canyonwalker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
canyonwalker) wrote2021-08-17 05:14 pm
canyonwalker) wrote2021-08-17 05:14 pm
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The Afghanistan Papers Warned Us...
The government of Afghanistan has crumbled and its collapsed fled the country as the Taliban took over once city after another in just a few weeks. (See my previous blog from earlier today.) A military force that, on paper, had every advantage over the Taliban— vastly superior numbers, better training, air power— folded up like a paper tiger.
A common narrative across news coverage is that people are utterly shocked not only that this happened but that it happened so fast. But we shouldn't be. The memo about this came out two years ago.
The memo, in this case, is The Afghanistan Papers. It's a set of assessments of the US effort in Afghanistan prepared by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and published by the Washington Post in late 2019 after a 3 year effort to declassify them via the Freedom of Information Act. Example sources: "The Afghanistan Papers", Wikipedia article; "A Secret History Of The War", Washington Post article 9 Dec 2019.
What the Afghanistan Papers tell us is that all those years of military leaders and presidents telling us how well nation-building in Afghanistan was going were all lies. The metrics they offered to quantify success were all fudged. When they couldn't keep fudging them anymore because people could tell they were fudged, they classified them. The leaders even knew that the official objectives were ridiculous and that the country of Afghanistan was too riddled with tribal loyalty and corruption to be built into something resembling a modern Western state.
Why weren't we all more aware of this? Well, for one, this came out during the Trump administration, when articles about how our political leaders are deliberately lying to us were weekly events. It was quickly forgotten under Trump's "The media is the enemy, and the way to beat them is to flood the zone with shit" strategy of distraction.
While maybe for some of us the significance of The Afghanistan Papers got lost in the noise, one person who shouldn't have been so surprised is President Biden. He was in the White House for 8 years as VP, so he should be more aware than most of us what utter BS the Afghanistan success story was. But instead he promised us a month ago that "There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy"— recalling the US's ignominious exit from Vietnam in 1975— only for similar scenes to play out this week in Afghanistan.
I'm not saying that Biden shouldn't have completed the troop withdrawal— a withdrawal that was committed to by President Trump, I must point out— just that he should have been a bit more careful in setting expectations. Under-promise and over-deliver, not vice versa!
A common narrative across news coverage is that people are utterly shocked not only that this happened but that it happened so fast. But we shouldn't be. The memo about this came out two years ago.
The memo, in this case, is The Afghanistan Papers. It's a set of assessments of the US effort in Afghanistan prepared by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and published by the Washington Post in late 2019 after a 3 year effort to declassify them via the Freedom of Information Act. Example sources: "The Afghanistan Papers", Wikipedia article; "A Secret History Of The War", Washington Post article 9 Dec 2019.
What the Afghanistan Papers tell us is that all those years of military leaders and presidents telling us how well nation-building in Afghanistan was going were all lies. The metrics they offered to quantify success were all fudged. When they couldn't keep fudging them anymore because people could tell they were fudged, they classified them. The leaders even knew that the official objectives were ridiculous and that the country of Afghanistan was too riddled with tribal loyalty and corruption to be built into something resembling a modern Western state.
Why weren't we all more aware of this? Well, for one, this came out during the Trump administration, when articles about how our political leaders are deliberately lying to us were weekly events. It was quickly forgotten under Trump's "The media is the enemy, and the way to beat them is to flood the zone with shit" strategy of distraction.
While maybe for some of us the significance of The Afghanistan Papers got lost in the noise, one person who shouldn't have been so surprised is President Biden. He was in the White House for 8 years as VP, so he should be more aware than most of us what utter BS the Afghanistan success story was. But instead he promised us a month ago that "There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy"— recalling the US's ignominious exit from Vietnam in 1975— only for similar scenes to play out this week in Afghanistan.
I'm not saying that Biden shouldn't have completed the troop withdrawal— a withdrawal that was committed to by President Trump, I must point out— just that he should have been a bit more careful in setting expectations. Under-promise and over-deliver, not vice versa!