Government Lies About Afghanistan

In another deeply discouraging revelation, the Washington Post has obtained documents clearly showing that American officials were, yet again, lying to the American people about the status of the Afghanistan war. WaPo obtained the documents after a three-year legal fight under the Freedom of Information Act. This is Vietnam deja vu all over again. The WaPo writes:

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 They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

“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.

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.

In her 2015 book, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (book review here), Sarah Chayes pointed out that for years American efforts in Afghanistan were grossly ignorant of the situation there. Due to astounding US ignorance, US activities were utterly incompetent. Worse yet, at times State Department attempts at effective US policy were directly undermined by CIA activities that both negated useful action and fomented hatred of the US presence. The CIA secretly supported kleptocrats and brutal warlords, apparently in return for very little. Many ordinary Afghan people came to see the US no better than the brutal kleptocrats and murderers who ran the country.

The WaPo documents corroborate the story that Chayes figured on her own based on her personal experiences in trying to help the Afghan people.

Things like this provide good reasons to distrust the US government and its role in global affairs. This failure is bipartisan and long-running. This is another example of why I have given up on both parties and their incompetent, corrupt, self-centered two-party system. They have learned nothing from history. They afford the American people no trust or respect, keeping us in the dark and feeding us lies and BS. They operate in opacity and squander the people's wealth and blood in service to hiding the embarrassment of their own corruption and incompetence. Three presidents have failed so far, Bush, Obama and Trump. All three have failed to deliver on promises to prevail in Afghanistan.

US experts have argued that the war is lost. The end game is a desperate search for the least worst failure. No politician wants to look bad, so the end will be spun as peace with honor or some other such nonsense. The president's negotiations with the Taliban will lead to either no resolution or failure. That is despite him being self-described as the world's best negotiator.

What next?

So, what should America do? If we withdraw, people who tried to help the US to nation build will be slaughtered and women will go straight back to the dark ages. Under GOP anti-immigrant policy, we cannot allow those illegal immigrants to come here now, even if they did risk their own lives to help us. The Afghan kleptocrats we propped up and funded will quietly leave the country and live in luxury off of their stolen wealth. American taxpayers provided that wealth.

This really is the Vietnam quagmire all over again.