Al-Etihad, UAE, December 14
Last Monday, The Washington Post published an important investigation of what it described as the “secret history” of the American war in Afghanistan. In classified testimonies that were collected as a part of an internal government review, hundreds of US officials and experts acknowledged the confusion surrounding the 18-year war that still has no end in sight. They expressed their despair at the failure of the American strategy to confront the Taliban and their anger at the massive corruption that American aid facilitated within the Afghan government. Many of them question why thousands of Americans had to lose their lives and why billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money under both Republican and Democratic administrations had to be wasted, while the crisis in Afghanistan continues to unfold. Gen. Douglas Lott, assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser in the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, testified in an interview with government investigators: “We had no basic understanding about Afghanistan and we didn’t know what we were doing there. … We had no idea what we were doing.” According to the Washington Post report, US officials also acknowledged that they misleadingly issued “rosy statements” about their progress in Afghanistan despite knowing that these statements were false. “Every piece of information was being modified to paint the best possible picture,” said Bob Crowley, a retired colonel who served as a counterinsurgency adviser at the US military headquarters in Kabul between 2013 and 2014. Interestingly, this Washington Post report was released only after a lengthy legal battle with the federal authorities. The final report consists of more than 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and transcripts of officials and experts involved in the Afghanistan war effort. Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post pointed out that “most of the sources were talking under the assumption that their statements would never be published so American officials acknowledged that their strategies for fighting the war were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted huge sums of money in trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern country.” The findings of The Washington Post only confirm what some observers already know. Katie Kaiser, director of politics at the progressive Win Without War group, claimed that there was little doubt that the distinctive legacy of the Afghanistan war would be the incredible loss of life and the waste of taxpayer dollars in a country whose elites have been corrupted. But in Washington, it seems, there is still a range of political elites and members of Congress defending the US military’s indefinite stay in Afghanistan, asserting that a withdrawal will simply lead to a greater catastrophe. This report, however, confirms that the very same politicians who have so vigorously been defending the war are also the ones secretly complaining about it behind closed doors. –Ishan Tharoor (translated by Asaf Zilberfarb)