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Mumbai: That the United States of America (US) led “Operation Enduring Freedom” to flush out Al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan as an “Enduring US Disaster” was becoming evidently clear since 2006. Audit reports of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) in its reports since 2006 too was pointing towards objective failures. Even the Washington Post had in December 2019 in its expose had concluded that subsequent US administrations had misled the Americans and the world about ostensible progress over nearly two decades in Afghanistan.
What began as a response to the September 11, 2001 (9/11) terror attacks in the US, on October 7, 2001 aimed at flushing out Al-Qaeda from its hideouts in Afghanistan, ended in a humiliating, messy pull-out of the US and its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies on August 15, 2021. The only high point of this “Never Ending War on Terrorism” was the killing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011 in Abbottabad near Islamabad in Pakistan.
But much before the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, barely five years into Operation Enduring Freedom, the focus of the operation that had no clear enemy target besides Osama bin Laden, Taliban all of a sudden became the enemy for the US and its NATO allies.
In recent memory, PeW Research Center (PRC) had been conducting periodic surveys on the war against terror in Afghanistan in February 2014, October 2018 and the more recent one on August 31, 2021, a fortnight after the US pulled out its armed forces on August 15, 2021. The overwhelming underlying feeling that Americans expressed ranged from feeling pessimistic, to terming it as failure, and critical of the way the Biden administration handled the messy pull-out.
Nearly 54% of American adults felt that the decision to pull-out troops from Afghanistan was the right one, says PRC in its August 31, 2021 survey conducted between August 23-29. The American public, 42%, said that the Biden administration had done a poor job. Most were broadly critical of the way the situation was handled.
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Most Americans (46%) believe the situation in Afghanistan poses a security threat to the US. On partisan lines, both Republicans (70%) and Democrats (69%) agree that the US failed to achieve its goals in Afghanistan. A large majority of Americans (71%) say that the Biden administration has done a poor job in handling the Afghan situation.
In its October 2018 survey, the PRC had noted, “Seventeen years into the US military mission in Afghanistan, Americans remain pessimistic about US efforts in the country. About half of adults (49%) say the United States has mostly failed in achieving its goals”. Nearly, 45% of Americans then had felt that the US made the right decision in sending its troops to Afghanistan.
The mood of the Americans in February 2014 was no different either according to the PRC. The Americans saw more failures than success as the US role in Afghanistan was effectively coming to an end. After the killing of Osama bin Laden, public confidence that the US efforts were on the right path. A June 2011 survey found that 58% said they thought the US would achieve its goals.
If the PRC surveys were anything to go by, then the SIGAR audit reports of August 29, 2006, August 30, 2009, October 15, 2015, January 15, 2020 and July 31, 2021 blew the lid open on why the US army mission was an Enduring Disaster.
The SIGAR was specifically created by the Congress in 2008 to combat waste, fraud and abuse in the US reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and to keep a tab on the spending on the war on terror in Afghanistan.
The SIGAR in its August 2006 report had remarked that the primary sources of information on success of the mission contradict Pentagon optimism over the decades. The report argues that the sanctuaries for terrorists in Pakistan, Afghanistan corruption enabled Taliban resurgence. In its assessment, the SIGAR opined that former US president’s – nation building of George W Bush, the surge of Barack Obama and the Donald Trump deal with Taliban, “all failed”.
The then US Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann had warned Washington in his cable (in 2006) that “we are not winning in Afghanistan, although we are far from losing” (that would take another 14 years). Neumann had then said that the primary problem was that of a lack of political will to provide additional resources to bolster current strategy and to match increasing Taliban offensives.
The SIGAR in September 2009 had leaked to the Washington Post attempts made by the Pentagon to pressurise then US president Barack Obama into approving more troops, and the Pentagon had then declassified it right away. General Stanley McChrystal had in his testimony before the US Senate in December 2009, McChrystal had flatly declared “the next eighteen months will likely be decisive and ultimately enable success. In fact, we are going to win”. His 66 pages remain a testament to American military hubris (hubris = exaggerated pride or self-confidence)”.
But it was the SIGAR documents containing “US lessons learned” interviews obtained by Craig Whitlock of Washington Post through Freedom of Information lawsuits that really let the proverbial cat out of the bag.
Richard Boucher was one of the longest State Department spokesperson in the US history, starting under Madeleine Albright, then under Colin Powell and later on even under Condoleezza Rice, before taking over the South Asia portfolio at State between 2006-2009.
In one of the interviews in October 2015 to SIGAR, Boucher candidly remarked “Did we know what we were doing – I think the answer is no. 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. The Taliban was shooting back at us so we started shooting at them and they became the enemy. Ultimately, we kept expanding the mission.” Boucher confessed further, “if there was ever a notion of mission creep it is Afghanistan.”
His judgement about Afghanistan was thus, “The only time this country (Afghanistan) has worked properly was when it was a floating pool of tribes and when warlords presided over by someone who had a certain eminence who was able to centralize them to the extent that they didn’t fight each other too much. I think this idea that we went in with, that this was going to become a state government like a US state or something like that, was just wrong and is what condemned us to fifteen years of war instead of two or three.”
But it was the January 15, 2020 SIGAR report, that contained the “snowflakes” notably those by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, which were obtained from the National Security Archive (NSA). that conclusively points to how the US government had systematically misled the public about ostensible progress over nearly two decades in Afghanistan.
In his testimony of John Sopko who headed the SIGAR in his testimony before the Congress had remarked, “the system of rotation of US personnel after a year or less in Afghanistan amounted to an “annual lobotomy”. (Lobotomy = A lobotomy, or leucotomy, was a form of psychosurgery, a neurosurgical treatment of a mental disorder that involves severing connections in the brain’s prefrontal cortex.)
Sopko concluded, “Unchecked corruption in Afghanistan undermined US strategic goals – and we helped to foster that corruption” through “alliances of convenience with warlords” and “flood(ing) a small, weak economy with too much money, too fast.”
The most recent quarterly report of SIGAR of July 31, 2021 that provides some noteworthy evidence explaining as to why Washington would be so surprised by the rapid collapse of Afghan government forces in the two weeks after the report was published.
In the report on page 62, a sidebar states, “For years, US taxpayers were told that, although circumstances were difficult, success was achievable.”
The document quotes General David Petraeus in 2011, General John Campbell in 2015, General John Nicholson in 2017, and the Pentagon press secretary in 2021, all endorsing the effectiveness of the Afghan security forces. The SIGAR report comments on the $88 billion invested in those forces: “The question of whether that money was well spent will ultimately be answered by the fighting on the ground.”
That question of SIGAR was answered on August 15 as within hours Afghan capital Kabul fell to the Taliban forces that had swept all over the country in such spectacular speed without encountering any resistance. The US funded and trained Afghan security forces simply laid down their arms in display of abject surrender, much to the embarrassment of the US and its NATO allies.