An Inspector General’s report, obtained by the Washington Post, reportedly shows a years-long concerted effort on the part of American military and government officials to hide the cost of the war in Afghanistan — and the war’s chances of success.
The Post reports that officials were aware that the now 20-year-long, trillion dollar effort may have been doomed to failure from the beginning, and that military strategists involved in the war were confused about the war’s objectives and how to achieve them. The trove of around 2,000 documents essentially, the Post says, accuses military leaders and senior government officials of “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”
The report was generated, the Post says, as part of a “look back” on the Afghan war “examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in American history,” and includes interviews with senior Bush and Obama Administration officials, foreign affairs experts, diplomatic staff, aid workers, and Afghanis.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” one witness, Douglas Lute, a three-star general who served as and advisor to both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama is quoting as saying. “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute told the Inspector General. “Who will say this was in vain?”
The report’s dry statistics are shocking, but the interviews, attended to the report, are worse. They paint a picture of two administrations concerned about the public’s ever-souring view on the war and, in some cases, a government desperate to paint the best picture of the Afghan conflict possible, even if that meant lying outright about progress.
Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Col. Bob Crowley told the Inspector General, according to the Washington Post. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
“Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public,” according to the Post. “They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.”
Even aid workers, who were charged with spending as much money as possible to ease the pain of ordinary Afghanis were critical of the United States, effort, according to the documents. Some even went so far, the Post says, as to accuse Congress of merely throwing money at the war without regard for outcomes.
“One unidentified contractor told government interviewers he was expected to dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly the size of a U.S. county. He once asked a visiting congressman whether the lawmaker could responsibly spend that kind of money back home: ‘He said hell no.'”
The report itself is fascinating, if perhaps only because it seems the effort spans at least two administrations — Bush’s and Obama’s. Although the Post includes the Trump Administration in the mix, they do seem to acknowledge that the Trump Administration has made an effort to extricate the U.S. from Afghanistan — something both White Houses struggled to do.
The report is just one of several that may have been compiled in regards to the Afghan War, the Post also reports, and the investigators who compiled the report were explicitly tasked with seeking out failure. Other reports may — and likely will — paint a different picture of Afghanistan, but those are still forthcoming.