Summary: Today’s must read is a retrospective on our expedition to Afghanistan, now that the cloud of lies slowly dissipates. Since Vietnam we’ve masked our failures by myths, short-circuiting our ability to learn. A hegemonic power can substitute power for smarts. The coming multi-polar world will prove more challenging, so that weaknesses become terminal flaws.
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Opening from “Afghanistan: ‘A Shocking Indictment’”
by Rory Stewart
New York Review of Books, 6 November 2014
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Review of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes
by Anand Gopal
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Ashraf Ghani, who has just become the president of Afghanistan, once drafted a document for Hamid Karzai that began:
There is a consensus in Afghan society: violence…must end. National reconciliation and respect for fundamental human rights will form the path to lasting peace and stability across the country. The people’s aspirations must be represented in an accountable, broad-based, gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic, representative government that delivers daily value.
That was 12 years ago. No one speaks like that now — not even the new president. The best case now is presented as political accommodation with the Taliban, the worst as civil war.
Western policymakers still argue, however, that something has been achieved: counterterrorist operations succeeded in destroying al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, there has been progress in health care and education, and even Afghan government has its strengths at the most local level. This is not much, given that the US-led coalition spent $1 trillion and deployed one million soldiers and civilians over 13 years. But it is better than nothing; and it is tempting to think that everything has now been said: after all, such conclusions are now reflected in thousands of studies by aid agencies, multilateral organizations, foreign ministries, intelligence agencies, universities, and departments of defense.
But Anand Gopal’s shows that everything has not been said. His new and shocking indictment demonstrates that the failures of the intervention were worse than even the most cynical believed. Gopal, a Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor reporter, investigates, for example, a US counterterrorist operation in January 2002. US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, had identified two sites as likely “al-Qaeda compounds.” It sent in a Special Forces team by helicopter; the commander, Master Sergeant Anthony Pryor, was attacked by an unknown assailant, broke his neck as they fought and then killed him with his pistol; he used his weapon to shoot further adversaries, seized prisoners, and flew out again, like a Hollywood hero.
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As Gopal explains, however, the American team did not attack al-Qaeda or even the Taliban. They attacked the offices of 2 district governors, both of whom were opponents of the Taliban. They shot the guards, handcuffed one district governor in his bed and executed him, scooped up twenty-six prisoners, sent in AC-130 gunships to blow up most of what remained, and left a calling card behind in the wreckage saying “Have a nice day. From Damage, Inc.”
Weeks later, having tortured the prisoners, they released them with apologies. It turned out in this case, as in hundreds of others, that an Afghan “ally” had falsely informed the US that his rivals were Taliban in order to have them eliminated. In Gopal’s words:
The toll … 21 pro-American leaders and their employees dead, 26 taken prisoner, and a few who could not be accounted for. Not one member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda was among the victims. Instead, in a single 30-minute stretch the US had managed to eradicate both of Khas Uruzgan’s potential governments, the core of any future anti-Taliban leadership — stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies.
Gopal then finds the interview that the US Special Forces commander gave a year and a half later in which he celebrated the derring-do, and recorded that 7 of his team were awarded bronze stars, and that he himself received a silver star for gallantry.
{Please read the rest here; it’s a demonstration of why the NYRB deserves to be on your reading list} 
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For More Information
About Afghanistan:
- The Big Lie at work in Afghanistan, 23 June 2009
- Andrew Exum & co recommend new ways to lose at the all-star CNAS Conference in June 2009
- The trinity of modern warfare at work in Afghanistan, 13 July 2009
- We are warned about Afghanistan, but choose not to listen (part 2), 19 July 2009
- Joshua Foust describes the case for our war in Afghanistan, 28 August 2009
- Another attempt to justify our Af-Pak war, and show the path to victory, 31 August 2009
- The advocates for the Af-pak war demonstrate their bankruptcy. Will the American public notice?, 1 September 2009
- Every day the war’s advocates find new reasons we should fight in Afghanistan!, 7 September 2009
- How many troops would it take to win in Afghanistan?, 15 September 2009 — Lots.
- A new reason to kill thousands of people? Stay tuned for the answer!, 24 September 2009
- We destroy a secular regime in Afghanistan (& its women’s rights), then we wage war on the new regime to restore women’s rights. Welcome to the American Empire., 20 November 2009
- Hidden history of our first step into the Afghanistan War. It’s still important for us to understand., 6 August 2012
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