The Larger Lessons of Afghanistan
Part One
Today I need to take a break from wall-to-wall COVID.
Magicians have a term for an action taken to deliberately distract an audience's attention while the magician is performing some sleight of hand: misdirection.
Is it paranoia to occasionally wonder if the whole COVID pandemic is being used as deliberate misdirection, to distract us from noticing an economic system steadily degenerating into neo-feudalism? If so, maybe it's important to not give too much attention to the endless drama of COVID.
As a Canadian, I am constantly amazed by the shallowness of what passes for political analysis in the United States, and astonished by how quickly big stories simply disappear. (Let me be clear, I am not saying things are any better in Canada, only that I have less ability to look at my own country with the eyes of an outsider.)
To me, what was really striking about American media coverage of America's botched exit from Afghanistan, was the media's reluctance to cop to the full scale of that disaster. Yes, Joe Biden offered us a Master Class in how NOT to end the forced occupation of a foreign country. But that particular fiasco was really only the final scene in a long-running disaster movie.
For 20 years, Americans had been told the U.S. was working to create a "functioning, secular democracy" with a "modern, well-equipped military" in Afghanistan. Which collapsed in twelve days. Isn't that the real story?
I kept waiting for the American media to really dig into that much larger catastrophe. But they have moved on now. The Afghan debacle is yesterday's news. Which is why I feel the need to write about it, because I think there are things to be learned in what happened.
When I think back on what Americans (and Canadians) were told about what was happening in Afghanistan, in retrospect it was like watching a bad re-make of the movie Groundhog Day. Year after year, it was the same set of soundbites. 'Great progress' was being made in 'nation-building'. The new, 'modern' Afghan military was 'almost ready' to take over defence of the country.
Since the US exit from Afghanistan, a number of former State Department officials, as well as members of the US military who once served in Afghanistan, have admitted that, as far back as 2004, it was pretty clear to those on the ground in Afghanistan that 'nation-building' was an abject failure. Even back then, the Afghan Government was a corrupt kleptocracy with minimal public support, and the Afghan 'army' had a great many fictitious soldiers on the payroll. They have only reinforced the damning patterns exposed in The Afghanistan Papers, which I’ll talk about in Part Two of this series.
Those whistle-blowers tell us that by 2010 pretty much everyone posted to Afghanistan recognized that the official narrative was so far from reality as to be almost laughable. But, with the US having invested hundreds of American lives and hundreds of billions of American dollars in the fiction America could re-make Afghanistan into a mini-me America, it was politically untenable to admit that all those lives and all that money had been wasted.
The decision was made to pretend the Universe was unfolding as it should in Afghanistan. It was the geopolitical equivalent of the story of the Emperor's New Clothes. I suspect that many members of the US Congress and Senate understood full well what was happening, and played along anyways.
I'm sure it must be infuriating for Americans to realize that America had been failing in Afghanistan for 16 years or more, but whistleblowers are only telling us about it now.
Why didn't they tell us sooner? I suspect those belated whistleblowers might give a two-word answer to that question: Chelsea Manning.
The documents that whistleblower Chelsea - then Preston - Manning released via Wikileaks in April, 2010, directly challenged the sunny narrative the US Government had promulgated about post-war Iraq. Though Manning was particularly criticized for releasing a video that featured American helicopter pilots laughing while they gunned down reporters from the Reuters News Agency, it was that brutally gritty video, more than anything else, that caused most Americans to question the official US Government story line on Iraq.
For blowing the whistle on what was arguably a war crime, Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Though Manning was pardoned after seven years, a very clear message was sent to any potential American whistle-blower: tell the truth about US foreign policy and you will go to jail for a very long time. What happened to Manning was not an isolated incident. For all his talk of the need for government 'transparency,' Barack Obama has jailed more whistleblowers than any previous US President.
Between the US State Department and the US military, there were tens of thousands of Americans in Afghanistan who could have itemized in detail the discrepancies between the official Government narrative on Afghanistan, and the reality. I can hardly blame them for remaining silent when the US Government was making it abundantly clear that the reward for such truth-telling would be prison.
I think a good argument can be made that it is very expensive to keep whistleblowers in jail. If even one of the thousands of Americans who were in a position to document the falsity of the official US Government narrative in Afghanistan had felt safe to become a whistleblower in 2011, or even 2016, admitting the truth of the US situation in Afghanistan and getting out then would have saved hundreds of American lives, and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.
If Americans aren't happy to be learning the truth so long after the fact, changes must be made. It is obvious that current legal protections for whistleblowers are inadequate. The laws that protect whistleblowers need strengthening, and some teeth.
Even with new laws in place, I suspect that whistleblowers will remain reluctant to come forward. The only way to really make clear that things have changed would be bold action. Drop the charges against Julian Assange. Pardon Edward Snowden. Give Chelsea Manning an official apology and re-instate her military pension.
I understand why governments hate whistleblowers. I understand why the military is gung-ho to lock whistleblowers up and throw away the key. But whistleblowers perform an essential role in any democracy. It is very expensive to try to live without them.
Part Two of this series can be found here.