John F. Sopko has been the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012. He spent years trying to convince people in Washington that the war was failing and the Afghan government we supported was a sham, and in this NY Times op-ed he is still bitter about it:
The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, revealed what little American lives and money had purchased over 20 years there. It also laid bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.
As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, my staff and I have audited and investigated U.S. programs and spending to rebuild Afghanistan — a mission that, it was hoped, would turn the theocratic, tribal-based “Graveyard of Empires” into a modern liberal democracy.
In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, we have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent or checklists of completed tasks. . . .
To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.
Sopko goes on to detail all the usual failures of American government in action: money spent simply to justify having a bigger budget next year, projects pushed through to completion even though the rationale for them had evaporated. We were supposed to be supporting the development of Afghan security forces, so rosy statistics on the number of soldiers etc. were reported, even though Sopko's office kept reporting that many Afghan soldiers were "ghosts" kept on the books so the officers could pocket their salaries, and so on.
It's worth thinking over how we managed to spend hundreds of billion on this disaster.
It began with the righteous fury that overtook the US after 9-11 and Bush II's war against "evil." I didn't bother to oppose our invasion of Afghanistan because I saw it as inevitable; they were harboring our enemies and we were not going to stand for that. But I never thought it would end well. I recall posting somewhere the words of a 19th-century British Parliamentarian who said, "the first rule of politics is, don't invade Afghanistan."
Then our wars of retribution got mixed up with a grander set of ideas. The root cause of terrorism, many westerners believed, was the failure of governments across the Middle East to provide decent lives for their citizens. The region was dominated by two forces: vicious authoritarian thugs, and religious reactionaries. In that context, terrorism seemed inevitable and maybe even admirable. What was needed was to reshape these countries toward democracy, capitalism, and hope. So we embarked on our trillion-dollar crusade to reshape the Middle East. We invaded two countries and set up new governments, and various Washington types called for invading more.
There is a very limited sense in which this was successful; after a 15-year nightmare, Iraq has emerged as a better place than it was under Saddam. There is a real Arab movement for democracy and human rights, and some of its proponents have welcomed or defended US intervention. We can hope that maybe the final completion of the Syrian revolt will lead to something better than Assad, although for now it remains only a hope.
But the price has been very, very high: US politics has been corrupted, and the elites that supported the interventions discredited, leading to the rise of Trump and other angry outsiders. Across the region, hundreds of thousands of deaths. The Arab Spring began with high hopes but spawned mostly reaction and repression, with the Egyptian middle classes hurriedly abandoning their own call for democracy.
After Bush we got Obama, who continued the Afghan war for other reasons. He campaigned as a moderate who opposed, not all wars, but only "dumb wars," so it was crucial to his positioning that while he withdrew from Iraq he supported trying to tame Afghanistan. It was his administration that saw most of the lies and rose-tinged forecasts that so annoy Sopko.
So it was not until Trump that we had a president willing to abandon Afghanistan, and it may be (opinions differ on this) that he accepted an absurdly long withdrawal timeline from the Pentagon because he wanted to put anything that smacked of defeat off until after the 2020 election. So it was left to Biden to bite the bullet.
2 comments:
I think it's important to remember that the Bush admin, from the very first hours after the 9/11 attacks, had its eyes on Iraq. Reportedly, Bush himself was asking about Iraqi involvement that evening. It's hard not to suspect an element of what can only be called hope in those inquiries. As I'm sure you know, there had long been a faction, including most prominently Paul Wolfowitz, that had been advocating for the US to adopt a more messianic-imperial policy in the world, with Iraq to be the first, but not last, stage on which to enact that. I think there's room for spotting another, less noisy group, led by Nixon admin veterans Cheney and Rumsfeld, who wanted to restore the national security apparatus as it had existed in Nixon's time and before, when the intelligence agencies acted largely without oversight, the War Powers Act had not been passed, etc., etc. In other words, it's important to recognize that the Iraq invasion was not just a response to 9/11 and a new-grown theory about what to do about terrorism; rather 9/11 presented an opportunity for various factions to do what they had wanted to do for a long time, to rationalize their existing desires as an answer to "what do to about terrorism."
(I would add I do not think these neocon factions were "really" motivated by oil as such, or to gain profits for "shareholders," etc., etc. They seem to me to have truly believed in the appalling things they were striving for. They were also sincerely and fatally incurious about important realities of Iraqi life, like the Sunni-Shi'ite divide, etc.)
I think it's reasonable to imagine that an admin unburdened by such projects *might* have been more focused on operations in Afghanistan, been willing to put major American forces into Tora Bora, really forced Pakistan to close off escape routes, and conceivably kill Bin Ladin within less than six months of 9/11. The possibility of negotiating with the Taliban via Pakistan *might* then have been opened up.
As you say, it was not going to end "well," and I do not offer my alternative scenario as one in which it might have. But it was the policy I was looking for at the time, and I was bitterly disappointed when the one adopted was more, "Sorry, we're going to Iraq." As I told several students at the time, they should have sent three divisions into Tora Bora, instead of paying a thousand Afghans to go up there and pretend to look for him.
John, didn't you once admit in these pages that, "I myself was pretty fired up"? I definitely was. I'm not embarrassed to say I wanted vengeance on al-Qaeda and Bin Ladin. And I wanted it to be violent. I thought allowing Bin Ladin to escape from Tora Bora was a terrible, pathetic failure.
As you suggest about the rest of what Sopko discusses, the whole story makes plain several deep weaknesses in the culture and society of that era of our national life, which may be said to have begun with Kennedy's election, and now gives every sign of passing into history. That period accomplished many great things, but it also indulged a national insistence on turning meritocracy into a good news machine, whereby all us little strivers have to say happy talk about our little bailiwicks all the time, as well as our weird approach to organizational budgeting, whereby "success" is defined as every department spending whatever money they've been given, whether it needs to be spent or not (I admit I can't say when or whence this originated) and many other features Sopko discusses. This sort of stuff is part of the reason our Old Regime seems presently so "late and unlamented." I'm pretty sure the new one will be bad in its own way, but it will be different. For one thing, I suspect we'll still have happy talk, but it will be more overtly contrived and performative, more redolent of the real Ancien Regime, a flattery of the bewigged potentates.
A mere twelve years after the Soviets left Afghanistan in disgrace, we had already forgotten history and decided to repeat it for ourselves. Every single one of Sopko's complaints sounds exactly like something you'd hear said about the Soviet fiasco.
Leaders wholly disconnected from reality?
Subordinates making up what they think their leaders want to hear?
Ghost soldiers on the books to defraud the state?
These are -literally- stock tropes of Russian corruption and incompetence.
And yet we think so highly of ourselves, even now - even as we blindly retread the very path they marched, footstep for footstep. We're taking longer to reach the same destination, but we will eventually reach the same outcome at this rate.
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