Juan Cole - America’s Trillion $ Failure in the Afghanistan War has been Obvious All Along // Peter Beaumont: Afghanistan papers detail US dysfunction: 'We did not know what we were doing'
Craig
Whitlock at the Washington Post brought out a blockbuster report
Monday on the lies US government and military personnel have been telling the
American people about the Afghanistan War since 2002. The Post also
published 611
of the primary documents here. A lot of the reporting
off Whitlock’s article has focused on US government lies and misrepresentations
about so-called progress on the war front. But that was all along obvious to
anyone who knows anything serious about Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Our Madison Avenue
advertising culture gives the US government the tools to pull the wool over
people’s heads. Government spokesmen on the Forever Wars just have two
categories, “progress” and “slow progress.” An epochal disaster like losing a
whole province is “slower progress than we would like.” The rules of formal
American journalism favor the Progress Flacks, since if the president or his
spokesman says something at a news conference, that is Important and goes
first, and the journalists are not allowed to point out that what was said was
an obvious lie lest their impartiality be questioned. Good journalists may
quote an opposing view, but it will come late in the column after the readers’
minds have already been made up for them.
But mostly US news
organizations slighted Afghanistan as a news story. How many segments on the
war does CNN do a year? 8? How many times has Afghanistan been on the front
page of the Post or the Times? Yet we have thousands of troops still there
being asked to risk their lives. The Afghanistan War, the longest in US
history, has been fought in a fit of absent-mindedness....
https://www.juancole.com/2019/12/documents-americas-afghanistan.htmlAfghanistan papers detail US dysfunction: 'We did not know what we were doing'
In the midst of Barack Obama’s much vaunted military surge against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2010, Hayam Mohammed, an elder from Panjwai near the Pakistani border confronted an officer from the US 101st airborne who had come into his village. “You walk here during the day,” the elder told the soldier bitterly as the Observer listened. “But at night [the Taliban] come bringing night letters” – threats targeting those collaborating with foreign forces.
That surge, which like so many other initiatives in Afghanistan’s long
war was celebrated as a huge success, today serves only as a grim reminder of
the deception and failure revealed
in the explosive Afghanistan papers published
by the Washington
Post this week. Comprising more than 600 interviews with key insiders collected
confidentially by the Office of Special Inspector General for Reconstruction in
Afghanistan [Sigar], and published after a three-year court battle, the trove
has been compared in significance to the Pentagon Papers, the secret Department
of Defense history of the Vietnam war leaked in 1971...
