When you read about something that everyone's forgotten about by now--or wants to forget about--you feel out on an island in a way. But also in a way, that makes it all the more necessary.
Besides, The Afghanistan Papers took longer than I thought. I couldn't get through more than two chapters at a time. It was just too hard. Craig Whitlock, of the Washington Post, is an excellent reporter and journalist, and it shows. He is quite thorough. He flinches at nothing. The chapters are short and concise, but they were infuriating, futile and revelatory of blind anger that wouldn't stop to reconsider itself, and anger that you'd think, initially, that we would be too big for.
It all just drags you further and further down. The failure was so complete, so multi-faceted, that it begs so many--demands too many--questions.
Such as: Why don't we learn anything? Why do we keep treating people without technology as beneath us? Why do we make absurd assumptions about them?
I knew it would be filled with errors committed by a bloated military that thought it could fight two wars at once, identifying them similarly-seen one Arab, seen them all--and somehow change their societies. Well, it did. It made them unholy messes.
There's bullying that lines everything done there. Some big country says, We're looking for a bad guy, and everyone's supposed to stand aside and let us do that. And the Afghans did, in a manner of fashion, for a while. But we had to stay ten years to find him, and they began to hate everything about us, and used us for their own gain. Passive aggression is insidious but very, very effective. Then it graduated, and Afghans began to ambush the very people who were trying to help them. Think of the atmosphere that created.
Pentagon leaders have been grilled by Congress about our involvement in Afghanistan in a by-now all-too-familiar dance to the funeral music. When things fail, there must be investigations, you know, but only in hindsight. Nobody bothered to sufficiently fact-find when everything surged onward.
I have only one question: Why the hell did we stay so long? We had no idea what we were doing!
We went in, we applied overwhelming force as you might have guessed, with nowhere near the kinds of resources that we could have expended. We pretty much had our way, too, as you also might have guessed. The folks on the ground weren't even supplied to stay long. And, in terms of rounding up and/or destroying the bad guys, we didn't do bad at all.
But the big prize, bin Laden, was still roaming. So we stayed. And burgeoned a new culture, new nest eggs, new investments. We became, once again, not liberators, not agents of revenge, but aliens in an alien land.
We really did try to train the Afghans. We ran into all kinds of issues, including people who liked the money but not so much the discipline. They dealt with whatever they needed when they needed it and not one second before. Tough to sustain planning that way.
And the bad guys morphed. Al-Qaeda was pretty much eradicated, but turned into ISIS, an even tougher, harder, fiercer foe. They retrenched in Iraq. Plus, as we learned (or thought we learned) in Vietnam, the natives won't disappear. Give them twenty years to bounce back, and by golly, they will. And the Taliban did.
We said we didn't want to repeat the previous mistakes, but found, like all other addicts, that stopping something you're used to takes far more work and attention than suspected. It takes a different mind-set, one which never developed. The military culture reveled in it, but the quick wins allowed the public to turn its back and drift from its attention. And with the previous victories, the military could sustain its presence with rhetoric that masked the true situation.
And then there was Iraq, the president's personal vendetta, the opportunity for the machos to display their bullying from which Sept. 11 provided the pretext. It got attached to the entirety of the effort through the bully pulpit and an exaggeration and big lie (re: WMDs). If nothing else, this book underscores and amplifies the tragedy of that hubris. The shadow of Iraq loomed over everything we tried in Afghanistan.
Beyond that, there was a stunning lack of preparation of the U.S. troops about to enter an entirely mysterious and alien culture, one with values that they could barely comprehend, much less imitate. The language barrier was ridiculous. The attempt to impose one's will failed with the pretension that our 'good' things introduced to people could suddenly make them 'not bad.'
That the failures were covered up is, by now, commonplace, and done by Republican and Democratic presidents (Obama does not look good here). The military tried that in Vietnam and couldn't maintain the deceptions. That they lasted so much longer in Afghanistan is a tribute only to media strung thin and a public that wearied.
The attitude of those who tried to train the natives to defend themselves reminded me of the film The Man Who Would Be King, in which Sean Connery and Michael Caine desert from the British Army and travel to a strange land called Kafiristan, where they are hailed as (white) gods. They try to train the natives into a fighting force but can't seem to communicate very well. Not without reason: An overwhelming percentage of them are illiterate. They can't maintain their deception forever, though. The suspicions of the natives grow, they are exposed, and are condemned.
In Afghanistan, a very lifelike clone for Kafiristan, the same thing happened: Puppet rulers were created (and sustained through an election that really was rigged, like that of Diem in Vietnam), dependency extended, but wore thin. The metamorphosis failed the same way it failed in Vietnam, from the rural, tribal outward areas first, then to the cities where government presence held things together longer. It was textbook.
A people who do not understand the implications and responsibilities of democracy (as opposed to those who willfully undermine it because it makes them uncomfortable, a problem here in the States) will take generations to embrace it, if they can at all. I continually refer to the leaflet handed out by a socialist group in World War I, begging men to resist the draft: Democracy, it said, cannot be shot into a nation. It must be allowed to grow from within.
That always takes time, more than good intentions and tolerance for error and imperfections. It also takes a much larger commitment than the one we settled on. We really had won, according to our original goals: al-Qaeda had been largely routed. But it wasn't enough.
We had already developed a quasi-governmental presence, one that sudden withdrawal would produce bad looks. We had already looked really bad in Vietnam. We needed to avoid that in Afghanistan, but nobody knew how. So we got out the same playbook, based on the same attitudes. We patronized the natives, treated them as an afterthought. No wonder they turned on us. Again.
This time, we delayed a withdrawal until twenty years had passed. But it was too late: The counter-revolution of Muslim extremists had penetrated too far. There were no ceremonies. Our heads were down, just like before.
The "decent interval" of our leaving to create ownership of ultimate failure with the government we once supported didn't happen this time. The bad guys were already in charge. They let us leave without too much damage, suicide bombings notwithstanding.
But I couldn't let it just pass. More than 2400 of some of our best people are dead now, and no coverup will suffice. Yes, in an indirect way, you could say that they died for their country; after all, al-Queda caught a pretty big haymaker from us, and their numbers are deeply reduced. But like the Taliban, they can recover, too. Will we hunt them down again, somewhere else, just fill in the blank of the nation that will receive our enormous military help but have to deal with the nightmare of us, their cultural misfits?
We can't kill them all. We can't capture them all. The mentality that motivated their training is still out there, and we haven't been invited to their camps.
We really do have policy and intervention choices, and we really do need a discussion about it. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan: three big, big mistakes, or if they weren't mistakes at the start, the mistakes were applied so thoroughly that by the time they had ended, you couldn't tell the difference.
Withdrawal from world affairs? I don't think that's an option. Too many businessmen are making too much money. Economic imperialism is too well established, and has been for going on two centuries now. Authoritarianism is running too rampant, though we ourselves may still be inclined to accept it too well. As long as we have a government that cares, it should care about democracy elsewhere, too. And there's always NATO and the carnivorous Putin who borders it on the east.
I recommend The Afghanistan Papers, despite its strong dose of bad news. Because at some dinner or some gathering or another, someone's going to take out the same old rhetoric based on the same old assumptions and put them on the table. I think someone should be there with this new set of facts to refute them, someone who hasn't forgotten this disaster, either.
Either way, you get the sinking feeling about a once-proud empire, fading in the distance in spite of itself, or perhaps because of itself. Prestige is a real thing, but we've lost so much of it now that our allies can't possibly look at us the same way. We've said to three countries, we have your back, and failed to sustain that promise each time. No philosophical argument overcomes utter failure.
Be well. Be careful. Get a booster. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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