The Afghanistan Papers. None Of This Was A Secret. We Knew The War Was Unwinnable. Full 6 Parts. Washington Post. Really Pointless Because EVERYTHING in this has been reported for 18 years.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/

The Afghanistan Papers | A Secret History Of The War

[Part 1] At War With The Truth

U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found.

By Craig Whitlock Dec. 9, 2019

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

"We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn't know what we were doing," Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House's Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: "What are we trying to do here? We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."

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"If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction ... 2,400 lives lost," Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. "Who will say this was in vain?"

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=lute_doug_ll_01_d5_02202015&page=4&anno=1&filter=filter-spin

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government's botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan's thriving opium trade.

The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

"What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?" Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, "After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan."

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The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. 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.

"Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible," Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. "Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone."

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John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show "the American people have constantly been lied to."

The interviews are the byproduct of a project led by Sopko's agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Known as SIGAR, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.

In 2014, at Sopko's direction, SIGAR departed from its usual mission of performing audits and launched a side venture. Titled "Lessons Learned," the $11 million project was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one.

The Lessons Learned staff interviewed more than 600 people with firsthand experience in the war. Most were Americans, but SIGAR analysts also traveled to London, Brussels and Berlin to interview NATO allies. In addition, they interviewed about 20 Afghan officials, discussing reconstruction and development programs.

Drawing partly on the interviews, as well as other government records and statistics, SIGAR has published seven Lessons Learned reports since 2016 that highlight problems in Afghanistan and recommend changes to stabilize the country.

https://www.sigar.mil/lessonslearned/lessonslearnedreports/index.aspx?SSR=11&SubSSR=60&WP=Lessons%20Learned%20Reports

But the reports, written in dense bureaucratic prose and focused on an alphabet soup of government initiatives, left out the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews.

"We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians," read the introduction to one report released in May 2018.

The reports also omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people who were interviewed for the project. While a few officials agreed to speak on the record to SIGAR, the agency said it promised anonymity to everyone else it interviewed to avoid controversy over politically sensitive matters.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, The Post began seeking Lessons Learned interview records in August 2016. SIGAR refused, arguing that the documents were privileged and that the public had no right to see them.

The Post had to sue SIGAR in federal court — twice — to compel it to release the documents.

The agency eventually disclosed more than 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and transcripts from 428 of the interviews, as well as several audio recordings.

The documents identify 62 of the people who were interviewed, but SIGAR blacked out the names of 366 others. In legal briefs, the agency contended that those individuals should be seen as whistleblowers and informants who might face humiliation, harassment, retaliation or physical harm if their names became public.

By cross-referencing dates and other details from the documents, The Post independently identified 33 other people who were interviewed, including several former ambassadors, generals and White House officials.

The Post has asked a federal judge to force SIGAR to disclose the names of everyone else interviewed, arguing that the public has a right to know which officials criticized the war and asserted that the government had misled the American people. The Post also argued the officials were not whistleblowers or informants, because they were not interviewed as part of an investigation.

A decision by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington has been pending since late September.

The Post is publishing the documents now, instead of waiting for a final ruling, to inform the public while the Trump administration is negotiating with the Taliban and considering whether to withdraw the 13,000 U.S. troops who remain in Afghanistan.

The Post attempted to contact for comment everyone whom it was able to identify as having given an interview to SIGAR. Their responses are compiled in a separate article.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/responses-from-people-featured-in-the-afghanistan-papers/2019/12/08/086864aa-0bed-11ea-97ac-a7ccc8dd1ebc_story.html

Sopko, the inspector general, told The Post that he did not suppress the blistering criticisms and doubts about the war that officials raised in the Lessons Learned interviews. He said it took his office three years to release the records because he has a small staff and because other federal agencies had to review the documents to prevent government secrets from being disclosed.

"We didn't sit on it," he said. "We're firm believers in openness and transparency, but we've got to follow the law. ... I think of any inspector general, I've probably been the most forthcoming on information."

The interview records are raw and unedited, and SIGAR's Lessons Learned staff did not stitch them into a unified narrative. But they are packed with tough judgments from people who shaped or carried out U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

"We don't invade poor countries to make them rich," James Dobbins, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as a special envoy to Afghanistan under Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. "We don't invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan."

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To augment the Lessons Learned interviews, The Post obtained hundreds of pages of previously classified memos about the Afghan war that were dictated by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006.

Dubbed "snowflakes" by Rumsfeld and his staff, the memos are brief instructions or comments that the Pentagon boss dictated to his underlings, often several times a day.

Rumsfeld made a select number of his snowflakes public in 2011, posting them online in conjunction with his memoir, "Known and Unknown." But most of his snowflake collection — an estimated 59,000 pages — remained secret.

In 2017, in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute based at George Washington University, the Defense Department began reviewing and releasing the remainder of Rumsfeld's snowflakes on a rolling basis. The Archive shared them with The Post.

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/foia/2018-01-24/rumsfeld-snowflakes-come-cold

Together, the SIGAR interviews and the Rumsfeld memos pertaining to Afghanistan constitute a secret history of the war and an unsparing appraisal of 18 years of conflict.

Worded in Rumsfeld's brusque style, many of the snowflakes foreshadow problems that continue to haunt the U.S. military more than a decade later.

"I may be impatient. In fact I know I'm a bit impatient," Rumsfeld wrote in one memo to several generals and senior aides. "We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave."

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"Help!" he wrote.

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The memo was dated April 17, 2002 — six months after the war started.

What they said in public

April 17, 2002

"The history of military conflict in Afghanistan [has] been one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We're not going to repeat that mistake."

— President George W. Bush, in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute

With their forthright descriptions of how the United States became stuck in a faraway war, as well as the government's determination to conceal them from the public, the cache of Lessons Learned interviews broadly resembles the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's top-secret history of the Vietnam War.

When they were leaked in 1971, the Pentagon Papers caused a sensation by revealing the government had long misled the public about how the United States came to be embroiled in Vietnam.

Bound into 47 volumes, the 7,000-page study was based entirely on internal government documents — diplomatic cables, decision-making memos, intelligence reports. To preserve secrecy, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara issued an order prohibiting the authors from interviewing anyone.

SIGAR's Lessons Learned project faced no such restrictions. Staffers carried out the interviews between 2014 and 2018, mostly with officials who served during the Bush and Obama years.

About 30 of the interview records are transcribed, word-for-word accounts. The rest are typed summaries of conversations: pages of notes and quotes from people with different vantage points in the conflict, from provincial outposts to the highest circles of power.

Some of the interviews are inexplicably short. The interview record with John Allen, the Marine general who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2013, consists of five paragraphs.

In contrast, records of interviews with other influential figures are much more extensive. Former U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker sat for two interviews that yielded 95 transcribed pages.

Unlike the Pentagon Papers, none of the Lessons Learned documents were originally classified as a government secret. Once The Post pushed to make them public, however, other federal agencies intervened and classified some material after the fact.

The State Department, for instance, asserted that releasing portions of certain interviews could jeopardize negotiations with the Taliban to end the war. The Defense Department and Drug Enforcement Administration also classified some interview excerpts.

The Lessons Learned interviews contain few revelations about military operations. But running throughout are torrents of criticism that refute the official narrative of the war, from its earliest days through the start of the Trump administration.

At the outset, for instance, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had a clear, stated objective — to retaliate against al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Yet the interviews show that as the war dragged on, the goals and mission kept changing and a lack of faith in the U.S. strategy took root inside the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department.

Fundamental disagreements went unresolved. Some U.S. officials wanted to use the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Others wanted to transform Afghan culture and elevate women's rights. Still others wanted to reshape the regional balance of power among Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia.

"With the AfPak strategy there was a present under the Christmas tree for everyone," an unidentified U.S. official told government interviewers in 2015. "By the time you were finished you had so many priorities and aspirations it was like no strategy at all."

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The Lessons Learned interviews also reveal how U.S. military commanders struggled to articulate who they were fighting, let alone why.

Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warl-rds on the CIA's payroll? According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an answer.

As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn't tell friend from foe.

"They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live," an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special Forces team told government interviewers in 2017. "It took several conversations for them to understand that I did not have that information in my hands. At first, they just kept asking: 'But who are the bad guys, where are they?'"

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The view wasn't any clearer from the Pentagon.

"I have no visibility into who the bad guys are," Rumsfeld complained in a Sept. 8, 2003, snowflake. "We are woefully deficient in human intelligence."

What they said in public

Dec. 1, 2009

"The days of providing a blank check are over. ... It must be clear that Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security and that America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan."

— President Barack Obama, in a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the same thing. They would avoid falling into the trap of "nation-building" in Afghanistan.

On that score, the presidents failed miserably. The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan — more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.

The Lessons Learned interviews show the grandiose nation-building project was marred from the start.

U.S. officials tried to create — from scratch — a democratic government in Kabul modeled after their own in Washington. It was a foreign concept to the Afghans, who were accustomed to tribalism, monarchism, communism and Islamic law.

"Our policy was to create a strong central government which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government," an unidentified former State Department official told government interviewers in 2015. "The timeframe for creating a strong central government is 100 years, which we didn't have."

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Meanwhile, the United States flooded the fragile country with far more aid than it could possibly absorb.

During the peak of the fighting, from 2009 to 2012, U.S. lawmakers and military commanders believed the more they spent on schools, bridges, canals and other civil-works projects, the faster security would improve. Aid workers told government interviewers it was a colossal misjudgment, akin to pumping kerosene on a dying campfire just to keep the flame alive.

One unnamed executive with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), guessed that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill: "We lost objectivity. We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason."

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Many aid workers blamed Congress for what they saw as a mindless rush to spend.

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. 'Well, sir, that's what you just obligated us to spend and I'm doing it for communities that live in mud huts with no windows.'"

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The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption.

In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers — allies of Washington — plundered with impunity.

Christopher Kolenda, an Army colonel who deployed to Afghanistan several times and advised three U.S. generals in charge of the war, said that the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai had "self-organized into a kleptocracy" by 2006 — and that U.S. officials failed to recognize the lethal threat it posed to their strategy.

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"I like to use a cancer analogy," Kolenda told government interviewers. "Petty corruption is like skin cancer; there are ways to deal with it and you'll probably be just fine. Corruption within the ministries, higher level, is like colon cancer; it's worse, but if you catch it in time, you're probably ok. Kleptocracy, however, is like brain cancer; it's fatal."

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By allowing corruption to fester, U.S. officials told interviewers, they helped destroy the popular legitimacy of the wobbly Afghan government they were fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs and bureaucrats extorting bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce order.

"Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption," Crocker, who served as the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul in 2002 and again from 2011 to 2012, told government interviewers. He added, "Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, it's somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it."

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What they said in public

Sept. 4, 2013

"This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day. And I think that's an important story to be told across the board."

— Then-Army Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley, praising the Afghan security forces during a press briefing from Kabul. Milley is now a four-star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Year after year, U.S. generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central plank of their strategy: to train a robust Afghan army and national police force that can defend the country without foreign help.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries — paid by U.S. taxpayers — for tens of thousands of "ghost soldiers."

None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable.

One unidentified U.S. soldier said Special Forces teams "hated" the Afghan police whom they trained and worked with, calling them "awful — the bottom of the barrel in the country that is already at the bottom of the barrel."

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A U.S. military officer estimated that one-third of police recruits were "drug addicts or Taliban." Yet another called them "stealing fools" who looted so much fuel from U.S. bases that they perpetually smelled of gasoline.

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"Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane," an unnamed senior USAID official told government interviewers.

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Meanwhile, as U.S. hopes for the Afghan security forces failed to materialize, Afghanistan became the world's leading source of a growing scourge: opium.

The United States has spent about $9 billion to fight the problem over the past 18 years, but Afghan farmers are cultivating more opium poppies than ever. Last year, Afghanistan was responsible for 82 percent of global opium production, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, former officials said almost everything they did to constrain opium farming backfired.

"We stated that our goal is to establish a 'flourishing market economy,'" said Douglas Lute, the White House's Afghan war czar from 2007 to 2013. "I thought we should have specified a flourishing drug trade — this is the only part of the market that's working."

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From the beginning, Washington never really figured out how to incorporate a war on drugs into its war against al-Qaeda. By 2006, U.S. officials feared that narco-traffickers had become stronger than the Afghan government and that money from the drug trade was powering the insurgency.

No single agency or country was in charge of the Afghan drug strategy for the entirety of the war, so the State Department, the DEA, the U.S. military, NATO allies and the Afghan government butted heads constantly.

"It was a dog's breakfast with no chance of working," an unnamed former senior British official told government interviewers.

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The agencies and allies made things worse by embracing a dysfunctional muddle of programs, according to the interviews.

At first, Afghan poppy farmers were paid by the British to destroy their crops — which only encouraged them to grow more the next season. Later, the U.S. government eradicated poppy fields without compensation — which only infuriated farmers and encouraged them to side with the Taliban.

"It was sad to see so many people behave so stupidly," one U.S. official told government interviewers.

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What they said in public

Sept. 8, 2008

"Are we losing this war? Absolutely no way. Can the enemy win it? Absolutely no way."

— Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, in a news briefing from Afghanistan

The specter of Vietnam has hovered over Afghanistan from the start.

On Oct. 11, 2001, a few days after the United States started bombing the Taliban, a reporter asked Bush: "Can you avoid being drawn into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan?"

"We learned some very important lessons in Vietnam," Bush replied confidently. "People often ask me, 'How long will this last?' This particular battlefront will last as long as it takes to bring al-Qaeda to justice. It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two. But we will prevail."

In those early days, other U.S. leaders mocked the notion that the nightmare of Vietnam might repeat itself in Afghanistan.

"All together now — quagmire!" Rumsfeld joked at a news conference on Nov. 27, 2001.

But throughout the Afghan war, documents show that U.S. military officials have resorted to an old tactic from Vietnam — manipulating public opinion.

In news conferences and other public appearances, those in charge of the war have followed the same talking points for 18 years. No matter how the war is going — and especially when it is going badly — they emphasize how they are making progress.

For example, some snowflakes that Rumsfeld released with his memoir show he had received a string of unusually dire warnings from the war zone in 2006.

After returning from a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan, Barry McCaffrey, a retired Army general, reported the Taliban had made an impressive comeback and predicted that "we will encounter some very unpleasant surprises in the coming 24 months."

"The Afghan national leadership are collectively terrified that we will tip-toe out of Afghanistan in the coming few years — leaving NATO holding the bag — and the whole thing will collapse again into mayhem," McCaffrey wrote in June 2006.

Two months later, Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, gave the Pentagon chief a classified, 40-page report loaded with more bad news. It said "enormous popular discontent is building" against the Afghan government because of its corruption and incompetence. It also said that the Taliban was growing stronger, thanks to support from Pakistan, a U.S. ally.

Yet with Rumsfeld's personal blessing, the Pentagon buried the bleak warnings and told the public a very different story.

In October 2006, Rumsfeld's speechwriters delivered a paper titled "Afghanistan: Five Years Later." Brimming with optimism, it highlighted more than 50 promising facts and figures, from the number of Afghan women trained in "improved poultry management" (more than 19,000) to the "average speed on most roads" (up 300 percent).

"Five years on, there is a multitude of good news," it read. "While it has become fashionable in some circles to call Afghanistan a forgotten war, or to say the United States has lost its focus, the facts belie the myths."

Rumsfeld thought it was brilliant.

"This paper," he wrote in a memo, "is an excellent piece. How do we use it? Should it be an article? An Op-ed piece? A handout? A press briefing? All of the above? I think it ought to get it to a lot of people."

His staffers made sure it did. They circulated a version to reporters and posted it on Pentagon websites.

https://archive.defense.gov/home/dodupdate/For-the-record/documents/20062006d.html

Since then, U.S. generals have almost always preached that the war is progressing well, no matter the reality on the battlefield.

"We're making some steady progress," Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, told reporters in September 2008, even as he and other U.S. commanders in Kabul were urgently requesting reinforcements to cope with a rising tide of Taliban fighters.

Two years later, as the casualty rate among U.S. and NATO troops climbed to another high, Army Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez held a news conference in Kabul.

"First, we are steadily making deliberate progress," he said.

In March 2011, during congressional hearings, skeptical lawmakers pelted Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, with doubts that the U.S. strategy was working.

"The past eight months have seen important but hard-fought progress," Petraeus responded.

One year later, during a visit to Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stuck to the same script — even though he had just personally dodged a suicide attack.

"The campaign, as I've pointed out before, I think has made significant progress," Panetta told reporters.

In July 2016, after a surge in Taliban attacks on major cities, Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan at the time, repeated the refrain.

"We are seeing some progress," he told reporters.

What they said in public

March 27, 2009

"Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course. Instead, we will set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable."

— Obama, in remarks from the White House

During Vietnam, U.S. military commanders relied on dubious measurements to persuade Americans that they were winning.

Most notoriously, the Pentagon highlighted "body counts," or the number of enemy fighters killed, and inflated the figures as a measurement of success.

In Afghanistan, with occasional exceptions, the U.S. military has generally avoided publicizing body counts. But the Lessons Learned interviews contain numerous admissions that the government routinely touted statistics that officials knew were distorted, spurious or downright false.

The toll of war

Since 2001, an estimated 157,000 people have been killed in the war in Afghanistan.

Afghan security forces
64,124*

Afghan civilians
43,074*

Humanitarian aid workers
424

Taliban fighters and other insurgents
42,100*

U.S. contractors
3,814

U.S. military personnel
2,300

Journalists and media workers
67

NATO and coalition troops
1,145

*estimated

Note: U.S. military number is current through November 2019. The other figures and estimates are current as of October 2019.

Sources: Defense Department; Costs of War Project, Brown University; U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan; Committee to Protect Journalists
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/img/afghanistan-death-toll-ai2html-large.jpg?v=8

A person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said there was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary.

"It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture," the senior NSC official told government interviewers in 2016. "The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war."

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Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the senior NSC official said, the White House and Pentagon would spin them to the point of absurdity. Suicide bombings in Kabul were portrayed as a sign of the Taliban's desperation, that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat. Meanwhile, a rise in U.S. troop deaths was cited as proof that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.

"It was their explanations," the senior NSC official said. "For example, attacks are getting worse? 'That's because there are more targets for them to fire at, so more attacks are a false indicator of instability.' Then, three months later, attacks are still getting worse? 'It's because the Taliban are getting desperate, so it's actually an indicator that we're winning.'"

"And this went on and on for two reasons," the senior NSC official said, "to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate."

In other field reports sent up the chain of command, military officers and diplomats took the same line. Regardless of conditions on the ground, they claimed they were making progress.

"From the ambassadors down to the low level, [they all say] we are doing a great job," Michael Flynn, a retired three-star Army general, told government interviewers in 2015. "Really? So if we are doing such a great job, why does it feel like we are losing?"

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Upon arrival in Afghanistan, U.S. Army brigade and battalion commanders were given the same basic mission: to protect the population and defeat the enemy, according to Flynn, who served multiple tours in Afghanistan as an intelligence officer.

"So they all went in for whatever their rotation was, nine months or six months, and were given that mission, accepted that mission and executed that mission," said Flynn, who later briefly served as Trump's national security adviser, lost his job in a scandal and was convicted of lying to the FBI. "Then they all said, when they left, they accomplished that mission. Every single commander. Not one commander is going to leave Afghanistan ... and say, 'You know what, we didn't accomplish our mission.'"

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He added: "So the next guy that shows up finds it [their area] screwed up ... and then they come back and go, 'Man this is really bad.'"

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Bob Crowley, the retired Army colonel who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Afghanistan in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers that "truth was rarely welcome" at military headquarters in Kabul.

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"Bad news was often stifled," he said. "There was more freedom to share bad news if it was small — we're running over kids with our MRAPs [armored vehicles] — because those things could be changed with policy directives. But when we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn't welcome."

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John Garofano, a Naval War College strategist who advised Marines in Helmand province in 2011, said military officials in the field devoted an inordinate amount of resources to churning out color-coded charts that heralded positive results.

"They had a really expensive machine that would print the really large pieces of paper like in a print shop," he told government interviewers. "There would be a caveat that these are not actually scientific figures, or this is not a scientific process behind this."

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But Garofano said nobody dared to question whether the charts and numbers were credible or meaningful.

"There was not a willingness to answer questions such as, what is the meaning of this number of schools that you have built? How has that progressed you towards your goal?" he said. "How do you show this as evidence of success and not just evidence of effort or evidence of just doing a good thing?"

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Other senior officials said they placed great importance on one statistic in particular, albeit one the U.S. government rarely likes to discuss in public.

"I do think the key benchmark is the one I've suggested, which is how many Afghans are getting killed," James Dobbins, the former U.S. diplomat, told a Senate panel in 2009. "If the number's going up, you're losing. If the number's going down, you're winning. It's as simple as that."

Last year, 3,804 Afghan civilians were killed in the war, according to the United Nations.

That is the most in one year since the United Nations began tracking casualties a decade ago.


If you have information to share about The Afghanistan Papers, contact The Post at afghanpapers@washpost.com.

Were you or one of your family members involved in the Afghanistan war? Tell us about your experiences.

Craig Whitlock
Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter who specializes in national security issues. He has covered the Pentagon, served as the Berlin bureau chief and reported from more than 60 countries. He joined The Washington Post in 1998.

Interviews And Memos | Explore the documents | Key insiders speak bluntly about the failures of the longest conflict in U.S. history
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/documents-database/
'We didn't know what the task was'

Post Reports | 'We didn't know what the task was' | Hear candid interviews with former ambassador Ryan Crocker and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn
https://wapo.st/afghanistan-papers-post-reports

The Fight For The Documents | About the investigation | It took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview records
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-the-post-unearthed-the-afghanistan-papers/2019/12/08/07ddb844-1847-11ea-a659-7d69641c6ff7_story.html

_____________________________

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-strategy/

The Afghanistan Papers | A Secret History Of The War

[Part 2] Stranded Without A Strategy

Bush and Obama had polar-opposite plans to win the war. Both were destined to fail.

By Craig Whitlock Dec. 9, 2019

In the beginning, the rationale for invading Afghanistan was clear: to destroy al-Qaeda, topple the Taliban and prevent a repeat of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Within six months, the United States had largely accomplished what it set out to do. The leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban were dead, captured or in hiding.

But then the U.S. government committed a fundamental mistake it would repeat again and again over the next 17 years, according to a cache of government documents obtained by The Washington Post.

In hundreds of confidential interviews that constitute a secret history of the war, U.S. and allied officials admitted they veered off in directions that had little to do with al-Qaeda or 9/11. By expanding the original mission, they said they adopted fatally flawed warfighting strategies based on misguided assumptions about a country they did not understand.

The result: an unwinnable conflict with no easy way out.

"If there was ever a notion of mission creep it is Afghanistan," said Richard Boucher, who served as the State Department's top diplomat for South Asia from 2006 to 2009, according to a transcript of what he told government interviewers in 2015. He added: "We have to say good enough is good enough. That is why we are there 15 years later. We are trying to achieve the unachievable instead of achieving the achievable."

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In unusually candid interviews, officials who served under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama said both leaders failed in their most important task as commanders in chief — to devise a clear strategy with concise, attainable objectives.

Diplomats and military commanders acknowledged they struggled to answer simple questions: Who is the enemy? Whom can we count on as allies? How will we know when we have won?

Their strategies differed, but Bush and Obama both committed early blunders that they never recovered from, according to the interviews.

After a succession of quick military victories in 2001 and early 2002, Bush decided to keep a light force of U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely to hunt suspected terrorists. Soon, however, he made plans to invade another nation — Iraq — and Afghanistan quickly became an afterthought.

James Dobbins, a career diplomat who served as a special envoy for Afghanistan under Bush and Obama, told government interviewers it was a hubristic mistake that should have been obvious from the start.

"First, you know, sort of just invade only one country at a time. I mean that seriously," Dobbins said, according to a transcript of his remarks. "They take a lot of high-level time and attention and we'll overload the system if we do more than one of these at a time."

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By the time Obama took office in 2009, al-Qaeda had largely vanished from Afghanistan. But the Taliban had made a comeback.

Obama tore up Bush's counterterrorism strategy and approved a polar-opposite plan — a massive counterinsurgency campaign, backed by 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops, as well as tons of aid for a weak Afghan government.

In contrast with Bush, Obama imposed strict deadlines and promised to bring home all U.S. troops by the end of his presidency.

But Obama's strategy was also destined to fail. U.S., NATO and Afghan officials told government interviewers that it tried to accomplish too much, too quickly, and depended on an Afghan government that was corrupt and dysfunctional.

Worse, they said, Obama tried to set artificial dates for ending the war before it was over. All the Taliban had to do was wait him out.

"There were a number of faulty assumptions in the strategy: Afghanistan is ready for democracy overnight, the population will support the government in a short time frame, more of everything is better," Bob Crowley, a retired Army colonel who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers.

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Over the past 18 years, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 came home wounded, according to Defense Department figures.

Marine Cpl. Burness Britt is transported after being wounded by an IED in Helmand province in 2011. (Anja Niedringhaus/AP) Spec. Robert Lewis Warren, wounded in a Taliban ambush months before, shaves his head in Washington in 2010, days before undergoing surgery to repair his skull. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

Today, about 13,000 U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan. The U.S. military acknowledges the Taliban is stronger now than at any point since 2001. Yet there has been no comprehensive public reckoning for the strategic failures behind the longest war in American history.

There has been no Afghanistan version of the 9/11 Commission, which held the government to account for the worst terrorist attack on American soil; no Afghanistan version of the Fulbright Hearings, when senators aggressively questioned the war in Vietnam; no Afghanistan version of the Army's official, 1,300-page, introspective history of the war in Iraq.

In 2014, a small federal agency created by Congress decided to try to fill the void.

The Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known as SIGAR, launched an $11 million project — titled "Lessons Learned" — to study the war's core mistakes. After interviewing more than 600 people, agency researchers published seven reports that recommended policy changes.

https://www.sigar.mil/lessonslearned/lessonslearnedreports/index.aspx?SSR=11&SubSSR=60&WP=Lessons%20Learned%20Reports

To avoid controversy, SIGAR sanitized the harshest criticisms from the Lessons Learned interviews and omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the people it spoke with. It also scrapped plans to publish a separate report on deficiencies in the Afghan war strategy.

After a three-year legal battle, The Post obtained notes and transcripts, as well as several audio recordings, from more than 400 of the interviews. In stark language, the documents reveal that people who were directly involved in the war could not shake their doubts about the strategy and mission, even as Bush, Obama and, later, President Trump told the American people it was necessary to keep fighting.
The Afghanistan Papers

"What were we actually doing in that country?" an unidentified U.S. official who served as a liaison to NATO said in a government interview. "What are our objectives? Nation-building? Women's rights? ... It was never fully clear in our own minds what the established goals and timelines were."

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Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House official under Bush and Obama, said few people paused to question the very premise for keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

"Why did we make the Taliban the enemy when we were attacked by al-Qaeda? Why did we want to defeat the Taliban?" Eggers said in a Lessons Learned interview. "Collectively the system is incapable of taking a step back to question basic assumptions."

Boucher, a career diplomat who also served as chief State Department spokesman under Bush, said U.S. officials did not know what they were doing.

"First, we went in to get al-Qaeda, and to get al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, and even without killing bin Laden we did that," Boucher told government interviewers. "The Taliban was shooting back at us so we started shooting at them and they became the enemy. Ultimately, we kept expanding the mission."

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What they said in public

March 28, 2002

"The only thing you can do is to bomb them and try to kill them. And that's what we did, and it worked. They're gone."

— Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on the Taliban and al-Qaeda, MSNBC interview

Rumsfeld's premature declaration was the first of many times that senior U.S. leaders mistakenly assumed they could end the war on their terms. The Taliban was beaten down but hardly gone.

Lulled into overconfidence by the apparent ease of conquering Afghanistan, the Bush administration refused to sit down with defeated Taliban leaders to negotiate a lasting peace — a decision U.S. officials would later regret.

The Taliban was excluded from international conferences and Afghan gatherings from 2001 to 2003 that drew up a new government, even though some Taliban figures had shown a willingness to join in. Instead, the United States posted bounties for their capture and sent hundreds to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"A major mistake we made was treating the Taliban the same as al-Qaeda," Barnett Rubin, an American academic expert on Afghanistan who served as an adviser to the United Nations at the time, told government interviewers. "Key Taliban leaders were interested in giving the new system a chance, but we didn't give them a chance."

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The Taliban was not involved in the 9/11 attacks; none of the hijackers or planners were Afghans. But the Bush administration categorized Taliban leaders as terrorists because they had given al-Qaeda sanctuary and refused to hand over Osama bin Laden.

While the Taliban was easy to demonize because of its brutality and religious fanaticism, the movement proved too large and ingrained in Afghan society to eradicate.

"Everyone wanted the Taliban to disappear," Rubin said in a second Lessons Learned interview. "There was not much appetite for what we called threat reduction, for regional diplomacy and bringing the Taliban into the peace process."

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An unnamed U.N. official agreed, telling interviewers that it was the biggest missed opportunity of the war.

"At that moment, most Hizb-i-Islami or Taliban commanders were interested in joining the government," the U.N. official said, referring to another Afghan militia that fought U.S. troops. "Lesson learned: If you get the chance to talk to the Taliban, talk to them," the official said.

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Belatedly, U.S. officials came to realize it was impossible to vanquish the group. Today, Pentagon officials say the only way to end the war is with a political settlement in which the Taliban reconciles with the Afghan government.

Last year, the U.S. government opened direct, high-level peace talks with the Taliban for the first time.

Five of the Taliban's negotiators are former U.S. prisoners of war who each spent a dozen years in captivity in Guantanamo. The lead U.S. envoy is Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan American diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and later as ambassador to Iraq and the United Nations.

In a Lessons Learned interview in December 2016, Khalilzad acknowledged that by refusing to talk to the Taliban, the Bush administration may have blown a chance to end the war shortly after it started.

"Maybe we were not agile or wise enough to reach out to the Taliban early on, that we thought they were defeated and that they needed to be brought to justice, rather than that they should be accommodated or some reconciliation be done," he said.

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A year after Khalilzad's Lessons Learned interview, Trump pulled him back into public service by tapping him as the U.S. envoy for negotiations with the Taliban.

Federal officials redacted extensive portions of Khalilzad's interview before releasing a transcript to The Post in June, saying it contained classified information. In a court filing, the Justice Department said disclosure of the classified material "might negatively impact ongoing diplomatic negotiations."

The Post has asked a federal judge to review whether Khalilzad's remarks were properly classified. A decision is pending.

In Lessons Learned interviews, other officials said the Bush administration compounded its early mistake with the Taliban by making another critical error — treating Pakistan as a friend.

Pakistan's military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, had given the Pentagon permission to use Pakistani airspace and let the CIA track al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistani territory. As a result, the Bush White House was slow to recognize that Pakistan was simultaneously giving covert support to the Taliban, according to the interviews.

"Because of people's personal confidence in Musharraf and because of things he was continuing to do in helping police up a bunch of the al-Qaeda in Pakistan. There was a failure to perceive the double game that he starts to play by late 2002, early 2003," Marin Strmecki, a senior adviser to Rumsfeld, told government interviewers.

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"I think that the Afghans, and [President Hamid] Karzai himself, are bringing this up constantly even in the earlier parts of 2002," Strmecki added. "They are meeting unsympathetic ears because of the belief that Pakistan was helping us so much on al-Qaeda. ... There is never a full confronting of Pakistan in its role supporting the Taliban."

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What they said in private

Oct. 21, 2014

"Your job was not to win, it was to not lose."

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— A former National Security Council staff member, on how Afghanistan was eclipsed by the war in Iraq, Lessons Learned interview

By late 2002, Afghanistan had become yesterday's war in the eyes of the Bush administration. It was already preparing for a much bigger invasion, that of Iraq.

On Oct. 21, after spending several hours at the White House in meetings about Iraq, even Rumsfeld seemed taken aback by how much Afghanistan had receded from Bush's mind, according to a previously unpublished memo that the defense secretary wrote later that day.

Just before 3 p.m., Rumsfeld got a few minutes alone with the commander in chief. Rumsfeld asked Bush whether he wanted to arrange a meeting with Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, and Army Lt. Gen. Dan McNeill, who had been serving as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan for the past six months.

Bush was perplexed.

"He said, 'Who is General McNeill?'" Rumsfeld wrote in the memo. "I said he is the general in charge of Afghanistan. He said, 'Well, I don't need to meet with him.'"

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The memo was obtained as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute based at George Washington University, which shared it with The Post.

For his part, McNeill told government interviewers that he was given little strategic guidance. He said the Pentagon mainly cared about keeping a lid on the number of U.S. troops.

"There was no campaign plan in [the] early days," he said. "Rumsfeld would get excited if there was any increase in the number of boots on the ground."

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At the time, McNeill commanded about 8,000 troops — a tiny fraction of the number that would ultimately go to Afghanistan. A few contrarians in the Bush administration pushed to do more.

Richard Haass, a senior diplomat who served as the Bush administration's special coordinator for Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, told government interviewers that he floated a proposal to deploy 20,000 to 25,000 U.S. troops, alongside an equal number of allied forces. But he said his plan was shot down.

"I couldn't sell the idea. There was no enthusiasm. There was a profound sense of a lack of possibility in Afghanistan," Haass said in a Lessons Learned interview. "I was never talking about 100,000-plus people. I was talking about a very narrow mission. A mission not much different than what we have now. Training and arming in a limited role."

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He added: "It was seen as too much and that is ironic given where we ended up. In retrospect, it looks like a bargain."

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By keeping troops to a minimum in Afghanistan, the Bush administration was looking to claim swift victories on two fronts at the same time.

On May 1, 2003, while standing under a "Mission Accomplished" banner on an aircraft carrier, Bush declared an end to "major combat operations" in Iraq.

On the very same day, Rumsfeld visited Kabul and announced an end to "major combat activity" in Afghanistan.

Both declarations backfired spectacularly. Iraq descended into civil war. Meanwhile, as the U.S. government fixated on Iraq, the Taliban steadily regrouped.

Nicholas Burns, a career U.S. diplomat who served as ambassador to NATO under Bush, said the administration lost sight of the big picture in Afghanistan at a pivotal time.

"After 2003 and 2004 ... I can't remember us ever saying, should we still be there? Are we being useful? Are we succeeding?" he told government interviewers.

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"I think we would have done better if we had made some more specific, strategic assumptions," Burns said. "Yes, we're here open-ended. We think that might be 10 to 15 to 20 years. Or no, we'd like to bring American engagement, you know, to an end. ... I don't remember us asking that very tough question."

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Of the hundreds of people interviewed by SIGAR, Burns was one of the few who accepted personal responsibility for his role in the war's failures.

"At the time, but especially in ensuing years, I've often wondered did we make a mistake — and I'm part of this obviously, so I have to own part of it — in not deciding strategically if there was going to be an endpoint," he said. "I fault myself, and you know, we probably should have asked those questions more consistently by 2005 and 2006."

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By the time British Gen. David Richards took charge of NATO forces in Afghanistan in 2006, the Taliban was giving U.S. and allied troops all they could handle in the eastern and southern parts of the country.

Richards said the alliance failed to adapt.

"We were trying to get a single coherent long-term approach — a proper strategy — but instead we got a lot of tactics," he told government interviewers. "There was no coherent long-term strategy."

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In his Lessons Learned interview, Richards recalled having a tense encounter with Rumsfeld in 2006. The Pentagon chief asked the NATO commander why things were deteriorating in the south. Richards replied that it was because he did not have enough resources: "And Rummy said 'General what do you mean?' I said, 'We don't have enough troops and resources and we've raised expectations.' He said 'General, I don't agree. Move on.'"

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The next year, NATO forces in Afghanistan got a new commander: McNeill, the general whose name Bush had once forgotten. McNeill was ordered back to Afghanistan to take command a second time as the Taliban launched a wave of suicide attacks and began planting bombs all over the country.

By March 2007, the number of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan had climbed to 50,000. Despite the increase, McNeill said nobody in charge was able to articulate a clear mission and strategy.

"I tried to get someone to define for me what winning meant, even before I went over, and nobody could. Nobody would give me a good definition of what it meant," he told government interviewers. "Some people were thinking in terms of Jeffersonian democracy, but that's just not going to happen in Afghanistan."

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"There was no NATO campaign plan — a lot of verbiage and talk, but no plan," McNeill added. "So for better or for worse, a lot of what we did, we did with some forethought, but most of it was reacting to conditions on the ground. ... We were opportunists."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_07_xx_xx_undated_mcneill1&page=2&anno=4&filter=filter-strategy
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What they said in public

Dec. 1, 2009

"As your commander in chief, I owe you a mission that is clearly defined."

— Obama in a speech to Army cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., announcing he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan

Even before the new commander in chief moved into the White House, U.S. military leaders recognized they needed a fresh war plan. Years of hunting suspected terrorists was getting them nowhere. The Taliban kept gaining ground.

"At the time, I was looking at Afghanistan and I was thinking that there has to be more to solving this problem than killing people, because that's what we were doing and every time I went back security was worse," Army Maj. Gen. Edward Reeder, a Special Operations commander who deployed to the war zone several times before retiring in 2015, told government interviewers.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=reeder_edward_ll_07_71_10262017&page=1&anno=1&filter=filter-strategy

U.S. military leaders wanted to double down on a counterinsurgency strategy. The objective was to win the "hearts and minds" of the Afghan people by protecting them from the Taliban, limiting civilian casualties and building popular support for the new Afghan government.

The new strategy would require far more troops and far more aid for the Afghan government. A similar approach — dubbed "the surge" — had seemed to work in Iraq.

In August 2009, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then-commander of U.S. and NATO forces, wrote a classified 66-page assessment of the war that called for a "properly resourced" counterinsurgency campaign and laid out his proposed strategy in meticulous detail.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. and allied officials said McChrystal and the Obama administration glossed over two basic questions: Whom were they fighting? And why?

Obama had repeatedly declared the goal of the war was to "disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al-Qaeda." But the first draft of McChrystal's strategic review did not even mention al-Qaeda, because the group had all but disappeared from Afghanistan, according to an unnamed NATO official involved in the review.

"In 2009, the perception was that al-Qaeda was no longer a problem," the NATO official told government interviewers. "But the entire reason for being in Afghanistan was al-Qaeda. So then the second draft included them."

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Another jarring disconnect was that the United States and its allies could not agree on whether they were actually fighting a war in Afghanistan or doing something else, the NATO official said.

"There are big implications with calling this a war," the NATO official added. "Legally under international law that has serious implications. So we checked with the legal team and they agree it's not a war."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_01_xx_brussels_02242015&page=3&anno=2&filter=filter-strategy

To paper over the problem, McChrystal added a line in his report that said the conflict was "not a war in a conventional sense."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_01_xx_brussels_02242015&page=3&anno=3&filter=filter-strategy

The official description of the mission was even more convoluted.

The long definition stated that the objective for U.S. and NATO forces was to "reduce the capability and will of the insurgency, support the growth in capacity and capability of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and facilitate improvements in governance and socio-economic development, in order to provide a secure environment for sustainable stability that is observable to the population."

After months of debate at the White House, Obama approved the counterinsurgency strategy.

In his December 2009 speech at the U.S. Military Academy, he announced he would deploy 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, on top of the 70,000 that he and Bush had previously authorized. NATO and other U.S. allies would increase their forces to 50,000.

But Obama added a last-minute wrinkle that caught many of his senior advisers by surprise. He imposed a timeline on the mission and said the extra troops would start to come home in 18 months.

"The timeline was just sprung on us," Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command at the time, said in a Lessons Learned interview. "Two days before the president made the speech, on a Sunday, we all got called and were told to be in the Oval Office that night for the president to lay out what he would announce two evenings later. And he laid it out, there it is."

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"None of us had heard that before," Petraeus added. "And we were then asked, are you all okay with that? He went around the room and everyone said yes. And it was take it or leave it."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=petraeus_david_ll_07_64_08162017&page=2&anno=2&filter=filter-strategy

Barnett Rubin, the Afghan expert, was serving as an adviser to the State Department at the time. He told government interviewers he and other U.S. officials were "stupefied" when they heard Obama reveal the timeline during the West Point speech. All the Taliban had to do was lay low until U.S. and NATO troops left.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_07_xx_nyc_rubin_02172017&page=3&anno=1&filter=filter-strategy

He said it was understandable that Obama wanted to put the Afghan government on notice that the Americans wouldn't fight forever.

"But there was a mismatch between deadline and strategy," Rubin added. "With that deadline, you can't use that strategy."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_07_xx_nyc_rubin_02172017&page=3&anno=2&filter=filter-strategy

What they said in public

July 27, 2010

"We're going to have to break them, irreconcilable from reconcilable. If they're irreconcilable, we will neutralize them."

— Then-Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, on the Taliban, during a Senate hearing

Like the Bush administration, Obama lacked an effective diplomatic strategy for dealing with the Taliban.

In public, the Obama administration called for "reconciliation" between the Afghan government and insurgent leaders. But the Lessons Learned interviews show his advisers disagreed strenuously over what that meant.

Rubin, who favored talking to the Taliban, told interviewers that some hard-liners defined reconciliation as, "We'll be nice to people who surrender."

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In particular, he said, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was "very reluctant to move on this," because of her presidential aspirations.

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"Women are [a] very important constituency for her and she couldn't sell making a bargain with the Taliban," Rubin said. "If you want to be the first woman president you cannot leave any hint or doubt that you're not the toughest person on national security."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_01_xx_nyc_01202015&page=3&anno=2&filter=filter-strategy

Other diplomats argued that trying to deal with the Taliban was a waste of time.

"I never believed that the negotiations with the Taliban, conducted by whomever, were going to lead anywhere significant," Ryan Crocker, who served as Obama's ambassador to Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012, told government interviewers. "I felt at the most, it might be possible to chip away individual Taliban figures and bring them over to the government side, but that would be an incremental issue. ... I never thought there was an upside."

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In the Lessons Learned interviews, Obama officials acknowledged that they failed to resolve another strategic challenge that had dogged Bush — what to do about Pakistan.

Washington kept giving Pakistan billions of dollars a year to help fight terrorism. Yet Pakistani military and intelligence leaders never stopped supporting the Afghan Taliban and giving sanctuary to its leaders.

"The Obama administration just thought if you just hang in there Pakistan will see the light," a former White House official told government interviewers in 2015.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_01_xx_dc_02272015&page=3&anno=1&filter=filter-strategy

In a separate interview in 2015, another unnamed official complained that the Obama administration would not let U.S. troops attack Taliban camps on the Pakistani side of the border.

"And still today we wonder what the problem is," the official said. "I talked to General Petraeus and I was saying that if I were a general and a bullet came and hit my men I would follow it. And Petraeus said yeah well go talk to Washington."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_05_xx_03272017&page=3&anno=1&filter=filter-strategy

Crocker, who also served as U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 2004 to 2007, told government interviewers that Pakistani leaders did not bother to hide their duplicity.

He recounted a conversation he had with Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, who was then Pakistan's intelligence chief, in which he "was getting on him again" about the Taliban.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=crocker_ryan_ll_second_interview_12012016&page=36&anno=1&filter=filter-strategy

"And he says, 'You know, I know you think we're hedging our bets. You're right, we are, because one day you'll be gone again, it'll be like Afghanistan the first time, you'll be done with us, but we're still going to be here because we can't actually move the country. And the last thing we want with all of our other problems is to have turned the Taliban into a mortal enemy, so, yes, we're hedging our bets.' "

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In his December 2016 Lessons Learned interview, Crocker said the only way to force Pakistan to change would be for Trump to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely and give them the green light to hunt the Taliban on Pakistani territory.

"It would allow him to say, 'You worry about our reliability, you worry about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, I'm here to tell you that I'm going to keep troops there as long as I feel we need them, there is no calendar.'

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=crocker_ryan_ll_second_interview_12012016&page=37&anno=1&filter=filter-strategy

"'That's the good news. The bad news for you is we're going to kill Taliban leaders wherever we find them: Baluchistan, Punjab, downtown Islamabad. We're going to go find them, so maybe you want to do a strategic recalculation.'"

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=crocker_ryan_ll_second_interview_12012016&page=37&anno=2&filter=filter-strategy

What they said in private

Feb. 2, 2015

"Tactics without strategy is a good way to fail."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_02_xx_berlin_02022015&page=1&anno=1&filter=filter-strategy

— Unnamed German official, Lessons Learned interview

At first, hopes were high that Obama's strategy would turn the tide. But military and civilian officials interviewed for the SIGAR project said it soon became clear that lessons learned from one war zone did not necessarily apply to the other.

An unidentified Special Forces officer who deployed to Afghanistan in 2013 said all the conventional forces there thought it would be just like Iraq. "They were constantly referring to it," he said, but "just because [the villagers] are wearing robes and speaking derka derka doesn't mean it's the same country."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_07_xx_dc_09072016&page=1&anno=2&filter=filter-strategy

The officer told government interviewers the new counterinsurgency strategy was rushed, with the troops receiving scant direction from above: "We were given no documents that instructed us how to do our job. We were given the commander's vague strategic priorities but [that] generally amounted to 'go do good things.' Both at the strategic and operational level, doing it right took a back seat to doing it fast."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_07_xx_dc_09072016&page=1&anno=1&filter=filter-strategy

Others said the strategy was based on buzzwords and lacked substance. U.S. military leaders adopted an approach they labeled "clear, hold and build," in which troops would clear insurgents from a district and remain until local government officials and Afghan security forces could stabilize the area with an influx of aid.

Because they were operating on a tight timetable, U.S. commanders first tried to clear areas where the Taliban was deeply entrenched, such as Helmand and Kandahar provinces in southern Afghanistan. The approach backfired when U.S. officials lavished aid on districts that remained supportive of the Taliban yet neglected peaceful areas that sided with the government in Kabul.

In a Lessons Learned interview, a senior official with the U.S. Agency for International Development said friendly governors from stable provinces would come to Kabul and ask: "What do I have to do to get love from the Americans, blow some shit up?"

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"We needed to go first where the fence-sitters and low-hanging fruit was [and] reward good behavior," the USAID official said, adding that the Americans and their allies needed to "reinforce people who are cooperating with the government, so we can demonstrate success, then create a demand for it in insecure areas. ... But this takes time, as it should, and we didn't have time or patience."

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In 2014, as evidence piled up that Obama's plan was faltering, a senior State Department official told government interviewers that the mission had been unfocused from the start.

"I am sick of Obama saying, 'We're sick of war,'" the senior diplomat said. "Only 5 percent of Americans are involved in the war; it doesn't affect most Americans."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_01_xx_arlington_10082014&page=2&anno=1&filter=filter-strategy

"If I were to write a book, its [cover] would be: 'America goes to war without knowing why it does,'" she added. "We went in reflexively after 9/11 without knowing what we were trying to achieve. I would like to write a book about having a plan and an endgame before you go in."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_01_xx_arlington_10082014&page=2&anno=2&filter=filter-strategy

Dozens of U.S. and Afghan officials told interviewers that the problems reflected a much deeper flaw. Despite years and years of war, the United States still did not understand what was motivating its enemies to fight.

The Taliban's presence "was a symptom, but we rarely tried to understand what the disease was," an unnamed USAID official said in a Lessons Learned interview in 2016.

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In a separate interview that year, an Army civil-affairs officer said: "In order to clear, you need to know your enemy. You don't know your enemy — [you're just] tearing things down and pissing people off."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_05_xx_phone2_01272016&page=2&anno=1&filter=filter-strategy

Shahmahmood Miakhel, a senior Afghan official who now serves as governor of Nangahar province, told interviewers there was a simple way to tell whether the U.S. strategy was working.

"I told Petraeus that in the counterinsurgency in which you don't know your friend, you don't know your enemy and environment, you are going to fail," Miakhel said. "I told him to check your list of people to be killed and captured, and see has this become longer or shorter. If it has increased, that means that your strategy [has] failed."

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http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=miakheil_shah_mahmood_ll_02072017&page=5&anno=2&filter=filter-strategy

In March 2011, when he was commander of U.S. and NATO forces, Petraeus estimated there were "somewhere around 25,000 Taliban," according to testimony he gave to Congress.

Today, the U.S. military estimates the number has more than doubled — to about 60,000.

If you have information to share about The Afghanistan Papers, contact The Post at afghanpapers@washpost.com.

Were you or one of your family members involved in the Afghanistan war? Tell us about your experiences.

Craig Whitlock

Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter who specializes in national security issues. He has covered the Pentagon, served as the Berlin bureau chief and reported from more than 60 countries. He joined The Washington Post in 1998.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-nation-building/

The Afghanistan Papers | A Secret History Of The War

[Part 3] Built To Fail

Despite vows the U.S. wouldn't get mired in 'nation-building,' it's wasted billions doing just that

By Craig Whitlock Dec. 9, 2019

George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all promised the same thing: The United States would not get stuck with the burden of "nation-building" in Afghanistan.

In October 2001, shortly after ordering U.S. forces to invade, Bush said he would push the United Nations to "take over the so-called nation-building."

Eight years later, Obama insisted his government would not get mired in a long "nation-building project," either. Eight years after that, Trump made a similar vow: "We're not nation-building again."

Yet nation-building is exactly what the United States has tried to do in war-battered Afghanistan — on a colossal scale.

Since 2001, Washington has spent more on nation-building in Afghanistan than in any country ever, allocating $133 billion for reconstruction, aid programs and the Afghan security forces.

Adjusted for inflation, that is more than the United States spent in Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.

Unlike the Marshall Plan, however, the exorbitant nation-building project for Afghanistan went awry from the start and grew worse as the war dragged on, according to a trove of confidential government interviews with diplomats, military officials and aid workers who played a direct role in the conflict.

Instead of bringing stability and peace, they said, the United States inadvertently built a corrupt, dysfunctional Afghan government that remains dependent on U.S. military power for its survival. Assuming it does not collapse, U.S. officials have said it will need billions more dollars in aid annually, for decades.

Speaking candidly on the assumption that most of their remarks would not be made public, those interviewed said Washington foolishly tried to reinvent Afghanistan in its own image by imposing a centralized democracy and a free-market economy on an ancient, tribal society that was unsuited for either.

Then, they said, Congress and the White House made matters worse by drenching the destitute country with far more money than it could possibly absorb. The flood crested during Obama's first term as president, as he escalated the number of U.S. troops in the war zone to 100,000.

"During the surge there were massive amounts of people and money going into Afghanistan," David Marsden, a former official with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), told government interviewers. "It's like pouring a lot of water into a funnel; if you pour it too fast, the water overflows that funnel onto the ground. We were flooding the ground."

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By some measures, life in Afghanistan has improved markedly since 2001. Infant mortality rates have dropped. The number of children in school has soared. The size of the Afghan economy has nearly quintupled.

But the U.S. nation-building project backfired in so many other ways that even foreign-aid advocates questioned whether Afghanistan, in the abstract, might have been better off without any U.S. help at all, according to the documents.

"I mean, the writing is on the wall now," Michael Callen, an economist with the University of California at San Diego and a specialist in the Afghan public sector, told government interviewers. "We spent so much money and there is so little to show for it."

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Callen and others blamed an array of mistakes committed again and again over 18 years — haphazard planning, misguided policies, bureaucratic feuding. Many said the overall nation-building strategy was further undermined by hubris, impatience, ignorance and a belief that money can fix anything.

Much of the money, they said, ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt Afghan officials, while U.S.-financed schools, clinics and roads fell into disrepair, if they were built at all.

Some said the outcome was foreseeable. They cited the U.S. track record of military interventions in other countries — Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Haiti, Somalia — over the past quarter-century.

"We just don't have a post-conflict stabilization model that works," Stephen Hadley, who served as White House national security adviser under Bush, told government interviewers. "Every time we have one of these things, it is a pickup game. I don't have any confidence that if we did it again, we would do any better."

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Troubles plaguing many reconstruction programs in Afghanistan have been well documented, but the interviews obtained by The Post contain new narratives from insiders on what went wrong.

"Once in a while, ok, we can overspend," Douglas Lute, an Army lieutenant general who served as the White House's Afghan war czar from 2007 to 2013, told government interviewers. "We are a rich country and can pour money down a hole and it doesn't bust the bank. But should we? Can't we get a bit more rational about this?"

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In comments echoed by other officials who shaped the war, Lute said the United States lavished money on dams and highways just "to show we could spend it," fully aware that the Afghans, among the poorest and least educated people in the world, could never maintain such huge infrastructure projects.

"One poignant example of this is a ribbon-cutting ceremony complete with the giant scissors I attended for the district police chief in some G-dforsaken province," Lute said. He recalled how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had overseen the design and construction of a police headquarters that featured a glass facade and an atrium.

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"The police chief couldn't even open the door," Lute said. "He had never seen a doorknob like this. To me, this encapsulates the whole experience in Afghanistan."

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What they said in private

Sept. 23, 2014

"We weren't seriously into it — didn't have our heart in it. We were pushed into state-building."

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— Senior State Department official, on the early years of the war, Lessons Learned interview

Ever since the war started, U.S. officials have debated — and decried — the expense of rebuilding Afghanistan. In 2008, as reports of fraud and excessive spending piled up, Congress created a watchdog agency to follow the money.

Since then, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, has carried out more than 1,000 audits and investigations, exposing wasteful projects and highlighting $2 billion in potential savings.

In 2014, SIGAR launched a special $11 million project — titled "Lessons Learned" — to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan. Agency staffers interviewed more than 600 people with firsthand experience in the war.

SIGAR published two Lessons Learned reports that focused on nation-building, but they were steeped in jargon and omitted the most critical comments from the interviews.

https://www.sigar.mil/lessonslearned/lessonslearnedreports/index.aspx?SSR=11&SubSSR=60&WP=Lessons%20Learned%20Reports

"The U.S. government's provision of direct financial support sometimes created dependent enterprises and disincentives for Afghans to borrow from market-based financial institutions," concluded an April 2018 report on development of the Afghan private sector. "Furthermore, insufficient coordination within and between U.S. government civilian and military agencies often negatively affected the outcomes of programs."

In one of the hundreds of Lessons Learned interviews obtained by The Post, Robert Finn, who served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003, said Bush administration officials dismissed his early warnings that they needed to do far more to stabilize Afghanistan.

"This is a systemic problem of our government," he said. "We can't think beyond the next election. When we went to Afghanistan everybody was talking about a year or two, and I said to them that we would be lucky if we were out of here in 20 years."

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Of the three commanders in chief, Bush may have been the unlikeliest nation-builder. When he first campaigned for the presidency, he derided the Clinton administration for committing to unpopular "nation-building exercises" in Somalia and Haiti.

"I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building," he said during a debate with Democratic nominee Al Gore in October 2000. "I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war."

A year later, Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan. Victory on the battlefield came swiftly. Coping with the aftermath would take longer than most expected.

No nation needed more building than Afghanistan. Desperately poor, it had been consumed by continuous warfare since 1979, when it was invaded by another superpower, the Soviet Union.

Few Afghans knew much about the outside world. A large majority was illiterate. The country's ousted rulers, the Taliban, a movement of religious zealots, had banned many hallmarks of modern civilization, including television, musical instruments and equal rights for women.

"We were dealing with parts of a society who thought the king was still in power, never knew the Russians came, or that the Americans were here," Jordan Sellman, who spent several years in Afghanistan working for USAID, told government interviewers. "They didn't even use currency, but bartered for items. We were bringing 21st-century stuff to a society living in a different time period."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=sellman_jordan_ll_05_a3_12032015&page=2&anno=1&filter=filter-nation-building

Mindful of Bush's campaign rhetoric, his administration initially tried to avoid responsibility for Afghanistan's reconstruction, according to people interviewed for the Lessons Learned project.

The administration tried to get the United Nations, NATO and other countries to take charge of humanitarian aid and reconstruction. The United States agreed to help train a new Afghan army but pushed to keep it small, because the Pentagon and State Department did not want to bear the long-term costs.

Eventually, however, officials interviewed for the Lessons Learned project said, the Bush administration recognized it had a duty to help Afghanistan build a new economy from scratch. Although Afghanistan had scant experience with free markets, the United States pressured the Afghans to adopt American-style capitalism.

Yet several U.S. officials told government interviewers it quickly became apparent that people who would make up the Afghan ruling class were too set in their ways to change.

"These people went to the communist school," said Finn, the former ambassador. A common Afghan fear, he recalled, was "if you allow capitalism, these private companies would come in and make profit."

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Richard Kraemer, a former senior program officer for Afghanistan at the National Endowment for Democracy, told government interviewers that Afghan bureaucrats "were in favor of a socialist or communist approach because that's how they remembered things the last time the system worked." Afghanistan was run by communists from 1978 until 1992.

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But Kraemer said U.S. officials suffered from an equally narrow mind-set. "We had all good intentions," he added, "... but we had plenty of hubris. Dogmatic adherence to free-market principles led to our inability to adopt a nuanced, balanced approach to what Afghanistan needed."

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When it came to economics, others said the United States too often treated Afghanistan like a theoretical case study and should have applied more common sense instead.

Donors insisted that a large portion of aid be spent on education, even though Afghanistan — a nation of subsistence farmers — had few jobs for graduates.

"We were building schools next to empty schools, and it just didn't make sense," a Special Forces officer told government interviewers. He said local Afghans made clear "they didn't really want schools. They said they wanted their kids out herding goats."

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U.S. and European officials also insisted that Afghanistan embrace free trade, even though it had almost nothing of value to export.

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"What could we sell?" an Afghan official said in a Lessons Learned interview in March 2017. "A few grapes here or something of the like."

Economic policies that might have helped Afghanistan slowly emerge from penury, such as price controls and government subsidies, were not considered by U.S. officials who saw them as incompatible with capitalism, said Barnett Rubin, a former adviser to the United Nations and State Department.

In developing countries, "the idea that there are perfectly functioning markets without subsidies is pure fiction, fantasy," Rubin, a New York University professor and leading academic on Afghanistan, told government interviewers. "Every late-developing country happened by government picking winners."

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What they said in private

July 22, 2015

"The worst thing you can do is apply lessons from one country to another."

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— Peter Galbraith, former U.S. and U.N. diplomat, Lessons Learned interview

It didn't take an Ivy League political scientist to see that Afghanistan needed a better system of government. Riven by feuding tribes and implacable warl-rds, the country had a volatile history of coups, assassinations and civil wars.

The Bush administration persuaded the Afghans to adopt a made-in-America solution — a constitutional democracy under a president elected by popular vote.

In many ways, the new government resembled a Third World version of Washington. Power was concentrated in the capital, Kabul. A federal bureaucracy sprouted in all directions, cultivated by dollars and legions of Western advisers.

Under American tutelage, Afghan officials were exposed to newfangled concepts and tools: PowerPoint presentations, mission statements, stakeholder meetings, even appointment calendars.

But there were fateful differences.

Under the new constitution, the Afghan president wielded far greater authority than the other two branches of government — the parliament and judiciary — and also got to appoint all the provincial governors. In short, power was centralized in the hands of one man.

The rigid, U.S.-designed system conflicted with Afghan tradition, typified by a mix of decentralized power and tribal customs. But with Afghanistan defeated and broke, the Americans called the shots.

"In hindsight the worst decision was to centralize power," an unnamed European Union official said in a Lessons Learned interview.

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A German official echoed the point: "After the fall of the Taliban, it was thought that we needed a president right away, but that was wrong."

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An unidentified USAID official said he was astounded that the State Department thought an American-style presidency would work. "You'd think they've never worked overseas," he said. "Why did we create centralized government in a place that has never had one?"

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A big reason is that U.S. leaders had a potential Afghan ruler in mind. Hamid Karzai, a tribal leader from southern Afghanistan, belonged to the country's largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns.

Perhaps more importantly, Karzai spoke polished English and was a CIA asset. In 2001, a U.S. spy had saved his life, and the CIA would keep Karzai on its payroll for years to come.

At first, to American eyes, the new system of government led by Karzai worked. In 2004, after serving as interim leader, Karzai was elected president in Afghanistan's first national democratic election. He built a personal rapport with Bush; the two leaders chatted frequently by videoconference.

But relations gradually soured. Karzai grew outspoken and criticized the U.S. military for a surge of airstrikes and night raids that inflicted civilian casualties and alienated much of the population. Meanwhile, U.S. officials chafed as Karzai cut deals with warl-rds and doled out governorships as political spoils.

"After 2005, my impression was that the warl-rds were back because Karzai wanted them back and he only understood the patronage system," Hadley, the Bush administration national security adviser, told government interviewers. "Karzai was never sold on democracy and did not rely on democratic institutions."

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Richard Boucher, who served under Bush as the State Department's chief spokesman and later its top diplomat for South Asia, told government interviewers that Karzai's governing instincts "were to rely on his friends. That is how Afghanistan works — relying on his friends, supporters and local potentates; powers that be, not just powers that the Americans created."

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"Getting him to use that governing structure that we put in place, that we told him he had to have, was really hard," Boucher added. "We said, you have to work through this democratic, bureaucratic system just like we have in America."

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In 2009, Karzai won reelection, narrowly avoiding a runoff thanks to a massive ballot-box stuffing campaign that tainted the outcome. Many U.S. officials were appalled and pressed for an independent investigation. Karzai, in turn, privately accused the Obama administration of violating Afghan sovereignty and plotting to oust him from power.

In the end, U.S. officials swallowed their objections. After all, they had built the new nation and put Karzai in charge.

What they said in private

Oct. 7, 2016

"There was a crazy amount of pressure to spend money."

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— USAID official, Lessons Learned interview

A few weeks after Karzai's reelection, Obama announced he would send 30,000 more U.S. troops to the war zone as part of a new strategy to defeat the Taliban and bolster the Afghan state.

In a December 2009 speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., Obama told Americans this would not mean a drawn-out extension of the nation-building campaign that had already dragged on for eight years.

"Some call for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort, one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade. I reject this course," Obama said. "Our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended, because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own."

Obama's generals, however, held no illusions.

During a June 2010 hearing on Capitol Hill, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus was asked point-blank by skeptical lawmakers whether the United States was nation-building in Afghanistan.

"We are indeed," said Petraeus, who at the time was the chief of the U.S. Central Command. "I'm just not going to evade it and play rhetorical games."

In fact, a cornerstone of Obama's counterinsurgency strategy was to build the Afghan government at breakneck speed — with unprecedented sums from the U.S. treasury.

Petraeus and other U.S. commanders were betting the Afghan people would choke off support for the Taliban if they felt Karzai's government could protect them and deliver basic services.

But there were two big hurdles.

First, there was not much time for the counterinsurgency strategy to work. Obama had given the Pentagon just 18 months to turn the tide of the war before he wanted to start bringing troops home.

Second, across much of Afghanistan, there was hardly any government presence to begin with. And where there was, it was often corrupt and hated by the locals.

As a result, the Obama administration ordered the military, the State Department, USAID and their contractors to build up the Afghan government as quickly as possible. In the field, soldiers and aid workers were given a virtual blank check to construct schools, hospitals, roads — anything that might win loyalty from the populace.

"Petraeus was hell-bent on throwing money at the problem," an unidentified U.S. military officer told government interviewers. "When Petraeus was around, all that mattered was spending. He wanted to put Afghans to work."

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An unnamed USAID official complained that he was always being asked "How much are you spending?" instead of "Are you winning the battle?" He added, "We were always chasing the dragon — always behind, never good enough."

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Another unidentified aid worker told government interviewers that the pace was unrealistic and unsustainable: "It was difficult to bring a region that is [a] hundred years ... behind out in a few years."

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In a Lessons Learned interview, Petraeus acknowledged the spendthrift strategy. But he said the U.S. military had no choice given Obama's order to start reversing the surge in 2011.

"What drove spending was the need to solidify gains as quickly as we could knowing that we had a tight drawdown timeline," he said. "And we wound up spending faster than we would have if we felt we had forces longer than we did."

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What they said in private

Jan. 22, 2016

"We were building roads to nowhere. ... With what we spent, Afghanistan should look like Germany in 1955."

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— Special Forces adviser, Lessons Learned interview

Amid the haste to spend, U.S. agencies wasted large sums of money on ghost projects that never took shape.

Tim Graczewski was a Navy Reserve officer who oversaw economic development projects in southern Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. When he arrived for the surge, he told government interviewers, he had to hunt for a 37-acre project that appeared to exist only on paper.

Before his arrival, the U.S. government had signed $8 million in contracts to build an industrial park near Kandahar for 48 businesses. But after reviewing the files, Graczewski said, he could not even find the site.

"It blew my mind how much we didn't know about the park in the first place when we embarked on this project," he said. "It was impossible to get info on it, even where it was located. It was that much of a blank spot. Nobody knew anything about anything."

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Graczewski said he finally located the property, but there were no buildings — only some empty streets and sewer pipes.

"Don't know who did it, but figured it was there, so let's try to use it," he recalled. Despite efforts to revive the project, he said, it "fell apart" after he left in 2010.

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U.S. auditors visited the site four years later and found it largely deserted. A single company, an ice cream packing outfit, was open for business.

Undaunted, the U.S. government tried to connect the industrial park to an even more ambitious nation-building project — to generate electricity for Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-biggest city, and surrounding areas.

Hamstrung by a primitive electrical grid, Kandahar suffered from a scarcity of power. U.S. military commanders saw an opportunity. If they could generate a reliable flow of electricity, grateful Kandaharis would support the Afghan government and turn against the Taliban.

To do that, the U.S. military wanted to rebuild an aging hydroelectric power station at the Kajaki Dam, about 100 miles north of Kandahar. USAID had built the dam in the 1950s and installed turbines in the 1970s, but it quickly fell into disrepair.

The U.S. government had been trying to jump-start the project and add capacity since 2004 without much to show for it. The Taliban controlled the area surrounding the dam, as well as some transmission lines. Repair crews needed armed convoys or helicopters to access the site.

Despite the risks, by 2010, U.S. generals were lobbying to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the project, calling it a critical part of their counterinsurgency strategy.

Some development experts pushed back, arguing that it made no sense to finance a giant construction project in enemy territory. They noted that the Afghans lacked the technical expertise to maintain it in the long run.

They also questioned whether it would really help win the hearts and minds of Afghans accustomed to life without central power.

"Why did we think providing electricity to communities in Kandahar who had no concept of what to do with it would convince them to abandon the Taliban?" a senior USAID official said in a Lessons Learned interview.

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In the end, the generals won the argument. Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan at the time, told government interviewers he had deep misgivings about the dam project but approved a portion of it anyway.

"I made the decision to go ahead with it, but I was sure it was never going to work," Crocker said. "The biggest lesson learned for me is, don't do major infrastructure projects."

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For the generals, the dam project was not enough.

It would take years to complete, and with the clock ticking on their counterinsurgency strategy, they wanted to supply electricity to the Kandaharis right away. So they drew up a temporary plan to buy giant diesel-fueled generators that could start humming in a matter of months, not years.

It was a horribly inefficient and costly way to generate electricity for an entire city. Expenses would run to $256 million over five years, mostly for fuel. Again, some people tried to push back.

An unidentified NATO official told government interviewers that he was given the task of trying to secure financing for the generators from international donors but got nowhere.

"Anyone who looked at this more closely could see that the math didn't add up, that it was all nonsense," he said. "We went to the World Bank [and] they didn't want to touch it. ... People look at it and they think it's crazy."

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Another former U.S. ambassador said that he opposed the diesel generator plan, too, but that U.S. military commanders prevailed.

"Petraeus got the power back on in Iraq and wanted to do the same in Afghanistan," the unnamed former ambassador told government interviewers. "But in Iraq, it made more sense; they had oil, engineers, and indigenous capacity; it was doable."

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By December 2018, the U.S. government had spent $775 million on the dam, the diesel generators and other electrical projects in Kandahar and neighboring Helmand province, according to a SIGAR audit.

Power generation at the dam has nearly tripled, but the projects are still plagued by dysfunction; last year, USAID determined that the Afghan public utility for Kandahar was not commercially viable and may never be able to operate without foreign subsidies.

Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House official under Bush and Obama, told government interviewers that such projects failed to achieve their objective — bringing peace and stability — and that U.S. military officials were guilty of "biting off more than they can chew."

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"There is a bigger question here — why does the U.S. undertake actions that are beyond its abilities?" Eggers said. "This question gets at strategy and human psychology, and it is a hard question to answer."

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What they said in private

Jan. 27, 2016

"A majority of the problems we faced were self-induced by our inability to think like a native."

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— U.S. Army civil-affairs officer, Lessons Learned interview

The nation-building campaign was undone not only by white elephants. According to the Lessons Learned interviews, as well as audits from SIGAR, one of the most mismanaged pots of money was the Commanders' Emergency Response Program, or CERP.

Authorized by Congress, it allowed military commanders in the field to bypass normal contracting rules and spend up to $1 million on infrastructure projects. But most cost less than $50,000 each.

Commanders told government interviewers that they were under so much pressure to spend that they blindly copied CERP paperwork from past projects, knowing that it was unlikely anyone would bother to inspect it afterward.

"You'd see the same picture of a [health] clinic posted to a hundred different clinic project reports around the country," said one senior officer who worked at military headquarters in Kabul.

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An Army brigade commander in eastern Afghanistan told government interviewers that he often saw CERP proposals that referred to "sheikhs" — a giveaway that they were cut-and-pasted from reconstruction projects in Iraq. ("Sheikh" is an Arabic title of respect but is generally not used in Afghanistan.)

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At one point, the brigade commander recalled telling his staffers that if they could not show that a CERP project would be beneficial, "then the smartest thing to do is nothing." In response, he said: "I got crickets. 'We can't build nothing,' they said. I told them we might as well throw our money away."

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Brian Copes, an Army National Guard general who served as a civil-affairs commander in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan, likened the flood of aid to "crack cocaine," calling it "an addiction that affected every agency."

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In a Lessons Learned interview, he said he came across a U.S.-built greenhouse that cost $30,000 and had fallen into disuse because the Afghans could not maintain it. His unit built a replacement greenhouse out of iron rebar that worked better and cost only $55 — despite pressure to spend far more.

"Congress gives us money to spend and expects us to spend all of it," Copes said. "The attitude became we don't care what you do with the money as long as you spend it."

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Despite its best efforts, the U.S. military could spend only about two-thirds of the $3.7 billion that Congress funded for CERP, according to Defense Department figures. Of the $2.3 billion it did spend, the Pentagon was able to provide financial details for only about $890 million worth of projects, according to a 2015 audit.

Officials from other agencies told government interviewers they were appalled at the waste and mismanagement.

"CERP was nothing but walking-around money," said Ken Yamashita, USAID's mission director for Afghanistan from 2011 to 2014, likening the payments to cash handouts for political purposes.

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An unidentified NATO official called the program "a dark pit of endless money for anything with no accountability."

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Of all the flaws with the Afghanistan nation-building campaign — the waste, the inefficiency, the half-baked ideas — nothing confounded U.S. officials more than the fact that they could never tell whether any of it was actually helping them win the war.

An Army officer assigned to U.S. military headquarters in Kabul during the surge told government interviewers that it was hard enough to track whether CERP projects were actually built, let alone whether they made a difference on the battlefield.

"We wanted hard quantitative metrics that would tell us that X project is producing the desired outcomes, but we had a hard time defining those metrics," he said. "We had no idea how to measure if [a] hospital's existence was reducing support for the Taliban. That was always the last 10 yards that we couldn't run."

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Even some of the most well-intentioned projects could boomerang.

Tooryalai Wesa, who served as governor of Kandahar province from 2008 to 2014, said U.S. aid workers once insisted on carrying out a public-health project to teach Afghans how to wash their hands.

"It was an insult to the people. Here people wash their hands five times a day for prayers," Wesa told government interviewers. "Moreover, hand wash project is not needed. Think about employment, and think about enabling people to earn something."

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But that could backfire, too.

For one project in Kandahar, U.S. and Canadian troops paid villagers $90 to $100 a month to clear irrigation canals, according to Thomas Johnson, a specialist on Afghanistan who works as a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School.

It took a while for the troops to figure out their program was indirectly disrupting local schools. Teachers in the area earned much less, only $60 to $80 a month.

"So initially all the school teachers quit their jobs and joined the ditch diggers," Johnson said in a Lessons Learned interview. He served as a political and counterinsurgency adviser to the Canadians from 2009 to 2010.

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A similar problem arose in eastern Afghanistan, where one gung-ho Army brigade was so determined to make a difference that it promised to build 50 schools — but unwittingly ended up helping the Taliban, according to an officer in the brigade.

"There weren't enough teachers to fill them, so buildings languished," the unnamed U.S. military officer told government interviewers, "and some of them even became bomb-making factories."

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If you have information to share about The Afghanistan Papers, contact The Post at afghanpapers@washpost.com.

Were you or one of your family members involved in the Afghanistan war? Tell us about your experiences.

Craig Whitlock

Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter who specializes in national security issues. He has covered the Pentagon, served as the Berlin bureau chief and reported from more than 60 countries. He joined The Washington Post in 1998.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-corruption-government/

The Afghanistan Papers | A Secret History Of The War

[Part 4] Consumed By Corruption

The U.S. flooded the country with money — then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled

By Craig Whitlock Dec. 9, 2019

About halfway into the 18-year war, Afghans stopped hiding how corrupt their country had become.

Dark money sloshed all around. Afghanistan's largest bank liquefied into a cesspool of fraud. Travelers lugged suitcases loaded with $1 million, or more, on flights leaving Kabul.

Mansions known as "poppy palaces" rose from the rubble to house opium kingpins.

President Hamid Karzai won reelection after cronies stuffed thousands of ballot boxes. He later admitted the CIA had delivered bags of cash to his office for years, calling it "nothing unusual."

In public, as President Barack Obama escalated the war and Congress approved billions of additional dollars in support, the commander in chief and lawmakers promised to crack down on corruption and hold crooked Afghans accountable.

In reality, U.S. officials backed off, looked away and let the thievery become more entrenched than ever, according to a trove of confidential government interviews obtained by The Washington Post.

In the interviews, key figures in the war said Washington tolerated the worst offenders — warl-rds, drug traffickers, defense contractors — because they were allies of the United States.

But they said the U.S. government failed to confront a more distressing reality — that it was responsible for fueling the corruption, by doling out vast sums of money with limited foresight or regard for the consequences.

U.S. officials were "so desperate to have the alcoholics to the table, we kept pouring drinks, not knowing [or] considering we were killing them," an unnamed State Department official told government interviewers.

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The scale of the corruption was the unintended result of swamping the war zone with far more aid and defense contracts than impoverished Afghanistan could absorb. There was so much excess, financed by American taxpayers, that opportunities for bribery and fraud became almost limitless, according to the interviews.

"The basic assumption was that corruption is an Afghan problem and we are the solution," Barnett Rubin, a former senior State Department adviser and a New York University professor, told government interviewers. "But there is one indispensable ingredient for corruption — money — and we were the ones who had the money."

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To purchase loyalty and information, the CIA gave cash to warl-rds, governors, parliamentarians, even religious leaders, according to the interviews. The U.S. military and other agencies also abetted corruption by doling out payments or contracts to unsavory Afghan power brokers in a misguided quest for stability.

"We had partnerships with all the wrong players," a senior U.S. diplomat told government interviewers. "The U.S. is still standing shoulder-to-shoulder with these people, even through all these years. It's a case of security trumping everything else."

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Gert Berthold, a forensic accountant who served on a military task force in Afghanistan during the height of the war, from 2010 to 2012, said he helped analyze 3,000 Defense Department contracts worth $106 billion to see who was benefiting.

The conclusion: About 40 percent of the money ended up in the pockets of insurgents, criminal syndicates or corrupt Afghan officials.

"And it was often a higher percent," Berthold told government interviewers. "We talked with many former [Afghan] ministers, and they told us, you're under-estimating it."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_dc_10062015&page=5&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

Berthold said the evidence was so damning that few U.S. officials wanted to hear about it.

"No one wanted accountability," he said. "If you're going to do anti-corruption, someone has got to own it. From what I've seen, no one is willing to own it."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_dc_10062015&page=4&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

WHAT THEY SAID IN PRIVATE

Aug. 24, 2015

"We used the bad guys to get the badder guys. We [thought we] could circle back and get the bad guys later, only we never did."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_xx3_08242015&page=3&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

— USAID official, Lessons Learned interview

The interviews were conducted between 2014 and 2018 by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR. The agency was created by Congress to investigate fraud and waste, but it used the interviews for a special project, titled "Lessons Learned," to diagnose policy failures from the war.

In September 2016, SIGAR published a 164-page report that chronicled how corruption had harmed the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and that made recommendations for tackling the problem.

https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/LessonsLearned/SIGAR-16-58-LL.pdf

"The U.S. government should take into account the amount of assistance a host country can absorb, and agencies should improve their ability to effectively monitor this assistance," the report stated. "U.S. strategies and plans should incorporate anticorruption objectives into security and stability goals, rather than viewing anticorruption as imposing trade-offs on those goals."

But the Lessons Learned report about corruption omitted the names of the vast majority of those who were interviewed, as well as the most unsparing criticisms about how Washington was at fault. The Post sued SIGAR in federal court — twice — to force it to release the interview records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The documents make clear that the seeds of runaway corruption were planted at the outset of the war.

According to the interviews, the CIA, the U.S. military, the State Department and other agencies used cash and lucrative contracts to win the allegiance of Afghan warl-rds in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Intended as a short-term tactic, the practice ended up binding the United States to some of the country's most notorious figures for years.

Among them was Mohammed Qasim Fahim Khan, a Tajik militia commander. As leader of the Northern Alliance, Fahim Khan played a critical role in helping the United States topple the Taliban in 2001. He served as Afghanistan's defense minister from 2001 to 2004 and later as the country's first vice president — despite a reputation for brutality and graft.

In a Lessons Learned interview, Ryan Crocker, who twice served as the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul, said he held no illusions about Fahim Khan. He recalled a bloodcurdling encounter with the defense minister in early 2002 when Fahim Khan nonchalantly informed him that another Afghan government minister had been murdered.

"He giggled while he related this," Crocker said. "Later, much later, it emerged, I don't know if it was ever verified or not, it emerged that Khan himself had the minister killed. But I certainly came out of those opening months with the feeling that even by Afghan standards, I was in the presence of a totally evil person."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=crocker_ryan_ll_first_interview_01112016&page=28&anno=3&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=crocker_ryan_ll_first_interview_01112016&page=28&anno=4&filter=filter-corruption

"I check just about every other day, and as far as I know, he is still dead," Crocker told interviewers.
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=crocker_ryan_ll_first_interview_01112016&page=27&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

Even so, the Bush administration treated Fahim Khan as a VIP and once welcomed him to the Pentagon with an honor cordon.

Details of exactly how much money he and other warl-rds pocketed from the United States remain secret. But confidential documents show the payouts were discussed at the highest levels of government.

In April 2002, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld dictated a top-secret memo ordering two senior aides to work with other U.S. agencies to devise "a plan for how we are going to deal with each of these warl-rds — who is going to get money from whom, on what basis, in exchange for what, what is the quid pro quo, etc."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=snowflake_warl-rds_wolfowitz_04012002&page=1&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

"Let's get on it," he admonished.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=snowflake_warl-rds_wolfowitz_04012002&page=1&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

Two months later, Rumsfeld sent a follow-up memo to Doug Feith, the Pentagon's policy chief. "Is the DoD giving any food, weapons or money to any of the warl-rds or to Karzai? Is the CIA doing that? Is State doing it?" he wrote. "We need to get a sense of that balance."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=snowflake_warl-rds_feith_nsarchive06262002&page=1&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=snowflake_warl-rds_feith_nsarchive06262002&page=1&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

The Rumsfeld memos were released by the Pentagon in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed in 2017 by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute at George Washington University. They are among hundreds of pages of memos, known as "snowflakes," that Rumsfeld dictated about the Afghan war between 2001 and 2005.

Another warl-rd who was a prime beneficiary of U.S. largesse was Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek strongman from northern Afghanistan who now serves as one of the country's vice presidents.

Dostum fought alongside CIA operatives and U.S. Special Operations forces after 9/11. He was accused of war crimes after his militia suffocated hundreds of Taliban prisoners in November 2001 by locking them in airtight shipping containers.

Like Fahim Khan, however, Dostum was embraced by the Bush administration, according to the Rumsfeld memos.

A few weeks after the Taliban prisoners in his custody died of asphyxiation, Dostum took the time to send a holiday letter to the U.S. commander in chief.

"Dear U.S. president, George W. Bush!" Dostum wrote in a note sent via U.S. military mail. "Please accept my cardinal greetings on New Year's Day! Afghan people, experiencing peace after a long period of sufferings are grateful for your efforts in this regard."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=snowflake_dostum_bush_nsarchive_01102002&page=4&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=snowflake_dostum_bush_nsarchive_01102002&page=4&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

"I wish your Excellency good health, great successes and the best of luck," he wrote.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=snowflake_dostum_bush_nsarchive_01102002&page=4&anno=3&filter=filter-corruption

Rather than intercept the warl-rd's missive, the Pentagon went to unusual lengths to deliver it. Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, faxed the letter directly to Rumsfeld, who in turn ordered his staff to make sure it reached Bush's desk.

"Dostum is one of the Northern Alliance commanders," one of Rumsfeld's aides scribbled on a memo. "He turned out to be quite a warfighter — and our forces worked very well with him."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=snowflake_dostum_bush_nsarchive_01102002&page=1&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

More allegations of atrocities — rape, torture, murder — dogged Dostum over the years. He fell in and out of favor in Washington. But U.S. officials could never quite bring themselves to sever ties.

In 2014, The Post reported that Dostum had been receiving about $70,000 a month in CIA funds routed through the Afghan presidential palace.

In a 2015 Lessons Learned interview, an unnamed U.N. official suggested the amount was actually higher, alleging that the United States and other sources had been giving Dostum $100,000 a month "to not cause trouble." The official did not give further details.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_xx_08272015&page=3&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

Dostum, in a 2014 interview with The Post, denied receiving such payouts, as well as the other allegations against him. "If I were a danger, I would have done something in the past 13 years," he said, adding, "This is just propaganda against me."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/dostum-a-former-warl-rd-who-was-once-americas-man-in-afghanistan-may-be-back/2014/04/23/9d1a7670-c63d-11e3-8b9a-8e0977a24aeb_story.html

WHAT THEY SAID IN PRIVATE

Dec. 11, 2015

"We were giving out contracts to pretty nasty people, empowering people we shouldn't have empowered, in order to achieve our own goals."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_dc_12112015&page=3&anno=3&filter=filter-corruption

— Senior U.S. official, Lessons Learned interview

To many Afghans, the warl-rds were cruel despots whose misrule helped destroy the country. So it didn't help the Americans to be viewed as the warl-rds' allies.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, several senior U.S. officials acknowledged that the warl-rds were odious and corrupt. But they described them as the only effective bulwark against the Taliban and said it was better to pay them to be friends than tangle as enemies.

"I'm not so sure we should have done it any differently. These 'warl-rds' equaled the ground force that just defeated the Taliban and al-Qaeda" by partnering with American troops, said a U.S. diplomat who served in Afghanistan in the early years of the war. "These weren't just random bandits running around."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_02_xx_phone_05312015&page=3&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_02_xx_phone_05312015&page=3&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

One warl-rd who was both loved and hated by U.S. officials was Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, the governor of Helmand province from 2001 to 2005. Dubbed "SMA" by Americans, he was renowned for ruthlessly enforcing order.

In 2005, U.S. and Afghan narcotics agents raided Akhundzada's offices and found an enormous stash — nine tons — of opium. He denied wrongdoing. But under international pressure, he was removed as governor.

With the absence of Akhundzada's iron hand, the province quickly became a magnet for insurgents, and its drug-trafficking problem exploded. Some U.S. officials came to regret his departure.

Dan McNeill, a retired Army general and two-time military commander in Afghanistan, described Akhundzada as "a simple-minded tyrant" but said he was effective as governor because he "kept other bad guys at bay." He called Akhundzada's removal a "huge mistake."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_07_xx_xx_undated_mcneill1&page=6&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_07_xx_xx_undated_mcneill1&page=6&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

"SMA was dirty but he kept stability because people were afraid of him," McNeill told government interviewers. "It's not good and I'm not advocating dancing with the devil, but maybe one of his disciples, and that was SMA."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_07_xx_xx_undated_mcneill1&page=6&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

Akhundzada, who went on to become a provincial senator, was unapologetic about his ruthless tactics. In a 2009 interview with the British news outlet the Telegraph, he said that after he was fired as governor, 3,000 of his followers switched sides and joined the Taliban "because they had lost respect for the government."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/6615329/Afghan-governor-turned-3000-men-over-to-Taliban.html

In another Lessons Learned interview, Richard Boucher, who served as assistant secretary of state for South Asia during the Bush administration, took a nuanced view of the warl-rds.

"[I] hate corruption and have worked anti-corruption all over the world but there are different kinds of corruption," he said. Corruption that "spreads the wealth" to people who need it, he added, was tolerable, even necessary.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=boucher_richard_ll_01_b9_10152015&page=6&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

In Afghanistan, patronage has traditionally been at the core of how government and society function. As an example, Boucher admiringly cited Gul Agha Sherzai, a warl-rd who reportedly amassed a fortune by skimming taxes and contracts while serving as a provincial governor.

During a 2006 visit to the eastern city of Jalalabad, Boucher asked Sherzai whether he needed help with any construction projects.

"He said, 'I need five schools, five colleges, five dams, and five highways,'" Boucher recalled. "I said, well okay, but why five? He said, 'I got this tribe, this tribe, this tribe, this tribe, and one for everybody else.' I thought that was one of the funniest things I ever heard and now I think it is now one of the smartest things I ever heard."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=boucher_richard_ll_01_b9_10152015&page=6&anno=3&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=boucher_richard_ll_01_b9_10152015&page=6&anno=4&filter=filter-corruption

Boucher said it was better to funnel contracts to Afghans who "would probably take 20 percent for personal use or for their extended families and friends" than give the money to "a bunch of expensive American experts" who would waste 80 to 90 percent of the funds on overhead and profit.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=boucher_richard_ll_01_b9_10152015&page=6&anno=5&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=boucher_richard_ll_01_b9_10152015&page=2&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

"I want it to disappear in Afghanistan, rather than in the Beltway," he said. "Probably in the end it is going to make sure that more of the money gets to some villager, maybe through five layers of corrupt officials, but still gets to some villager."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=boucher_richard_ll_01_b9_10152015&page=3&anno=4&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=boucher_richard_ll_01_b9_10152015&page=3&anno=5&filter=filter-corruption

But others told government interviewers that the United States and its allies were foolish to encourage and excuse warl-rds' corrupt behavior.

"Gul Agha Sherzai was good at what he did; he could deliver things to people. But that didn't mean he was clean," an unnamed U.N. official said in a Lessons Learned interview. "We were not tough enough and in private meetings everyone was trying to curry favor and in the end made compromises that helped their own country's power to the detriment of the mission, and the Afghans liked it."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_xx_08262015&page=2&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_xx_08262015&page=2&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

In another interview, Nils Taxell, a Swedish anti-corruption expert who served in Afghanistan, mocked foreign officials for justifying Sherzai as "a benevolent asshole" because he "didn't take or keep everything for himself, he left a little for others."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_xx_07032015&page=2&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

Sherzai, whose nickname is "the Bulldozer," has remained active in Afghan politics. He repeatedly denied allegations of wrongdoing when he ran, unsuccessfully, for president in 2014.

"There is no evidence against me," he told NBC News. "If I was involved in corruption, I would have high-rise buildings in Dubai and would have millions of dollars in foreign banks!"

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/afghanistan-election/would-be-afghan-leader-al-qaeda-will-return-if-u-n70771

WHAT THEY SAID IN PRIVATE

April 2, 2015

"In the beginning, the military kept saying that corruption was an unfortunate short-term side effect then toward the end the feeling was 'Oh, my G-d, this could derail the whole thing.'"

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_01_xx_dc_04022015&page=2&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

— Former National Security Council staffer, Lessons Learned interview

Yet warl-rds were hardly the only ones the United States targeted with bribes.

In 2002 and 2003, when Afghan tribal councils gathered to write a new constitution, the U.S. government gave "nice packages" to delegates who supported Washington's preferred stance on human rights and women's rights, according to a U.S. official who served in Kabul at the time.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_phone_07312015&page=4&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

"The perception that was started in that period: If you were going to vote for a position that [Washington] favored, you'd be stupid to not get a package for doing it," the unnamed official told government interviewers.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_phone_07312015&page=4&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

By the time Afghanistan held parliamentary elections in 2005, that perception had hardened. Lawmakers realized their votes could be worth thousands of dollars to the Americans, even for legislation they would have backed anyway, the U.S. official said.

"People would tell each other, so-and-so has just been to the U.S. Embassy and got this money. They said 'ok now I need to go,'" the U.S. official said. "So from the beginning, their experience with democracy was one in which money was deeply embedded."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_phone_07312015&page=4&anno=3&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_phone_07312015&page=4&anno=4&filter=filter-corruption

By 2006, the Afghan government had "self-organized into a kleptocracy" under which people in power could plunder the economy without restraint, according to Christopher Kolenda, a retired Army colonel who advised several U.S. commanders during the war.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_dc_04052016&page=2&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

"The kleptocracy got stronger over time, to the point that the priority of the Afghan government became not good governance but sustaining this kleptocracy," Kolenda told government interviewers. "It was through sheer naivete, and maybe carelessness, that we helped to create the system."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_dc_04052016&page=2&anno=3&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_dc_04052016&page=3&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

After Obama took office in 2009, Pentagon officials persuaded him to expand the war, deploy 100,000 U.S. troops and adopt a counterinsurgency strategy.

The objective was to choke off popular support for the Taliban by protecting civilians and building trust in the Afghan government.

But many Afghans saw their government as incompetent and malicious. Judges, police and all manner of officeholders routinely subjected people to extortion. In contrast, Afghans often viewed the Taliban as brutal but efficient and devout.

Belatedly, U.S. military commanders started a campaign to root out corruption and clean up the Afghan government. The awakening frustrated many U.S. civilian officials who felt the uniformed brass had downplayed the problem since the start of the war.

"It was like they just discovered something new about the pernicious effects of corruption," an unnamed White House staffer said in a Lessons Learned interview.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_01_xx_dc_04022015&page=3&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

For years, the official added, "people in the field would be moaning and groaning over the compromises made by the military on working with corrupt actors but they would be shut down."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_01_xx_dc_04022015&page=3&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

Regardless, U.S. leaders began taking a much harder line against corruption in public, insisting that Afghans would have to change their ways.

In March 2009, Obama declared, "I want to be clear: We cannot turn a blind eye to the corruption that causes Afghans to lose faith in their own leaders."

A few days later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "Corruption is a cancer as dangerous to long-term success as the Taliban or al-Qaeda."

In August 2009, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan at the time, warned: "Malign actions of power brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power ... have given Afghans little reason to support their government."

To reinforce the message, Washington mobilized a small army of anti-corruption lawyers, advisers, investigators and accountants to go to Kabul and assist the Afghan government.

Despite all that, the rot would soon get worse.

WHAT THEY SAID IN PRIVATE

Jan. 20, 2015

"Holbrooke hated Hamid Karzai. He thought he was corrupt as hell."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_01_xx_nyc_01202015&page=4&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

— Barnett Rubin, senior adviser to Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2009 to 2010, Lessons Learned interview

On Aug. 20, 2009, Afghans went to the polls to choose a president. It was a critical moment. Obama was contemplating whether to send tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to the war zone. He needed a reliable and credible ally in Kabul.

Right away, reports surfaced of electoral fraud on an epic scale — ghost voting, official miscounting, ballot-box stuffing, plus violence and intimidation at the polls.

Initial results showed Karzai, the incumbent, had won. But his opponents, and many independent observers, accused his side of trying to steal the election. A U.N.-backed panel investigated and determined Karzai had received about 1 million illegal votes, a quarter of all those cast.

The outcome put Obama administration officials in a box. They had said corruption was intolerable but also had promised to respect Afghan sovereignty and not interfere with the election. Moreover, they did not want to completely alienate Karzai. If there was another vote, many saw him as the likely victor anyway.

In the end, the Obama administration brokered a deal in which Karzai was declared the winner after he agreed to share some power with his main rival. But in Lessons Learned interviews, several U.S. officials said the messy result ruined U.S. credibility.

"That was profoundly destructive to a rule-of-law principle," said Sarah Chayes, who served as a civilian adviser to the U.S. military at the time. "It was devastating that we were willing to patch up the elections. ... While we had the opportunity to say that corruption is important, explicit instructions were given that it is not."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_dc_05262015&page=5&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_dc_05262015&page=5&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_dc_05262015&page=5&anno=3&filter=filter-corruption

Peter Galbraith, a Karzai critic who served as a deputy U.N. envoy to Afghanistan in 2009, was removed from his post after he complained that the United Nations was helping cover up the extent of the election fraud. An American, Galbraith told government interviewers that the U.S. government also stood by when Karzai appointed cronies to election boards and anti-corruption posts.

"There was a broader impact, because of the culture of dishonesty," Galbraith said. "You cannot separate administrative fraud from the corruption of the system."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=galbraith_peter_ll_07222015&page=2&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

Mayhem from the election was just starting to subside when another scandal blew up in Kabul.

In January 2010, Afghan anti-corruption agents trained by the United States raided the headquarters of the New Ansari Money Exchange, one of the country's largest financial institutions, and carted away tens of thousands of documents.

U.S. officials suspected the politically connected firm was laundering money for narcotics traffickers and insurgents by moving billions of dollars to Dubai and other foreign destinations.

According to Michael Flynn, who would later become President Trump's national security adviser, U.S. forces played a pivotal role in the operation and pored over the seized documents and data.

"We literally went there and surrounded the bank and had a standoff. We took all of the data," Flynn, who was serving at the time as the U.S. military intelligence chief in Afghanistan, told government interviewers. "It was huge. I thought it was a huge success. We conducted that raid and in three days, we did a lot of exploitation. We brought in like 45 people from around the country very quietly."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=flynn_michael_ll_11102015&page=5&anno=3&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=flynn_michael_ll_11102015&page=5&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

"New Ansari was just in­cred­ibly corrupt," he said. "It had double books and people were just stealing us blind."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=flynn_michael_ll_11102015&page=5&anno=4&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=flynn_michael_ll_11102015&page=5&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

Despite a huge cache of incriminating evidence, the criminal investigation soon hit a wall, Flynn added: "Was anyone held accountable? No, no one was held accountable."

The wall, it turned out, was inside Afghanistan's presidential palace. Months after the raid, investigators wiretapped a conversation in which a senior aide to Karzai allegedly agreed to block the New Ansari probe in exchange for a bribe.

Afghan law enforcement agents arrested the aide, Mohammad Zia Salehi, in July 2010. Within hours, however, Karzai personally intervened and ordered Salehi's release from jail, declaring that investigators had overstepped their authority. The Afghan government later dropped all charges against Salehi.

Some U.S. officials were furious and said it was time for a reckoning, while others argued it was more important to mollify Karzai and retain his support for the war. Complicating matters further was a New York Times report that Karzai's aide had been on the CIA's payroll for years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/world/asia/26kabul.html

Again the Obama administration backed down, and the U.S.-inspired anti-corruption drive lost even more steam.

"The pivot point was the Salehi case," said an unnamed Justice Department official based in Kabul at the time. He told government interviewers that the arrest provoked "a hornet reaction" by the presidential palace, which ordered Afghan law enforcement agents to stop cooperating so closely with U.S. officials.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_04_xx3_04122016&page=1&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

"The interest and enthusiasm seemed to be lost after Salehi," added Gert Berthold, the forensic accountant who served in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2012.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_dc_10062015&page=4&anno=3&filter=filter-corruption

WHAT THEY SAID IN PRIVATE

Dec. 11, 2015

"Our money was empowering a lot of bad people. There was massive resentment among the Afghan people. And we were the most corrupt here, so had no credibility on the corruption issue."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_dc_12112015&page=5&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption

— Senior U.S. official, Lessons Learned interview

Less than two months after Salehi's catch and release, an even bigger scandal arose to test the Obama administration's resolve.

Kabul Bank, the country's biggest, nearly collapsed under the weight of $1 billion in fraudulent loans — an amount equal to one-twelfth of the country's entire economic output the year before. The Afghan government engineered an emergency bailout to stem a run on the bank as angry crowds lined up to withdraw their savings.

Investigators soon determined Kabul Bank had falsified its books to hide hundreds of millions of dollars in unsecured loans to politically connected business executives, including the president's brother Mahmoud Karzai and the family of Fahim Khan, the warl-rd then serving as the country's first vice president.

"On a scale of one to 10, it was a 20 here," an unnamed U.S. Treasury Department official posted to Kabul as an Afghan government adviser told interviewers. "It had elements that you could put into a spy novel, and the connections between people who owned Kabul Bank and those who run the country."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_xx_10012015&page=2&anno=1&filter=filter-corruption
http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_03_xx_xx_10012015&page=2&anno=2&filter=filter-corruption

U.S. officials had gone to great lengths to help the Afghan government create a viable financial sector, and now it was at risk of complete failure. Moreover, much of the looted money had originated from the U.S. treasury, which subsidized the salaries of Afghan soldiers, police and civil servants who made up the bulk of Kabul Bank's depositors.

At first, in public and in private, the Obama administration leaned on Karzai to fully investigate the Kabul Bank scandal — not only to recover the stolen money but also to demonstrate to the Afghan people that no one was above the law. The episode was seen as a pivotal moment, not just in the anti-corruption campaign but in the war itself, according to the Lessons Learned interviews.

"There were a million things we were trying to do, and all of it depended on the Karzai regime as an effective partner," an unnamed senior U.S. official told government interviewers. "But if this [Kabul Bank scandal] was allowed to continue, is the rest of this kind of moot? There was a lot of personal anger and disgust. Feeling we cannot have this."

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The scandal was also embarrassing to the U.S. government, which had deployed legions of financial advisers and watchdogs to Kabul yet had somehow missed a giant Ponzi scheme under their noses.

A second unnamed Treasury Department official told government interviewers that soon after he arrived in Afghanistan in the summer of 2010, he met with an American who had been working on contract as a consultant to Afghanistan's central bank for at least three years. The U.S. official wanted to know more about Kabul Bank, which unknown to both of them was on the verge of failure.

"We had an hour-long conversation," the official said. "I asked him, do you think this is a financially sound bank? He said, 'Yes.' And literally 30 days afterward, the whole house of cards came down. This was one of the biggest misses in my career. A $1 billion bank collapsed, and the U.S. adviser swore to me it was financially sound."

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Another unidentified senior U.S. official told government interviewers, however, that U.S. spy agencies had known about troubles inside Kabul Bank a year before the meltdown.

He said U.S. intelligence officials were tracking illicit money flows from the bank to the Taliban and other insurgents and had shared the information with their counterparts in Afghan intelligence. But none of the intelligence agencies alerted law enforcement, "because it wasn't in their mandate," he added.

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For about a year after the scandal became public, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, led by then-Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, made the case a top priority and pressed Karzai to take action, three former officials told government interviewers. But they said the embassy backed off after Eikenberry was replaced by Ryan Crocker in July 2011.

"It was a case study of how fragile and precarious U.S. policy can be. Literally overnight our entire policy changed," the second Treasury Department official said. Crocker's "attitude was to make the issue go away, bury it as deep as possible, and silence any voices within the embassy that wanted to make this an issue."

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The official and others said Crocker, as well as U.S. military commanders and others in Washington, did not want to risk alienating Karzai, because they needed his support as tens of thousands of additional U.S. soldiers arrived in the war zone.

They also said Crocker and his allies did not want Congress or international donors to use the bank scandal as an excuse to cut off aid to Kabul.

"The United States started easing up its pressure due to the changeover in leadership at the embassy," an unnamed former International Money Fund official told government interviewers. "I saw the tide turn when the going got tough."

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For his part, Crocker told government interviewers he agreed corruption was an enormous problem that had sabotaged the war effort. But by the time the Kabul Bank scandal struck, it was too late, he said.

"The corruption was so entrenched and so much a part of the lifestyle of the establishment writ broadly, you know, that I saw little prospect" of change, he said, "just kind of a sense of futility."

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Crocker also said he was sympathetic to a counterargument from the Afghan president, who spread the blame more broadly.

"I was struck by something Karzai said and repeated a number of times during my tenure, which is that the West, led by the U.S., in his clear view, had a significant responsibility to bear for the whole corruption issue," Crocker said.

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"I always thought Karzai had a point, that you just cannot put those amounts of money into a very fragile state and society, and not have it fuel corruption," he added. "You just can't."

If you have information to share about The Afghanistan Papers, contact The Post at afghanpapers@washpost.com.

Were you or one of your family members involved in the Afghanistan war? Tell us about your experiences.

Craig Whitlock

Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter who specializes in national security issues. He has covered the Pentagon, served as the Berlin bureau chief and reported from more than 60 countries. He joined The Washington Post in 1998.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-army-police/

The Afghanistan Papers | A Secret History Of The War

[Part 5] Unguarded Nation

Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption

By Craig Whitlock Dec. 9, 2019

For almost two decades, U.S. military commanders have assured the public they are making progress on the cornerstone of their war strategy: to build a strong Afghan army and police force that can defend the country on their own.

"We're on the right track now," Marine Gen. Jim Mattis told Congress in 2010.

"The Afghan forces are better than we thought they were," Marine Gen. John Allen told Congress in 2012. "The Afghan national security forces are winning," Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson told reporters in 2014.

But in a trove of confidential government interviews obtained by The Washington Post, U.S., NATO and Afghan officials described their efforts to create an Afghan proxy force as a long-running calamity. With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would remain private, they depicted the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated, poorly trained, corrupt and riddled with deserters and infiltrators.

In one interview, Thomas Johnson, a Navy official who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Kandahar province, said Afghans viewed the police as predatory bandits, calling them "the most hated institution" in Afghanistan. An unnamed Norwegian official told interviewers that he estimated 30 percent of Afghan police recruits deserted with their government-issued weapons so they could "set up their own private checkpoints" and extort payments from travelers.

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Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Kabul, told government interviewers that the Afghan police were ineffective "not because they're out-gunned or out-manned. It's because they are useless as a security force and they're useless as a security force because they are corrupt down to the patrol level."

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Victor Glaviano, who worked with the Afghan army as a U.S. combat adviser from 2007 to 2008, called the soldiers "stealing fools" who habitually looted equipment supplied by the Pentagon. He complained to government interviewers that Afghan troops had "beautiful rifles, but didn't know how to use them," and were undisciplined fighters, wasting ammunition because they "wanted to fire constantly."

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Since 2002, the United States has allocated more than $83 billion in security assistance to Afghanistan, a sum that dwarfs the defense budgets of other developing nations. In 2011, at the peak of the war, Afghanistan received $11 billion in security aid from Washington — $3 billion more than what neighboring Pakistan, which has a stockpile of nuclear weapons and a far bigger army, spent that year on its military.

Yet after almost two decades of help from Washington, the Afghan army and police are still too weak to fend off the Taliban, the Islamic State and other insurgents without U.S. military backup.

Government watchdogs and journalists have chronicled severe shortcomings with the Afghan security forces over the years. But the interview records obtained by The Post contain new insights into what went wrong and expose gaping contradictions between what U.S. officials said in public and what they believed in private as the war unfolded.

On paper, the Afghan security forces look robust, with 352,000 soldiers and police officers. But the Afghan government can prove only that 254,000 of them serve in the ranks.

For years, Afghan commanders inflated the numbers so they could pocket salaries — paid by U.S. taxpayers — for no-show or imaginary personnel, according to U.S. government audits. As a result, Washington now asks the Afghans to produce biometric data, including fingerprints and face scans, to verify the existence of people in uniform.

The army and police have suffered so many casualties that the Afghan government keeps the exact numbers a secret to avoid destroying morale. Estimates are that more than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, about 17 times the number of U.S. and NATO troops who have lost their lives.

The national army accounts for most of the Afghan security forces, with about 162,000 troops. It reports to the Defense Ministry and includes the Afghan air force and other units.

The national police number about 91,000. They report to the Interior Ministry and are more of a paramilitary force than a crime-fighting agency. The police guard the border, staff security checkpoints and try to hold territory that the army has cleared of insurgents.

With the Afghan security forces lagging in quantity and quality, the U.S. military has been unable to extricate itself from the faraway conflict. Although the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan has dwindled from 100,000 eight years ago to 13,000 today, the Trump administration has had to escalate the war from the skies to prevent the Taliban from taking over.

President Trump has said he wants to withdraw more U.S. troops, and his diplomats are engaged in peace talks with the Taliban. But during his presidency, U.S. military aircraft have pounded Afghanistan each month with three times as many bombs and missiles, on average, as they dropped per month during President Barack Obama's second term, according to Air Force statistics.

In the interview documents obtained by The Post, U.S. and NATO officials partially blamed themselves for the predicament. They said they moved too slowly to build up the Afghan forces during the first few years of the war when the Taliban presented a minimal threat. Then, after the Taliban rebounded, they rushed and tried to train too many Afghans too quickly.

Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, told government interviewers in 2015 that the poor timing and inept planning were mortal setbacks.

"These are strategic consequences to this," Strmecki said. "This is not just doing good or it would be nice to be able to operate better. You succeed or fail on whether you can do these things in a timely manner."

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The interviews were conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, an agency created by Congress to uncover fraud and waste in the war zone. In 2014, SIGAR launched a special project titled "Lessons Learned" to examine policy failings from the war. It interviewed more than 600 people who played a direct role in the conflict, from military commanders to aid workers.

Drawing partly on the interviews but largely on other government documents, SIGAR published two Lessons Learned reports in 2017 and 2019 that highlighted an array of problems with the Afghan security forces. The reports followed several SIGAR audits and investigations that had pinpointed similar troubles with the Afghan army and police.

https://www.sigar.mil/lessonslearned/lessonslearnedreports/index.aspx?SSR=11&SubSSR=60&WP=Lessons%20Learned%20Reports

But the Lessons Learned reports omitted the names of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project, as well as their most biting critiques. The Post obtained notes and transcripts of the interviews under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) after a three-year legal battle.

"We got the [Afghan forces] we deserve," Douglas Lute, an Army lieutenant general who served as the White House's Afghan war czar under Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, told government interviewers.

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If the U.S. government had ramped up training between 2002 and 2006, "when the Taliban was weak and disorganized, things may have been different," Lute added. "Instead, we went to Iraq. If we committed money deliberately and sooner, we could have a different outcome."

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WHAT THEY SAID IN PUBLIC

Feb. 15, 2007

"The United States and our allies will help President [Hamid] Karzai increase the size and capabilities of the Afghan security forces. After all, for this young democracy to survive in the long term, they'll have their own security forces that are capable and trained."

— President George W. Bush, in a speech about Afghanistan

The disconnect between what U.S. officials really thought about the Afghan security forces and what they said in public became ingrained during the early stages of the war.

In October 2004, the Pentagon distributed a set of talking points that bragged about the Afghan army and police. The document praised the 15,000 soldiers in the nascent Afghan army as "a highly professional, multi-ethnic force, which is rapidly becoming a pillar of the country's security."

It also touted how the Afghan national police — partly under the tutelage of NATO ally Germany — had 25,000 newly trained officers.

But internally, Bush administration officials shared anxieties and sounded alarms. In February 2005, Rumsfeld forwarded a confidential report to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about the Afghan National Police, or ANP. The report was titled, "ANP Horror Stories" and described how most of the police were illiterate, underequipped and barely trained.

"Please take a look," Rumsfeld wrote in a memo, accompanying the report. "This is the Afghan National Police situation. It is a serious problem. My impression is that these two pages were written in as graceful and non-inflammatory a way as is possible."

One month later, Rumsfeld sent another confidential memo to national security adviser Stephen Hadley, complaining about a tangled arrangement between the Pentagon and the State Department to train Afghan police that was going nowhere.

Saying he was "ready to toss in the towel," Rumsfeld added: "I don't think it is responsible to the American taxpayers to leave it like it is. We need a way forward. I've worked on it and worked on it. I am about to conclude that it is not possible for the U.S. Government bureaucracy to do the only sensible thing."

Rumsfeld disclosed the two memos about the Afghan police when he published a memoir in 2011. The memos and other documents show that Rumsfeld pushed to train the Afghan forces quickly yet wanted to keep them small so the U.S. government would not get stuck with the expense of sustaining a massive foreign army and police force.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, other Bush administration officials said Rumsfeld was stingy and shortsighted. They said Washington would have saved money in the long run — and perhaps even subdued the Taliban — if it had built a bigger Afghan army and police force sooner.

The first years of the war were marked by a "disorganized, unprepared, ridiculous U.S. approach" to training the Afghan security forces, one unnamed former U.S. official told government interviewers. At first, the Bush administration insisted on a cap of 50,000 Afghan soldiers and police — a number that the official called "totally irrelevant for security needs."

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Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2004, said the Afghan government wanted Washington to pay for security forces of 100,000 to 120,000. But he said in a Lessons Learned interview that Rumsfeld drew a hard line and held the training program "hostage" until the Afghans agreed to the 50,000 cap, which led to long delays.

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"So we were fighting in 2002, 2003 about those sort of numbers," Khalilzad told government interviewers, saying it was apparent more Afghan forces were required. "Now we're talking about G-d knows what, 300,000 or whatever."

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Strmecki said the dispute dragged on even as it became clearer in 2004 and 2005 that the Afghan forces needed to expand quickly to fight a resurgent Taliban. "The way it gets resolved is the way everything gets resolved in Washington — by not getting resolved," he said.

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In his Lessons Learned interview, Strmecki said another fundamental problem was that the U.S. government lacked the capacity to train and equip large foreign armies from scratch.

"You wouldn't invent how to do infantry operations at the start of a war. You wouldn't invent how to do artillery at the start of a war," Strmecki said. "Right now, it is all ad hoc. There is no doctrine, no science to it. It gets done very unevenly. When you are creating security forces for another society, it is the most important political act you will ever do. That requires an awful lot of thought and sophistication."

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WHAT THEY SAID IN PUBLIC

Nov. 19, 2008

"I will report to you that the army is on the right path. The Afghan army has good soldiers. We are developing that army from scratch. It is well trained. It is well led."

— Army Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, in remarks at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington

When Obama took office in January 2009, the war was going badly. He unveiled a new counterinsurgency strategy and nearly tripled the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 100,000.

Obama told the American people that the surge in U.S. troops was temporary. He later promised to bring home all U.S. troops by the end of his presidency in January 2017.

His war strategy hinged on implementing a huge expansion of the Afghan security forces, from 200,000 soldiers and police to 350,000. The idea was for U.S. and NATO troops to train and advise the Afghans until they could take over the fight on their own.

Despite a persistent shortage of trainers and recruits, U.S. military commanders and other senior officials assured the public time and again that the Afghan security forces were constantly improving and that U.S. troops would eventually no longer need to serve in combat.

"This is the worst nightmare for the Taliban, that the Afghan army is increasingly effective, partnered with our forces and moving against an enemy that they know better than anyone," Mattis, the Marine general who later served as Trump's defense secretary, told a Senate panel in July 2010. "I think this is very heartening."

Five months later, at a White House news conference, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Afghan security forces were progressing "ahead of schedule," adding, "They are performing well in partnership with coalition troops and will continue to improve with the right training, equipment and support."

Members of Congress from both parties also lavished praise on the Afghans.

"The growth in the size and capability of the Afghan security forces and control of territory by those forces is robbing the Taliban of their propaganda target and bringing us closer to the success of the mission," then-Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said at a March 2011 hearing.

"We are turning around the war," added Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the senior Republican on the committee at the time. "Afghan security forces are growing in quantity and improving in quality even faster than planned."

In 2011, Obama ordered a partial, staged withdrawal of U.S. troops. With fewer Americans in the fight, setbacks began piling up for the Afghan security forces, and the Taliban slowly seized more territory. But U.S. commanders kept telling the public everything was going according to plan.

"This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day," then-Army Lt. Gen. Mark A. Milley said during a 2013 press briefing from Kabul. "Have there been one or two outposts that have been overrun? Yes. But you're talking about 3,000 to 4,000 outposts that are in the country."

Today, Milley is a four-star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As the war continued, news reports from the front made clear that the Afghan security forces were struggling to hold back the Taliban.

In public, Pentagon officials started to revise their assessments. They still said the security forces were making progress but acknowledged that maybe they had overstated the Afghans' abilities in the past.

"It's not that the Afghans aren't good at fighting. They are," Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said during a visit to Kandahar in February 2015. "But just a few years ago there really was no Afghan national security force at all."

During another visit to the war zone 10 months later, Carter said: "The Afghan security forces are getting there. ... If you'd have asked me to bet on it five years ago, I don't know. I'd maybe give you even odds on it or something. But it's coming together."

By the time Obama left office in January 2017, the plan had fallen short. Instead of ending the war as he had promised, Obama left 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Less than a year later, his successor in the White House decided that was not enough and sent back several thousand more U.S. troops to help the Afghans. Today, about 13,000 U.S. service members remain the country.

"The stronger the Afghan security forces become, the less we will have to do," President Trump said in August 2017 during a speech at Fort Myer, Va.

WHAT THEY SAID IN PUBLIC

June 1, 2016

"[They] performed better this year than they were performing last year, and based on that, we are cautiously optimistic about the coming months."

— Army Brig. Gen. Charles Cleveland, in a news briefing on the Afghan security forces

In the Lessons Learned interviews, U.S. and NATO officials said the glowing progress reports delivered to the public were largely an illusion and glossed over major deficiencies that were visible from the outset.

For starters, only about 2 in 10 Afghan recruits could read or write. U.S. and NATO trainers put them through crash literacy courses, but those lasted only a few weeks.

Other gaps in basic knowledge had to be bridged. One U.S. Special Forces trainer told government interviewers that the Afghans mistook urinals in the barracks as drinking fountains . Another U.S. trainer said he had to teach conscripts basic human anatomy: "They didn't understand how a tourniquet could help stop bleeding if you're not even putting it over the wound."

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Questionable motivations and loyalties snaked through the ranks of the army and police. Ethnic and tribal tensions posed a perpetual problem, with the officer corps dominated by warl-rds who doled out promotions based on patronage, according to the interviews.

Filling specialized billets was especially tough. It took nearly a decade to get the Afghan air force off the ground, because of not just a lack of qualified pilots but also a dearth of mechanics who could read repair manuals.

One U.S. military adviser assigned to the Afghan air force told government interviewers that "Afghans would come to them with 'pilot wings' that they found or purchased, claiming to be pilots but having no flight experience."

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The unnamed U.S. adviser said that the air base where he worked was plagued by "shenanigans" and that many Afghans reeked of jet fuel when they left each day because they were smuggling out small containers of it to sell on the black market.

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Petty corruption was rampant. In a 2015 Lessons Learned interview, an unnamed U.N. official described how Afghan police recruits would undergo two weeks of training, "get their uniforms, then go back to the province and sell them." Unworried that they might get in trouble, he said, many would reenlist and "come back to do it again."

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U.S. advisers constantly tried to plug holes in the system to prevent looting and stealing but said they were often stymied by Afghan government officials who did not want things to change.

"The less they behaved, the more money we threw at them," a former U.S. official told government interviewers in 2015. "There was no real incentive to reform."

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For much of the war, Washington paid the salaries of the security forces by transferring huge sums of money to the Afghan government, which in turn paid soldiers and police officers in cash — after commanders often took an illicit cut for themselves, according to the interviews and news reports.

Today, to prevent skimming, most of security forces receive their pay by electronic bank account transfers, but graft persists.

In a 2015 Lessons Learned interview, Michael Callen, an economist who specializes in the Afghan public sector, recalled working with a newly arrived U.S. colonel who wanted to set up a secure system that would pay Afghan police officers by mobile-phone transfers instead of cash.

"This colonel had just rotated in and he had a bee in his bonnet and he was really excited and he said we're going to pay mobile monies — we're going to pay salaries using mobile monies," Callen said.

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Callen said he and the colonel tried to sell the idea to an unnamed Interior Ministry official, who wasn't buying. "He's falling asleep and has no interest. Then he's like, 'Sure, if you want to go do it, go do it in places where there aren't mobile money agents. ... Go do it in places where cell phones don't work.'

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"Why is ... the interior minister sitting here half falling asleep and half sabotaging you? Because he has a vested interest in making sure this doesn't work."

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Mobile phones are common in Afghanistan, and the Interior Ministry eventually set up a pilot program to pay a small number of police officers with mobile-phone credits. U.S. officials said the experiment worked well, but the Afghan government did not implement it widely.

Virulent corruption compromised the security forces in other ways. Over time, the Afghan public became so disgusted by all the bribery and extortion that many questioned who represented the bigger evil — the Taliban or the Afghan government.

In a 2017 Lessons Learned interview, Shahmahmood Miakhel, a former adviser to the Afghan Interior Ministry, said he once got an earful from district tribal leaders who could not stand either side.

"I asked that why is it possible that a large number of about 500 security forces cannot defeat about 20 or 30 Taliban. The community elders replied that the security people are not there to defend the people and fight Taliban, they are there to make money" by selling their weapons or fuel, recalled Miakhel, who now serves as the governor of Nangahar province in eastern Afghanistan.

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"I asked the elders that ok the government is not protecting you, but you are about 30,000 people in the district. If you don't like Taliban then you must fight against them.'

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"Their response was that we don't want this corrupt government to come and we don't want Taliban either, so we are waiting to see who is going to win."

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WHAT THEY SAID IN PUBLIC

July 23, 2018

"We're on the right track. Again, this is a tough war. It's a war. A war is a contest of wills. The Afghan army and police are demonstrating a will to succeed."

— Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, in a press briefing from Kabul

Over the course of the war, U.S. military officials have made distinctions in their appraisal of the Afghan security forces. Despite its problems, there is a consensus that the army has made strides and earned a measure of respect from the Afghan public. Elite special-operations units often receive praise for their combat effectiveness.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, U.S. officials aimed much of their criticism at the Afghan police, which function more as a paramilitary force than officers on the beat.

In particular, they heaped scorn on units known as the Afghan Local Police, or ALP. With about 30,000 personnel, the local police are militias organized at the village level. Although they were established in 2010 at the behest of the United States — and trained by the U.S. military — they quickly generated a reputation for brutality and drew complaints from human rights groups.

One unnamed U.S. military official told government interviewers in 2016 that about a third of the local police "seemed to be drug addicts or Taliban." He added that their "main concern was getting fuel from their U.S. unit, they always wanted fuel."

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Marine Gen. John Allen, who served as commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2013, defended the local police and described them as a major success.

"The ALP stood their ground 80 percent of the time they were attacked," he told government interviewers. "Indeed, the Taliban were more concerned about ALP than almost any other single measure taken to protect the Afghan people."

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But almost no one else who was interviewed for the Lessons Learned project agreed with Allen. Robert Perito, a former analyst at the U.S. Institute of Peace who studied the Afghan police, called the local police "dysfunctional" and said that in many areas it was "a corrupt force, run by warl-rds."

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One unnamed adviser to a U.S. Special Operations team officer told government interviewers in 2016 that his unit worked with an ALP chief who was "definitely corrupt" and that his militia was rife with thieves and saboteurs.

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"They would say something was broken, or they would ask for fuel and then they would sell it in the market," the adviser said. "Or they would say their vehicle was broken down. ... There was one instance when our mechanic took the trucks and discovered that they had been intentionally destroyed. It was something really obvious, they cut a pipe or something like that."

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Scott Mann, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, told government interviewers that the local police training expanded too rapidly between 2011 and 2013, causing the program to deteriorate.

"If you use surrogates or take shortcuts, you get what you pay for," Mann said. "You get unaccountable militias that prey on the population."

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In the Lessons Learned interviews, officials said the United States and NATO deserved a large share of the blame. They said the training programs for the Afghan security forces — not just the police — were ill-designed, poorly coordinated and thinly staffed.

One former U.S. trainer said he was selected for the job because he "had a pulse." When government interviewers asked him in 2017 which U.S. official was in charge of police training, he replied that no single person was and that he "wasn't sure who he would say fills a role that could be considered as such."

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Others said the programs were plagued by inconsistency and hamstrung by the fact that U.S. and NATO trainers served for only six to 12 months at a time. One called the loss of institutional knowledge "the annual lobotomy."

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For years, the United States and NATO could not find enough certified law enforcement professionals to train the Afghan police. To fill the gap, the Pentagon assigned regular troops to the job, even though they knew little about police work.

Victor Glaviano, the former combat adviser, told government interviewers that it "made no sense" for U.S. infantry troops to train the police. Yet Glaviano, who had experience as a military police officer, said the Afghan police had such a poor reputation that he "didn't complain" when he was assigned to work with an Afghan army unit instead.

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"Thinking we could build the [security forces] that fast and that well was insane," an unnamed former U.S. official told government interviewers in 2016. "We can't even stand up a sustainable local police unit in the U.S. in 18 months. How could we expect to set up hundreds of them across Afghanistan in that time frame?"

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If you have information to share about The Afghanistan Papers, contact The Post at afghanpapers@washpost.com.

Were you or one of your family members involved in the Afghanistan war? Tell us about your experiences.

Craig Whitlock

Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter who specializes in national security issues. He has covered the Pentagon, served as the Berlin bureau chief and reported from more than 60 countries. He joined The Washington Post in 1998.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-opium-poppy-production/

The Afghanistan Papers | A Secret History Of The War

[Part 6] Overwhelmed By Opium

The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn
By Craig Whitlock Dec. 9, 2019

In late 2017, U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan launched Operation Iron Tempest, a storm of airstrikes by B-52 bombers, F-22 Raptors and other warplanes. The main target: a network of clandestine opium production labs that U.S. officials said was helping to generate $200 million a year in drug money for the Taliban.

"This is a new war, and the gloves are off," Air Force Brig. Gen. Lance Bunch said during a swaggering news conference in Kabul. "That is our new strategy going forward, and it's definitely been a game-changer and the Taliban is definitely feeling it. ... The war has changed."

But within a year, Operation Iron Tempest had fizzled out. Many of the suspected labs turned out to be empty, mud-walled compounds. After more than 200 airstrikes, the U.S. military concluded it was a waste of resources to keep blowing up primitive targets with advanced aircraft and laser-guided munitions.

Of all the failures in Afghanistan, the war on drugs has been perhaps the most feckless, according to a cache of confidential government interviews and other documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Since 2001, the United States has spent about $9 billion on a dizzying array of programs to deter Afghanistan from supplying the world with heroin. In dozens of interviews, however, key players in the anti-narcotics campaign acknowledged that none of the measures have worked and that, in many cases, they have made things worse.

Mohammed Ehsan Zia, a former Afghan cabinet minister in charge of rural development programs, told U.S. government interviewers that the United States and other NATO countries never settled on an effective strategy and just threw money at the opium problem. He said they constantly changed policies and relied on a carousel of consultants who were ignorant about Afghanistan.

"Foreigners read 'Kite Runner' on [the] plane and believe they are an expert on Afghanistan and then never listen," Zia said, referring to the best-selling novel about an Afghan boy haunted by oppression and ethnic strife. "The only thing they are experts in is bureaucracy."

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Afghanistan dominates the global opium markets. Last year, it produced 82 percent of the world's supply, according to estimates by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

Defying U.S. efforts to curtail it, Afghan opium production has skyrocketed over the course of the 18-year war. Last year, Afghan farmers grew poppies — the plant from which opium is extracted to make heroin — on four times as much land as they did in 2002.

With business booming, the opium industry has tightened its stranglehold on the Afghan economy, corrupted large sectors of the Afghan government and provided the Taliban a rising source of revenue, U.S., European and Afghan officials said in the interviews.

"Drugs was a nasty thing that had to be contended with," Douglas Wankel, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who led a federal counternarcotics task force in Kabul from 2004 to 2007, told government interviewers. "The biggest problem was corruption in Afghanistan and drugs was part of it. You couldn't deal with one without dealing with the other."

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The United States and its closest NATO ally, Britain, tried all sorts of strategies to shrink opium production. They bribed farmers to stop cultivating poppies, hired mercenaries to invade poppy fields and drew up plans to spray defoliants from the sky. But the poppies spread anyway.

The State Department and DEA have led most of those efforts for the United States. For most of the war, the U.S. military has struggled to make up its mind about how involved it should get in the opium wars.

During the George W. Bush administration, most U.S. generals wanted nothing to do with the battle over opium. According to the interviews, they saw it as a distraction or hindrance to their primary mission of fighting terrorists.

During the Obama administration, as evidence mounted that drug money was financing the insurgency, the generals began to see opium as a military threat. Because the generals' war strategy hinged on winning the support of the Afghan people, however, they were reluctant to take action that could alienate poppy farmers — a large chunk of the population — or U.S.-friendly warl-rds who profited from opium trafficking.

Andre Hollis served as the Pentagon's top civilian official for drug issues from 2001 to 2003 and later as a senior adviser to the Afghan Counternarcotics Ministry. He said the U.S. Defense Department "fundamentally didn't understand what getting involved in counternarcotics entailed."

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"Everyone was focusing on traditional roles. They would only talk to those in their battle space. From a DOD perspective, it was tactical, and about finding and killing al-Qaeda," he told government interviewers. "Everyone had [their] own agenda and counternarcotics was way down the list."

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The previously undisclosed interviews were conducted between 2014 and 2018 by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, for a special project called "Lessons Learned."

In June 2018, SIGAR published a 270-page report that documented the failure of the war on Afghan opium and made policy recommendations — in flat, bureaucratic jargon — for dealing with the problem.

https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/lessonslearned/SIGAR-18-52-LL.pdf

"A whole-of-government U.S. counternarcotics strategy should be developed to coordinate various agencies around shared, long-term goals," the report concluded. "The goals of a U.S. counternarcotics strategy should be aligned with and integrated into the larger security, development, and government objectives of the United States and the host nation."

But the Lessons Learned report omitted the names of the vast majority of those who were interviewed and left out their toughest criticisms. The Post sued SIGAR in federal court to force it to release transcripts and notes of the interviews under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

To supplement the Lessons Learned interviews, The Post obtained several oral-history interviews that the nonprofit Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training conducted with U.S. officials who served in Afghanistan, as well as confidential memos that then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote about the Afghan drug trade.

Together, the documents reveal that many people involved in the war on opium thought the policies they were carrying out made no sense.

"I was convinced we were doing the wrong things and history would come to judge" those in charge, an unnamed British official said in a Lessons Learned interview in June 2016. The official said the outcome was "a legacy that shows what we did was harmful. Partly because people are stupid and partly because they actively choose not to listen."

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An unnamed U.S. official gave a similar account of foolishness and blamed bureaucratic infighting for many of the problems.

"There was violent competition in Washington not only within Congress, between the Hill and the administration but also between different parts of the administration," the U.S. official told government interviewers in May 2016. "It was sad to see so many people behave so stupidly."

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WHAT THEY SAID IN PUBLIC

March 2000

"We are 100 percent determined to control drugs, but we cannot do it alone. This problem existed long before the Taliban, and we need much more help from the outside world to solve it."

— Abdul Hameed Akhunzada, head of the Taliban's anti-drug commission, in an interview with The Post.

Hardscrabble Afghan farmers have been growing varieties of the opium poppy — Papaver somniferum — for generations. With a little irrigation, the plants thrive in warm, dry climates and are especially bountiful in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, the heart of the insurgency.

In full bloom, the flowers look majestic in incandescent shades of white, pink, red or purple. After the petals fall away, the stem is capped by a seed pod the size of an egg. At harvest time, farmworkers slice open the pods to drain a milky white sap that is dried into a resin.

Once the opium resin is transported to drug labs or refineries, it is processed into morphine and heroin. Afghan opium feeds the demand for heroin in Europe, Iran and other parts of Asia. One of the few markets it does not control is the United States, which gets most of its heroin from neighboring Mexico, according to the DEA.

Ironically, the only power that has demonstrated an ability to cripple the Afghan drug industry is the Taliban.

In July 2000, when the Taliban controlled most of the country, its reclusive one-eyed leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, declared that opium was un-Islamic and imposed a ban on growing poppies.

Much to the surprise of the rest of the world, the ban worked. Afraid to cross the Taliban, Afghan farmers immediately ceased planting poppies. The United Nations estimated that poppy cultivation plunged by 90 percent from 2000 to 2001.

The edict stirred tumult in global heroin markets and disrupted the Afghan economy. But even today, Afghans recall the moment with awe and say it demonstrates the comparative haplessness of the current Afghan government, the United States and their allies in the opium wars.

"When [the] Taliban ordered to stop poppy cultivation, Mullah Omar could enforce it with his blind eye. No one cultivated poppy after the order was passed," Tooryalai Wesa, a former governor of Kandahar province, said in a Lessons Learned interview. "Now, billions of dollars came and were given to the Ministry of Counternarcotics. It actually didn't decrease [anything]. The poppy even increased."

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The Taliban had hoped the 2000 opium ban would win favor in Washington and entice the United States to provide humanitarian aid. But those hopes collapsed when al-Qaeda — which had been given sanctuary by the Taliban — launched the 9/11 attacks.

As soon as the U.S. military invaded and toppled the Taliban in 2001, Afghan farmers resumed sowing their poppy seeds. According to the interviews, U.S. officials were concerned about a rebound in opium production but focused on other priorities, such as hunting for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders.

President Bush asked the United Nations and NATO allies to tackle the problems of opium production and trafficking. Britain agreed to take charge but got off to a disastrous start, according to the interviews.

In the spring of 2002, British officials floated an irresistible offer. They agreed to pay Afghan poppy farmers $700 an acre — a fortune in the impoverished, war-ravaged country — to destroy their crops.

Word of the $30 million program ignited a poppy-growing frenzy. Farmers planted as many poppies as they could, offering part of their yield to the British while selling the rest on the open market. Others harvested the opium sap right before destroying their plants and got paid anyway.

In a Lessons Learned interview, Anthony Fitzherbert, a British agricultural expert, called the cash-for-poppies program "an appalling piece of complete raw naivete," saying that the people in charge had "no knowledge of nuances and [I] don't know they really cared."

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U.S. officials said the British wanted to be seen as doing something, even though they had little confidence the program would work. Michael Metrinko, a former U.S. diplomat who served in the embassy in Kabul at the time, said the results were predictable.

"Afghans like most other people are quite willing to accept large sums of money and promise anything knowing that you will go away," Metrinko said in an oral-history interview. "The British would come and hand out sums of money and the Afghans would say, 'Yes, yes, yes, we're going to burn it right now,' and the Brits would leave. They would then get two sources of income from the same crop."

https://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Metrinko,%20Mike.toc.pdf?_ga=2.140164021.707592957.1575482293-350211411.1574618593

WHAT THEY SAID IN PUBLIC

Oct. 11, 2001

"It'd be helpful, of course, to eradicate narco-trafficking out of Afghanistan as well."

— President George W. Bush, in a televised news conference, four days after he launched the war in Afghanistan

As Afghan farmers plowed more soil to grow poppies and the British struggled to cope with the opium problem, the Bush administration debated whether and how to get involved.

Yet the bureaucratic dysfunction was just as bad in Washington as it was in London, according to the interviews and other documents. The State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, or INL, was supposed to take charge of U.S. policy. But the Pentagon largely called the shots on what happened in Afghanistan, and it was unsure about what to do.

In a confidential October 2004 memo, Rumsfeld reported to several senior Pentagon officials that the French defense minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, had recently told him she was worried the opium trade was getting out of control and could weaken Afghan President Hamid Karzai's grip on power.

"She thinks it is important to act soon, to avoid having a situation where drug money elects the Afghan Parliament, and the Afghan Parliament then opposes Karzai and corrupts the government," Rumsfeld wrote.

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Rumsfeld had no ready answer. "I told her I'd get back to her," he added.

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One month later, Rumsfeld sent another confidential memo to Doug Feith, the Pentagon's policy chief, to complain about the Bush administration's aimless approach.

"With respect to the drug strategy for Afghanistan, it appears not to be synchronized — no one's in charge," Rumsfeld wrote. "Department of State has to develop a strategy. Other countries in the region want to get involved — Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, along with Afghanistan. Why don't you see what you can do about that."

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The Rumsfeld memos were disclosed by the Pentagon in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed in 2017 by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute at George Washington University. They are among hundreds of pages of memos, known as "snowflakes," that Rumsfeld dictated about the Afghan war between 2001 and 2005.

Around the same time, anxieties over opium were rising at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, other documents show.

In a September 2005 diplomatic cable, then-U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann warned the White House and the State Department that "narcotics could be the factor that causes corruption" to consume Afghanistan's fledgling democracy.

"Many of our contacts correctly fear that the burgeoning narcotics sector could spin Afghan corruption out of anyone's control," Neumann wrote in the cable. "They fear that the sheer mass of illegal money from growing, processing, and trafficking opium could strangle the legitimate Afghan state in its cradle."

But Bush administration officials could not agree on a course of action.

"Some groups said, 'Let's go in and rip out the opium poppies, let's spray the opium poppies, let's treat this as a criminal act,'" Patrick Fine, who served as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) mission director for Afghanistan from 2004 to 2005, said in an oral-history interview.

https://adst.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Fine-Patrick.oh1_.pdf

But Fine said others replied "that these are just poor peasant farmers, 'If we treat them like enemies then we are just making enemies. If we are trying to stabilize the country we don't want to turn the populace against us. They've been growing poppies for a thousand years here and if we rip out their fields we are impoverishing them.'"

Wankel, the former DEA agent, said the Pentagon and the British government were slow to recognize that narcotics were fueling the insurgency.

"The U.S. military didn't want to deal with the drugs issue — better to be an ostrich — had to take them kicking and screaming," he said in a Lessons Learned interview. "[It] created a whole new problem that the military didn't know how to deal with."

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WHAT THEY SAID IN PUBLIC

Dec. 9, 2004

"Opium cultivation, heroin production is more dangerous than the invasion and the attack of the Soviets on our country. It is more dangerous than the factional fighting in Afghanistan. It is more dangerous than terrorism"

— Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in a speech declaring a "holy war" against poppies

Prodded by Congress to do something, in 2004 the INL took a hard line.

The agency hired a small army of 1,200 security contractors to crack down against poppy farming, including mercenaries from South Africa, veterans of the Balkan wars and Gurkha soldiers from Nepal, according to Ronald McMullen, who served as director of the agency's Afghanistan-Pakistan office from 2006 to 2007.

In an oral-history interview, McMullen said that when he took charge of the office he was baffled by some of the tactics the contractors and Afghan counternarcotics police were using.

https://adst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/McMullen-Ronald.pdf

"I was shocked to learn that the American-funded anti-poppy police unit was eradicating Afghan poppies by hand," he said. "We'd send a truck of counternarcotics police out to a field of blossoming opium poppies, the police would hop out of the truck, pick up sticks and walk through the field whacking poppies with their sticks."

There was immense political pressure from Washington and London to show that anti-opium programs were working. In a Lessons Learned interview, an unnamed former British government contractor said that U.S., British and U.N. officials exaggerated data to make it appear that they had destroyed far more poppy fields than they really had from 2005 to 2007.

"There was systematic over-reporting and intimidation but no one wanted to hear it," the former British contractor told U.S. government interviewers. "We ended up with absurd numbers."

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Neumann, who had been the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, told government interviewers that there was "desperate pressure for short-term results."

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In a 2015 Lessons Learned interview, Neumann said the flawed eradication programs were "driven by Congress wanting to see something tangible," even though it was clear there was no simple solution. He added that "Washington did not understand that a successful counternarcotics effort was going to be a function of a massive rural development effort."

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Many U.S. lawmakers and Bush administration officials wanted to adopt an aggressive approach that Washington had backed in Colombia to combat cocaine trafficking. A core part of that program, known as Plan Colombia, was the aerial spraying of herbicides to eradicate coca plants — despite concerns that the chemicals could cause cancer.

The Bush administration touted Plan Colombia as a success, but some U.S. officials said it was a mistake to think it could work in Afghanistan.

John Wood, a National Security Council staffer in the Bush White House, told government interviewers that Colombia's then-president, Álvaro Uribe, was a reliable ally who supported aerial spraying: "Uribe was a credible leader and linked insurgency and drugs. The Colombian military was competent. There was U.S. commitment, as the final product [cocaine] was going to the United States."

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In contrast, the Afghan security forces were much weaker and Karzai, the Afghan president, had deep reservations about spraying.

According to the Lessons Learned interviews, some senior Bush administration officials leaned hard on Karzai to allow spraying. But other Americans were opposed.

U.S. military commanders, worried about the potential health risks to their troops, had flashbacks to the Vietnam War, when U.S. forces sprayed Agent Orange — a toxic defoliant — over tropical jungles. British officials also disliked the idea of aerial spraying and lobbied Karzai against it.

The dissension made Karzai even more suspicious about U.S. motives. He rejected the spraying plan and reacted coolly to other proposals to restrict poppy farming and prosecute suspected opium traffickers.

"Urging Karzai to mount an effective counternarcotics campaign was like asking an American president to halt all U.S. economic activity west of the Mississippi," McMullen, the former INL director, said in his oral-history interview. "That was the magnitude of what we were asking the Afghans to do."

WHAT THEY SAID IN PUBLIC

Nov. 19, 2009

"We are starting to see results. Farmers are beginning to switch from poppies to pomegranates. Girls are attending schools."

— Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a Kabul news conference

The U.S. policy changed immediately after Barack Obama's election in 2009. The State Department's new special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, had written an op-ed in The Post a year earlier blasting the Bush administration's poppy eradication efforts as "the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy."

Upon taking office, Holbrooke brought eradication to a standstill. The U.S. government shifted its focus to programs that tried to persuade Afghan poppy farmers to switch to other crops or adopt other livelihoods altogether.

But those efforts mostly backfired. In Helmand province, the epicenter of the poppy belt, USAID and the U.S. military paid Afghans to dig or renovate miles of canals and ditches to irrigate fruit trees and other crops. But the canals worked just as well to irrigate poppies — which were much more profitable to grow.

Similarly, USAID invested millions of dollars to entice Helmand farmers to start wheat-growing operations. While wheat production increased, farmers relocated their poppy fields to other parts of the province. Between 2010 and 2014, poppy cultivation across the country nearly doubled, according to U.N. estimates.

Some U.S. officials suggested part of the problem was that Washington fundamentally misunderstood Afghanistan and mistakenly viewed opium as just another crop.

"Afghanistan is not an agricultural country; that's an optical illusion," Barnett Rubin, an academic authority on Afghanistan who served as a senior adviser to Holbrooke, said in a Lessons Learned interview. The "largest industry is war, then drugs, then services," he added. "Agriculture is down in fourth or fifth place."

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U.S. military commanders were relieved by the Obama administration's decision to abandon poppy eradication programs. They saw them as unnecessary irritants to Afghan villagers whose loyalty they were trying to win, according to William Wechsler, who served as the Pentagon's top civilian in charge of drug issues from 2009 to 2012.

At the same time, military officials were growing concerned that the opium trade was providing a major revenue stream to the Taliban, which imposed taxes on farmers and traffickers. U.S. commanders wanted badly to deprive the Taliban of drug money but were not sure how to do it, Wechsler told government interviewers.

"The military attitude — 'so what do we do?' That was more uncertain," he said. Commanders were open to integrating law enforcement, drug interdiction and even economic development programs into their counterinsurgency strategy but never received clear marching orders from the Obama administration, he said.

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_04_xx2_11012016&page=2&anno=1&filter=filter-narcotics

"I am not aware of any civilian effort that told the military what they should do in counternarcotics," Wechsler added. "The military would have been happy with a civilian counternarcotics strategy."

http://wapo.st/2pSqA52?document=background_ll_04_xx2_11012016&page=2&anno=2&filter=filter-narcotics

But Todd Greentree, a former State Department official who served as a political adviser to the U.S. military in Afghanistan from 2008 to 2012, said it proved impossible to develop a coherent strategy for all arms of the U.S. government.

"There was contradiction between counternarcotics and counterinsurgency, because so much of the rural population depended on income from opium production," he said in an oral-history interview. "Counterinsurgency operations that relied on support of the population would be disrupted by counternarcotics operations that were intended to eradicate opium."

https://adst.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Greentree-Todd.pdf

"We were always debating and discussing it," he added. "But at the level of policy, it was a contradiction that was left unmanaged."

If you have information to share about The Afghanistan Papers, contact The Post at afghanpapers@washpost.com.

Were you or one of your family members involved in the Afghanistan war? Tell us about your experiences.

Craig Whitlock

Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter who specializes in national security issues. He has covered the Pentagon, served as the Berlin bureau chief and reported from more than 60 countries. He joined The Washington Post in 1998.
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Interviews and memos | Explore the documents | Key insiders speak bluntly about the failures of the longest conflict in U.S. history
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/documents-database/

Post Reports | 'We didn't know what the task was' | Hear candid interviews with former ambassador Ryan Crocker and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn
https://wapo.st/afghanistan-papers-post-reports

The fight for the documents | About the investigation | It took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview records
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-the-post-unearthed-the-afghanistan-papers/2019/12/08/07ddb844-1847-11ea-a659-7d69641c6ff7_story.html
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