A review by buermann
The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock

4.0

The funniest thing about this book is how President Donald J. Trump comes out of it looking merely as dishonest as his immediate predecessors, a feat only possible in a catalog of lies. This book is a catalog of lies. Twenty years and anybody who told the truth got fired -- if not imprisoned -- for the offense.

The most annoying thing is that it follows the WaPo style guide that seemingly instructs writers to dwell on occupation casualties while treating Afghans like they're CGI extras in a disaster movie. At the beginning of Chapter 8, "Lies and Spin", a paragraph gives brief biological sketches of three foreign soldiers killed in a suicide attack -- down to one's love of lollipops -- while the "twenty Afghan laborers who came to the base that day looking for work" are barely afterthoughts.

An ironic tension, amidst the barrage of lies, is when officials are being too honest. Nobody likes Obama announcing an upfront deadline to his surge, but then everybody complaining about how deadlines make the policy untenable -- to appear "credible" his war council all want an open ended commitment unto perpetuity -- go right ahead and tell him it'll work anyway, lying to their commander in chief. Pretty amazing! Almost like none of them cared if anything would work, they just wanted to keep fighting, to an end none of them were ever able to envision.

Everybody lies about Afghan casualties. Nonstop cover-ups. There's hardly any effort to account for the enemy let alone the innocents. A US airstrike leveling part of Azizabad in 2008 killed dozens of children and the DoD kept lying about it until USA Today finally uncovered the story in 2019. The same goes for anti-drug and reconstruction and pacification and rehabilitation efforts. New programs to repeat previous programs' failures are grandly announced and produce new streams of data that are proudly published until they make the program look bad and then the data is classified and the program is quietly shut down, over and over again.

The US government has set up a lot of kleptocratic dictatorships over the years, genocidally at times, 'standing up as we cover it up.' One has to ponder why that proved impossible in Afghanistan, and there's plenty of gristle to chew on here. One thing that strikes me is the incredible amount of the scamming by the people we put in charge of the government being run against the occupation itself. If you think about the tax base for the Afghan kleptocracy the opium exports probably amount to 50 billion over 20 years. Compare that to the tax base of American aid and occupation contracts over that same span and the opium is dwarfed at least 4 to 1. In a kleptocracy like Mobutu's Congo the American aid mostly went to securing the regime, and the regime had useful raw resources to integrate into Western markets, the lower rungs of society were still needed to work the mines to keep the wheels of graft turning, so there was some bare fraying thread of reciprocity left between a working class and its ruler's middle management through a functional patronage system.

But in Afghanistan so many foreign dollars were flowing and swallowed by corruption (much of that also flowing to the Taliban) that anybody not in on the racket with two stones left to rub together were going to be shaken down by that racket until they had nothing left. Then they'd join the Taliban.

I kept coming across quotes from the exit interviews of US officials that sounded like they were lifted out of Anand Gopal's "No Good Men Among the Living," describing the different ways the Afghan government's recruitment drive for the insurgency worked. What did the Taliban need the ISI for?

This book gives a chapter to discussion of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Everybody knows the ISI is involved but nobody knows the first fucking thing about what they're doing, what they did. I'm not sure how the Pakistanis are so good at evading US signals intelligence, which permeates every communications network on the planet, but for all the Post's FOIA requests have to show for it the ISI operates entirely by word of mouth.

There's a certain kind of Atlantic Council/Kissinger & Associates groupie that, anytime anybody reports something they don't like about Afghanistan without mentioning the ISI their freshly pressed trousers wad way up their buttcrack, "well they're just not being serious, where's the ISI!?" They never have any idea what to do about the ISI, mind you, but they very much demand that the ISI take their share of the blame, a real "everybody made mistakes" move.

I think a key thing to understand about this entire war is that the United States knew, and everybody in charge remembered, how instrumental the ISI was to both the US funded insurgency against the Soviets and the subsequent formation of the Taliban to end the civil war the unmanaged aftermath of Operation Cyclone left behind. It's obvious that Pakistan's leadership is invested in Afghanistan and take their interests there seriously. The Taliban were their proxies, if we install a new government, who will be Pakistan's new proxies? That should have been at the top of the Bush administration's mind before they started the war.

So when the Bush administration went barging back in and restarted that civil war just two years after it had 'ended' he cut the Taliban entirely out, just like he would later disastrously do to the Baath Party and the army in Iraq. No quarter was given, top to bottom, dividing the country straight down all the exact same cracks. At the top, that meant cutting Pakistan out of any of the influence it might have had in the new government on its long and unguarded western border, where it also had its own autonomous tribes occasionally producing trouble -- radicalized in the same corrupting influences that came along with Operation Cyclone -- and which the progress of the war would make orders of magnitude more dangerous and troublesome, with groups now dedicated to the overthrow of the Pakistani government because the Pakistani government gave America permission to bomb their villages.

Any text that includes the testimony of Afghan government officials by necessity will talk about the ISI, since they very much liked to blame all their problems on Pakistan, and not at all disingenuously: most of them had just been defeated by Pakistan, they were old enemies. There's a quote at the end of the chapter (p.87) where Ambassador Ryan Crocker recounts a discussion he had with Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the head of the ISI:

"[Kayani] says, 'You know, I know you think we're hedging our bets, you're right, we are because one day you'll be gone again, it'll be like Afghanistan the first time, you'll be done with us, but we're still going to be here because we can't actually move the country. And the last thing we want with all of our other problems is to have turned the Taliban into a mortal enemy, so, yes, we're hedging our bets.'"

Pakistan is a nuclear power with a credible nuclear deterrent pointed at nuclear-armed India. They both have interests in Afghanistan. Among others, Pakistan in preventing trouble at its border, and India in making trouble on Pakistan's border. We're governed by monsters, but even our monsters do not want to get kicked out of the country club for their role in last year's nuclear holocaust.

So what is anyone supposed to do about the ISI's backing of the Taliban (dollars being fungible, paid for by the American tax payer to try and bribe Pakistan into supporting their old enemies next door: kleptocracy was built into this arrangement from the start) when you've already cut them out of the deal? We tried to bribe them when they needed influence. And by the time the US got around to hosting talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, the Taliban had not so much already won as the Afghan government already lost, unrecoverably, and American leaders knew it, and just kept lying about it.

America's mendocracy turned Afghanistan into a failed kleptocracy because the Bush administration refused to submit to Jesus and offer clemency to the hosts of its enemy, antagonizing Pakistan's stratocracy. The Taliban had won by 2003, when Rumsfeld wrote that memo complaining that he had no idea "who the bad guys are", when his most dangerous enemy was the government he'd just established. Everything that followed was cognitive dissonance.