The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

Content Warning: This section contains accounts of terrorism and war-related violence, including torture and the killing of civilians.

“Astonishingly, commanding generals admitted that they had tried to fight the war without a functional strategy: ‘There was no campaign plan. It just wasn’t there,’ complained Army Ge. Dan McNeill, who twice served as the US commander during the Bush administration. ‘There was no coherent long-term strategy,’ said British Gen. David Richards, who led US and NATO forces 2006 to 2007. ‘We were trying to get a single coherent long-term approach—a proper strategy—but instead we got a lot of tactics.’”

A major advantage of the “Lessons Learned” project from which this book draws the bulk of its information is its remarkable candidness. Speaking on behalf of what they believed (rightly, at the time) to be a military study not for public consumption, even the highest levels of command admitted not only that the planning of the war was poor throughout but also that they knew this, went along with it, and made optimistic public statements that they knew at the time to be false.

“Having overthrown the Taliban somewhat unexpectedly, US military commanders were unprepared for the aftermath and unsure what to do. They worried Afghanistan would fall into chaos, but they also feared that if they sent more US ground forces to fill the vacuum, they might be saddled with responsibility for the country’s many problems. As a result, the Pentagon dispatched a few extra troops to assist with the hunt for bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders but limited their visibility and tasks as much as possible.”

From the beginning, the US was torn between its strong reluctance to become enmeshed in the internal politics of Afghanistan and also recognizing that an abrupt departure could ultimately put them right back where they started. Throughout, the solution to this dilemma was to split the difference, allocating just enough resources to claim that a problem was being seriously addressed while never giving it the time, resources, or nuance that could even plausibly address the problem in a substantive way.

“‘Much of what we call Taliban activity was really tribal or it was rivalry or it was old feuding,’ [Michael Metrinko] said. ‘I’d had this explained to me over and over and over again by tribal elders, you know, the old men who had come in with their long white beards and would sit and talk for an hour or two. They would laugh about some of the things that were happening. What they always said was you American soldiers don’t understand this, but you know, what they think is a Taliban act is really a feud going back more than one hundred years in that particular family.’”

Shortly after 9/11, President Bush announced the so-called “Bush Doctrine” whereby actors around the world were either on the side of the United States in its struggle against terrorism or were on the side of the terrorists.