From Bush to Biden: The other U.S. Afghanistan “war”
By: Karl Suyat
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 chartered an unfamiliar terrain for the empire that was the United States. The thick smoke that wafted from a World Trade Center which went up in flames became the incentive for George W. Bush and his war cheerleaders to instigate a war against those who were behind the strike at the empire’s heartland.
The Bush government’s premise when it waged what it dubbed as a “global war on terror” was both nationalist and imperialist: an act of avenging the projected glory and supremacy of Washington, and a bold venture which is essentially a declaration that the United States, true to its imperial roots, is bent on acting as a global messiah.
Operation Enduring Freedom was Bush’s irrational, incoherent, and inhumane response to the tragedy of September 11. Airstrikes had begun to strike at the suspected headquarters of Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist organization, helmed by a shadowy Taliban regime that the U.S. accused of protecting Bin Laden’s coterie. It was a brutal and sweeping military campaign that succeeded in driving out the Taliban, only to give back its footing on the people of Afghanistan with the American forces’ own human rights abuses, mishandling, and failed promises.
Contributing writer Jon Schwarz provided the fitting description for how the Bush regime, in particular his leading neoconservative warmonger Donald Rumsfeld, saw the September 11: “[Rumsfeld] saw the deaths of thousands of Americans as a wonderful opportunity to do whatever the George W. Bush administration wanted.” And what an opportunity it was for the war criminal regime.
The American foreign policy is no stranger to disastrous efforts in a war-laced foreign policy. For one, in the American war launched against the socialist Vietcong movement in Vietnam, the atrocious actions that U.S. forces carried out in a raid that became the infamous My Lai massacre — where 300 civilians, including children, were slaughtered in one fell swoop — drove the Vietnamese people into supporting the Vietcong’s valiant resistance against American intervention.
It was the same mistake that Bush and Rumsfeld’s war in Afghanistan had done: the fledgling Taliban movement earned momentum among the Afghan people when U.S. soldiers dispatched in Afghanistan spearheaded a horrifying campaign of extrajudicial killings and indiscriminate bombing, until Joseph “Joe” Biden was compelled to parade a hasty and messy exist.
It was nowhere near any success, even by the metric of imperialist achievement — except if the metric of success was in leaving an infuriating blood trail.
Successive American administrations, however, were feeding the American public with the exact opposite of the reality, hiding irrefutable evidence of failure to prop up the fiction that the United States was winning over a war that, in reality, the U.S. is actually losing to a point of no return.
It was a complex web of lies, a secret history of a merciless war, that led to this existential moment in the post-U.S. Afghanistan when research associate and writer Caroline Orr Bueno was forced to contemplate: “Are Biden’s critics really upset about the disastrous situation in Afghanistan, or are they just angry that he exposed it?”
“THE U.S. WAR in Afghanistan has been defined by lies.”
Two American scholars with an academic pedigree on American foreign policy and Middle Eastern affairs, Daniel Bessner and Derek Davison, wrote a bold indictment of the Bush-led war after the Biden administration’s botched exit plan had unravelled: the war was founded on falsehood. But it was not a mere 2021 observation.
A series of interviews were prepared by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the leading American oversight authority on “Afghanistan reconstruction.” SIGAR’s main task was to scrutinize every possible waste or fraud in war-related expenditures. At this point, the war that George W. Bush’s administration instigated in Afghanistan had been raging on for close to 20 years. The set of interviews sourced by SIGAR were as revealing to another hideous American war as the 47 volumes of Robert S. McNamara’s study — which was able to predict and foresee the impending U.S. defeat in Vietnam.
This time, the bombshell fell off the gates of The Washington Post.
The Post was no stranger to these revelations. While Sheehan was writing the series of Times reports documenting the rudiments of the McNamara study, the Post had followed their lead and obtained volumes of the study from Ellsberg through Post journalist Ben Bagdikian, who had close ties with Ellsberg. By the third installation of the Times’ series on the study, the U.S. Department of Justice was forced to furnish an injunction order against the further publication of the study’s contents. It was too late. The Post had caught up on the Papers already, and started to publish its own series of reports under Post executive editor Ben Bradlee’s meticulous watch.
This confluence led to the renowned New York Times Co. v. United States case, the first act of media resistance against Richard M. Nixon’s endeavors to silence the free press. Struggling to maintain the two papers’ right to publish under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment clause was not in vain — on June 30, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6–3 to justify the twin newspapers’ publication of pages lifted off the Pentagon Papers.
In 2019, the Post faced a new divulgence into another looming American defeat in another hideous, unpopular American war. SIGAR’s “federal project” produced 2,000 pages of “previously unpublished notes of interviews” with people who have had direct participation in the Afghanistan war, from American generals to Afghan officials. Unlike in 1971, when Ellsberg leaked the documents to the press, the Post acquired the totality of documents from the SIGAR’s 2,000-page files through a Freedom of Information Act request that it had won in court.
It was called the Afghanistan Papers.
AS WITH THE Pentagon Papers, the Afghanistan Papers shattered the false proposition that American presidents, military officials, and diplomats who embody America’s ravaging foreign policy sold: that Washington is close to prevailing in Afghanistan. It was never the case. The costs of the Afghanistan war were nowhere near trivial: almost 241,000 killed, including 71,344 civilians and 2,300 American soldiers killed and 20,589 wounded out of close to 800,000 soldiers sent to wage war in Afghanistan. American financial institutions, in collusion with the State Department, spent nearly $1 trillion for the war (with the exclusion of other expenses, such as those of the CIA) — an expenditure of American taxpayers’ money that was scandalously huge for a shameful imperialist venture.
In the words of retired Navy SEAL officer and former White House staffer Jeffrey Eggers, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”
Post journalist Craig Whitlock, who wrote about the documents, explained that not only false claims had marred the general American opinion about the war in Afghanistan: “They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.” Former senior counterinsurgency adviser and Army colonel Bob Crowley drove the point further when he said that “[e]very data point was altered to present the best picture possible.” It was a deliberate attempt to mislead and deceive the American public to justify a losing war.
The Post journalist makes a clear case for the Papers: “The Lessons Learned interviews contradict years of public statements by presidents, generals and diplomats. The interviews make clear that officials issued rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hid unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. Several of those interviewed described explicit efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public and a culture of willful ignorance, where bad news and critiques were unwelcome.”
The Papers discussed more about the debunking of official narratives about the war, and not certain military strategy or operation — unlike Pentagon. But it was nevertheless revealing about the longest U.S. war in history.
Whitlock elaborated: “At the outset, for instance, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had a clear, stated objective — to retaliate against al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Yet the interviews show that as the war dragged on, the goals and mission kept changing and a lack of faith in the U.S. strategy took root inside the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department.”
Bush’s official claim in Operation Enduring Freedom back in October 2001 was simple: to “get Bin Laden.” It expanded into different variations: defeating the Taliban, “nation-building,” installing democracy, restoring peace and order, even “counter-terrorism,” thereby befuddling the field for those who were pawned into the war.
Another revelation from the Papers dwelled upon the “confusion” about who the enemy was. Was it Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, or both? Could it be the rising Islamic State, the foreign jihadists flocking Kabul, or even the scattered warlords who were on the CIA’s payroll? “As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn’t tell friend from foe,” Whitlock concluded.
Rumsfeld himself, the war’s architect, confided in a 2003 snowflake memorandum: “We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.” Was not this the same intelligence deficiency that U.S. officials led to the 9/11 tragedy? No wonder, American military strategy in Afghanistan had become indiscriminate violence against enemies that had become a scarecrow, which gave birth to wholesale bombings and killings even of innocent Afghan civilians.
Investigative journalist Azmat Khan provided a more incisive deception that was also at the heart of the Papers: “Now, shortly after the bombing campaign started, the Taliban fell fairly quickly. And by April of 2002, it was very apparent to the Americans that they couldn’t just sweep in, overthrow a regime, and walk away. You needed to build a new government.”
In the American playbook of imperialism, this is a no-brainer. In fact, most imperialist projects that the United States has committed have been anchored on the skewed idea of reconstructing a nation after the war’s smoke has cleared. But all three U.S. imperialism Chief Executives that the Papers have covered — Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump — publicly vowed to do otherwise. Even in that, the U.S. both failed and lied to the American public.
SIGAR’s revelations hinted at this: the United States squandered $133 billion for a “grandiose nation-building” project in Afghanistan. It also flooded Kabul with an enormous amount of “aid” in the name of “rehabilitation.”
Whitlock expounds: “During the peak of the fighting, from 2009 to 2012, U.S. lawmakers and military commanders believed the more they spent on schools, bridges, canals and other civil-works projects, the faster security would improve. Aid workers told government interviewers it was a colossal misjudgment, akin to pumping kerosene on a dying campfire just to keep the flame alive.” It was the same narrative that Washington sold to the public.
The grandiose “nation-building” ticket, however, was a ruse — a smokescreen, to conceal the waste and corruption that afflicted both the U.S. funding and “aid” to the American-backed Afghan regime that it purportedly established to prevent a Taliban resurgence. The plunder with impunity that infected the funding for the Afghanistan reconstruction was not disclosed to the American public because, while Washington claims a no-tolerance stance on graft, as the Papers revealed, “[U.S. officials] they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers — allies of Washington — plundered with impunity.”
The corruption, the lucrative venture that the Afghanistan war had morphed into, was too sick and revealing of the true nature of the war that no less than U.S. Army colonel Christopher Kolenda himself repulsed with a staunch tone of condemnation: “I like to use a cancer analogy. Petty corruption is like skin cancer; there are ways to deal with it and you’ll probably be just fine. Corruption within the ministries, higher level, is like colon cancer; it’s worse, but if you catch it in time, you’re probably ok. Kleptocracy, however, is like brain cancer; it’s fatal.”
YET THE BIGGEST lie about Afghanistan was the insistence among American officials, high-ranking officers, and pundits that “victory was around the corner.”
On September 4, 2013, former U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley claimed an elaborate and bare-faced lie in public: “[The Afghan] army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day. And I think that’s an important story to be told across the board.” It was a lie. U.S. officials knew it from ten miles away.
In Vietnam, the central U.S. strategy was direct military intervention in the combat fields until 1975. In Afghanistan, the Obama administration decided to take a drastic shift into “support,” as an auxiliary to the U.S. “reconstruction” efforts in Afghanistan. “Year after year,” Whitlock wrote, “U.S. generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central plank of their strategy: to train a robust Afghan army and national police force that can defend the country without foreign help.” But in private, what U.S. officials and generals who were overseeing the protracted war in Afghanistan betrayed the public lie: Afghan security forces “were incompetent, unmotivated, and rife with deserters.”
In the words of an unidentified U.S. soldier and member of the American military’s Special Forces team, the Afghan army was “awful — the bottom of the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel.”
Along this line of deception, three American presidents had all tried to peddle the lie that pushing through with the war was the best option, that the war was “winnable” and U.S. forces were out to claim victory. Until the truth came out. The 2,000 pages of interviews and documents that were classified by the U.S. State Department and other high-ranking American officials contained the grim and indisputable realities of the Afghanistan war that Bush, Obama, and Trump had all willingly hid to cheer the war on and mislead an inquisitive, but nevertheless complacent, American public.
Thus, when it dawned on the U.S. Empire that the war was nowhere near any tangible or palpable sense of achievement for the U.S. interventionist project, it was too late. Cracks have started to reveal themselves. By 2019, the Trump administration was forced to talk with the Taliban and negotiate a slow, gradual withdrawal. Biden had no choice but to execute the last leg of the embassy and military withdrawal from Kabul.
Until August 16, 2021.
SOURCES:
[1] BBC. “The Vietnam War.” BBC.Com, n.d. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z89hg82/revision/5
[2] Bennis, Phyllis. “War Criminal Found Dead at 88.” The Nation, 1 July 2021. Retrieved from: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/donald-rumsfeld-obit/
[3] Bessner, Daniel and Davison, Derek. “The Afghanistan War Was Founded on Lies. Some People Are Still Telling Them.” The New Republic, 17 Aug 2021. Retrieved from: https://newrepublic.com/article/163291/afghanistan-war-founded-lies-people-still-telling-them
[4] Bueno, Caroline Orr. “Biden Exposed the Ugly Reality of the Afghanistan War.” The New Republic, 24 Aug 2021. Retrieved from: https://newrepublic.com/article/163346/biden-backlash-ugly-reality-afghanistan-war
[5] Emamdjomeh, Armand, Shapiro, Leslie, and Whitlock, Craig. “A SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR.” The Washington Post, 9 Dec. 2019. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/documents-database/
[6] Guillen, Angelo Karlo T. “AFGHANISTAN: A CASE STUDY IN AMERICAN AGGRESSION [Part 4].” Panay Today, 16 August 2021. Retrieved from: https://panaytoday.net/2021/08/16/afghanistan-a-case-study-in-american-aggression-part-4/
[7] Palmer, Anna and Sherman, Jake. “POLITICO Playbook: America’s longest war finally has its Pentagon Papers moment.” POLITICO, 9 Dec 2019. Retrieved from: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2019/12/09/americas-longest-war-finally-has-its-pentagon-papers-moment-487846
[8] Schwarz, Jon. “Farewell to Donald Rumsfeld, Dreary War Criminal.” The Intercept, 1 July 2021. Retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2021/06/30/donald-rumsfeld-death-iraq-war/
[9] TIME. “‘Major American Failure.’ A Political Scientist on Why the U.S. Lost in Afghanistan.” TIME, 18 August 2021. Retrieved from: https://time.com/6091183/afghanistan-war-failure-interview/
[10] Vox. “How the US created a disaster in Afghanistan.” Vox, 26 August 2021. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sueJoTVqxw&t=3s
[11] Whitlock, Craig. “AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH.” The Washington Post, 9 Dec 2019. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/?nid
