Has The U.S. Government Massively Deceived The Public About Afghanistan?

The Washington Post has gotten big play the past couple of weeks for a huge six-part series of articles about the Afghanistan war, all bearing the date of December 9. The overall title is “THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS: A secret history of the war.” You can get the sense of the main point of the series from the headline of the first installment, “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.” Here’s the first sentence:

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.

It’s certainly a thesis with surface plausibility, given constant government deception about many subjects. And the term “The Afghanistan Papers” is clearly intended to play off the previous “Pentagon Papers,” a collection of secret documents that exposed very real government lying about supposed success being achieved in Vietnam so many years ago.

But does the thesis that the American people have been massively deceived for years about progress in Afghanistan really stand up? I don’t buy it. I think it’s been obvious for a very long time to anyone who looks at it critically that the Afghanistan war is not “winnable” in any conventional sense. Indeed we don’t even have a working definition of what “winning” might consist of. What are the goals that we are seeking to accomplish? I’ve never seen a list, and I’m sure that you haven’t either.

My first post on this blog about the Afghanistan situation was in July 2017, which admittedly was long into the morass. However, that post noted that I had attended a presentation in 2010 — early in the Obama administration — by a guy named Stanley McChrystal, who was at that moment the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. In 2010, Obama was implementing a “surge” of 100,000 U.S. troops in the country, intended to effect a quick victory in the conflict. It’s fair to say that the gist of McChrystal’s presentation was that he was very hopeful of success and that progress was being made, although he never made clear how the progress would ever lead to the end of the conflict, let alone to peace and prosperity in Afghanistan. My post recounted the following question and answer exchange between myself and McChrystal (paraphrase):

"The Afghan economy is hugely dependent on the production of opium, with some estimates of the percent of Afghan GDP from opium in excess of 50%.  Yet the U.S. says it plans both to turn Afghanistan into a functioning country and also do away with the opium production.  How is it possible to eliminate the Afghans' dominant source of income without turning them all against us?"  I still remember how McChrystal's began his answer, which was "It's difficult."  The answer went on some from there, but it was completely clear that there was no idea or strategy that had any real chance to work.

In other words, McChrystal was saying what he had to say to support his commander-in-chief. But his answer told me all I needed to know. Here was my conclusion in 2017 (which was the same thing I would have said in 2010):

[T]here almost certainly is no perfect answer for Afghanistan.  Any hope of relative peace and calm in Afghanistan means living with widespread production of opium for the foreseeable future.  Alternatively, we can aggressively pursue eradication of the opium, and face the increasing ascendancy of the Taliban, widespread fighting, and the likely overthrow of the current Afghan regime within a few years.  Take your choice!  I guess it's no wonder that nobody wants to talk about it.

For another realistic response to the Post’s cheap accusations, try this piece by Jonathan Schroden at War on the Rocks from December 16, headline “There Was No ‘Secret War on the Truth’ in Afghanistan.” (Note: I had to go through four pages of Google results to come to this.) Excerpt:

It’s easy to criticize the American effort in Afghanistan. Among its many shortcomings, Washington has vacillated across numerous ineffective strategies, failed to fully account for the geopolitical constraints of the conflict, and consistently prioritized expediency over effectiveness. But did U.S. officials pervasively lie to the American people about the war? The Washington Post seems to think so. . . . But is that claim accurate? Unfortunately, it’s not. The story the Post is telling is neither wholly true, nor supported by the documents it published. Instead, the Post’s reporting puts sensationalist spin on information that was not classified, has already been described in publicly-available reports, only covers a fraction of the 18 years of the war, and falls far short of convincingly demonstrating a campaign of deliberate lies and deceit.

There is much detail at the link.

I do want to give the Washington Post credit for one thing, which is the last part of the six part series, titled “Overwhelmed by Opium: The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn.” This piece focuses at least some attention on the role of opium in the economy of Afghanistan and in financing the Taliban. You can’t really begin to understand the situation in Afghanistan without understanding the role of opium in its economy. Needless to say, the efforts of the U.S. to eradicate the production of drugs in Afghanistan have been no more successful than such efforts have been here at home, or in Mexico or Latin America.