The Afghanistan Papers: Bipartisan failure at the highest levels of government

In this post-truth era of fake news and false narratives, how do we know what to believe? What if someone told us that federal government officials have been lying to us for 18 years about the war in Afghanistan? What if we were dealt a series of false narratives about the progress of a war that deployed 775,000 troops of which 2,400 lost their lives and over 20,000 were wounded in action. Believe it or not?

In this case, it’s difficult not to believe since it’s coming from a federal government agency that interviewed over 400 officials with a direct role in the conflict. The Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) was charged with investigating fraud in the war, but it uncovered senior U.S. officials “making pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable,” according to the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers.

The Washington Post fought in court for three years to require the federal government to release of over 2,000 pages of interviews and observations that provides the damning evidence of lies, corruption and incompetence. They make clear that officials under presidents Bush, Obama and Trump failed. The presidents themselves did little to bring a sense of mission to why the U.S. was in Afghanistan and if we were employing the strategies that would bring victory. Even the peace process under Trump is stalled.

One official claimed that U.S. officials were “stupefied” when Obama announced his timeline for keeping troops in Afghanistan, thereby giving the Taliban what it needed to lay low until U.S. and NATO troops left.

In a briefing for President Bush on Afghanistan, the name of Gen. Dan McNeil, Commander of the U.S. Forces in Afghanistan at the time, was referenced. Bush had to ask who he was. In one of the interviews, McNeil said he tried to get someone to define what winning meant, but no one could.

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis admitted in his interview that the U.S. was not good at nation-building and we weren’t “paying enough attention as Bush launched the war on Iraq in 2003.” In other words, now we were fighting a war on two fronts while we were still trying to figure out how to win in Afghanistan.

One official interviewed, a forensic accountant who analyzed 3,000 Defense Department contracts worth $106 billion, claimed that 40% of the money ended up in the pockets of insurgents, criminal syndicates or corrupt Afghan officials.” The interviews are replete with tales of corruption with even the Afghan President Hamid Karzai accusing the U.S. of flooding his country with too much money that was bound to wind up in the wrong hands.

Another official pointed out “there was no independent body in Congress or in the Pentagon that asked, ‘what is working and what is not’?” Missing from the Afghanistan war is the Afghan version of the Fulbright hearings during the Vietnam War which helped Americans understand the futility of carrying on the war.

Congress seems to have taken a holiday on the Afghanistan war. Since both Republican and Democratic administrations bear the blame, it’s likely that neither house of Congress wants to air its bipartisan dirty laundry?

A few months ago, I interviewed C.J. Chivers, an award-winning New York Times reporter and an ex-Marine who served in Desert Storm. He wrote a book, “The Fighters,” about those serving in Afghanistan, those who came back and those who didn’t. (You can listen to him discuss his book on the Readers Corner app). It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the ravages of war on returning GI’s and those who did not return, too often long forgotten for their courage in volunteering to serve.

One of the pages introducing the reader to the book quotes an inscription that Chivers read on the wall of the government center in Ramadi, Iraq. It reads, “America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war; America is at the mall.”

That quote speaks volumes about recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where, without the draft to antagonize and mobilize those who object to serving or to the war itself, we go about our business without giving much thought to a war that affects only those volunteers and their families who must live with the deaths or disabilities requiring lifelong treatment.

The Afghanistan Papers bear a resemblance to the Pentagon Papers that brought to light secret U.S. involvement in Vietnam without congressional approval or public knowledge. Looking back on the unpopular Vietnam War and the returning warriors who were denied a soldier’s welcome and respect back home, it causes us to pause in wars like Iraq and Afghanistan and hold our criticism for fear of sounding unpatriotic and not in full support of those who serve.

Pause — ignore may be a better word — is exactly what the media has done with The Afghanistan Papers. According to The New Republic, neither NBC nor ABC covered the investigation in their nightly broadcasts, and coverage in other outlets is scarce. The New Republic claims it’s a case of such an overwhelming indictment of the entire bipartisan U.S. policymaking apparatus that it requires a holistic condemnation of the bureaucrats, generals and presidents from both parties. That, according to The New Republic, is more difficult for the media to handle, especially when there are no hearings to cover.

Whatever the reason, the American people must have a full accounting of the Afghanistan Papers in the media so we do not send one more American to his or her death fighting a war that is not winnable and that has been waged as a war of deceit and incompetence. At the very least, hearings of the kind Fulbright held on Vietnam should be held. The 24,000 lost lives ought to be enough reason to make that case.