Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Washington Post Prints Afghanistan Papers
The Washington Post printed several stories based on documents it sued the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction to have. The story is reminiscent of the Pentagon Papers published to reveal the idiocies of the Vietnam War a generation or so ago. As in that case, the US government had no idea what it was doing, spent a lot of money doing it, and in the end, accomplished nothing. Moveover, it shows that the political and military leadership misled the American people almost from the beginning.
The WaPo explains, "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 They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.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."
The fact that the US government was clueless about what it was doing was obvious almost from the inception of the war. After the Al Qaeda murders of September 11, 2001, the terror group could not be allowed to continue training in Afghanistan, and a US-led force took on the terrorists. However, the Bush administration went further and took out the Taliban government as well replacing it with a government drawn from the Northern Alliance, antagonistic to the Taliban. Then, the Bush administration engaged in the great mistake. It sought to build a nation in Afghanistan.
"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."
Since the people were poor, the solution to the Busheviks was clear -- money. The billions spent were wasted because Afghanistan could not absorb the firehose of cash that Washington turned on it. "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." But the money kept coming. That brought corruption.
Ambassadord Ryan Crocker said, "Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption. 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."
The brass spoke endlessly of progress, but there was no way to know if there were any. "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."
This journal backed the attack on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Destroying their ability to cause the West further harm was right. The idea that the US could turn Afghanistan into a nation with a central, democratic government was ridiculous, and this journal said so at the time. A trillion or two dollars and several thousand deaths later, Washington has admitted the same. Now, the question is what next? One fears more of the same.
© Copyright 2019 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
|
|
|
