The Afghanistan Papers

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War. Craig Whitlock. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Deception is a necessary component for any wartime belligerent. In The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, investigative journalist Craig Whitlock explores the range of deceptions integral to America’s two-decade war in Afghanistan. However, his work is not the tale of a triumphant disinformation campaign like Winston Churchill’s famous “bodyguard of lies,” a narrative with which he begins his preface.[1] Rather, Whitlock’s work is an exploration of how a range of deceptions twisted American planning, hamstrung the coalition war effort, concealed rampant corruption, deceived the public, and prolonged the war. His work chronicles a Gordian knot of deceits within the U.S. national security establishment, between it and U.S. politicians, between the U.S. government and its allies, and between the U.S. government and the American people. It is a tragic and frequently gut-wrenching tale of failure, incompetence, absurdity, and hubris informed largely by individuals’ unwillingness or inability to recognize or tell the truth.

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Whitlock’s work is built largely on oral histories collected by the U.S. government. The primary corpus are interviews compiled by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), an oversight authority charged with investigating waste, fraud, and abuse within the American effort to rebuild Afghanistan. The Washington Post successfully sued the U.S. government to release SIGAR’s findings and obtained over 2,000 pages of interviews with 428 individuals. Whitlock also used a series of interviews from the U.S. Army’s Leadership Experience project, the Miller Center’s George W. Bush oral history project, and a collection of Donald Rumsfeld’s post-it notes memos (referred to by insiders as “snowflakes”) held by the National Security Archive.

Whitlock uses his sources to weave a terse, efficient narrative through three presidential administrations and nearly twenty years of the war. The book is divided into twenty-one chapters over six parts that cover the war efforts of the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump administrations. He expertly sums up each administration’s endeavors, as all attempted in their own way to grope and slog through an increasingly unpopular war. The Bush administration’s effort began as a limited and efficient campaign which morphed into a confused and cheaply funded nation-building endeavor. Obama’s war attempted to take the lessons learned from Iraq and apply them to the “good war” in Afghanistan. This new phase flooded the country with planes of troops and suitcases of cash, neither of which turned the tide and may have very well doomed the war to failure. Trump began his war with promises of withdrawal, then proceeded with escalation, and finally negotiated a ceasefire with the Taliban.

The U.S. government often could not determine friend from foe. Whitlock cites the case of alleged drug lord Haji Juma Khan. Khan was arrested by Indonesian officials and extradited to New York to face narcotics smuggling charges. During his initial hearing Khan’s lawyers noted that he was also a high-level paid informant for the Central Intelligence Agency and—ironically—the Drug Enforcement Administration. The judge warned the defense team about releasing classified information, sealed the proceedings, and closed them to the public. Khan was released after ten years in prison. No official explanation for his arrest or release has ever been offered by the U.S. government.[4]

Whitlock weaves the impact of deception throughout his narrative, and this is where his book makes its greatest contribution to the bevy of literature on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. While a comparable work such as Steve Coll’s Directorate S is an exhaustive examination of the war, and nearly two and a half times as long, The Afghanistan Papers presents a trim, cohesive narrative with a more limited goal. Whitlock’s scope is more constrained than that of other scholars and journalists who have covered Afghanistan’s recent history. While Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban tells the story of the title’s eponymous militant organization, and Thomas Barfield’s Afghanistan is a deep socio-political history of the country, Whitlock’s work focuses on the machinations of the U.S. government. He does, however, make regular forays into the war’s ground-level prosecution in service of his larger thesis that deceit was endemic in the U.S. government’s prosecution of the war.

From start to finish Whitlock offers examples of how U.S. and allied policymakers deceived themselves, deceived each other, and deceived the American public. From the beginning U.S. policymakers were not honest with themselves as to what was needed to prevail in Afghanistan. He illustrates that it took months for the United States government to determine that it would embark on a nation-building effort, a phrase rarely uttered by U.S. officials, a deception in of itself, and they decided to do so on the cheap. The Bush administration sought to rebuild Afghanistan with minimal troops, minimal funding, and when possible, by pawning responsibilities off on NATO allies. He cites a Donald Rumsfeld memo describing an Afghan government request for a $466 million annual training budget for the new Afghan army as “crazy” and added that “[t]he U.S. position should be zero” and “[w]e are already doing more than anyone.”[5]

In addition to self-deceptions, Whitlock offers ample evidence of how U.S. officials and organizations shaved the truth or outright lied to one another, to their western allies, and to the fledgling Afghan government. Whitlock asserts that when allegations of fraud and corruption reached the top of the Afghan government, the U.S. chose to bury the issue and thereby save their client state from embarrassment. He cites the testimony of an anonymous Treasury official who claimed the U.S. government ended a fraud investigation into the Bank of Afghanistan when it got too close to then President Hamid Karzai.[6] U.S. officials publicly decried such governing conditions while tolerating its offenders because they were essential allies who could be alienated.

The-President Hamid Karzai at an Afghanistan Independence Day celebration in Kabul, 19 Aug 2011. (MSgt Michael O'Connor/U.S. Air Force Photo)

Lastly, Whitlock illustrates that U.S. officials routinely deceived the public as to the status of the war using semantics, data manipulation, and often outright falsehoods. To support his claims, he juxtaposes the public statements of American officials with his source base of oral histories and government documents. Examples include then Defense Secretary Rumsfeld publicly touting progress in the summer 2004 despite privately agonizing over the war’s execution, going so far as to admit in private, “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”[7] Other examples include U.S. government officials praising Pakistani counterterrorism efforts despite on-the-ground knowledge of their double-dealing with the Taliban.[8] Whitlock also notes that the U.S. government made concerted efforts to minimize the threat of insider attacks from the Afghan National Security Forces in contradiction of the government’s own internal assessments.[9]

Whitlock goes to great lengths to illustrate officials constantly spinning their public statements on the war using semantic games around definitions of “victory,” “winning,” “progress,” and “success,” all while either knowing or ignoring the truth on the ground. Whitlock’s protagonists are the junior officers, noncommissioned officers, enlisted soldiers, and junior civilian staff in the field who had an unvarnished view of a war in disarray. Despite being preserved here for the reader, those narratives were often lost in a sea of bureaucracy or suppressed by a leadership class determined to put a positive spin on the war for public consumption.

As Whitlock notes in his acknowledgement section, The Afghanistan Papers is a work of journalism. As such it is often light on analysis and can leave the reader speculating as to the cause of such rampant deceit. Some causal relationships are apparent, often due to competing priorities when one initiative superseded another, thereby requiring deception to hide an unsavory political choice. However, other causal links are harder to determine. Are all of Whitlock’s actors knowingly deceiving the public or do they believe their own distorted narratives? Whitlock makes most of his judgments, with some notable exceptions like using Rumsfeld’s memos, via contrasting the claims of policymakers with the oral histories of actors in the field. Was there a disconnect between the ground truth and the upper echelons of the government? If so, what were the contours of that failure? Were the efforts to deceive deliberate and systematic or merely a parade of cognitive dissonance? Absent from Whitlock’s source base is documentary evidence needed to illuminate the connections between the varying levels of the U.S. government’s war-making behemoth.

Officials with SIGAR have publicly taken issue with the way The Washington Post characterized their operation in the newspaper's 2019 article series. SIGAR officials have refuted claims that they redacted individual names for the purposes of obfuscation, avoided controversy, or suppressed certain interviews. The Washington Post published SIGAR’s official op-ed on 17 December 2019.[10]

These issues aside, Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War is essential reading for national security scholars, and anyone interested in a bureaucratic history of America’s longest war. His research illustrates some truly dispiriting failures of American foreign policy formulation, military planning, and program execution. The book also serves as a bitter reminder that the state will lie to the public and often for less than noble purposes. Whether this is a story of human failing or bureaucratic breakdown is an issue for further scholars and historians. In the meantime, The Afghanistan Papers should be read by anyone asking, “What the hell happened?”

Brandan P. Buck is a PhD student in history at George Mason University. He is a former intelligence professional and veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2021), 187

[2] Whitlock, 165, 187.

[3] Whitlock, 187.

[4] Whitlock, 261.

[5] Whitlock, 58.

[6] Whitlock, 194.

[7] Whitlock, 23, 54.

[8] Whitlock, 85.

[9] Whitlock, 216.

[10] Sopko, John F. “Setting the record straight on 'The Afghanistan Papers.'” The Washington Post, 17 December 2019, available at: SIGAR_setting-the-record-straight-on-the-afghanistan-papers.pdf