, the old men who had come in with their long white beards and would sit and talk for an hour or two. They would laugh about some of the things that were happening. What they always said was you American soldiers don’t understand this, but you know, what they think is a Taliban act is really a feud going back more than one hundred years in that particular family.’”

Shortly after 9/11, President Bush announced the so-called “Bush Doctrine” whereby actors around the world were either on the side of the United States in its struggle against terrorism or were on the side of the terrorists. The Taliban was a principal example of this binary distinction—it was certainly hostile in many respects and had sheltered Al Qaeda, but in the aftermath of the US invasion, it became clear that the Taliban was a collection of different factions with their own interests and not a monolithic organization bent on worldwide terror. Still, the narrative of good and evil prevailed, and the US missed an opportunity to understand its enemy more accurately.

“Despite his new rhetoric about partnering with the Afghans, Bush clung to his tightwad inclinations. At an international donors’ conference for Afghanistan prior to the president’s State of the Union speech, the United States pledged $296 million in reconstruction aid and extended a $50 million line of credit. Combined, the amount was less than one-half of one percent of what Washington would end up spending to rebuild Afghanistan during the next two decades.”

Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, proved to have sizable public and international support since the US was retaliating for a direct attack on its soil. The support of NATO, the United Nations, and other organizations could lend money, manpower, and expertise, but this also created a collective action problem. With so many agencies at work in the same theater, it became a contest of who could take on the least amount of responsibility. This made it nearly impossible to establish clear lines of responsibility for even the most critical matters.

“It soon became apparent that Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was a titanic mistake—not just for Iraq, but for Afghanistan. The Iraq War was a far bigger undertaking at first. It required an invasion force of 120,000 troops, about thirteen times the number deployed to Afghanistan. Lulled into overconfidence by its rapid defeat of the Taliban, the Bush administration figured it could handle two wars at once. It was a rash assumption that defied history and common sense.”

The apparent early success of US and allied forces in late 2001 precipitated a host of false assumptions that would combine into terrible policy errors. Believing that the Taliban was a spent force, the Bush administration had also built up the terrorist threat into an existential danger requiring a generational effort. They therefore had the public support for a broader campaign that they believed they could carry out with ease since the last war ended quickly and the next one presumably would as well. It was not long before the US found itself bogged down in two wars, neither of which it could hope to win without worsening its fortunes in the other.

“Almost all Afghans had been deprived of a basic education during their country’s decades of turmoil. An estimated 80 to 90 percent could not read or write. Some could not count or did not know their colors. Yet the Americans expected them to embrace PowerPoint presentations and operate complex weapons systems.”

The relative lack of importance that the US attributed to Afghan reconstruction meant that even when they did apply time and resources, they often rushed it however possible. One particular example was the training of the Afghan army, which simply relied on existing training manuals for US soldiers with no thought paid to the particularities of Afghan history and culture. When the Afghans failed to measure up, they were then blamed for being incompetent, worsening tensions between their ostensible allies.

“They designed another ball featuring the flags of several countries, including Saudi Arabia, whose flag depicts the Koranic declaration of faith in Arabic script. Expecting the new items to be highly popular, psy-ops teams distributed the soccer balls widely and even dropped them from helicopters—only to trigger public protests from angry Afghans who thought putting holy words on a ball was sacrilegious.”

While the story of Afghanistan is undoubtedly tragic, some of the US’s efforts to appeal to hearts and minds backfired. Concerned with winning hearts and minds but unwilling to delve beneath the surface of Afghan culture, Americans ended up treating Afghans as though they were easy to manipulate with brazen appeals to their interests, only to be surprised when their outreach crossed well-established cultural boundaries.

“The Pakistani commanders were career military men whose professional bearing and manner usually gave them an air of believability. Many had attended military exchange programs in the United States and spoke British-accented English that, to American ears, sounded suave and sophisticated. In that regard, they were a contrast to the unschooled, inexperienced Afghan officers whom the Americans partnered with on a daily basis. ‘You’d have these well-educated Pakistani generals who were nicely dressed and very articulate, and then you’d have his [Afghan] counterpart in a uniform that was three sizes too big, a pair of boots that were too big and gloves that didn’t fit […] [T]here would be this feeling that we were all great friends and everyone would be patting each other on the back, telling each other that we were really going to make things happen.’”

In Whitlock’s account, much of the US’s deception was self-imposed, but other actors occasionally helped the Americans in their Willful Blindness that led them to believe everything was going smoothly. The credibility of the message often depends on the messenger, and given the immense frustrations the US was having with its Afghan charges, the polished and highly competent Pakistani army could easily make the case that any trouble was due to the incompetence of the Afghans and not their own willful duplicity.

“Many US officials mistakenly viewed the war as a peacekeeping and reconstruction mission. He tried to explain to anyone who would listen that the fighting had intensified and the Taliban had bolstered its firepower. ‘If we don’t do this right, we’re going to allow these guys to keep us languishing here for a lot of years,’ he cautioned. But the Bush administration suppressed its internal warnings and put a shine on the war in public.”

For years into the war, even as the security situation continued to deteriorate, Bush administration officials continued to operate on the assumption that the Taliban’s defeat at the end of 2001 was final and irrevocable. Part of this was probably due to traditional European notions of war, where the disappearance of an army from the field and the overthrow of a government typically did mark the end of hostilities. There may also have been an element of cultural chauvinism that doubted that the comparatively low-tech Taliban would ever dare challenge the industrial and informational powerhouse that had driven them from power in the first place. These assumptions withstood years of contrary evidence until the Taliban’s comeback was a fait accompli.

“The NATO-led coalition—formally known as the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF—located its headquarters in a large yellow building adjacent to the US embassy in the Wazir Akbar Khan quarter of Kabul. Behind its tall concrete blast walls, the ISAF compound stood out as a pleasant oasis in the capital and featured a well-tended garden. Inside the headquarters building, however, the coalition battled bureaucratic dysfunction. Representatives from the thirty-seven countries had to coordinate operations, make staffing decisions and iron out political conflicts. Constant turnover made things harder. Coalition members limited their personnel to short tours of duty, usually three to six months. By the time new arrivals got up to speed, they had to train a replacement.”

NATO acted on its Article V provision for the first time in its history, whereby all members came to the defense of the United States after 9/11. This had obvious benefits in terms of resources and diplomatic support for the war, but it also introduced a multitude of competing interests who sought responsibility in some respects and avoided it in others. Different countries had their own political requirements, specializations, and interests, complicating a mission that was already hazily defined.

“When Afghanistan did come up in public, military commanders downplayed the Taliban’s resurgence to an almost laughable extent. In a December 2007 television appearance on PBS, General McNeill dusted off the old military talking point that violence was getting worse not because the Taliban was getting stronger, but because the US and NATO forces were aggressively pursuing the enemy. ‘We just felt we wouldn’t wait on them and we’d go out after them,’ he said. The PBS interviewer, Gwen Ifill, was skeptical. ‘But the Taliban, we thought, at one point, we were told at one point, was vanquished, had been wiped out,’ she said. ‘Is it alive and well now?’ ‘Well, that statement didn’t come from me,’ McNeill replied. ‘They had scattered to some areas where we could not get to them, and now we are getting into those areas.’”

As in Iraq, the press was probably too slow to recognize the glaring problems in Afghanistan, in part because their information was dependent on a military that lied to them and then lied about lying to them when they were called out on the lies. Even when the press pushed them, however, the military leadership proved utterly brazen in its willingness to deceive in the face of obvious facts to the contrary. Reporters were understandably loath to risk their access to more information by contradicting military leadership, even when it became clear that their information was faulty if not entirely false.

“The US was so ‘obsessed with chasing’ the Taliban after 9/11 that it failed to grasp the downside of partnering with thugs like [Abdul Rashid] Dostum. ‘On the basis of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, we relied on the warlords’ and helped them grab power, [Sarah Chayes] said in a Lessons Learned interview. ‘We didn’t know the population was thrilled with the Taliban kicking the warlords out.’”

American reliance on warlords was in part a reliance on the existing power structures that could not be forcibly displaced without major costs and political efforts to address those costs. Even so, the US made matters worse by trying to reconcile its support for the warlords with an ostensibly democratic ethos, putting them into official positions where they could inflict even more damage on the population in service of their interests. The US was so fixated on the Taliban as their enemy that they simply assumed that the population shared their binary understanding of the conflict without making a serious effort to understand their interests and motivations.

“Operation River Dance did succeed in infuriating Helmand’s poppy farmers. To sabotage the eradicators, they planted homemade bombs and other booby-traps in the soil and flooded their fields to bog down the tractors. Many blamed the Americans for ruining their livelihood. They were especially indignant that the Americans were destroying a product consumed mostly in the West. ‘I had a number of villages ask me, “Colonel, why are you eradicating something that your folks use and want?” They could not understand that.’”

US and NATO efforts to destroy opium production were among the best-intentioned and utterly disastrous policies they pursued in Afghanistan. It alienated a rural population that they critically needed for support and fueled corruption by driving production underground; opium production continued to rise despite their best efforts to stamp it out. It made the original problem worse while creating even more problems and yet endured for years based on a faulty analogy to the US experience in Colombia, another example of the US refusing to think about Afghanistan on its own merits.

“By 2009, many soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines had logged multipole tours of duty in Afghanistan. The war made less sense each time they went back. Years of hunting suspected terrorists had gotten them nowhere. The Taliban kept holding their ground. ‘At the time, I was looking at Afghanistan and I was thinking that there had to be more to solving this problem than killing people, because that’s what we were doing and every time I went back security was worse.’”

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan placed an enormous strain on a relatively small percentage of the military population, who would rotate in and out of the theater again and again. Those who saw the conflict progress over many years gained a unique insight into its complexities—how the message from the top was the same year after year, even as conditions gradually worsened. Failure to reckon with strategic realities meant that the US was left with tactical strategies that they kept even as they diminished in their effects.

“Faced with dissension in the ranks, the commander in chief tried to thread the needle. In a December 2009 speech at the US Military Academy at West Point, Obama announced he would deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. With all the forces he and Bush had already authorized, that meant McChrystal would have 100,000 US troops under his command. In addition, NATO members and other allies agreed to increase their forces to 50,000. But Obama added a wrinkle. He imposed a strict timeline on the mission and said the extra troops would start to come home in eighteen months. The timetable stunned many senior leaders in the Pentagon and the State Department. They thought it was a serious strategic error to commit to a withdrawal schedule in advance and make it public. The Taliban just had to lie low until the US and NATO surge forces left.”

Obama fashioned himself as a pragmatist, able to solve problems on the merits without having to rely on ideological preconceptions. He accordingly tended to take the middle road between extremes, and this is how he ultimately approached Afghanistan. But, in this case, the effort to split the difference did not evade the structural problems of the conflict but rather perpetuated them. Afghanistan was not a problem to troubleshoot, but rather a deeply flawed effort requiring profound reexamination.

“Eighteen months was not much time for the counterinsurgency strategy to succeed. Second, the Afghan government still had no presence in much of the country. As a result, the Obama administration and Congress ordered the military, the State Department, USAID and their contractors to bolster and expand the reach of the Afghan government as quickly as possible. Troops and aid workers constructed schools, hospitals, roads, soccer fields—anything that might win loyalty from the populace, with little concern for expense. Spending in the destitute country skyrocketed to unimaginable heights. In two years, annual US reconstruction aid to Afghanistan nearly tripled, from $6 billion to $17 billion in 2010. At that point, the US government was pumping roughly as much money into Afghanistan as the undeveloped country’s economy produced on its own. In retrospect, aid workers and military officials said it was a colossal misjudgment. In its rush to spend, the US government drenched Afghanistan with far more money than it could absorb.”

Obama came into office noting, to some extent correctly, that Afghanistan had been sidelined in favor of Iraq when the former had a much more obvious relationship to America’s core counterterrorism objectives. It therefore made sense, at least in theory, for the US to commit more resources to reconstruction, but after so many years, and given Obama’s simultaneous (and similarly understandable) interest in not prolonging this new infusion of resources, the two prongs of the strategy collapsed into each other.

“After the fall of the Taliban that winter, Afghanistan desperately needed a leader who could unite its belligerent factions. Karzai emerged as the consensus choice inside and outside the country. He was a Pashtun yet acceptable to the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara strongmen who led the Northern Alliance. He also drew support from all the foreign powers that gathered in Germany at the Bonn conference to help the Afghans plot their future. James Dobbins, the US diplomat who guided the summit, said Pakistan’s ISI spy agency first floated Karzai’s name as a potential leader. Russia, Iran, and the United States also approved—a rare moment of agreement among historic rivals.”

With the sudden fall of the Taliban, the US had to find a new leader, a task subject to many contradictory conditions. It obviously could not be someone with ties to the Taliban, but only a Pashtun (the most populous ethnic group) could unite the country. Since most Pashtun leaders had been loyal to the Taliban, Karzai emerged as one of the few acceptable candidates, despite being from a minor tribe and spending much of his adult life outside the country. In the years to come, he would prove acceptable to everyone but beloved by very few.

“In a Lessons Learned interview, an unnamed US military officer said mistakes were so common that some Army units were ‘focused on consequences management, paying Afghans for damages and condolence payments.’ The officer, who served in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan in 2008, recalled an incident when Army Rangers erroneously raided the home of an Afghan army colonel, killing him and his wife, a schoolteacher. […] In public, Bush administration officials expressed regret over the civilian casualties. In private, they seethed over Karzai’s blistering comments and pressed him to tone down his criticism.”

American ignorance of Afghan culture had deadly consequences, and it made matters worse by opting for damage control rather than learning from its mistakes. In addition to the humanitarian costs, US officials failed to see how the wanton killing of civilians undermined Karzai’s position, whose ineffective protests revealed the extent of his powerlessness. It was another particularly grim example of tactics—namely, an insistence on killing the enemy as the path to victory—interfering in an actual strategy.

“Gert Berthold, a forensic accountant who served on a military task force in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2012, helped analyze 3,000 Defense Department contracts worth $106 billion to see who was benefiting. The task force concluded that about 18 percent of the money went to the Taliban and other insurgent groups. ‘And it was often a higher percent,’ Berthold said in a Lessons Learned interview. ‘We talked with many former [Afghan] ministers, and they told us, “You’re underestimating it.”’”

In their rush to spend money and then use that money as evidence of success, the Obama administration failed to account for logistical realities. Getting supplies to the mountainous, landlocked country required enormous transportation expenses, often through territory that was not reliably under the control of the US or its allies. The US therefore paid the Taliban enormous sums of money to bring in the materials for fighting the Taliban, an ironic effort that was not only wasteful but also made things worse.

“At a July 2010 news briefing with reporters at the Pentagon, Army Maj. Gen. John Campbell, the commanding general of US forces in eastern Afghanistan, said the Taliban had carried out 12 percent more attacks during the first half of the year compared to the first six months of 2009. Aware that might sound bad, Campbell quickly added that ‘the effectiveness of these attacks have gone down about 6 percent.’ He did not explain how the military measured ‘effectiveness’ with such precision. But he reassured reporters that the war was going well.”

Whitlock notes many instances in which public cheerleading for the war crossed the line into absurdity, even among those who were in the position to know the truth. Perhaps expecting a degree of deference to military expertise from Congress and journalists, and at the very least being unwilling to be the ones to say out loud what they all knew in private to be true, generals made statements that were obvious attempts at evasion and misdirection.

“‘I asked why is it possible that a large number of about 500 security forces cannot defeat about twenty or thirty Taliban. The community elders replied that the security people are not there to defend the people and fight the Taliban, they are there to make money’ by selling their US-supplied weapons or fuel, [Shahmahmood] Miakhel recalled in a Lessons Learned interview.”

As the soldiers of a bureaucratized and relatively harmonious nation-state, US soldiers took for granted that the goal of soldiers everywhere was to defend their people against hostile forces, pledging their loyalty to a single government. They did not consider how Afghanistan, with its vastly different culture and historical circumstances, might take the accoutrements of a modern military, such as small arms, vehicles, and fuel, and adapt them to their own conditions.

“James Dobbins, the diplomat who helped run the Bonn Conference in 2001, came back as Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2014. He said the spat over the security agreement exemplified a paradox that Obama never resolved. The president wanted to think the United States was a steadfast ally that would not abandon them against the Taliban. Yet he was simultaneously telling war-weary Americans that it was time to leave. ‘There was a continuous tension in both our messaging and our actual behavior,’ Dobbins said in a Lessons Learned interview.”

As in Iraq, the US argued with the Afghan government over the specific terms of withdrawal, particularly whether US soldiers could be held liable by local courts for major crimes. The refusal to take accountability, while also insisting to the public at home that the war would be over soon, made it impossible for Obama to convince Karzai that he was a reliable partner, especially as the drawdown of ground forces and the shift to drone strikes caused a spike in civilian casualties.

“What became clear to generals was that as long as Trump was president, they would have to speak more forcefully and boast that his war strategy was destined to succeed. […] [General Nicholson] went out of his way to heap praise on Trump’s strategy, calling it ‘fundamentally different’ and ‘a game changer.’ Though Nicholson had previously described the war as being locked in a stalemate, he insisted he no longer saw it that way. ‘The president has left no doubt in terms of our will to win,’ Nicholson said. ‘We will be here until the job is done…We are on our way to a win.’”

Trump’s critiques of the war on terror as a candidate were far more scathing than those of Obama, but while many interpreted this to mean that he was a noninterventionist, his critiques usually revolved around generals and political officials lacking the toughness to win. Once he was in office, his image of his own toughness provided cover for generals to continue the war for which Trump had lambasted them. The result was that the war went on as before, producing no meaningful effects despite insistences of progress, except with more civilian casualties and an outright refusal to collect unfavorable facts.

“‘Afghanistan is not an agricultural country; that’s an optical illusion,’ Barnett Rubin, the academic expert who served as an advisor to [Richard] Holbrooke, said in a Lessons Learned interview. The ‘largest industry is war, then drugs, then services.’ Agriculture, he said, ‘is down to fourth or fifth place.’”

Because Afghanistan is not an industrialized country, US personnel assumed it was agricultural since that is what they understood to be the alternative. They further assumed that it was backward and uncivilized, not realizing that Afghanistan was in fact highly adept at the industries that had emerged from decades of war, foreign intervention, and worldwide drug consumption. The assumption that Afghanistan was deficient, rather than skilled in matters the US did not like or understand, doomed many reconstruction efforts from the start.