President Joe Biden and his team of advisers were reportedly shocked at how quickly the Afghan government and military fell to Taliban forces once the United States withdrew from the region. I have a hard time believing this since military officials at the very top of the chain of command have known for years that this is what would happen.
A couple of years ago, the Washington Post published the Afghanistan papers, a trove of government documents that revealed our military establishment knew our efforts to prop up the Afghan government and train its military were failing. Several high-ranking generals confirmed that the initial invasion and its subsequent mission — to empower the Afghan people to fight off the Taliban on their own — was doomed to fail because America was essentially trying to change the priorities forcibly of a people whose values were very different from our own.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan,” said Douglas Lute, who led the White House’s efforts in Afghanistan during the Bush and Obama administrations. “We didn’t know what we were doing. What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
James Dobbins, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as special envoy to Afghanistan under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, put it this way: “We invade violent countries to make them peaceful, and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”
To continue justifying our occupation of Afghanistan, U.S. officials lied repeatedly to the public, the investigation found. Several military officials admitted it was common for the federal government to hide statistics deliberately or distort them to make it seem like the U.S. was winning the war.
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” said Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who advised the U.S. military commanders on counterinsurgency in 2013 and 2014. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
At a certain point, the U.S. couldn’t even figure out who they were fighting. Al Qaeda had been successfully repudiated, but then, there was the problem of the Taliban. Pakistan was also a nuclear threat, as were the radical Islamic State jihadists who tried to take advantage of the region’s constant mayhem. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted in a September 2003 memo, “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are. We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.”
This never got any better. The U.S. troops in the region had to shift their attention constantly from Taliban shadow leaders, to corrupt Afghan government officials, to cultural warlords. It was a constant power struggle, one that had begun long before the U.S. arrived and one that is destined to continue for a very, very long time. Our officials knew this yet still thought they could force change.
“Our policy was to create a strong central government, which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government, an unidentified former State Department official said in 2015. “The time frame for creating a strong central government is 100 years, which we didn’t have.”
These revelations are vital if we’re to have an honest conversation about our withdrawal from Afghanistan. There is no question that President Joe Biden botched our exit from the region catastrophically. But the big-picture question here — should we have withdrawn at all? — demands a full accounting of the facts. And the facts are that the U.S. military knew its Afghanistan mission was futile but pursued it anyway and lied to us about it for years.
