The Larger Lessons of Afghanistan
Part Two
Officials on the ground in Afghanistan were aware as early as 2005 that the projects of "nation-building" and a building a "modern Afghan military" were already failing. It only got worse thereafter. (To anyone who would dispute this statement, let me remind you that when the American military finally left, it took all of twelve days for both the Government and the military of Afghanistan to collapse.)
How do we know the problems were longstanding? Though the US Government did an excellent job of bullying potential whistle-blowers into silence in Afghanistan, they were not able to prevent the release of information from hundreds of what might be called inadvertent whistle-blowers.
John Sopko was the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, assigned to audit and evaluate US efforts in Afghanistan. In 2014, he initiated a special research project named Lessons Learned. Over the next four years, his office interviewed 600 people involved in all aspects of America's involvement in Afghanistan. The Washington Post sued for release of those interview transcripts under a Freedom of Information filing, and was given access to transcripts of 423 of those interviews.
Those interviews explored in depth a vast range of problems. Those problems were detailed in excruciating detail in a six-part series by Craig Whitlock in the Washington Post in December of 2019 (The Afghanistan Papers has since been released as a full-length book.)
This raises the obvious question: If the Afghan project was already failing in 2005, how is it that it took 16 years for the US to finally cut its losses and leave?
One piece of the problem was that the military very carefully cherry-picked the data they reported, in order to make it appear the situation in Afghanistan was much rosier than it was. (Craig Whitlock reports on this issue at length.)
Another issue was there was a reluctance by much of the media to talk plainly about the known problems in Afghanistan. To do so was seen as 'not supporting our men and women in uniform.'
Politicians also seemed reluctant to push for an end to the war, again perhaps not wanting to "demoralize" American soldiers serving there.
Ron Paul was willing to speak up in 2012.
So was his son Rand Paul in 2017:
But they were the exceptions, and the mainstream media did its best to ignore them. (Which, I'm sure is completely unrelated to the huge advertising budgets of American arms manufacturers.)
When you look at what was done to Tulsi Gabbard, perhaps the reluctance of most politicians to speak up was understandable.
Tulsi Gabbard ran to be the Democratic candidate for U.S. President in 2020, on a platform that called for ending America's endless foreign wars. She said the best way to truly support American troops was to never leave them in some foreign hell-hole without a damn good reason.
First, Hillary Clinton claimed Gabbard was a Russian asset. (Clinton also accused Green Party President and long-time pacifist Jill Stein of being a Russian asset, equally without a shred of evidence.)
Tulsi Gabbard was a decorated Iraq War veteran, a volunteer with the Hawaii National Guard, and served on the Congressional Armed Services Committee. I think it would be fair to say Gabbard was one of the last people in America you could credibly accuse of being insufficiently patriotic. What Hillary said was an ugly McCarthyism directed against the most unlikely of targets. But most of the mainstream media in America did not rebuke Hillary for guttersnipe politics.
Then NBC made the charge that Russian trolls were supporting Tulsi's campaign, a false charge that quickly unravelled. (Never let the truth get in the way of a good smear!)
Armaments manufacturers are big contributors to the election campaigns of American politicians. Maybe that partly explains why the views of most US politicians didn't reflect the views of their constituents re the war in Afghanistan. (In a 2020 Yougov poll, 76% of Americans favored ending the war in Afghanistan.)
Which brings us to what may be the second larger lesson to be learned.
Craig Whitlock's painstaking research clearly shows that the American people were denied accurate information about what was really happening in Afghanistan for decades.
What's worse, in 21st Century America, though a clear majority of Americans wanted US troops out of Afghanistan, it seems you can't talk about that idea without being ignored, or worse still, accused of being a Russian asset.
It seems distinctly possible that advertising dollars and campaign contributions from arms manufacturers have had an out-sized influence on how the Afghan war was discussed in Washington, and in U.S. media.
Rather than simply moving on, I believe a thorough investigation of these issues is in order.
Part One of the series can be found here. Part Three can be found here.