The Afghanistan Papers

The preliminaries

• Within three days of 9/11, Congress passed legislation authorizing the Bush administration to go to war against al-Qaeda and any country that harbored the network. With incredibly strong public backing, there was no need to lie or spin to justify war.
  • At the beginning, the mission was straightforward: defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11.
  • Military strategists are taught never to start a war without having a plan to end it. But neither Bush nor anyone else publicly articulated how or when military operations in Afghanistan would end.
    • For instance, it was unclear whether the U.S. wanted to punish the Taliban or simply remove it from power.
• As time went on, leaders at the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department began to make false assurances to hide setbacks.

The Beginning | 2001 – 2002

• In spring 2002, the U.S. and its allies toppled the Taliban-led government in less than six weeks and killed or captured hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters. 
• Bush said that the U.S. focused on eliminating terrorist cells in other countries, but many officials worried that this would lead to the U.S. military getting stuck in the Middle East without a clear exit strategy.
  • They were worried that Afghanistan would fall into chaos, and if they sent more U.S. forces, they would be saddled with the country’s many problems.
  • Then Bush promised that the U.S. would transform Afghanistan–an impoverished country that had been traumatized by warfare for nearly 30 years.
    • The U.S. made the hubristic mistake of assuming that the conflict had ended successfully, even though Bin Laden was on the loose, so people started paying attention to Iraq instead.
• The Bush administration also made the mistake of blurring the line between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The two groups shared an extremist religious ideology and a mutual support pact, but pursued different goals.
  • Al-Qaeda was primarily a network of Arabs, not Afghans, with a global presence and outlook.
    • For instance, bin Laden spent his days plotting to overthrow the Saudi royal family and other Middle East autocrats allied with the U.S.
  • The Taliban was local. Most of its followers belonged to the Pashtun tribes within Afghanistan. The Taliban protected bin Laden and built a strong alliance with al-Qaeda, but Afghans did not play a role in 9/11.
• By 2002, very few al-Qaeda members remained in Afghanistan and the U.S. was left fighting the Taliban. For the next two decades, the U.S. waged a war against people who had nothing to do with 9/11.
• In Afghanistan, there was no real national government authority and nothing to work with in terms of government infrastructure like the military, police, civil service, etc.
  • The U.S. pushed the Afghans to consolidate power in the hands of their president (so the U.S. could install a ruler, Hamid Karzai). The decision to put so much power in the hands of one man was ultimately disastrous.
    • Additionally, this rigid system conflicted with Afghan tradition: a mix of decentralized authority and tribal customs.

The Great Distraction | 2003 – 2005

• Lulled into overconfidence by its rapid defeat of the Taliban, the Bush administration thought it could handle two wars at once, adding a new one in Iraq in 2003.
  • During summer 2003, the U.S. military rapidly lost its grip on the war in Iraq. Troops continued to die, even after Bush declared victory, and nobody could find the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein supposedly had been hiding.
  • But the Bush administration continued to reassure the public that everything was under control.
  • In Afghanistan, a popular rebellion was taking root, and there was no U.S. guiding military doctrine to rely upon, as none of them really had much training in counterinsurgency. 
• In 2003, the U.S. began to attempt to create, from scratch, a 70,000-man indigenous army to protect the weak Afghan government from an array of enemies: the Taliban, al-Qaeda, other insurgents, and renegade warlords.
  • Year after year, the U.S. government reassured the American public that the project was working. 
  • But, the project flopped from the start–Washington wildly underestimated how much the Afghan security forces would cost, how long it would take to train them, and how many people would be needed to battle the rising insurgency.
  • Instead of determining the strengths of the Afghans as a fighting people and building upon that, the Pentagon designed an Afghan army to match the U.S. military, even though almost all recruits had been deprived of a basic education.

The Taliban Comes Back | 2006-2008

• During this time, many U.S. officials mistakenly viewed the war as a peacekeeping and reconstruction mission. Those on the ground tried to explain that fighting had intensified and the Taliban had gained strength.
  • But the Bush administration suppressed the internal warnings and put a shine on the war, saying that things were going so well that the Pentagon would soon bring home thousands of troops.
• The warlords
  • Afghan warlords had been the backbone of Afghanistan’s politics for decades, often divided and warring. When in power, the Taliban controlled several factions of warlords.
  • After driving the Taliban from power, the Bush administration wanted the warlords to support the new Afghan government, so it swallowed concerns about their human-rights records. But Washington’s tolerance of their behavior alienated and angered many Afghans who saw the warlords as the root of the country’s problems.
    • Importantly, a substantial number of Afghans viewed the Taliban as less evil than the warlords, crediting them for their consistent, if harsh, administration of justice.
• Opium
  • Afghan poppies, the plant from which opium is extracted to make heroin, had dominated global drug markets for decades, and production reached new heights after the U.S.-led invasion, as farmers took advantage of the Taliban’s collapse and produced as much of the crop as they could.
    • By 2006, poppies powered ⅓ of Afghanistan’s entire economic output and supplied 80-90% of the world’s opium.
    • The drug boom paralleled the Taliban’s revival, so the Bush administration believed that narcotics revenue was helping the insurgency, so pushed for an opium crackdown.
      • Although officials hailed the effort as an enormous success, it backfired in every regard.
    • Specifically, many farmers blamed Americans for meddling with their crop, and it became clear that Afghan officials were pocketing much of the profit from the new opium rules and using it to punish their competitors.
    • Ultimately, instead of building confidence in the Afghan government and starving the Taliban of revenue, this campaign helped transform poppy-growing areas into a lethal stronghold for the insurgency.

Obama’s overreach | 2009 – 2010

• The Obama administration promised the U.S. would not get bogged down in Afghanistan, but 496 troops died in 2010.
• In December 2009, Obama openly opposed a drawn-out nation-building project, but the U.S. kept signing one blank check after another.
• The cornerstone of the administration’s counterinsurgency strategy was to strengthen the Afghan government and economy.
  • But there were two big problems: 18 months was not much time for the counterinsurgency strategy to succeed. And, the Afghan government still had no presence in much of the country.
  • Essentially, the U.S. government thought that doing things like providing electricity to communities that had no concept of what to do with it would convince them to abandon the Taliban.
• The government spent an exorbitant amount of money and officials from other agencies were appalled by the waste and mismanagement. It was “a dark pit of endless money for anything with no accountability.”
  • The U.S also fueled corruption by dispensing vast sums of money to protect and rebuild Afghanistan with no regard for the consequences.
• During this time, the Afghan government excused U.S. and NATO forces for conducting hundreds of intrusive night raids on Afghan homes as part of their insurgent-hunting operations.
  • One military officer said that mistakes were so common that some Army units were focused on consequence management, paying Afghans for damages and condolence payments.
  • U.S. officials also backed off and looked away while thievery and corruption became more entrenched than ever, tolerating the worst offenders just because they were allies.

Things fall apart | 2011 – 2016

• Bin Laden’s death appeared to mark a genuine turning point in the war, because as long as he remained free, no president could realistically consider ending U.S. military operations. But after 10 long years, he was finally dead.
• Obama decided to start bringing troops home. But despite the upbeat rhetoric, his war strategy was failing.
  • The U.S. and its allies couldn’t fix several fundamental problems. The Afghan security forces showed little sign they could ever safeguard their own country, Taliban leaders waited in Pakistan, while corruption deepend its grip on the Afghan government, alienating and angering the people.
  • This is what Bin Laden had hoped for: to lure the U.S. into an unwinnable conflict that would deplete its national treasury and diminish its global influence.
• The Obama administration touted statistics that distorted what was really happening on the ground. The Bush administration had done the same, but Obama staffers in the White House, Pentagon, and the State Department took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading and false.
• While this happened and the U.S. withdrew troops, the Taliban revived its forces and spread into new territory.

Stalemate | 2017 – 2021

• Like Obama, Trump acknowledged that Americans were “weary of war.” Trump vowed to not just end the war but to win it.
  • But his Cabinet and the Pentagon told him it would be cataclysmic to withdraw abruptly. If the Afghan government collapsed or the war spilled over to nuclear-armed Pakistan, he would own the problem. 
  • Trump decided to send more troops and expand military operations.
• He called the generals “dopes and babies.”
• Eventually, air strikes intensified, wounding a record number of civilians–during his first three years in office, U.S. strikes killed over 1,000 civilians a year, double the annual average of the previous decade–this helped the insurgents recruit.
• In 2019, Trump ordered the State Department and the Pentagon to engage in formal negotiations with the Taliban to find a way to remove U.S. troops without making it seem like a humiliating defeat.
  • That is, a lasting military defeat of the Taliban was highly unlikely, and a political settlement between the Afghan government and the insurgents was the only feasible way to end the war.

Biden | 2021

• Biden faced the same dilemma – how to win an unwinnable war?
  • If he backtracked on Trump’s agreements, then U.S. forces would be there indefinitely to prop up an ineffectual Afghan government.
• On April 14, 2021, he announced his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021.
• Unlike his predecessors, he gave a sobering assessment–he said the U.S. achieved its original objective by destroying al-Qaeda’s stronghold in Afghanistan, but the U.S. stance for staying was becoming increasingly unclear.

• Detailed explanations of military missions into Afghanistan, their successes and failures, and how the U.S. explained them afterwards
• How Pakistan reacted to the tense political climate, with the Taliban and al-Qaeda hiding on Pakistan’s border
• Descriptions of attack after attack on not just U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, but also violence that U.S. troops perpetrated upon the civilian Afghan population
• How Obama and his administration created an election debacle for Karzai, resulting in him stealing an election and the Afghan people viewing him as corrupt
• Insider attacks by Taliban members who had infiltrated the Afghan army