The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Foreword-Chapter 3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-11

Chapters 12-15

Chapters 16-18

Chapters 19-21

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

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Foreword-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Foreword Summary

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

Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld avowed, “I don’t recall that I’ve ever lied to the press. I don’t intend to, and it seems to me that there will be no reason for it” (xi). US forces invaded Afghanistan shortly thereafter, with near-unanimous support from the public and the international community. But as the war continued year after year, Rumsfeld and government officials would in fact deceive the press, the public, and even themselves, insisting that victory was around the corner even as conditions deteriorated. Barack Obama entered office promising to end a war that had gone on for more than seven years, but he failed to do so after another eight years. Whitlock had been reporting on the US military for years by that point and wanted to understand how the war had gone on for so long with such disappointing results. In the summer of 2016, he learned of a small federal agency that had steered a project called “Lessons Learned,” which conducted interviews and compiled documents on the war. Whitlock filed Freedom of Information Act requests, and after three years and two federal lawsuits, The Washington Post acquired the bulk of the material. The interviews were strikingly candid because they were meant for internal circulation and not the press. Even commanding generals admitted that “there was no coherent long-term strategy” and that the lives lost were lives wasted (xv).

The Lessons Learned report roughly parallels the Pentagon Papers, a series of documents leaked to the Post in 1971 that revealed the inner workings of the Vietnam War. Whitlock also conducted many of his own interviews and gained access to other previously classified materials, including many of Rumsfeld’s memos, called “snowflakes.” The Post ran a series of articles based on the Lessons Learned report in December 2019, prompting congressional hearings and renewed public interest in the war. Whitlock then found still more oral histories conducted within the armed forces, including newly declassified interviews conducted at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Whitlock states that he does not intend for this book to be a military history but rather a summation of the fundamental mistakes that undermined the war effort and the deceptions that kept it going.

Chapter 1 Summary: “A Muddled Mission”

By April of 2002, the US war in Afghanistan looked like a decisive victory. The invasion began in early October 2001, targeting the base of the Al Qaeda terrorists who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks and the Taliban government that harbored them. By the end of the year, Al Qaeda forces that had not been killed or captured had fled, and the Taliban was overthrown, with remarkably few American casualties. However, the apparent ease of the initial combat phase raised the question of an exit strategy. Rumsfeld was concerned that “[they were] never going to get the US military out of Afghanistan unless [they took] care to see that there [was] something going on that [would] provide the stability that [would] be necessary for [them] to leave. Help” (5). The administration struck a confident pose in public, insisting that objectives were clearly defined around preventing Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a sanctuary. They were acutely concerned about the risk of a prolonged conflict, drawing on the lessons of the Vietnam War and Afghanistan’s history of repelling invaders. At the same time, they were reluctant to leave Afghanistan so quickly that it would once again become destabilized and once again become a terrorist haven. Unsure of their next steps, soldiers began building temporary shelters that would eventually blossom into massive military installations. With their enemies seemingly on the run and a new government forming, there was nothing for them to do but wait around for further orders.

In April, President Bush gave a speech at the Virginia Military Institute defining a new and much broader set of objectives for the war: that the US was

obligated to help Afghanistan build a country free of terrorism, with a stable government, a new national army and an education system for boys and girls alike. ‘The peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations’ (14).

There was very little clarity about the precise role the US would undertake to advance these goals, how long it would take, or what resources it would require.

Chapter 2 Summary: “Who Are the Bad Guys?”

In August 2002, a report from Kandahar in southern Afghanistan reached the Pentagon, describing an alarming situation wherein Al Qaeda and the Taliban were preparing to regroup, with US and allied forces seemingly unprepared for the looming challenge. This lack of preparation was in part because the US had a poor understanding of the enemy. It had collected insufficient data about Al Qaeda and the Taliban and then made matters worse by conflating them due to their shared militant ideology. Yet the groups were profoundly different: Al Qaeda was a primarily Arab and global terrorist network, and the Taliban was a local insurgency exclusively interested in governing Afghanistan. The Taliban had in fact sheltered Al Qaeda but had no hand in (or prior knowledge of) the 9/11 attacks. The decision to treat the Taliban as an enemy of equal importance broadened the mission beyond its original goal of preventing another terrorist attack, drawing the US into the intricacies of Afghan politics and allying them with “war criminals, drug traffickers, smugglers and ex-communists” on the grounds that they were anti-Taliban (21). The US further insisted on viewing the Taliban as an ideological organization when allegiances were more often tribal.

This ignorance of local realities made it extremely difficult for US forces to distinguish friend from foe, and US forces would sometimes have friendly encounters with Taliban fighters only to then take fire from locals totally unaffiliated with the Taliban. In December 2001, intelligence located Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a network of caves and tunnels known as Tora Bora, near the border with Pakistan. Insistent on maintaining the lowest possible number of troops, US commanders relied on Afghan fighters reluctant to press the fight, and bin Laden managed to escape. Henceforth, “it was impossible for the United States to bring its troops home as long as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks roamed the region” (24). Later, the same commanders would deny that bin Laden was at Tora Bora at all, claiming that there was never a plausible chance of capturing or killing him at the time. Around that same time, as a new Afghan government was being negotiated in Bonn, Germany, the United State rejected an initiative by Taliban remnants to participate in that government. US officials categorized the Taliban as an evil terrorist organization that was in any case a spent force. This failure to understand the nuances of Afghan politics helped to turn what could have been a short war into the longest in US history, until they finally agreed to negotiate with the Taliban nearly 20 years later.

Chapter 3 Summary: “The Nation-Building Project”

President Bush had campaigned against costly nation-building efforts and, after the invasion of Afghanistan, promised not to get bogged down in humanitarian or reconstruction efforts. This promise was quickly broken, and the US would go on to “spend more on nation-building in Afghanistan than in any country ever” (30). Afghanistan was a desperately poor country that had endured decades of internecine warfare. Having invaded and occupied the country, the US recognized that the Afghans could not possibly stabilize the country on their own, leaving the new government that the Americans had helped form in a precarious position. At the same time, Bush was still opposed to nation building and tried in every way possible to limit the actual costs of US assistance. The Pentagon undertook the task of building an Afghan national army but insisted that other efforts be distributed among NATO allies.

Constant vacillation between a reluctance to nation building and a fear of abandoning Afghanistan inhibited the development of an overarching strategy. The State Department pushed for more expansive rebuilding efforts, while the Pentagon was predominantly concerned with “killing bad guys” (34). Rumsfeld was not necessarily opposed to reconstruction but wanted to avoid saddling the military with the attendant responsibilities. Meanwhile, the new government concentrated enormous power in the hands of interim president Hamid Karzai in the hopes that this would sideline the many warlords who exercised local control throughout most of Afghanistan. This flouted the country’s tradition of decentralized rule, with power sharing among various tribes rather than top-down administration. Most Afghans had no experience with relying on a bureaucracy for public services or pledging their loyalty to a distant figure in the capital.

Foreword-Chapter 3 Analysis

The initial chapters of the book clearly establish a set of themes that Whitlock will revisit frequently over the course of the book. The first is Mission Creep, the inexorable yet seemingly unintended expansion of the mission from its originally strict focus on counterterrorism to what became a historically ambitious project of nation building. President Bush had campaigned explicitly against nation building, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was fiercely dedicated to overturning the conventional wisdom of the Pentagon, which he regarded as a fixation on large cumbersome units designed to conquer and hold territory. His new fighting forces would be light and fast, overwhelming enemies with the proficient use of combined arms and then preparing for the next target.

The initial phase of combat appeared to confirm Rumsfeld’s plans and Bush’s predilections, with Al Qaeda’s infrastructure of training camps destroyed and the Taliban driven from power through the innovative use of airpower, special forces, and Afghan opposition forces—many of them riding on horseback. America’s war in Afghanistan could at least potentially have ended right there, were it not for several countervailing factors. First, the Bush administration immediately placed the 9/11 attacks within the framework of a “Global War on Terror,” which his administration would define as a generational struggle to achieve the final triumph of democracy worldwide. Bush and others would explicitly describe 9/11 as having created an “opportunity” (see the 2002 National Security Strategy) to unleash American military power that they regarded as having been unduly restrained. Whitlock cites these factors to argue that political and historical variables were the primary determinates for the shift in Bush’s military strategy in Afghanistan.

The history of Afghanistan as a site of political and ideological struggle between the US and the Soviet Union also had not been forgotten and played a role in expanding US strategic goals there. It would have been hard enough for US forces to declare victory and come home after a few months with a mission that many were already regarding as the successor to historical struggles against fascism and communism. This became nearly impossible after Osama bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora to what would become a decade of hiding. With the mastermind of 9/11 on the loose, most likely in or near Afghanistan, it became unconscionable for the US and its allies to leave when their original mission had not even been completed. By considering these factors, Whitlock makes the case that Bush’s military policy was in part driven by a political desire to avoid an outcome that could be construed as a failure by the media and broader public.

At the same time, the task within Afghanistan itself seemed to have largely been completed, with women jubilantly tearing off their burqas, men shaving their beards, and a new government coming into being with the promise to write a democratic constitution (enacted in 2004). By all appearances, the victory was both military and political, a vindication of both a new way of war and the universality of the American way of life. If the War on Terror could only be won by rooting out the social conditions of violent extremism, then the US would have to demonstrate that fact on the most forbidding of territories. Thus began a long and painful process of applying American Solutions to Afghan Problems, rooted in the combined impressions that Afghanistan was hopelessly backward and that the liberation from the Taliban was proof that only the US and its allies could deliver it from its beleaguered condition.

Whitlock’s narrative about the Bush administration functions to decisively attribute the failures in Afghanistan to a tension between ideology and the bottom line. Even as they undertook a more comprehensive role and identified themselves as the standard of progress, Bush “didn’t want the Pentagon to stray from its mission of chasing Al Qaeda and the Taliban” and sought to minimize the costs for reconstruction as much as possible (33). With minimal costs came minimal efforts to understand the intricacies of Afghan culture or how their example might frustrate the application of American models for reasons other than their purported incompetence or backwardness. The US had become so convinced that their mission was a righteous one that they did not even invest the resources necessary to reexamine their own premises, modeling the theme of Willful Blindness that Whitlock frequently discusses in the book.