Two years into the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon didn’t know “who the bad guys” were in Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote.
Rumsfeld divulged the lack of knowledge in a September 2003 memo to Stephen Cambone, a Pentagon official during the war. The memo was published by the Washington Post on Monday as part of a trove of documents known as the Afghanistan Papers.
“I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq,” Rumsfeld wrote. “I read all the intel from the community, and it sounds as though we know a great deal, but in fact, when you push at it, you find out we haven’t got anything that is actionable. We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.”
The confusion trickled down through the military hierarchy, according to the documents. In a December 2017 Lessons Learned interview, an adviser to U.S. Special Forces admitted not knowing friend from foe.
“At first they thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and the bad guys live,” the adviser told the special investigator for Afghanistan reconstruction. “It took several conversations for them to understand that I did not have that information in my hands.”
Rumsfeld’s 2003 public statements focused on progress. In May of that year — several months before his memo to Cambone — Rumsfeld declared an end to major combat in Afghanistan and said the administration “concluded we’re at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities. The bulk of this country today is permissive, it’s secure.”
Two years later, U.S. deaths in Afghanistan were double what they were in 2003, with 99 troops killed. U.S. forces suffered their most deadly year in Afghanistan in 2010 when 498 troops were killed.
