Earlier this month, The Washington Post published a large batch of official interviews and reports from high level government officials about their opinions of the nearly two-decade long war in Afghanistan. The overall consensus for quite a while now has been that the war succeeded in removing the al-Qaeda terrorist group, but did not ultimately remove the Taliban from power. But now, these new documents show the extent to which top decision makers pursed policies they knew to be deeply flawed or doomed to fail. So what can these documents reveal about the Afghanistan conflict and American politics? This week, we’ll tackle the hard questions of the war in Afghanistan.
We’ve already covered the history of the Afghanistan war and recent developments in a previous post. So what exactly are the “Afghanistan Papers?” The papers are a series of documents and interviews which were conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Congress created this position as a way to investigate the progress of the trillion dollar war in Afghanistan. The findings of SIGAR are already mostly known, but the Washington Post obtained the underlying information under the Freedom of Information Act. This information provides an even more troubling view of the Afghanistan conflict. The name “Afghanistan Papers” is taken from the “Pentagon Papers,” which revealed similar problems during the Vietnam War.
The findings of the Afghanistan Papers have been troubling. They show that government officials at nearly every level had serious concerns about the ability of the United States to achieve victory during the war. They also highlight the extent to which multiple administrations appear to have directly mislead the public about the prospects of victory and how how to win the war. This lead to continued spending on programs and initiatives that few individuals believed would be truly successful.
Looking back, was the war in Afghanistan every really winnable in the first place? It’s relatively easy to remove a terrible government from power or destroy terrorist training camps. But is it realistic to expect to transform Afghanistan (or any other country) into a fully functional American-style democracy? Such an endeavor is problematic in even the best of circumstances, but can be foolish when applied to a de-centralized nation with multiple warring factions and almost no history of strong national government. In addition, America’s prospects for success were handicapped by the fact that everyone knew American forces would leave eventually. And to make matters worse, the United States largely sidelined Afghanistan once the war in Iraq began.
You can’t handle the truth!
But these documents also reveal a larger problem with our politics today. Rather than look at the Afghanistan Papers as a vast conspiracy to lie to the American people for personal gain, the truth is likely much simpler. It’s that the American public simply couldn’t handle the truth. Any administration that would have admitted failure in Afghanistan would likely have been handed a major electoral defeat, so each administration had an incentive to continue painting a rosy picture of the war. Since the war was probably unwinnable in the first place, this created a recipe for disaster that spanned decades.
So what is the way forward in Afghanistan? It seems more likely that some type of negotiated settlement with the Taliban will occur and that the United States will finally (mostly) withdraw from the country. Whether a fragile peace between the Afghan government and the Taliban holds once American forces leave is still uncertain. But what’s been clear for a long time now is that the public has largely forgotten about Afghanistan except where it can be used as an attack against an opposing political tribe. In that context, is it any wonder that so many in the U.S. government felt the need to hide the truth? Afghanistan is likely somewhat better off now than it was under full Taliban control. However, the inevitable end of America’s longest war should be a time for reflection on some difficult lessons learned.