The Afghanistan Papers: At War With the Truth
By Craig Whitlock, The Washington Post
09 December 19
U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and
they knew it.
A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post
reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in
Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they
knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.
The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures
of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000
pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a
direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan
officials.
The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of
those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The
Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a
three-year legal battle.
In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of
what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly
two decades of warfare.
With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up
complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and
backbiting.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know
what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the
White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told
government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We
didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400
lives lost,”Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on
bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department.
“Who will say this was in vain?”
Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many
repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action,
according to Defense Department figures.
The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief
the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how
three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their
military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in
Afghanistan.
With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become
public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were
fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to
remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.
The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail
runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a
dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.
The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much
it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.
Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for
International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and
$978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta
Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War
Project at Brown University.
Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and
the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for
wounded veterans.
“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?”
Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama,
told government interviewers. He added, “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.”
The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S.
presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after
year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth
fighting.
Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the
U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. 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.
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,”Bob
Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to
U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers.
“Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything
we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews,
acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have
constantly been lied to.”
The interviews are the byproduct of a project led by Sopko’s agency, the Office
of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Known as
SIGAR, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and
fraud in the war zone.
In 2014, at Sopko’s direction, SIGAR departed from its usual mission of
performing audits and launched a side venture. Titled “Lessons Learned,” the
$11 million project was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the
United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country
or tried to rebuild a shattered one.
The Lessons Learned staff interviewed more than 600 people with firsthand
experience in the war. Most were Americans, but SIGAR analysts also traveled to
London, Brussels and Berlin to interview NATO allies. In addition, they
interviewed about 20 Afghan officials, discussing reconstruction and
development programs.
Drawing partly on the interviews, as well as other government records and
statistics, SIGAR has published seven Lessons Learned reports since 2016 that
highlight problems in Afghanistan and recommend changes to stabilize the
country.
But the reports, written in dense bureaucratic prose and focused on an alphabet
soup of government initiatives, left out the harshest and most frank criticisms
from the interviews.
“We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were
not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing
Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition
troops and civilians,” read the introduction to one report released in May
2018.
The reports also omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people who
were interviewed for the project. While a few officials agreed to speak on the
record to SIGAR, the agency said it promised anonymity to everyone else it
interviewed to avoid controversy over politically sensitive matters.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, The Post began seeking Lessons Learned
interview records in August 2016. SIGAR refused, arguing that the documents
were privileged and that the public had no right to see them.
The Post had to sue SIGAR in federal court — twice — to compel it to release
the documents.
The agency eventually disclosed more than 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and
transcripts from 428 of the interviews, as well as several audio recordings.
The documents identify 62 of the people who were interviewed, but SIGAR blacked
out the names of 366 others. In legal briefs, the agency contended that those
individuals should be seen as whistleblowers and informants who might face
humiliation, harassment, retaliation or physical harm if their names became
public.
By cross-referencing dates and other details from the documents, The Post
independently identified 33 other people who were interviewed, including
several former ambassadors, generals and White House officials.
The Post has asked a federal judge to force SIGAR to disclose the names of
everyone else interviewed, arguing that the public has a right to know which
officials criticized the war and asserted that the government had misled the
American people. The Post also argued the officials were not whistleblowers or
informants, because they were not interviewed as part of an investigation.
A decision by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington
has been pending since late September.
The Post is publishing the documents now, instead of waiting for a final
ruling, to inform the public while the Trump administration is negotiating with
the Taliban and considering whether to withdraw the 13,000 U.S. troops who
remain in Afghanistan.
The Post attempted to contact for comment everyone whom it was able to identify
as having given an interview to SIGAR. Their responses are compiled in a
separate article.
Sopko, the inspector general, told The Post that he did not suppress the
blistering criticisms and doubts about the war that officials raised in the
Lessons Learned interviews. He said it took his office three years to release
the records because he has a small staff and because other federal agencies had
to review the documents to prevent government secrets from being disclosed.
“We didn’t sit on it,” he said. “We’re firm believers in openness and
transparency, but we’ve got to follow the law. . . . I think of any inspector
general, I’ve probably been the most forthcoming on information.”
The interview records are raw and unedited, and SIGAR’s Lessons Learned staff
did not stitch them into a unified narrative. But they are packed with tough
judgments from people who shaped or carried out U.S. policy in Afghanistan.
“We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich,” James Dobbins, a former
senior U.S. diplomat who served as a special envoy to Afghanistan under Bush
and Obama, told government interviewers. “We don’t invade authoritarian
countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them
peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”
To augment the Lessons Learned interviews, The Post obtained hundreds of pages
of previously classified memos about the Afghan war that were dictated by
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006.
Dubbed “snowflakes” by Rumsfeld and his staff, the memos are brief instructions
or comments that the Pentagon boss dictated to his underlings, often several
times a day.
Rumsfeld made a select number of his snowflakes public in 2011, posting them
online in conjunction with his memoir, “Known and Unknown.” But most of his
snowflake collection — an estimated 59,000 pages — remained secret.
In 2017, in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive,
a nonprofit research institute based at George Washington University, the
Defense Department began reviewing and releasing the remainder of Rumsfeld’s
snowflakes on a rolling basis. The Archive shared them with The Post.
Together, the SIGAR interviews and the Rumsfeld memos pertaining to Afghanistan
constitute a secret history of the war and an unsparing appraisal of 18 years
of conflict.
Worded in Rumsfeld’s brusque style, many of the snowflakes foreshadow problems
that continue to haunt the U.S. military more than a decade later.
“I may be impatient. In fact I know I’m a bit impatient,” Rumsfeld wrote in one
memo to several generals and senior aides. “We are never going to get the U.S.
military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something
going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to
leave.”
“Help!” he wrote.
The memo was dated April 17, 2002 — six months after the war started.
What they said in public April 17, 2002
“The history of military conflict in Afghanistan [has] been one of initial
success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We’re not
going to repeat that mistake.”
— President George W. Bush, in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute
With their forthright descriptions of how the United States became stuck in a
faraway war, as well as the government's determination to conceal them from the
public, the cache of Lessons Learned interviews broadly resembles the Pentagon
Papers, the Defense Department's top-secret history of the Vietnam War.
When they were leaked in 1971, the Pentagon Papers caused a sensation by
revealing the government had long misled the public about how the United States
came to be embroiled in Vietnam.
Bound into 47 volumes, the 7,000-page study was based entirely on internal
government documents — diplomatic cables, decision-making memos, intelligence
reports. To preserve secrecy, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara issued an order
prohibiting the authors from interviewing anyone.
SIGAR’s Lessons Learned project faced no such restrictions. Staffers carried
out the interviews between 2014 and 2018, mostly with officials who served
during the Bush and Obama years.
About 30 of the interview records are transcribed, word-for-word accounts. The
rest are typed summaries of conversations: pages of notes and quotes from
people with different vantage points in the conflict, from provincial outposts
to the highest circles of power.
Some of the interviews are inexplicably short. The interview record with John
Allen, the Marine general who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan
from 2011 to 2013, consists of five paragraphs.
In contrast, other influential figures, including former U.S. ambassador Ryan
Crocker, sat for two interviews that yielded 95 transcribed pages.
Unlike the Pentagon Papers, none of the Lessons Learned documents were
originally classified as a government secret. Once The Post pushed to make them
public, however, other federal agencies intervened and classified some material
after the fact.
The State Department, for instance, asserted that releasing portions of certain
interviews could jeopardize negotiations with the Taliban to end the war. The
Defense Department and Drug Enforcement Administration also classified some
interview excerpts.
The Lessons Learned interviews contain few revelations about military
operations. But running throughout are torrents of criticism that refute the
official narrative of the war, from its earliest days through the start of the
Trump administration.
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.
Fundamental disagreements went unresolved. Some U.S. officials wanted to use
the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Others wanted to transform Afghan
culture and elevate women’s rights. Still others wanted to reshape the regional
balance of power among Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia.
“With the AfPak strategy there was a present under the Christmas tree for
everyone,” an unidentified U.S. official told government interviewers in 2015.
“By the time you were finished you had so many priorities and aspirations it
was like no strategy at all.”
The Lessons Learned interviews also reveal how U.S. military commanders
struggled to articulate who they were fighting, let alone why.
Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary?
What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists,
let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll? According to the documents, the
U.S. government never settled on an answer.
As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn’t tell friend from foe.
“They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the
good guys and bad guys live,” an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special
Forces team told government interviewers in 2017. “It took several
conversations for them to understand that I did not have that information in my
hands. At first, they just kept asking: ‘But who are the bad guys, where are
they?’ ”
The view wasn’t any clearer from the Pentagon.
“I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” Rumsfeld complained in a
Sept. 8, 2003, snowflake. “We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.”
What they said in public Dec. 1, 2009
“The days of providing a blank check are over. . . . It must be clear that
Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security and that America
has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan.”
— President Barack Obama, in a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West
Point, N.Y.
As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the same
thing. They would avoid falling into the trap of "nation-building" in
Afghanistan.
On that score, the presidents failed miserably. The United States has allocated
more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan — more than it spent, adjusted
for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan
after World War II.
The Lessons Learned interviews show the grandiose nation-building project was
marred from the start.
U.S. officials tried to create — from scratch — a democratic government in
Kabul modeled after their own in Washington. It was a foreign concept to the
Afghans, who were accustomed to tribalism, monarchism, communism and Islamic
law.
“Our policy was to create a strong central government which was idiotic because
Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government,” an
unidentified former State Department official told government interviewers in
2015. “The timeframe for creating a strong central government is 100 years,
which we didn’t have.”
Meanwhile, the United States flooded the fragile country with far more aid than
it could possibly absorb.
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.
One unnamed executive with the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID), guessed that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill: “We lost
objectivity. We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason.”
Many aid workers blamed Congress for what they saw as a mindless rush to spend.
One unidentified contractor told government interviewers he was expected to
dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly the
size of a U.S. county. He once asked a visiting congressman whether the
lawmaker could responsibly spend that kind of money back home: “He said hell
no. ‘Well, sir, that’s what you just obligated us to spend and I’m doing it for
communities that live in mud huts with no windows.’ ”
The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to
historic levels of corruption.
In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the
Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other
way while Afghan power brokers — allies of Washington — plundered with
impunity.
Christopher Kolenda, an Army colonel who deployed to Afghanistan several times
and advised three U.S. generals in charge of the war, said that the Afghan
government led by President Hamid Karzai had “self-organized into a
kleptocracy”by 2006 — and that U.S. officials failed to recognize the lethal
threat it posed to their strategy.
“I like to use a cancer analogy,” Kolenda told government interviewers. “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.”
By allowing corruption to fester, U.S. officials told interviewers, they helped
destroy the popular legitimacy of the wobbly Afghan government they were
fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs and bureaucrats extorting
bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce
order.
“Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been
the development of mass corruption,” Crocker, who served as the top U.S.
diplomat in Kabul in 2002 and again from 2011 to 2012, told government
interviewers. He added, “Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there,
it’s somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it.”
What they said in public Sept. 4, 2013
“This 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.”
— Then-Army Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley, praising the Afghan security forces during
a press briefing from Kabul. Milley is now a four-star general and chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Year after year, 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.
In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described
the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters.
They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries — paid by U.S.
taxpayers — for tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.”
None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off,
much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan
security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have
called unsustainable.
One unidentified U.S. soldier said Special Forces teams “hated” the Afghan
police whom they trained and worked with, calling them “awful — the bottom of
the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel.”
A U.S. military officer estimated that one-third of police recruits were “drug
addicts or Taliban.” Yet another called them “stealing fools” who looted so
much fuel from U.S. bases that they perpetually smelled of gasoline.
“Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane,” an
unnamed senior USAID official told government interviewers.
Meanwhile, as U.S. hopes for the Afghan security forces failed to materialize,
Afghanistan became the world’s leading source of a growing scourge: opium.
The United States has spent about $9 billion to fight the problem over the past
18 years, but Afghan farmers are cultivating more opium poppies than ever. Last
year, Afghanistan was responsible for 82 percent of global opium production,
according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
In the Lessons Learned interviews, former officials said almost everything they
did to constrain opium farming backfired.
“We stated that our goal is to establish a ‘flourishing market economy,’ ” said
Douglas Lute, the White House’s Afghan war czar from 2007 to 2013. “I thought
we should have specified a flourishing drug trade — this is the only part of
the market that’s working.”
From the beginning, Washington never really figured out how to incorporate a
war on drugs into its war against al-Qaeda. By 2006, U.S. officials feared that
narco-traffickers had become stronger than the Afghan government and that money
from the drug trade was powering the insurgency.
No single agency or country was in charge of the Afghan drug strategy for the
entirety of the war, so the State Department, the DEA, the U.S. military, NATO
allies and the Afghan government butted heads constantly.
“It was a dog’s breakfast with no chance of working,” an unnamed former senior
British official told government interviewers.
The agencies and allies made things worse by embracing a dysfunctional muddle
of programs, according to the interviews.
At first, Afghan poppy farmers were paid by the British to destroy their crops
— which only encouraged them to grow more the next season. Later, the U.S.
government eradicated poppy fields without compensation — which only infuriated
farmers and encouraged them to side with the Taliban.
“It was sad to see so many people behave so stupidly,” one U.S. official told
government interviewers.
What they said in public Sept. 8, 2008
“Are we losing this war? Absolutely no way. Can the enemy win it? Absolutely no
way.”
— Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division,
in a news briefing from Afghanistan
The specter of Vietnam has hovered over Afghanistan from the start.
On Oct. 11, 2001, a few days after the United States started bombing the
Taliban, a reporter asked Bush: “Can you avoid being drawn into a Vietnam-like
quagmire in Afghanistan?”
“We learned some very important lessons in Vietnam,” Bush replied confidently.
“People often ask me, ‘How long will this last?’ This particular battlefront
will last as long as it takes to bring al-Qaeda to justice. It may happen
tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two. But we
will prevail.”
In those early days, other U.S. leaders mocked the notion that the nightmare of
Vietnam might repeat itself in Afghanistan.
“All together now — quagmire!” Rumsfeld joked at a news conference on Nov. 27,
2001.
But throughout the Afghan war, documents show that U.S. military officials have
resorted to an old tactic from Vietnam — manipulating public opinion.
In news conferences and other public appearances, those in charge of the war
have followed the same talking points for 18 years. No matter how the war is
going — and especially when it is going badly — they emphasize how they are
making progress.
For example, some snowflakes that Rumsfeld released with his memoir show he had
received a string of unusually dire warnings from the war zone in 2006.
After returning from a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan, Barry McCaffrey, a
retired Army general, reported the Taliban had made an impressive comeback and
predicted that “we will encounter some very unpleasant surprises in the coming
24 months.”
“The Afghan national leadership are collectively terrified that we will tip-toe
out of Afghanistan in the coming few years — leaving NATO holding the bag — and
the whole thing will collapse again into mayhem,” McCaffrey wrote in June 2006.
Two months later, Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, gave the
Pentagon chief a classified, 40-page report loaded with more bad news. It said
“enormous popular discontent is building” against the Afghan government because
of its corruption and incompetence. It also said that the Taliban was growing
stronger, thanks to support from Pakistan, a U.S. ally.
Yet with Rumsfeld’s personal blessing, the Pentagon buried the bleak warnings
and told the public a very different story.
In October 2006, Rumsfeld’s speechwriters delivered a paper titled
“Afghanistan: Five Years Later.” Brimming with optimism, it highlighted more
than 50 promising facts and figures, from the number of Afghan women trained in
“improved poultry management” (more than 19,000) to the “average speed on most
roads” (up 300 percent).
“Five years on, there is a multitude of good news,” it read. “While it has
become fashionable in some circles to call Afghanistan a forgotten war, or to
say the United States has lost its focus, the facts belie the myths.”
Rumsfeld thought it was brilliant.
“This paper,” he wrote in a memo, “is an excellent piece. How do we use it?
Should it be an article? An Op-ed piece? A handout? A press briefing? All of
the above? I think it ought to get it to a lot of people.”
His staffers made sure it did. They circulated a version to reporters and
posted it on Pentagon websites.
Since then, U.S. generals have almost always preached that the war is
progressing well, no matter the reality on the battlefield.
“We’re making some steady progress,” Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of
the 101st Airborne Division, told reporters in September 2008, even as he and
other U.S. commanders in Kabul were urgently requesting reinforcements to cope
with a rising tide of Taliban fighters.
Two years later, as the casualty rate among U.S. and NATO troops climbed to
another high, Army Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez held a news conference in Kabul.
“First, we are steadily making deliberate progress,” he said.
In March 2011, during congressional hearings, skeptical lawmakers pelted Army
Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan,
with doubts that the U.S. strategy was working.
“The past eight months have seen important but hard-fought progress,” Petraeus
responded.
One year later, during a visit to Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
stuck to the same script — even though he had just personally dodged a suicide
attack.
“The campaign, as I’ve pointed out before, I think has made significant
progress,” Panetta told reporters.
In July 2016, after a surge in Taliban attacks on major cities, Army Gen. John
W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan at the time,
repeated the refrain.
“We are seeing some progress,” he told reporters.
What they said in public March 27, 2009
“Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course. Instead, we will set clear
metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable.”
— Obama, in remarks from the White House
During Vietnam, U.S. military commanders relied on dubious measurements to
persuade Americans that they were winning.
Most notoriously, the Pentagon highlighted “body counts,” or the number of
enemy fighters killed, and inflated the figures as a measurement of success.
In Afghanistan, with occasional exceptions, the U.S. military has generally
avoided publicizing body counts. But the Lessons Learned interviews contain
numerous admissions that the government routinely touted statistics that
officials knew were distorted, spurious or downright false.
A person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said
there was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce
figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard
evidence to the contrary.
“It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers
trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an
accurate picture,” the senior NSC official told government interviewers in
2016. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war.”
Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the senior NSC official
said, the White House and Pentagon would spin them to the point of absurdity.
Suicide bombings in Kabul were portrayed as a sign of the Taliban’s
desperation, that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat.
Meanwhile, a rise in U.S. troop deaths was cited as proof that American forces
were taking the fight to the enemy.
“It was their explanations,” the senior NSC official said. “For example,
attacks are getting worse? ‘That’s because there are more targets for them to
fire at, so more attacks are a false indicator of instability.’ Then, three
months later, attacks are still getting worse? ‘It’s because the Taliban are
getting desperate, so it’s actually an indicator that we’re winning.’ ”
“And this went on and on for two reasons,” the senior NSC official said, “to
make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops and
resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the
country to deteriorate.”
In other field reports sent up the chain of command, military officers and
diplomats took the same line. Regardless of conditions on the ground, they
claimed they were making progress.
“From the ambassadors down to the low level, [they all say] we are doing a
great job,” Michael Flynn, a retired three-star Army general, told government
interviewers in 2015. “Really? So if we are doing such a great job, why does it
feel like we are losing?”
Upon arrival in Afghanistan, U.S. Army brigade and battalion commanders were
given the same basic mission: to protect the population and defeat the enemy,
according to Flynn, who served multiple tours in Afghanistan as an intelligence
officer.
“So they all went in for whatever their rotation was, nine months or six
months, and were given that mission, accepted that mission and executed that
mission,” said Flynn, who later briefly served as Trump’s national security
adviser, lost his job in a scandal and was convicted of lying to the FBI. “Then
they all said, when they left, they accomplished that mission. Every single
commander. Not one commander is going to leave Afghanistan . . . and say, ‘You
know what, we didn’t accomplish our mission.’ ”
He added: “So the next guy that shows up finds it [their area] screwed up . . .
and then they come back and go, ‘Man this is really bad.’ ”
Bob Crowley, the retired Army colonel who served as a counterinsurgency adviser
in Afghanistan in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers that “truth was
rarely welcome”at military headquarters in Kabul.
“Bad news was often stifled,”he said. “There was more freedom to share bad news
if it was small — we’re running over kids with our MRAPs [armored vehicles] —
because those things could be changed with policy directives. But when we tried
to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption
of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn’t welcome.”
John Garofano, a Naval War College strategist who advised Marines in Helmand
province in 2011, said military officials in the field devoted an inordinate
amount of resources to churning out color-coded charts that heralded positive
results.
“They had a really expensive machine that would print the really large pieces
of paper like in a print shop,”he told government interviewers. “There would be
a caveat that these are not actually scientific figures, or this is not a
scientific process behind this.”
But Garofano said nobody dared to question whether the charts and numbers were
credible or meaningful.
“There was not a willingness to answer questions such as, what is the meaning
of this number of schools that you have built? How has that progressed you
towards your goal?”he said. “How do you show this as evidence of success and
not just evidence of effort or evidence of just doing a good thing?”
Other senior officials said they placed great importance on one statistic in
particular, albeit one the U.S. government rarely likes to discuss in public.
“I do think the key benchmark is the one I’ve suggested, which is how many
Afghans are getting killed,” James Dobbins, the former U.S. diplomat, told a
Senate panel in 2009. “If the number’s going up, you’re losing. If the number’s
going down, you’re winning. It’s as simple as that.”
Last year, 3,804 Afghan civilians were killed in the war, according to the
United Nations.
That is the most in one year since the United Nations began tracking casualties
a decade ago.
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