Afghanistan

[jackd]

Biden refused to kick the can down the road to another President. Had he done so, we'd be replaying this experience then. If civil society didn't develop in 20 years, what in the world makes anyone think it would after 10 or 20 more?

[LFC]

Aug 30, 2021 19:28:18 GMT @probabilistic3 said:

There's no serious claim of a few thousand marines securing Kabul, after the collapse of Afghan government. The claim was about American forces providing logistics and acting as a force multiplier, while front line war was continued to be fought by the Afghan army, and interior security provided by police. That was the situation in '17 and '18, until the US political decision of wholesale disengagement was made by Trump. That claim further goes to argue America sidelining the Ghani government during the Doha talks with the Taliban, arranging to hand over power come what might, striking a lopsided deal, and pulling out abruptly in '20 and '21 demoralized the Afghan security forces. Beyond loss of morale, US military withdrawal also deprived Afghan forces of air support and essential maintenance and replacement of equipment. Also, the loss of steady stream of US cash which fed the engine of corruption played a major part.

I don't remember reading that Trump changed the level of cooperation between our troops and theirs. Or the sidelining of Ghani. I'll have to look those up later but both undercut (and by undercut I mean obliterate) the Trump attempted revisionist history that they weren't really going to pull out.

Aug 30, 2021 19:28:18 GMT @probabilistic3 said:

Biden was not bound by Trump administration's decisions. If those were contrary to national interest he was well placed to ignore them.

The problem with that is that the Taliban had something to say about that as well and they said it very, very clearly. Staying much longer would have required a major ramp up of troops but you just laid out the case why ramping up wouldn't work without a multi-year commitment. We would have had to rebuild everything Trump tore down while increasing troop counts and that would take a lot of time. Sure we could have tried to extend the deadline another 6 months but we'd just be hoping that there wouldn't be any terrorist attacks during that period. And of course the armchair quarterbacks would be screaming that we should have gotten out faster if that had happened.

Aug 30, 2021 19:28:18 GMT @probabilistic3 said:

P.S. Biden has lost the claim to competence in governance. He has looked unsteady and irritated.

We're out. After 20 f***ing years we ... are ... out. I saw today we evacuated 115,000 in 17 days. We have all of the Americans who came to the airport out. We were hit with one terrorist attack and that was due to the request of an ally, always a tricky thing. If that's incompetence then sign me up for more.

I also saw that the 100+ American still there were told repeatedly to come to the airport over the lead-up to yesterday's final flight. They didn't. Oh well. That was their choice. Now getting them out is a diplomatic issue, not a military one.

[AnBr]

Biden Deserves Credit, Not Blame, for Afghanistan

America’s longest war has been by any measure a costly failure, and the errors in managing the conflict deserve scrutiny in the years to come. But Joe Biden doesn’t “own” the mayhem on the ground right now. What we’re seeing is the culmination of 20 years of bad decisions by U.S. political and military leaders. If anything, Americans should feel proud of what the U.S. government and military have accomplished in these past two weeks. President Biden deserves credit, not blame.

Unlike his three immediate predecessors in the Oval Office, all of whom also came to see the futility of the Afghan operation, Biden alone had the political courage to fully end America’s involvement. Although Donald Trump made a plan to end the war, he set a departure date that fell after the end of his first term and created conditions that made the situation Biden inherited more precarious. And despite significant pressure and obstacles, Biden has overseen a military and government that have managed, since the announcement of America’s withdrawal, one of the most extraordinary logistical feats in their recent history. By the time the last American plane lifts off from Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 31, the total number of Americans and Afghan allies extricated from the country may exceed 120,000.

[LFC]

A few more responses...

Aug 30, 2021 19:28:18 GMT @probabilistic3 said:

Whether the stalemate of '17 and '18 was sustainable in the long run, and whether that indeed was a desirable state for US interests for another generation while civil society developed and gathered steam are the critical questions.

I think the questions about civil society developing and gathering have been answered. After 20 years there's little to no evidence that it would have. Could it happen? Yes. Is there any evidence it was happening? Clearly not. Staying based on little more than hope is what we've been doing for the last decade. BTW "another generation" is generally viewed to be another 20-30 years.

Aug 30, 2021 19:28:18 GMT @probabilistic3 said:

His cold calculation is chaos from Afghan instability is going to be limited to Central and South Asia, and certainly not spillover to the US anytime soon. He estimates America on balance is not going to care terribly about the plight of Afghan women, or few beheadings in a distant land.

"Cold calculation?" Well that's a rather emotional and loaded term but let's look at other cold calculations. Isn't is also a "cold calculation" that we should ask U.S. troops to continue to sacrifice lives and bodily injury for a project that was clearly a failure? Isn't it also a "cold calculation" that preventing "a few beheadings" is more important than the thousands of Afghan civilians being killed and injured in a war zone every single year? Or do their deaths count less because they're mostly from bullets and explosions? And while I agree that the plight of Afghan women under any hard-core Muslim society (like our friends the Saudis have) is awful what about the plight of those dead, injured, or watching as their loved ones are killed and injured?

BBC has a good article on the costs of this war, both monetary and human. Anybody making an honest case must factor them in when making their own "cold calculations." One can make the argument that it's worth staying but ignoring these costs altogether would be downright icy. Here's a chart from the BBC link. Anybody making the argument for staying, which is of course the only way to stop the beheadings and women's plight, also makes the argument that this is worth it. There's no dodging it.

[LFC]

TDB's pet conservative fails to note that the 100 Americans left in Afghanistan were contacted multiple times to try to get them to leave. How ... convenient. Not much of a narrative without it.

Nemo resideo is a Latin phrase that means, “Leave no one behind.” It is such a fundamental American value that this commitment is embedded in the creed of several branches of the U.S. military. Yet some American citizens are being left behind now that the last plane has left Kabul on Monday. “We believe there are still a small number of Americans—under 200 and likely closer to 100–who remain in Afghanistan, and want to leave,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Monday. This contradicts Joe Biden’s previous comments. During an August 18 interview with George Stephanopoulos, Biden said, "If there's American citizens left, we're gonna stay to get them all out."

The decision to break that promise is wildly unpopular. According to a new ABC/Ipsos poll, 84% of Americans “think U.S. troops should remain in the country until all Americans are evacuated,” and 71% “think they should stay until all Afghans who helped the United States are evacuated as well.” These numbers exist in a world where abandoned Americans have not yet been taken hostage (except for the one that the Taliban already had) and where videos have not yet surfaced of Afghan interpreters being rounded up and summarily executed. The former is a legitimate fear; the latter is a guarantee.

And thanks to the Biden administration, it won’t be terribly hard to accomplish, either. According to Politico, “U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies…” One can only imagine what public opinion polls will look like when the Taliban targets the individuals on that list.

I wonder if Mr. Lewis will apologize for his piece if the Taliban, rather than targeting them, helps get them out of the country.

If you want to know why he's a crank well just see you he listens to.

In a way, we have been here before. While listening to conservative writer John Podhoretz on the Commentary podcast the other day, I was reminded how much of my childhood was overshadowed by talk of Vietnam War POWs allegedly being held captive after the war’s end in 1973.

The article then descends into things unknown, if these things are true, and the Taliban acting as they did 20 years ago. Can you imagine this happening 20 years ago when we were The Great Satan?

The Taliban has taken a victory lap of Kabul’s international airport hours after the final U.S. troops took flight—and its leaders have, optimistically, called for friendly relations with the Biden administration. According to Bloomberg News, Zabihullah Mujahed, the Taliban’s top spokesman, held a press conference Tuesday from Hamid Karzai International Airport. He reportedly declared that the Taliban is seeking “good and diplomatic relationship with the Americans,” but added: “We highlight to every occupier that whoever sees Afghanistan with an evil eye will face the same fate as the Americans have faced... We’ve never given up to pressure or force, and our nation has always sought freedom.” Mujahed said the Taliban will now attempt to restart operations at the airport, and confirmed that U.S. troops destroyed unspecified equipment before leaving.

[LFC]

Another view on the realities of Afghanistan from somebody who served two tours there. It neither spares the MSM or Biden but does call out bogus talking points that are being trotted out by "experts" and supposed journalists.

Here are some other lies I’ve seen. 1) The withdrawal has damaged U.S. credibility with its allies. No, it hasn’t. America has the same degree of credibility with its allies that it had before withdrawing from Afghanistan. The withdrawal may have damaged the reputation of individuals who did not expect President Biden to execute it, but that is another different thing. 2) The civilian casualties created by U.S. operations were worth the terrorists that were killed or apprehended as a result of them. No, the ends don’t justify the means. 3) Some kind of narrative or propaganda or procedure could have been done differently to counter Taliban propaganda. Counterfactual, unproductive, useless wasted words.

The worst lie, to my mind, though—the one that truly exposes its proponents as living in a fantasy world, and not a well-constructed one—is that the status quo was durable. That none of this needed to happen, and that the U.S. could have maintained a small footprint in Afghanistan for years or decades, “indefinitely.” This is a lie that normal people use every day to stave off fears about death, and is understandable at that level. But when former ambassadors in major media outlets, prominent think-tankers, and national security experts on social media platforms employ the fiction of a never-ending present to argue that the Afghan status quo enforced by American violence was sustainable even in the near term, with a Taliban that was obviously far more capable and confident than we gave them credit for, and a government that didn’t exist, boils the blood.

This “status quo” lie depends on readers not paying any attention to Afghanistan. It makes sense if a person’s first encounter with Afghanistan is the media coverage of America’s withdrawal. This coverage consists of crowds of former interpreters and stranded foreigners who fear the Taliban, and presumably supported the status quo ante. What this coverage doesn’t show is the steady march of the Taliban into Afghanistan’s rural areas, months and years of grinding down Afghan military and governance capacity even with an American presence. Proponents of the status quo cannot for whatever reason face the fact that the Afghanistan they describe had not existed for years, possibly ever.

These delusions all express an overt or subconscious desire not to see reality for what it is. Another sort of lie, intended to stonewall or deceive, has been employed routinely by the Biden administration. Through statements that contradict reported truths or offer rosy assessments, the administration has gaslit reporters and readers familiar with the situation on the ground, sowing mistrust and incurring ill will to no clear purpose.

[LFC]

Trump continues to be nuts.

Donald Trump has had a lot to say about how Joe Biden has mishandled the withdrawal from Afghanistan—but, when given the chance to explain what he would have done differently, Trump’s master plan boiled down to leaving the country in smouldering ruins before leaving it forever.

The ex-president appeared on Fox Business on Tuesday morning to get some things off his chest a day after the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan. During a curious rant about how he believes unnamed shadowy forces are controlling Biden, Trump shared his alternative withdrawal plans.

“It’s something that’s rather incredible,” he said. “They [the people supposedly controlling Biden] do horrible things, vicious things. They cheat, steal, lie. But they can’t do a simple withdrawal from a country that we should never have gone into in the first place... We should have hit that country years ago, hit it them really hard, and then let it rot.”

The former president was repeatedly thrown softball questions about how he would’ve handled the situation if he hadn’t lost the election. However, he repeatedly failed to give any answers of substance, merely saying that he would’ve won the war in Afghanistan if only he’d had a few more months.

“He [Biden] handed them a country on a silver platter,” said Trump. “He ought to apologize and stop trying to, excuse the language, bullshit everybody into thinking that what he did was good. We should have withdrawn but we should have withdrawn in a totally different way, with great dignity. It would have been a tremendous win for us.”

Again, he didn’t elaborate on what “totally different way” would have resulted in the “tremendous win” despite being asked for details.

While Trump repeatedly tried to criticize Biden for the failings in the U.S. evacuations from Kabul, he also laid into the thousands of desperate evacuees. With zero evidence, Trump claimed Afghan evacuees who have arrived in the U.S. include “many terrorists” and “criminal rapists.”

[jackd]

President Biden's speech, just concluded, rather effectively pushed Trump's statement into the shadows where it belongs.

[goldenvalley]

You couldn't get a bigger contrast between the immediate past president and the current one than that exhibited by the above two posts.

[LFC]

TPM has some horrifying stats on the cost of our war in Afghanistan. This jumped out at me.

Most Afghans alive today were not born when the U.S. war began. The median age in Afghanistan is just 18.4 years old. Including their country’s war with the Soviet Union from 1979 to 1989 and civil war in the 1990s, most Afghans have lived under nearly continuous war.

Also this.

There are, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 980,000 U.S. Afghanistan war veterans. Of these men and women, 507,000 served in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

[LFC]

Great, now there's some numbnuts Congressman who wants to be a hero. At least our military is out so if he ends up getting himself in trouble he's on his own rather than needlessly endangering the lives our troops.

Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) has apparently made contact with the outside world after he went quiet following two failed attempts to enter Afghanistan. The rogue congressman first requested permission from the Department of Defense to visit Kabul last week. Then, according to the Washington Post, he tried again Monday and threatened U.S. Embassy officials when they turned him down. The Post reported that Mullin planned to charter a helicopter and visit Afghanistan from neighboring Tajikistan to rescue five Americans who were left behind.

Mullin broke his silence in a text to Tusla World, writing: “Am I helping get Americans out of Afghanistan yes... (Am) I missing no, did I go dark for a little, yes because it wasn’t safe to be communicating.” Mullin did not confirm his whereabouts or what he plans to do next. U.S. officials told the Post they were unsure of Mullin’s location, describing his apparent freelance rescue operation as “extremely dangerous.”

What are the odds that he has no idea WTF he's doing?

[LFC]

What in the actual HELL are students doing in Afghanistan during a withdrawal???!!! Yes, they're members of the Afghan community but this is seriously insane risk taking. Nobody without overwhelming need should have been traveling to Afghanistan for the past two months.

At least 24 of the “under 200” Americans stranded in Afghanistan are students from Sacramento, California, according to San Juan Unified school district officials. The number is down from an initial estimate of 150, with officials working to bring the students home. “Our office has been in close contact with the San Juan Unified School District, and have urgently flagged the students’ information with the State Department and Department of Defense,” U.S. Rep. Ami Bera (D-CA), who represents the Sacramento area, said in a statement to The Sacramento Bee. The Sacramento area has been a landing base for Afghan refugees, with the region housing more Afghans than any other city in the country.

It is unknown when the students will be able to return, however, as U.S. evacuation flights ended Monday. President Joe Biden has said all U.S. citizens who want to return home will be able to, though his administration has not specified how the U.S. will coordinate charter flights.

[goldenvalley]

Sept 1, 2021 15:29:35 GMT LFC said:

What in the actual HELL are students doing in Afghanistan during a withdrawal???!!! Yes, they're members of the Afghan community but this is seriously insane risk taking. Nobody without overwhelming need should have been traveling to Afghanistan for the past two months.

At least 24 of the “under 200” Americans stranded in Afghanistan are students from Sacramento, California, according to San Juan Unified school district officials. The number is down from an initial estimate of 150, with officials working to bring the students home. “Our office has been in close contact with the San Juan Unified School District, and have urgently flagged the students’ information with the State Department and Department of Defense,” U.S. Rep. Ami Bera (D-CA), who represents the Sacramento area, said in a statement to The Sacramento Bee. The Sacramento area has been a landing base for Afghan refugees, with the region housing more Afghans than any other city in the country.

It is unknown when the students will be able to return, however, as U.S. evacuation flights ended Monday. President Joe Biden has said all U.S. citizens who want to return home will be able to, though his administration has not specified how the U.S. will coordinate charter flights.

Taking a guess here, it may be that the 24 students are Afghani born visiting family during the summer. Sacramento has a population of Afghani refugees that have lived here for almost 10 years. Mostly the husbands of the families worked with the US military.

[LFC]

Sept 1, 2021 15:36:37 GMT goldenvalley said:

Taking a guess here, it may be that the 24 students are Afghani born visiting family during the summer. Sacramento has a population of Afghani refugees that have lived here for almost 10 years. Mostly the husbands of the families worked with the US military.

I'm sure that's what it is and I mentioned the Afghan community above but seriously, would you send your child to visit family in a war zone as the U.S. military is withdrawing? It seems like an insane risk to me. Of course their mileage may vary but if you risk your child's life like it seems to me that you can beg for help but there should be no complaining about their situation. (I don't know that they are. It's probably most/all right-wingnuts.) It would be like an anti-masker blaming a school board for their child's COVID after they obtained a mask mandate waiver.

[goldenvalley]

Sept 1, 2021 15:48:58 GMT LFC said:

Sept 1, 2021 15:36:37 GMT goldenvalley said:

Taking a guess here, it may be that the 24 students are Afghani born visiting family during the summer. Sacramento has a population of Afghani refugees that have lived here for almost 10 years. Mostly the husbands of the families worked with the US military.

I'm sure that's what it is and I mentioned the Afghan community above but seriously, would you send your child to visit family in a war zone as the U.S. military is withdrawing? It seems like an insane risk to me. Of course their mileage may vary but if you risk your child's life like it seems to me that you can beg for help but there should be no complaining about their situation. (I don't know that they are. It's probably most/all right-wingnuts.) It would be like an anti-masker blaming a school board for their child's COVID after they obtained a mask mandate waiver.

From what little I know about this (a friend has worked with an Afghani family through a refugee charity for 7 years) the links to Afghanistan are strong.  Many times the fathers were still employed and spending long periods of time in the country even after they moved to Sac.  Extended family remained in Afghanistan.  Visiting for the summer might have been something routinely done and they may be in places other than Kabul.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall continues to pound on the MSM's coverage of the withdrawal.

With the American war in Afghanistan and the American withdrawal from Afghanistan now definitively over, I’ve been trying to put the entirety of the last four weeks into some perspective. As you can see I’ve been fairly dug in on the proposition that the great majority of the criticism we’ve seen amounts to ignorance and deflection. Pulling the plug on a failed or misconceived mission isn’t pretty. But it is inevitable. The ugliness is built into the failure rather than a consequence of recognizing it. Most of what we’ve seen is an attempt to deny the failure (mostly hawks) or imagine that withdrawing would be orderly and free of consequences. But with all this reasoning, what parts were handled poorly? What could have been better organized or cleaner?

Perhaps this is only a matter of stepping back and with the benefit of clear eyes and more perspective and, well … agreeing with myself. But honestly, I think I really agree with myself. The airlift evacuation appears to have transported well over 110,000 people out of the country, an astonishing feat under any circumstances and probably unprecedented for a civilian airlift in a kinetic military context and in the context of state collapse.

What happened two weeks ago was that the US-backed government fell. Quickly. And the US President, who had decided to end the US mission in Afghanistan without conditions, allowed it to fall rather than changing his mind. That is the entirety of what happened. Shifting gears to prevent the collapse would have signaled not only that the decision was wrong but also was poorly arrived at in the first place since the collapse of the government was always the probable and most likely the inevitable result of the decision.

Most Monday-morning quarterbacking of the “failure of execution” school doesn’t posit that the government would have survived, only that it might have lasted months or maybe a year longer, thus allowing the US to pass off the messiness on someone else. In other words, the failure of execution was largely a matter of optics. Extend the country’s civil war for a few more months or years – certainly at the cost of thousands of lives – to allow the US and the authors of the war to avoid the reputational splatter when the end came. That is an understandable but certainly ignoble aspiration.

This is the “decent interval” that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger engineered for the fall of South Vietnam – basically an effort to game the 1972 election with “peace with honor” and leave others to pick up the peaces. As it happens, when Saigon finally fell in April 1975 Nixon was just months into his forced retirement and California exile, having been forced into the first presidential resignation in history. Life’s a bitch.

This time he singled out Martha Radatz for moving the goalposts.

Let us remember that two weekends ago a crush of prominent commentators and reporters were stating as fact that the White House had been caught flatfooted and abandoned everyone who had worked for the US during its war in Afghanistan. They declared the evacuation a catastrophic failure and shameful betrayal when it was actually only starting and then in many cases took credit for the evacuation after it happened, on the premise that it was only their cries of betrayal that made it happen. This is a bracingly self-serving and sloppy logic. One of the worst offenders on this front, ABC’s Martha Raddatz, was forced to move the goalposts yet again yesterday: now judging the evacuation a “success,” she claimed Biden was “conflating the withdrawal with the evacuation … they did not realize the Taliban would take over so quickly.”

And there you have it. The problem was the withdrawal itself. That is by definition not a problem of execution but one of policy. Raddatz’s argument appears to be that the US should have known the government would fall in a matter of days and that if it knew this it should have stayed long to ensure it would last at least weeks or months if not years. This is arguing what amounts to a distinction without a difference verging on the logic of perpetual war and occupation which is what kept the US in Afghanistan for twenty years in the first place. It’s the final redoubt of a bad and for many deeply dishonest argument. Raddatz is like a desperate evacuee clinging to the skids of a departing helicopter as her preferred storyline collapses around her. Messy, indeed.

[jackd]

There is, it seems to me, a legitimate question as to the military's advice to the administration. I'm guessing they claimed more competence and commitment in the Afghan army than existed because they had, after all, trained and supplied them.

[goldenvalley]

Senator Graham is still a hawk and using a 2001 script:

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) says he believes the United States “will be going back into Afghanistan” despite the recently declared end of nearly two decades of American military presence in the country.

Graham, in an interview Monday with the BBC, predicted a looming clash between the Taliban and extremist groups such as the Islamic State would necessitate American military action in the country. “We will be going back into Afghanistan," Graham said. “We’ll have to, because the threat will be so large.”

He said that Afghanistan “will be a cauldron for radical Islamic behavior," presenting the United States with only two options: "You can say that’s no longer my problem … or hit them before they hit you.”

[LFC]

Sept 7, 2021 16:58:57 GMT goldenvalley said:

Senator Graham is still a hawk and using a 2001 script:

Thumping his little chest and pretending he's a big boy. It's rather pathetic.

[andydp]

Wonder how Fox news is covering this.

(Just checked:  After the usual "Biden is a Bozo" articles, the flight was about the fifth story down. At least this time, it wasn't on the fouth page.)  


Flight takes off from Kabul airport after Taliban cleared Americans and others to leave

(CNN)A commercial flight took off from Kabul airport on Thursday for the first time since the Taliban seized Afghanistan, hours after the militants cleared a group of Americans and other foreign nationals to leave the country.
It is unclear at this stage whether or how many Americans were on board the Qatar Airways flight, reported earlier to be bound for Doha, or the nationalities of the other passengers.

A US official and a source with knowledge of the matter had earlier said the Taliban had cleared around 200 people, including American citizens, to fly out.

Live pictures showed people boarding the flight on Thursday afternoon Kabul time; earlier, Qatari and Taliban officials were seen touring the airport tarmac, where the Qatar Airways Boeing 777 stood.

www.cnn.com/2021/09/09/asia/afghanistan-kabul-airport-flight-intl/index.html?iid=cnn-mobile-app&adobe_mc=TS%3D1631195533%7CMCMID%3D76697581589088355185551494486791580823%7CMCAID%3D300B1074BB1CDEC0-4000151047B41C75%7CMCORGID%3D7FF852E2556756057F000101%40AdobeOrg&fbclid=IwAR2XLgTdrHhlvDNwsSd77r8-B3tOXyZ1VH87J7ZtqN0Q-NGT1v19A5p4fos

[LFC]

Sept 9, 2021 16:41:35 GMT andydp said:

Wonder how Fox news is covering this.

(Just checked:  After the usual "Biden is a Bozo" articles, the flight was about the fifth story down. At least this time, it wasn't on the fouth page.) 

Looks like it's sinking fast. Red arrow mine.

[LFC]

The Faux headline in their Afghanistan live updates literally an hour or so before the plane touched down?

ABC, CBS nightly newscasts skip covering Americans trapped in Afghanistan once again

F***ing tools.

[LFC]

The Bush entry into Afghanistan was a bigger cluster-f*** than we realized. Remember Rumsfeld's desperate attempts at a rehab tour some years back? Sorry, Donny. You're going down in history as one of the worst Secretaries of Defense this nation has ever seen and nothing you try to spin is going to change that.

Craig Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War is a hallmark achievement of primary source reporting. It gathers interviews, documents, memos, and cables to tell the story of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan in the words of those in charge of the war, who tried, who failed. This book indicts the mission we sent our men and women to accomplish, in retaliation for what happened 20 years ago. It lays out how our efforts began with patriotic resolve and became a failure in planning, strategy, commitment, and imagination.

An investigative reporter for the Washington Post, Whitlock wrote the book assisted by a team of Post reporters and others, first for a 2019 series at the Post. Much of the material was gathered through lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to access thousands of government documents, creating this comprehensive account of deception and delusion.

“The gold standard are these public records and documents. This is exactly what we’re reaching for—records that haven’t been made public before, that are revelatory. That’s the whole point when you’re an investigative reporter,” Whitlock told The Daily Beast. “You can’t be accused of making stuff up, or using anonymous sources, because it’s right there in black and white.

“We had to fight like hell in court for a few years to get our hands on them, but I think we got a credible and honest set of documents and reflections on what went wrong in the war,” Whitlock said.

The evidence reveals high-level figures at their most unguarded and reflective. Archival memos provide comparisons of what military and political leaders said publicly versus privately at the same time. The sources sprawl from lengthy “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), down to “snowflake” memos dispatched by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—named by Rumsfeld’s staff for the “white-paper notes from the boss that piled up on their desks,” Whitlock wrote.

It’s a bad metaphor; snowflakes melt, Rumsfeld’s memos have remained.

Amidst this journalistic era of anecdotes, anonymity, and opinions masquerading as fact, The Afghanistan Papers reminds readers of the power of reportage built on documented evidence with names attached.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” is a quote not from a junior-enlisted soldier bellyaching to an embedded reporter at some backwater outpost—it is from Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, appointed by President George W. Bush as the Deputy National Security Adviser to help coordinate strategy for Afghanistan and Iraq.

“It’s really much worse than you think,” Lute said in that Lessons Learned interview in 2015. “There is a fundamental gap of understanding.”

As an investigative reporter, Whitlock had seen surprising documents before, but even he was stunned by such stark revelations at such high levels.

“It was the general officers saying it—I’m paraphrasing, but Lute is just going on that we didn’t know what we were doing, that we had a fundamental ignorance,” Whitlock told the Beast. “He sounds like the low-level guys, except he’s in charge. It’s a blistering assessment.”

After successful lawsuits to gain access to the interviews, the material arrived without an “organizing principle,” Whitlock said, requiring careful examination, trying to pick things out as the evidence revealed itself to the Post team.

“After a while, some themes jumped out to me,” Whitlock said. “First was the number of generals who said we didn’t have a strategy, not even bad or poorly thought out—no strategy at all.

By 2006, U.S. Army Col. Christopher Kolenda told the Lessons Learned interviewers in 2016, the Afghan government had “organized into a kleptocracy. The priority of the Afghan government became not good government but sustaining this kleptocracy. It was through sheer naiveté, and maybe carelessness, that we helped to create the system. Kleptocracy is like brain cancer; it’s fatal.”

Whitlock writes, “By allowing corruption to fester, the United States helped destroy the legitimacy of the wobbly Afghan government they were fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs extorting bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce order.”

If Kolenda’s observations are taken at face value—and, granted, he is just one officer interviewed years after the fact—the war was lost by 2006, when the Afghan government became unsustainable.

Whitlock quotes George W. Bush at a press conference on March 1, 2006. “We’re impressed by the progress your country is making,” Bush told Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

[LFC]

A lesson in history and hypocrisy.

The GOP’s Phony Complaints About Afghanistan

[goldenvalley]

Sept 13, 2021 17:39:51 GMT LFC said:

The Bush entry into Afghanistan was a bigger cluster-f*** than we realized. Remember Rumsfeld's desperate attempts at a rehab tour some years back? Sorry, Donny. You're going down in history as one of the worst Secretaries of Defense this nation has ever seen and nothing you try to spin is going to change that.

Craig Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War is a hallmark achievement of primary source reporting. It gathers interviews, documents, memos, and cables to tell the story of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan in the words of those in charge of the war, who tried, who failed. This book indicts the mission we sent our men and women to accomplish, in retaliation for what happened 20 years ago. It lays out how our efforts began with patriotic resolve and became a failure in planning, strategy, commitment, and imagination.

An investigative reporter for the Washington Post, Whitlock wrote the book assisted by a team of Post reporters and others, first for a 2019 series at the Post. Much of the material was gathered through lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to access thousands of government documents, creating this comprehensive account of deception and delusion.

“The gold standard are these public records and documents. This is exactly what we’re reaching for—records that haven’t been made public before, that are revelatory. That’s the whole point when you’re an investigative reporter,” Whitlock told The Daily Beast. “You can’t be accused of making stuff up, or using anonymous sources, because it’s right there in black and white.

“We had to fight like hell in court for a few years to get our hands on them, but I think we got a credible and honest set of documents and reflections on what went wrong in the war,” Whitlock said.

The evidence reveals high-level figures at their most unguarded and reflective. Archival memos provide comparisons of what military and political leaders said publicly versus privately at the same time. The sources sprawl from lengthy “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), down to “snowflake” memos dispatched by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—named by Rumsfeld’s staff for the “white-paper notes from the boss that piled up on their desks,” Whitlock wrote.

It’s a bad metaphor; snowflakes melt, Rumsfeld’s memos have remained.

Amidst this journalistic era of anecdotes, anonymity, and opinions masquerading as fact, The Afghanistan Papers reminds readers of the power of reportage built on documented evidence with names attached.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” is a quote not from a junior-enlisted soldier bellyaching to an embedded reporter at some backwater outpost—it is from Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, appointed by President George W. Bush as the Deputy National Security Adviser to help coordinate strategy for Afghanistan and Iraq.

“It’s really much worse than you think,” Lute said in that Lessons Learned interview in 2015. “There is a fundamental gap of understanding.”

As an investigative reporter, Whitlock had seen surprising documents before, but even he was stunned by such stark revelations at such high levels.

“It was the general officers saying it—I’m paraphrasing, but Lute is just going on that we didn’t know what we were doing, that we had a fundamental ignorance,” Whitlock told the Beast. “He sounds like the low-level guys, except he’s in charge. It’s a blistering assessment.”

After successful lawsuits to gain access to the interviews, the material arrived without an “organizing principle,” Whitlock said, requiring careful examination, trying to pick things out as the evidence revealed itself to the Post team.

“After a while, some themes jumped out to me,” Whitlock said. “First was the number of generals who said we didn’t have a strategy, not even bad or poorly thought out—no strategy at all.

By 2006, U.S. Army Col. Christopher Kolenda told the Lessons Learned interviewers in 2016, the Afghan government had “organized into a kleptocracy. The priority of the Afghan government became not good government but sustaining this kleptocracy. It was through sheer naiveté, and maybe carelessness, that we helped to create the system. Kleptocracy is like brain cancer; it’s fatal.”

Whitlock writes, “By allowing corruption to fester, the United States helped destroy the legitimacy of the wobbly Afghan government they were fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs extorting bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce order.”

If Kolenda’s observations are taken at face value—and, granted, he is just one officer interviewed years after the fact—the war was lost by 2006, when the Afghan government became unsustainable.

Whitlock quotes George W. Bush at a press conference on March 1, 2006. “We’re impressed by the progress your country is making,” Bush told Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

I've always wondered if Karzai was the Chalabi of Afghanistan, slick dudes who told Bush Administration people what they wanted to hear.

And why weren't these military folks who knew there was no strategy and no way to "win" not speaking up.  I get chain of command yada yada but this had far reaching ramifications that needed to be aired.