Books Only everything went wrong in Afghanistan – tens of thousands of documents tell a stark story about the West’s unfortunate expedition

On Monday October 21, 2002 President of the United States George W. Bush worked at the White House in Washington. Minister of Defense Donald Rumsfeld came to the office to ask if the president would like to meet with the general that week Tommy Franks and General Dan McNeillin.

Franks headed Centcom, the U.S. central war zone. He prepared for full-blown U.S. future invasion of Iraq.

The second general, Bush, did not remember. He asked, “Who is General McNeill?”

Rumsfeld responded that McNeill is leading U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The president acknowledged, “I don’t have to meet him.”

Situation description is talkative.

In October 2002, about a year had passed since the terrorist attacks of 11 September and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan.

The war had the broad support of the international community. Afghanistan had been ruled by the extremist Islamic Taliban and had once again operated under its auspices Osama bin Laden led by the terrorist organization al-Qaeda.

Now al-Qaeda had smoked out of Afghanistan and the Taliban out of power, so Bush could afford to forget General McNeill. Or so the president thought.

In white the exchange of words in the house is known because Rumsfeld, the host of the Pentagon, or Ministry of Defense, used to constantly dictate short diary entries called “snowflakes”.

Thousands of snowflakes accumulated in the early 2000s. Now they are essential material for the Washington Post journalist Craig Whitlockin in the book The war in Afghanistan. The secret papers of the Pentagon, which will be published in Finnish at the end of January.

“We tried to access as many contemporary documents as possible,” Whitlock tells HS in a phone interview. “I wasn’t prepared for how many absurdities I would face.”

Afghanistan The source material for the war is a total of tens of thousands of documents, of which the “Pentagon Papers” are only one part.

In fact, an even more important source of information is the hundreds of interviews with contemporaries conducted by a fairly unknown federal agency called SIGAR, which the Washington Post had access to under the U.S. Public Access Act after years of legal action.

“It cost three years, two lawsuits and a large sum of money [oikeudenkäyntikuluihin], ”Whitlock says. “God bless the Washington Post and editorial chiefs for believing this.”

The task of the SIGAR agency was to gather information about what had gone wrong in the war in Afghanistan. In the 2010s, the agency interviewed generals, soldiers, diplomats and aid workers.

The material is called “Lessons Learned”, which could be translated as “Teaching a Story”. The teaching was harsh: just about everything went wrong.

Whitlock is approaching Afghanistan with a strict American demarcation, but his book is a necessary depressing read for us as well. Finnish soldiers, diplomats and aid workers – and taxpayers – have been involved in the same bitter failure for 20 years.

It would be very rewarding to read an honest, self-critical report on Afghanistan from a Finnish perspective as well. The number of operational secrets is likely to be small once the operation is gone.

“The whole company rested on a very shaky footing,” Whitlock says. “As the whole world saw with their own eyes last August, there is not the slightest doubt who won this war. The Taliban won. ”

What happened 20 years ago?

From the beginning, the war started to “drift,” as Rumsfeld feared in one of the snowflake memo dictated in 2002. In public, Rumsfeld and other warlords spoke differently: the views were lush, in Afghanistan everything went like a dance.

“There was simply no war plan,” General McNeill complained in an interview with Teaching a Story.

The same continued through the years and decades.

“We tried to build one … decent strategy, but instead we came up with a lot of tactics,” said the British general. David Richards, which in 2006–2007 commanded the international Isaf troops in Afghanistan, ie in principle also Finnish soldiers.

Whitlock’s file also strongly illustrates the weakness of the expertise, strength and will to fight of Afghanistan’s own armed forces.

The great talk of a “transfer of responsibility” in the 2010s rested on a false foundation, and non-Americans believed in this lie.

AfghanistanThe value of the papers – and the extraordinary probative value – lies in the fact that the interviewees speak their mouths clean.

“I was amazed at how outspoken even high-ranking officials were,” Whitlock notes. “They literally said‘ we didn’t know what we were doing ’. I heard it [aineistossa] repeatedly from both Foreign Ministry officials and soldiers. “

Whitlock points out that Afghan interviewees would certainly have been wary of their words if they had known they would end up in the public so soon. Not to mention if he or another journalist had approached the same people on the same issues.

Craig Whitlockin the book is a sinister chronology of sad failure.

The heart of the United States and the Alliance as a whole was inciting corruption. Billions and again billions of dollars were blamed on the paralyzed country of a few tens of millions of people in the hope that development work would bear fruit.

Huge sums of money were also immersed in the fight against drugs. The money tended to get lost somewhere along the way.

“Dark money was flowing around the country,” as Whitlock describes. “Money launderers dragged suitcases containing a million dollars and more into planes leaving Kabul, where the misappropriated assets of vicious businessmen and politicians were taken abroad.”

The consequences of rampant corruption, a booming drug business and a war economy were, of course, also felt within Afghanistan. Out of the ruins of Kabul rose “poppy palaces,” brazenly lavish elite dwellings.

Protecting money was completely pointless. Whitlock’s book talks about an American aid project subcontractor, which was expected to target projects at a rate of three million dollars a day – in an area equivalent to a few medium-sized Finnish municipalities.

The subcontractor in question asked a congressman who was visiting Afghanistan whether he could use such money responsibly in his own constituency. The congressman replied that “I am not in hell”.

“Sir, that is exactly what you have obliged us to use,” the subcontractor replied. “And I do it in communities that live in clay huts with no windows.”

The source of this grain of information is the Story Teaching interview, from which, however, the SIGAR agency had erased the name information.

The war in Afghanistan is one of the first books to cover the entire arc from the defeat of the Taliban to its new rise to power. The Taliban took over Kabul last August.

The war in Afghanistan originally appeared last summer under the name The Afghanistan Papers. The Finnish version has been updated. Antti Parosen with transcript.

It would be nice to think that the international community even got something permanent in Afghanistan.

“The international community was trying to modernize Afghanistan, and the intention was good,” Craig Whitlock says.

“There were many attempts to improve the lives of Afghan women and girls, to improve the education system, to improve the Afghan economy.”

The end result is inconsolable.

“An attempt was made to create a functioning state, but it failed. Everything we thought we had achieved in Afghan society has already collapsed. ”

Craig Whitlock: The War in Afghanistan. The secret papers of the Pentagon. Kyösti Karvonen, Finland. Docendo. 434 s. The book is due to be published on January 27th.