The 18-year farce

A bombshell report in The Washington Post has revealed that top US officials held sharply negative views of America’s invasion of Afghanistan and had bleak assessments of the prospects for success. This goes counter to everything the American public — and the world — has been told for the past 18 years. The revelations came after a three-year legal battle over a freedom of information request led to the release of over 2,000 pages of interviews with over 400 officials on the war in Afghanistan. Apart from lying about the level of success in the war, the interviews reveal there was not even consensus on the war’s objectives, let alone how to end it. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing,” said Lt Gen (retd) Douglas Lute in a 2015 “lessons learned” interview. He served as an adviser on Afghanistan under presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama. The US didn’t even know who they were supposed to be fighting. “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” said Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary for the first six years of the war. Follow-up stories reveal even more.

The Obama administration’s support for Karzai despite knowing that he rigged his re-election also worried US officials. American Peter Galbraith, a former deputy UN envoy to Afghanistan, complained that the UN and the US were helping cover up the extent of election fraud. But the most telling nuggets came from former Bush national security adviser Stephen Hadley and former UN adviser Barnett Rubin. Hadley said the US underinvested in the civilian tools and capabilities of diplomacy, economic and social development, democratic governance, infrastructure development, and civilian institution-building that are essential for any post-conflict stabilisation effort to succeed. Rubin said, “A major mistake we made was treating the Taliban the same as al-Qaeda,” adding, “Key Taliban leaders were interested in giving the new system a chance, but we didn’t give them a chance.” 

Published in The Express Tribune, December 12^th, 2019.

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