Last week, seven members of a New Hampshire National Guard aviation unit were deployed to Afghanistan where, after a week’s training at the Army’s base at Fort Bliss, Texas, they will fly intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.
Their departure coincides with the publication of a series of Washington Post articles based on government documents that show that much of what the public has been told about the longest war in American history was false. There has been some progress in the past 18 years. Several million Afghan girls once denied an education are now in school. But the war is no closer to being won, and Afghan democracy is largely a sham.
The al-Qaida forces once led by Osama bin Laden have been routed. But as the Post series documented, America’s effort to bring peace and democracy to Afghanistan faces, in addition to ignorance and illiteracy, two more enemies: the Taliban and its medieval view of the Muslim religion, and pandemic corruption made worse by showering hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on a primitive society with little care for accountability.
When we think of the New Hampshire guard members we can’t help but hear the question former senator and secretary of state John Kerry put to Congress on his return from combat in Vietnam: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake.” We pray for the soldiers safe return and ask, how many more?
So far the war has claimed 2,400 American lives and left more than 20,000 with wounds that, in some cases, will require a lifetime of care. The U.S. has spent roughly $1 trillion on the war and aid efforts that include paying the salaries of several hundred thousand Afghan soldiers and police. Corruption is widespread in both, according to documents and recordings obtained by the Post. Soldiers sell their uniforms and weapons, desert and re-enlist. Theft is rampant and drug use common.
The Post stories are based on thousands of pages of interviews conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Diplomats, military commanders, aid workers, contractors and others with experience in Afghanistan were asked to provide an honest assessment of the state of affairs and America’s prospects going forward. Their accounts differ drastically from public pronouncements about the course of the war and progress at nation-building.
The Post has done the nation a great service. It took the newspaper, using the Freedom of Information Act, three years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to pry the information loose from the inspector’s office and the fight is ongoing. Did three presidential administrations purposely mislead the American people about the status of the war? Were they, from presidents on down, unable to accept reality or admit errors and a lack of progress? As one interviewee, Army General Doug Lute, told inspectors, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan – we didn’t know what we were doing.”
In 1971, the release of the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the war in Vietnam, exposed government lies and helped bring an end to that war. The so-called Afghanistan Papers are likely to have less effect. Thanks to a volunteer military the Afghan war touches few households and the war’s costs are not on tax bills but hidden in deficit spending that will be passed on to future generations.
There are now some 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, soon to include seven more from New Hampshire. Can they all be brought home? If not, how many should remain, if only to sound the alarm if the remote mountain nation once again becomes a terrorist stronghold? The Post’s reporting should lead to a national discussion, one based on fact not fantasy, on how and if the United States should extricate itself from its failed attempt at nation-building.