The
Afghanistan Fiasco and the Decline and Fall of the American Military
PHILIP GIRALDI • DECEMBER 19, 2019
120229-A-8536E-817 U.S. Army
soldiers prepare to conduct security checks near the Pakistan border at Combat
Outpost Dand Patan in Afghanistan's Paktya province on Feb. 29, 2012. The
soldiers are paratroopers assigned to Company A, 3rd Battalion, 509th Infantry
Regiment. DoD photo by Staff Sgt. Jason Epperson, U.S. Army. (Released)
A
devastating investigative report was published in the Washington
Post on December 9th. Dubbed the “Afghanistan Papers” in a
nod to the Vietnam War’s famous “Pentagon Papers,” the report relied on
thousands of documents to similarly expose how the US government at the
presidential level across three administrations, acting in collaboration with
the military brass and civilian bureaucracy, deliberately and systematically
lied repeatedly to the public and media about the situation in Afghanistan.
Officials from the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations have all surged
additional troops into Afghanistan while also regularly overstating the
“success” that the United States was attaining in stabilizing and democratizing
the country. While they were lying, the senior officers and government
officials understood clearly that the war was, in fact, unwinnable.
The
story should have been featured all across the US as Afghanistan continues to
kill Americans and much larger numbers of Afghans while also draining billions
of dollars from the United States Treasury, but the mainstream media was
largely unresponsive, preferring to cover the impeachment saga. Rather more
responsive were the families of Army Chief Warrant Officer Second Class David
C. Knadle, 33, of Tarrant, Texas, and Chief Warrant Officer Second Class Kirk
T. Fuchigami Jr., 25, of Keaau, Hawaii. Both were killed in a helicopter crash
on November 20th in Afghanistan’s Logar province while
assisting troops on the ground, according to a Pentagon press
release. They were participating in what was characteristically dubbed Operation
Freedom’s Sentinel. Both men were assigned to the 1st Battalion, 227th Aviation
Regiment, 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division in Fort Hood, Texas.
The Taliban took credit for the downing of the chopper, but the Army is still
investigating the cause.
Knadle
and Fuchigami are only the most recent of the more than 2,400 American service
members who have been killed in Afghanistan since October 2001, together with
20,589 wounded and an estimated 110,000 Afghan dead. In the wake of the Post’s
report, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1974, told a CNN reporter that
the Pentagon and Afghanistan Papers exposed the same governmental dysfunction:
“The presidents and the generals had a pretty realistic view of what they were
up against, which they did not want to admit to the American people.”
The
New Republic observes how “The documents are an
indictment not only of one aspect of American foreign policy, but also
of the US’s entire policymaking apparatus. They reveal a bipartisan
consensus to lie about what was actually happening in Afghanistan: chronic
waste and chronic corruption, one ill-conceived development scheme after
another, resulting in a near-unmitigated failure to bring peace and prosperity
to the country. Both parties had reason to engage in the cover-up. For the Bush
administration, Afghanistan was a key component in the war on terror. For the
Obama administration, Afghanistan was the ‘good war’ that stood in contrast to
the nightmare in Iraq.”
The
Afghan War’s true costs have never been precisely calculated, though they
certainly exceed $1 trillion and counting. The documents relied upon for
the Postreport include more than 2,000 pages of confidential
interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, including soldiers
and diplomats, as well as civilian aid workers and Afghan officials. Many of
the interviews were initially carried out by the Special Inspector General for
Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The Post divided the
interviews and supporting documentation into subject categories that
demonstrate how the situation in Afghanistan began to deteriorate as soon as
the United States followed up on its rapid invasion with a plan for nation
building. Resorting to the usual American expedient, the occupiers flooded the
country with money, which meant that the only thing blooming on the thin soil
was corruption, apart from the poppies that have made Afghanistan the world’s
leading supplier of opium.
One
contractor who was involved in nation building described how he was required to
spend $3 million daily for projects in an Afghan district roughly the size of a
US county. He asked a visiting congressman if he could be authorized to spend
that much money in the US “[The lawmaker] said hell no. ‘Well,
sir, that’s what you just obligated us to spend and I’m doing it for
communities that live in mud huts with no windows.’ ”
In
another interview the report cites Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the White
House Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, who told the
interviewers in 2015. “We were devoid of a fundamental
understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” later adding “What are we trying to do here? We
didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
Army
Colonel Bob Crowley, who served in Kabul in 2013-4, described how at
headquarters “Every data point was altered to
present the best picture possible,” adding also how “Surveys, for instance, were totally
unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right
and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
Part
of the problem with Afghanistan was the rotation of American soldiers in and
then out after one year or less, just as they were learning about the country
and the problems they faced. It has led to the joke that the United States has
not fought an eighteen-year war in Afghanistan: it has fought a one-year war
eighteen times.
The Post investigative
report coincides with an interesting deconstruction of the US military and how it
operates. David Swanson of World BEYOND War provides a lengthy
review of West Point Professor Tim Bakken’s new book The Cost of
Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, and Failure in the US Military. Per
Swanson, the book “traces a path of corruption, barbarism, violence, and
unaccountability that makes its way from the United States’ military academies
(West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs) to the top ranks of the US military
and US governmental policy, and from there into a broader US culture that, in
turn, supports the subculture of the military and its leaders. The US Congress
and presidents have ceded tremendous power to generals. The State Department
and even the US Institute of Peace are subservient to the military. The
corporate media and the public help maintain this arrangement with their
eagerness to denounce anyone who opposes the generals. Even opposing giving
free weapons to Ukraine is now quasi-treasonous.”
Bakken
even disputes the widely held view that the military academies have high
academic standards. He describes how the “system” pays to get potential
athletes and accepts students nominated by congressmen commensurate with
donations made to fund re-election campaigns. Swanson sums it up by observing
how the academies offer “a community college-level education only with more
hazing, violence, and tamping down of curiosity. West Point takes soldiers and
declares them to be professors, which works roughly as well as declaring them
to be relief workers or nation builders or peace keepers. The school parks ambulances
nearby in preparation for violent rituals. Boxing is a required subject. Women
are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted at the three military
academies than at other US universities.”
Bakken
concludes that appreciating the fundamental structural flaws in the US armed
forces “leads to a clearer understanding of the deficiencies in the military
and how America can lose wars.” In fact, he does not even seek to identify a
war that the United States has won since World War 2 in spite of the country
being nearly constantly engaged in conflict.
Together
the Bakken book and the Afghanistan Papers reveal just how much the American
people have been brainwashed by their leaders into believing a perpetual
warfare national narrative that is more fiction than fact. Donald Trump may
have actually appreciated that the voters were tired of the wars and was
elected on that basis, but he has completely failed to deliver on his promise
to retrench. It suggests that America will remain in Afghanistan for the foreseeable
future and the inevitable next war, wherever it might be, will be another
failure, no matter who is elected in 2020.
(Republished
from Strategic Culture Foundation by permission of
author or representative)
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