[photo: Jim Huylebroek, New York Times]
“On the afternoon of October 9, 2009, President Barack Obama
met with his top generals, Cabinet officials, and his vice president to hash
out strategy for the war in Afghanistan. Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David
Petraeus, along with much of the military brass, were pushing for a troop
increase of 40,000 to 85,000 in Afghanistan. Advocates for an expanded war
found their most nettlesome opponent in Joe Biden.
“‘As I read your report, you’re saying that we have about a
year,’ Biden said to McChrystal. ‘And that our success relies upon having a
reliable, a strong partner in governance to make this work?’
“McChrystal said yes, that was the case. Biden turned to
Karl Eikenberry, a former general who was now ambassador to Afghanistan. ‘In
your estimation, can we, can that be achieved in the next year?’
“Eikenberry told Biden no, it was not possible. ‘Right now,
we’re dealing with an extraordinarily corrupt government,’ he said.
“Biden cut in: ‘If the government’s a criminal syndicate a
year from now, how will troops make a difference?’ he asked.
“Woodward’s next lines are the most telling: ‘No one
recorded an answer in their notes.’
“Again, Biden asked: ‘If the government doesn’t improve and
if you get the troops, in a year, what would be the impact?’
“Richard Holbrooke, special envoy for Afghanistan and
Pakistan, chimed in with a reality that was largely kept from the U.S. public. ‘Our
presence is the corrupting force,’ Holbrooke said. It’s like pouring water into
a bucket with a hole in it.’”
—Ryan Grim, “Biden’s basic question in a 2009 White House
meeting exposed the folly of the Afghanistan war,” The Intercept, Sep 2
2021
*
“In the name of preventing
deaths from political violence at home, the United States has fueled a
generation of political violence abroad—some 46,000 civilian deaths and 69,000
national military and police deaths in Afghanistan, at least 185,000 civilian
deaths and at least 45,000 national military and police in Iraq. However,
support for the Afghanistan withdrawal has equally reflected a belief in the ‘smarter’
use of US military might. This entails raining death and destruction on
terrorist networks (and civilian bystanders) through air wars and drone strikes
while redirecting personnel and material towards Russia and China. When Fareed
Zakaria frames a US commitment to Afghanistan as ‘imperial overextension,’ his
problem seems to be with the overextension, not the imperial presence.
Andrew Leber, “Losing the wars,”
Fellow Travelers, Sep 12, 2021
*
“Ghani
spent his formative years in the United States as both a student and professor.
His children still live in the States; in fact, his son is a top aide to Sen.
Elizabeth Warren, and his daughter-in-law worked for now-Transportation
Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. Ironically, Ghani was often
at odds with the basic principles and values the United States were trying to
promote in Afghanistan. His government and the strongmen linked to him pursued
abuses with impunity. The targeted killing in November 2020 of my brother Yama
Siawash, who was a prominent journalist and a staunch critic of Ghani and his
strongmen, highlights this impunity. Yama was consistently threatened by
Ghani’s supporters as he engaged in heated debates with senior officials on
live television, seeking to hold his government to account through his
journalism. The car bomb, which killed my brother, occurred in a vehicle owned
by the Afghan government and was parked in the government’s parking lot in
Kabul’s green zone, a heavily-surveilled premises with footage accessible to
the U.S. government via the American army’s surveillance blimps.”
— Baktash
Siawash, “Ashraf Ghani was an American mistake with a high price for Afghans,” Responsible
Statecraft, Sep 14, 2021
*
“We are shown tragic scenes from the Kabul airport on a loop and
not the countless images of twenty years of suffering inflicted on the Afghan
people by the war: night raids, scared faces, families torn apart, houses
crushed by airstrike, children without limbs. Biden made sure to make it clear
that the indefinite ‘war on Terror’ is here to stay. He clarified how the war
is to be continued: ‘We have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which
means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the
ground—or very few, if needed.’ The world witnessed the unfolding of this ‘new’
strategy already shortly before American troops left Afghanistan when US drone
strikes in retaliation of the ISIS-K attack killed ten civilians, including
seven children. Perhaps to the American public the phrase ‘over-the-horizon
capabilities’ sounds like a new strategy. To us Middle Easterners, they are
very well known.”
— Mir Ali Hosseini, “Why we
shouldn’t congratulate Biden on Afghanistan,” Counterpunch, Sep 10, 2021
*
“After having spent roughly half [my adult life] as an
employee of the American Intelligence Community and roughly the other half in
exile, I know better than most how often the agencies get things wrong. I know,
too, how the collection and analysis of intelligence can inform the production
of disinformation and propaganda for use as frequently against America’s allies
as its enemies—and sometimes against its own citizens. Yet even given that
knowledge, I still struggle to accept the sheer magnitude and speed of the
change from an America that sought to define itself by a calculated and
performative respect for dissent to a security state whose militarized police
demand obedience, drawing their guns and issuing the order for total submission
now heard in every city: ‘Stop resisting.’”
—Edward Snowden, “A hell of our own making,” Continuing
Ed, Aug 17, 2021
*
“The Afghanistan Papers’
greatest value is to provide an impressionistic portrait of the generational worldview
and shaping illusions of an American elite—Democrats and Republicans alike on
both sides of the civilian-military divide—who responded to a long public
record of defeats, blunders, and missed opportunities in Afghanistan by
doubling down. Numerous U.S. officials privately acknowledged believing that
the war was unwinnable. ‘Your job was not to win; it was to not lose,’ one
former member of the National Security Council staff said in 2014.
“‘There was constant pressure
from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop
surge of 2009 to 2011 was working despite hard evidence to the contrary,”
recalls a National Security Council official quoted by the [Washington] Post.
‘Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,’ said Army
colonel and senior counterinsurgency adviser Bob Crowley in a 2016 interview.
“The blob was a self-protecting
vehicle for the ambitions of an American ruling class cut off from the
consequences of its own policies. Evidence of failure often led to bitter
intra-class recriminations along partisan lines, but it did not shake the
broadly shared faith in this class’s right to rule by grand design.”
—Jacob Siegel, “Data-driven defeat:
Information versus interests in Afghanistan,” American Affairs, Summer
2020 [a year before the collapse]
*
“It stretches credulity to
believe a nation that spent over $500 billion during 2001–13 on intelligence and
$527 billion more during the next seven years was so utterly inept that it had
no idea of Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban for over two decades.
Logically, only two conclusions are possible: either the famed capability of U.S.
intelligence is a hoax, or, finding itself mired in a faulty strategy in
Afghanistan, Washington was left with no option but to ignore what Pakistan had
been doing.”
— N.C. Asthanam, “Pakistan’s
support of the Taliban is one of the greatest fears of covert intelligence,” The
Wire, Sep 5, 2021
*
“It was a dozen years into the
war when I visited Camp Shorabak [where] we were taken to see NATO’s mission to
train Afghan soldiers in the use of the new and alien U.S. weaponry that
Congress had compelled them to adopt under the influence of the US military-industrial
complex. The Afghan officers, unarmed, sat on the ground. The British
instructor, with a pistol at his side, stood at the whiteboard, entirely
reliant on an unarmed Afghan translator. In each doorway stood a Georgian
soldier in full body armour, holding an automatic rifle poised with the safety
catch off, the Caucasian nation displaying its eagerness to join NATO through
its readiness to shoot our Afghan allies on the spot if they made a move to
attack their teacher. If I didn’t know already that the Afghan campaign was
doomed, I knew it then.”
—Anatol Lieven, “Nemesis:
Why the west was doomed to lose in Afghanistan,” Prospect, Aug 27, 2021
*
[Note the lack of human agency
in the highlighted texts.]
“In hindsight, we can now see
that 9/11 was a harbinger of what was to come: not the globalization of
terrorism but the terrors of globalization. Nonetheless, 9/11 marked a
historical turning point with a profound impact on US foreign policy in the
two decades since. Although the attacks did not usher in an era of
global terrorism, they did usher in the so-called Global War on
Terrorism, which profoundly affected what the U.S. did in the world, how
the world came to regard the U.S., and how many Americans came to see their
country’s foreign policy.
“The Global War on Terrorism
also led the US to launch a war in Iraq. Decisions to disband the Iraqi
military and exclude from government jobs many of the Iraqis who had been
associated with the previous regime exacerbated an already chaotic situation.
In the end, the U.S. was forced to increase its military presence to
nearly 170,000 troops to sustain the embattled successor government in Baghdad.
“Likewise, the push for war,
together with the 2007–09 global financial crisis and its economic fallout, powerfully
undermined Americans’ faith in elites, stimulating the rise of populist
sentiment that, among other things, helped pave the way for the presidency of
Donald Trump.”
—Richard Haass, “The world 9/11
made,” Project Syndicate, Sep 9, 2021
[Haass is a mega-blob-creature
speaking for the war-making apparatus.]
*
“After the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, the top U.S.
commanders in Hawaii were summarily relieved of their posts, reduced in rank,
and retired. Unless failure has consequences, further failures are all but
guaranteed. Allow me to suggest a corrective action: a purge. Oblige all active
duty three- and four-star generals (and admirals) to retire forthwith. Rebuild
the ranks of the senior officer corps with members of a younger generation
willing and able to acknowledge the shortcomings of recent American military
leadership at the top. I would suggest the following approach: The secretary of
defense—not the current incumbent; as a former four-star he too should be purged—should
personally interview one- and two-star officers deemed to possess particular
promise. The interview need not be long. Indeed, it should consist of a single
question: ‘On a scale of 1-to-10, where 1 is lousy, 10 excellent, and 5 mediocre,
how would you rate U.S. military performance over the past 20 years?’”
“Those replying with a number above 5 should be immediately
excused and denied consideration for further promotion. Those replying with a
number of 5 or below should be invited into an adjacent room and given two
hours to write an essay that addresses the following topic: ‘What is the
problem and how do we fix it?’”
—Andrew Bacevich, “A modest proposal: Fire all of the post 9/11
generals,” Responsible Statecraft, Sep 11, 2021 https://bit.ly/3Ad7d5Q
*
“Now
we can lure the Russians into the Afghan trap,” Brzezinski wrote Carter in a
secret note of February 1979. Carter is still alive. The mainstream American
press are not reporting that they have asked Carter for comment or that he has
refused. Not even the alt-media investigators have pursued him. But it’s
already clear what Carter thinks. He believes he scored one of the world’s
great strategic victories; he is disgruntled that he has never received the
public credit he thinks he deserves.”
—
John Helmer, “The two Satans of Afghanistan—and Jimmy Carter’s lips are
sealed,” Dances with Bears, Sep 5, 2021
*
“You know what’s deadly misinformation? When the government
drones a bunch of kids in Kabul and says there are no civilian casualties. Or
when leaders go to war on false pretenses. I don’t see anyone calling for Internet
bans of the Pentagon.”
—Matt
Taibbi on Twitter
*
“We came in through the Khyber Pass, risking the gunmen, or
flew on small planes, soaring over the mountains before diving sharply to the
runway. Landing in Kabul was dizzying even without the raw excitement of being
there, hearts pounding as we taxied past the carcasses of old military planes,
the backstory of the war we’d come to watch. Afghanistan opened for us like a
movie, in which we—the journalists who covered this war—played multiple and
sometimes conflicting roles. Many of us mainlined it, drawn back again and
again to the place and the people, to the way it made us feel worthy by feeding
the hope that we could do some good.
“Now I wonder what role I played in this disaster. How was
I—how were we, the press on the ground—complicit? We wrote about America’s
misdeeds, but the people back home must have missed those stories. The
government listened for a while, then got tired of it. What was our role? How
did we feed the war by serving as its narrators, its chorus, its riveted
audience?
“However adversarial, however skeptical, we were there as a
corollary of Western power. We made our careers in these places, fancied
ourselves truth-tellers, documenting the doublespeak of our governments and the
Afghans in power—but what did it matter if no one was paying attention?
“Moral injury is now, I believe, a national disorder. In our
broken country, perhaps nothing connects us so powerfully as our rage, guilt,
and failure to trust each other—all symptoms of this illness. Our leaders are
morally compromised. By extension, we are liars, cheaters, not to be trusted.”
—Vanessa Gezari, “I
reported on the war in Afghanistan. Was I complicit in the harm America caused?”
The Intercept, Sep 2, 2021
*
“Before he stole $169 million
and fled his failed state in disgrace, Afghanistan’s puppet President Ashraf
Ghani was formed in elite American universities, given U.S. citizenship,
trained in neoliberal economics by the World Bank, glorified in the media as an
‘incorruptible’ technocrat, coached by powerful DC think tanks like the
Atlantic Council.
“Indeed, Western governments
and their stenographers in the corporate media enjoyed a veritable love affair
with Ashraf Ghani. He was a poster boy for the exportation of neoliberalism to
what had been Taliban territory, their very own Afghan Milton Friedman, a
faithful disciple of Francis Fukuyama—who proudly blurbed Ghani’s book. Washington
was thrilled with Ghani’s reign in Afghanistan, because it had finally found a
new way to implement Augusto Pinochet’s economic program but without the PR
cost of torturing and massacring droves of dissenters in stadiums.
“Ghani worked at the World Bank
for a decade overseeing the implementation of devastating structural adjustment
programs, austerity measures, and mass privatizations, primarily in the Global
South, but also in the former Soviet Union. In 2006, Ghani leveraged his
experience implementing ‘pro-business’ policies from post-Soviet Russia to his
own homeland to co-found a think tank called the Institute for State
Effectiveness (ISE). Any novelist seeking to satirize DC think tanks might have
been criticized for being too on the nose if they wrote about such an ISE. The
cherry on top of the absurdity came in 2008, when Ghani and Lockhart detailed
their technocratic worldview in a book entitled Fixing Failed States: A
Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World.
“Highlighting their ideological
zealotry, [coauthors] Ghani and Lockhart even went so far as to assert an ‘incompatibility
between capitalism and corruption.’ Of course, Ghani would go on to prove just
how absurd this statement was by selling off his country to U.S. companies in which
his family members had invested, furnishing them with exclusive access to
Afghanistan’s mineral reserves, and then bolting to a Gulf monarchy with $169
million in stolen state funds.”
—Ben Norton, “How elite US institutions
created Afghanistan’s neoliberal President Ashraf Ghani who stole $169 million
from his country,” Grayzone, Sep 2, 2021 https://bit.ly/3AdpCPN
*
“In March, 2003, U.S. soldiers visited Sangin’s governor—[warlord
& U.S. ally] Dado’s brother—to discuss refurbishing a school and a health
clinic. Upon leaving, their convoy came under fire, and Staff Sergeant Jacob
Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales became the first American combat
fatalities in Helmand. U.S. personnel suspected that the culprit was not the
Taliban but Dado—a suspicion confirmed to me by one of the warlord’s former
commanders who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the
Americans reliant on him. Nonetheless, when Dado’s forces claimed to have
nabbed the true assassin—an ex-Taliban conscript named Mullah Jalil—the
Americans dispatched Jalil to Guantánamo. Unaccountably, this happened despite
the fact that, according to Jalil’s classified Guantánamo file, U.S. officials
knew that Jalil had been fingered merely to ‘cover for’ the fact that Dado’s
forces had been ‘involved with the ambush.’
“The incident didn’t affect Dado’s relationship with U.S.
Special Forces, who deemed him too valuable. The United Nations began agitating
for Dado’s removal. The U.S. repeatedly blocked the effort. In 2004, the U.N.
launched a program to disarm pro-government militias. A [Dado-linked] commander
learned of the plan and rebranded a segment of the militia as a ‘private-security
company’ under contract with the Americans, enabling roughly a third of the fighters
to remain armed. Another third kept their weapons by signing a contract with a
Texas-based firm to protect road-paving crews. (When the Karzai government
replaced these private guards with police, the commander engineered a hit that
killed 15 policemen, and then recovered the contract.)
“In 2019, as the U.S. was holding talks with Taliban leaders
in Qatar, the Afghan government and American forces moved jointly on Sangin one
last time. Shakira and other villagers fled for the desert, but not everyone
could escape. Ahmed Noor Mohammad, who owned a pay-phone business, decided to
wait to evacuate, because his twin sons were ill. His family went to bed to the
sound of distant artillery. That night, an American bomb slammed into the room
where the twin boys were sleeping, killing them. A second bomb hit an adjacent
room, killing Mohammad’s father and many others, eight of them children. The
next day, at the funeral, another air strike killed six mourners. In a nearby
village, a gunship struck down three children. The following day, four more
children were shot dead. Elsewhere in Sangin, an air strike hit an Islamic
school, killing a child. A week later, twelve guests at a wedding were killed
in an air raid.”
—Anand Gopal, “The other Afghan women,” New Yorker, Sep
6, 2021
*
“In the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of
Afghanistan in late 2001, U.S.-backed Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum’s
forces murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners by jamming
them into metal shipping containers and letting them suffocate. At the time,
Dostum was on the CIA’s payroll and had been working with U.S. special forces
to oust the Taliban from power. The Bush administration blocked subsequent
efforts to investigate the mass murder even after the FBI interviewed witnesses
among the surviving Afghans who had been moved to the U.S. prison in Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, and after human rights officials publicly identified the mass grave
site where Dostum’s forces had disposed of bodies. Later, President Barack
Obama promised to investigate and then took no action.
“Instead, Hollywood stepped in and turned Dostum into a
hero. The 2018 movie, 12 Strong, a jingoistic account of the partnership
between U.S. special forces and Dostum in the 2001 invasion, whitewashed Dostum
even as his crimes continued to pile up in the years after the prisoner
massacre. At the time of the movie’s January 2018 release, Dostum was in exile,
hiding from criminal charges in Afghanistan for having ordered his bodyguards
to rape a political opponent with an assault rifle. The movie (filmed in New
Mexico, not Afghanistan) was based on a book that a New York Times reviewer
called ‘a rousing, uplifting, Toby Keith-singing piece of work.’
“One of the first things the U.S. did after gaining
effective control over Afghanistan following the Taliban’s ouster in 2001 was
to set up secret torture chambers. Beginning in 2002, the CIA tortured both
Afghans and foreign prisoners flown to these torture rooms from all over
Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The worst torture chamber was
nicknamed ‘The Darkness’ by the prisoners sent there, who suffered such
complete sensory deprivation that they did not even know they were in
Afghanistan. They were chained in solitary confinement with no light and music
blaring constantly. They were hung by their arms for as long as two days,
slammed against walls, forced to lie naked on tarps while gallons of ice water
were poured over their bodies. At least one prisoner died in CIA custody after
being left shackled in frigid temperatures.
“No one was ever held to account for the American torture
regime in Afghanistan.”
—James Risen, “A war’s epitaph,” The Intercept, Aug
26, 2021
*
[And finally, the original casus belli: 9/11]
“The 9/11 hijackers did not act alone. They had a
substantial support network that was deeply embedded inside the United States
and abroad for nearly a decade prior to, on, and after the 9/11 attacks. It is
my understanding that this support network spanned several states including
California; Arizona; Nevada; Washington; Minnesota; Oklahoma; Illinois;
Florida; North Carolina; Virginia; Massachusetts; Maine; New York; New Jersey;
and Texas. The support network also included several countries like Germany;
Spain; France; the U.K.; Egypt; Kenya; Tanzania; Sudan; Yemen; Saudi Arabia;
the United Arab Emirates; Qatar; Pakistan; Malaysia; Thailand; Iran; and
Afghanistan.
“Known and lethal terrorists openly and freely operated inside
the U.S. for years before the 9/11 attacks, and yet authorities failed to
prevent the cold-blooded murders of our 3,000 loved ones. More than 14 U.S.
local and federal jurisdictions had law enforcement agencies that brushed up
against the 9/11 hijackers and their supporters. Moreover, more than 18 foreign
law enforcement counterparts also investigated some of those involved in the
9/11 attacks. They unearthed evidence, wrote reports, monitored activities,
watched money wires, and investigated stock sales, arms and weapons shipments
across borders, eyebrow-raising passports and visa documents, and lethal
operatives roaming the world, planning murder with impunity. These people
remain fully aware of the truth and how their one part of the damning puzzle fits
together. Yet none speak out.
“It would seem implausible that not one individual, entity,
bank, or business has been fully prosecuted and found criminally responsible as
a co-conspirator for the crime that took place. And yet our nation has not
found, and will not ever find, it necessary to hold any co-conspirator of the
9/11 hijackers accountable in a court of criminal law.
“Without any standing indictments or prosecutions meted out
by the Department of Justice against the other identifiable co-conspirators,
the job of seeking out accountability and justice has fallen on the shoulders
of the 9/11 families, who were left to take matters of justice into our own
hands through the second-rate route of civil litigation. This leaves us alone
and with a stark disadvantage as we try to hold terrorists and their
co-conspirators accountable for the murder of our loved ones in federal civil
court.
“Year after year, Department of Justice lawyers, attorneys
general, and prosecutors willfully choose to not help the 9/11 families as we
fight the terrorists in court; they nastily refuse to share or declassify the
information and evidence they have in their files so that we can nail
terrorists and terrorist supporters. Instead, horrifically, some U.S.
prosecutors literally sit on the side of the defendants (in this case, Saudi
Arabia) and help the key evidence we need stay secret.”
—Kristen Breitweiser, “My husband died on 9/11. I am still
waiting for a trial of his killers,” The Intercept, Sep 4 2021
*
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