Afghanistan Papers The Washington Post
Mar 26th 2021
The Afghanistan Papers were published on Dec 9th, 2019, just when the Covid 19 pandemic was starting. The war in Afghanistan, the longest US war, did not go away, the pandemic (and for the US, the election) just demanded all our attention.
Now that the deadline of May 1st for US troop withdrawal from the country is fast approaching, and the politicians are once again debating: should we leave or should we stay, it is good to visit these documents and articles again to get some background for the debates.
(Disclosure, I spent a few years in Afghanistan, in civilian projects, in 2010-12, so I am either biased or informed on this.)
The war has not gone according to plan, then again wars rarely do; it was not short and decisive, and the troops did not come home for Christmas. It took nearly ten years to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden, whose capture, along with defeating Al-Qaeda, was one of the reasons for the invasion. And the war is still going on.
So, the US government tried to figure out what went wrong. The Washington Post:
“As part of a government project to understand what went wrong, a federal agency interviewed more than 400 people who had a direct role in the conflict. In those interviews, generals, ambassadors, diplomats and other insiders offered firsthand accounts of the mistakes that have prolonged the war.
… more than 2,000 pages of “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction
… reveal there was no consensus on the war’s objectives, let alone how to end the conflict.”
These interviews and documents do not paint a pretty picture of the war effort, and reveal, among other things that, the US, and the West in general did not, and most likely still do not, understand Afghanistan. It is an underdeveloped war ravaged multi-ethnic Muslim country, with basically a tribal society. And this war was not the first war in the country during the recent past. (I’ll write more about this in a separate piece.)
Also, the counter-insurgency lessons learned in Vietnam and other places, were lost from the institutional memory of the US military structure, and had to be learned again, with blood.
How can you fight a counter-insurgency war in Vietnam, then fight with the insurgents against the Soviets in, of all places, Afghanistan, and then forget all the lessons learned? The collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-balancing of the US military for the new world order probably played a part, but it seems that the military organisation / bureaucracy is really efficient at losing institutional memory. There have to be many counter-insurgency and lessons-learned manuals in the US military, did no-one read them, or are they gathering dust on some shelf, and didn’t anyone read Sun Tzu’s Art of War?
And, what is glaringly obvious is that the military is an efficient, but a really blunt tool which should be used only with great care and forethought. It is really good for certain tasks, and totally counter-productive for some.
And then there is, of course, Opium, with a capital O. I will write a lot more on this , but just a basic point here; the West was focused on eradication, when poppy farming was a lifeline for impoverished farmers. To put it bluntly, eradicating a poor farmer’s cash crop does not make you his friend.
Here are links to six pieces that highlight the findings in the investigation. The Afghanistan Papers page has links to many interviews, a lot more data, and you can browse the documents by category, but you might as well start by reading these.
Spin - At war with the truth
Strategy - Stranded without a strategy
Nation-building - Built to fail
Corruption - Consumed by corruption
Security - Unguarded nation
Opium - Overwhelmed by opium
And last but not least, the Veterans. Reaction to The Afghanistan Papers from those who experienced the war on the ground.
We Were Right
