State Department officials attempted to censor watchdog reports on U.S. efforts in Afghanistan as Taliban militants swept across the country, according to a top oversight official.
“Some of the requests were bizarre, to say the least,” Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Ropko said Friday. “State requested we redact Ashraf Ghani’s name from our reports. While I’m sure the former president may wish to be excised from the annals of history, I don’t believe he faces any threats simply from being referenced by SIGAR.”
The requests extended a pattern of information suppression that the auditor described as “outrageous” and “offensive.” The habit of hiding embarrassing information damaged public debates about the conduct of the war and set the stage for the tragic chaos of the final evacuation from Kabul’s international airport.
“In my opinion, the full picture of what happened in August, and all the warning signs that could have predicted the outcome, will only be revealed if the information that the departments of Defense and State have already restricted from public release is made available,” Ropko said in his prepared remarks. “But as SIGAR has experienced all too often in the past, good intentions for transparency by senior leaders are frequently thwarted by bureaucratic inertia or fear of the public knowing the truth.”
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He faulted Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team for asking him to “temporarily suspend access” to public reports and audits “at the height of the emergency evacuation” operation, a request that was followed more recently by an attempt to have the inspector general’s office make thousands of redactions to public documents.
“Given how hard the department reportedly was working to evacuate Americans from Afghanistan and resettle Afghan refugees, I was surprised they found the time to go through every one of our reports and compile such an exhaustive list,” Ropko said. “Nevertheless, upon reviewing their request, it quickly became clear to us that State had little, if any, criteria for determining whether the information actually endangered anyone.”
Ropko observed that executive branch agencies classified much of the most important information documented in his reports as a “NATO secret,” thereby hiding it from most congressional staff.
“So you would have a [member of Congress] go in with no staff, which puts the member at an extreme disadvantage,” Ropko said. “I remember briefing members and we had to leave all their staff outside because the staff didn’t have NATO clearance — which isn’t any super-duper clearance. It’s just a different process. So that’s the problem. There was no public discourse because the public didn’t have any access.”
Ropko, who underscored the need to investigate the management of the final withdrawal from Afghanistan, suggested that the fundamental cause of the U.S. failure is obvious. He took aim at the U.S. partnership with known human rights abusers throughout the Afghan political system.
“Not only were individual boys and or girls being raped, basically being sex slaves to senior and mid-level Afghan politicians and police and military, but I view it as, what did the average Afghan think about us as a result?” he said. “We became associated with the worst excesses of Afghan culture: violating human rights, endemic corruption, supporting evil, really evil, people and warlords. And then you add to that the indiscriminate use of bombing, night raids, you name it.”
Ropko underscored that many of those “evil” U.S-backed Afghans were people whom “the Taliban kicked out once before” — setting an easy political task before the Taliban militants. “You ask the question, ‘How did the Taliban win?’ Well, they had the support of the Afghan people,” he said. “They didn’t have any magic weapons. … but they had the support of the Afghan people.”
“We recognize the importance of SIGAR’s continued efforts to promote the efficiency and effectiveness of reconstruction programs in Afghanistan,” said a State Deparment spokesperson. “We are aware of the challenges that SIGAR highlights in its report, and we have worked vigorously to address them and draw lessons learned.”
“Due to safety and security concerns regarding our ongoing evacuation efforts, we requested some reports be temporarily removed to redact identifying information from public records and protect the identities of Afghans and Afghan partner organizations,” the spokesperson added. “SIGAR has the authority to restore the reports when it deems appropriate.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has affirmed the importance of learning from an operation widely perceived as “the greatest debacle that NATO has seen since its foundation,” as a prominent German politician put it.
“We owe it to ourselves, to our Afghan friends and partners, to the future State Department employees who might find themselves facing a similar challenge one day to capture all that we learned, to study it, to apply it, to preserve it in a way that it enhances our future planning and helps us prepare better for future contingencies,” he said Wednesday, touting “a series of internal reviews” related to the evacuation effort. “We will not let this opportunity to learn and do better pass us by.”
If Blinken’s promise is kept, it might be a first for the U.S. government over the last several decades, to judge from Ropko’s sharp criticism of an executive branch that has shown an expensive penchant for repeating the errors of past administrations.
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“We’ve done it three times in the last 50 years. Vietnam — didn’t learn from that. And after it was done, we totally forgot everything. And we eliminated a lot of the capabilities we had built,” he said. “Then we did it in Afghanistan. We did it in Iraq. And there’s four or five countries in Africa, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it, but we’re starting [down] that slippery slope again. … So, no, we don’t learn lessons too well in the United States.”
