Read time: 25 minutes
Yesterday marked 20 years since Congresswoman Barbara Lee cast the sole vote against giving blanket authorization for George W. Bush to wage war as he saw fit after the 9/11 attacks. No matter how many agreed with her then, or in hindsight how many do now, the courage of her convictions is remarkable, given that she was alone in dissenting against an otherwise unanimous vote, and most of the country at that time was united behind the Bush administration and their imperative tone in calling for an invasion of Afghanistan.
In Part Two of this series, I linked to an article by Anatol Lieven for Politico in which he wondered if what unfolded in Afghanistan was driven by honest mistakes and failures of understanding, or if deliberate dishonesty had taken the wheel. Let’s un-muddy the waters and look into this more clearly.
Glenn Greenwald, in a Substack article, reveals that his own communications with whistleblower Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance may have some relevance:
In 2014, I reported along with Laura Poitras and another journalist that the NSA had developed the capacity, under the codenamed SOMALGET, that empowered them to be “secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation” in at least five countries. At any time, they could listen to the stored conversations of any calls conducted by cell phone throughout the entire country. Though we published the names of four countries in which the program had been implemented, we withheld, after extensive internal debate at The Intercept, the identity of the fifth — Afghanistan — because the NSA had convinced some editors that publishing it would enable the Taliban to know where the program was located and it could endanger the lives of the military and private-sector employees working on it (in general, at Snowden’s request, we withheld publication of documents about NSA activities in active war zones unless they revealed illegality or other deceit). But WikiLeaks subsequently revealed, accurately, that the one country whose identity we withheld where this program was implemented was Afghanistan.
In 2019, The Washington Post published The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War. In it, they show a pattern of lies stretching through (at that time) all three administrations going back to the 2001 invasion. Biden’s own preoccupation with image perception lately suggests that that same deceitful pattern has carried through to the end. From the Post’s investigation:
Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”
If according to Greenwald and The Washington Post, Afghanistan was at the mercy of every conceivable surveillance technology yet shrouded behind a veil of lies being fed to Americans to appease and mislead them, it begs the question: what exactly were our intelligence agencies shielding from public view?
Afghan women and children gather in a corner as U.S. soldiers search their home for Taliban insurgents during a night raid in a village in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, on June 14, 2007.
Photo: Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images
In an astonishing article by James Risen for The Intercept, entitled A War’s Epitaph: For Two Decades, Americans Told One Lie After Another About What They Were Doing in Afghanistan, he chronicles so much that I’m compelled to quote several passages at length. Read the following slowly and keep in mind - these are our guys. It is eye-opening, to say the least.
One of the first things the U.S. did after gaining effective control over Afghanistan following the Taliban’s ouster in 2001 was to set up secret torture chambers. Beginning in 2002, the CIA tortured both Afghans and foreign prisoners flown to these torture rooms from all over Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The worst torture chamber was nicknamed “The Darkness” by the prisoners sent there, who suffered such complete sensory deprivation that they did not even know they were in Afghanistan. They were chained in solitary confinement with no light and music blaring constantly. They were hung by their arms for as long as two days, slammed against walls, forced to lie naked on tarps while gallons of ice water were poured over their bodies. At least one prisoner died in CIA custody after being left shackled in frigid temperatures.
No one was ever held to account for the American torture regime in Afghanistan.
American drone strikes also started early in Afghanistan. The CIA killed Al Qaeda operative Mohammed Atef and others with a drone there in November 2001, just two months after 9/11. Afghanistan soon became the beta test site for high-tech drone warfare, leading to countless civilian casualties and deep resentment among the Afghan people, who felt helpless against the unseen threat circling overhead.
The U.S. launched more than 13,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan between 2015 and 2020, killing up to 10,000 people, according to statistics kept by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The CIA, relying on cellphone numbers to find, fix, and finish its alleged enemies, often launched its Hellfire missiles at the wrong targets or at targets standing amid groups of civilians.
The practice devastated Afghan villages, yet the U.S. refused to keep track of civilian casualties from drone strikes. Instead, officials insisted that each strike had hit its intended target, while ignoring the claims of villagers that the missiles had killed a tribal chief or decimated a meeting of village elders.
Along with drone strikes came “night raids,” in which U.S. and Afghan forces would burst into a home in the middle of the night and kill or capture those inside, breeding further resentment. The raids were so deeply unpopular that they sometimes led an entire village to switch its allegiance to the Taliban. What was worse, the U.S. military and the CIA failed for years to fully grasp the degree to which their airstrikes and night raids were being manipulated by Afghans who fed them false information to convince the Americans to launch raids against their local rivals or have those rivals carted off to Guantánamo.
There were other problems. Like the CIA providing cover for family members of the Afghan government to deal drugs.
An Afghan farmer works on a poppy field collecting the green bulbs swollen with raw opium, the main ingredient in heroin, in the Khogyani district of Jalalabad, east of Kabul, Afghanistan. | Rahmat Gul/AP Photo
It didn’t take long for corruption to become rampant under [former Afghan president Hamid] Karzai. With the CIA’s backing, the new president made his younger half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the de-facto viceroy of Kandahar and southern Afghanistan — and the boss of the massive Afghan heroin trade.
Ahmed Wali Karzai’s power over the heroin business meant that when tractor-trailers loaded with drugs were stopped by local security forces, he could call their commanders to order the release of the trucks and their contents.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration repeatedly uncovered evidence of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s leading role in the Afghan drug trade; in one instance, American investigators discovered links between a truck found with 110 pounds of heroin and an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai. The White House refused to allow the DEA to take any action against Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was secretly on the CIA’s payroll.
The willingness of the U.S. to turn a blind eye to Ahmed Wali Karzai’s role as a drug lord was just one symptom of a much larger problem. The U.S. had invaded a country whose most lucrative businesses, besides war, were opium production and heroin smuggling, and yet American officials could never figure out what to do about it. In the end, they did nothing.
For 20 years, America essentially ran a narco-state in Afghanistan.
Each time American officials sought to make counternarcotics a priority, they ran into the reality that the drug lords of Afghanistan were also the warlords of Afghanistan who were on the CIA payroll and who the U.S. military relied upon to battle the Taliban.
The U.S. spent nearly $9 billion on its token counternarcotics programs in Afghanistan, yet opium production and heroin smuggling in Afghanistan skyrocketed under the U.S.-backed government. Afghanistan now produces more than 80 percent of the world’s heroin supply.
Afghanistan’s opium production soared in 2002 — and just kept growing. By 2020, 224,000 hectares of land were under opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, compared with 123,000 hectares in 2010, according to the United Nations.
There’s even more.
You’ll recall that American war spending over the last two decades was upwards of at least a couple hundred million dollars a day. For a moment, just try to imagine how difficult it would be to actually spend even a fraction of that kind of money in a single day. Now imagine spending that every single day.
For 20 years.
Changing money in Kabul. Afghanistan’s fragile banking system could face further challenges if trust in it is undermined. Credit: Michael Kamber for The New York Times
No doubt this river of cash was bifurcating and bending into smaller streams that flowed out in many different directions. Here’s one of them, according to Risen:
Much of the American money enriched U.S. contractors without ever entering the Afghan economy. Much of it also disappeared into secret bank accounts in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, held by Afghan government officials, warlords, and their families, a phenomenon described in a 2020 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as “the cross-pollination of criminality between Afghanistan and Dubai.”
The frenetic example set by Kabul Bank provided the model for how the Afghan elite could efficiently and blatantly move American aid money out of Afghanistan and into their private offshore bank accounts. The bank, once the largest in Afghanistan, was founded by Sherkhan Farnood, a money-exchange dealer with operations in Kabul and Dubai who had fled Russia under suspicion that he was a money launderer. After he obtained the bank charter from the Karzai government, he used Kabul Bank to embezzle money from Afghan depositors to pay for his personal investments in Dubai real estate. Farnood also took out a $100 million loan from Kabul Bank to buy Pamir Airways, which flew commercial routes from Kabul to Dubai.
Farnood’s couriers transporting cash from his money exchange in Kabul could “now more easily transport money embezzled from a Farnood-controlled bank (Kabul Bank) on a Farnood-owned airline (Pamir Airways) and deliver it to a Farnood-owned exchange house (Shaheen Money Exchange) in Dubai,” the Carnegie report concluded.
It’s almost tiring to keep reading account after account of graft and plunder. Matt Taibbi, responding to commentary by Rachel Maddow, adds even more to this already staggering pile of lies responsible for countless deaths and unfathomable despair:
From Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, the pattern of American officials showering questionable political allies abroad with armfuls of cash is a long-established practice. However, the idea that this is the reason the “missions” fail in such places is just a continuation of the original propaganda lines that get us into these messes. It’s a way of saying the subject populations are to blame for undermining our noble efforts, when the missions themselves are often preposterous and, moreover, the lion’s share of the looting is usually done by our own marauding contracting community.
It’s bad enough that Maddow/MSNBC played a big part in delaying the withdrawal last year with hype of the bogus Bountygate story, which gave one last (false) dying breath to the war rationale. This latest criticism of theirs ignores the massive amounts of corruption that were endemic to the American side of the mission. Contractors made fortunes monstrously overcharging the taxpayer for everything from private security, to dysfunctional or unnecessary construction projects, to social programs that either had no chance for success, or for which metrics for measuring success didn’t exist.
The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) some years ago identified “$15.5 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse… in our published reports and closed investigations between SIGAR’s inception in 2008 and December 31, 2017,” and added an additional $3.4 billion in a subsequent review. All told, “SIGAR reviewed approximately $63 billion and concluded that a total of approximately $19 billion or 30 percent of the amount reviewed was lost to waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Thirty percent! If the overall cost of the war was, as reported, $2 trillion (about $300 million per day for 20 years), a crude back of the envelope calculation for the amount lost to fraud during the entire period might be $600 billion, an awesome sum. It could even be worse than that. SIGAR for instance also looked at a $7.8 billion sum spent on buildings and vehicles from 2008 on, and reported that of that, only $343.2 million worth “were maintained in good condition.” They added that just $1.2 billion of the original expenditure was used as intended. By that metric, the majority of the monies spent in Afghanistan might simply have gone up in smoke in bogus or ineffectual contracting schemes.
Worse, many enormous expenses that wouldn’t have been described by inspectors as outright fraud or waste were dubious anyway. As detailed earlier in this space in an interview with former Captain Adrian Bonenberger, the military spent an astonishing $50 billion just on one failed program, the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle, or MRAP. They spent nearly a million dollars per vehicle and scrapped 2,000 of them just six years after introducing them into the field in Afghanistan. How many stories like this were there?
This suggests more than mere failures of understanding or honest mistakes in Afghanistan, but rather, mission-creep and even outright abuse run amok. No doubt there were many good faith actors who made honest efforts to help people or do what they believed was right. But the official narratives, as put forth by those in positions of authority, and especially by those who profit from war, are almost invariably smoke and mirrors, and by design. Taibbi elaborates:
A major delusion of American war efforts anywhere in the world is that the missions are undertaken for the reasons given: to hold the line against communism, to build democracy and arrest poverty in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, or eliminate security havens for antagonists like al-Qaeda. Our presence may begin under the auspices of such excuses, but what happens almost every time is that the missions assume bureaucratic lives of their own, and contracting becomes an end in itself. This was a major revelation of The Afghanistan Papers exposé in the Washington Post, which contained the following passage:
One unidentified contractor told government interviewers he was expected to dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly the size of a U.S. county. He once asked a visiting congressman whether the lawmaker could responsibly spend that kind of money back home: “He said hell no. ‘Well, sir, that’s what you just obligated us to spend and I’m doing it for communities that live in mud huts with no windows.’ ”
All of the locales for our foreign adventures become boondoggles in large part because they’re so many levels removed from anything like oversight. The entire Pentagon is not audited, and could not pass an audit if there were ever to be one, which means the $700 billion military budget is already an unguarded trough for contractors like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. Overseas theaters are simply more inaccessible plunder zones within that already impenetrable black box of over-spending, for missions whose justifications are often so inscrutable that the public has a hard time immediately converting knowledge about waste or fraud into outrage.
And yet, as Chris Hedges seethes in an article for Salon, no one will be held accountable for any of it:
Not the generals. Not the politicians. Not the CIA and intelligence agencies. Not the diplomats. Not the obsequious courtiers in the press who serve as cheerleaders for war. Not the compliant academics and area specialists. Not the defense industry. Empires at the end are collective suicide machines. The military becomes in late empire unmanageable, unaccountable and endlessly self-perpetuating, no matter how many fiascos, blunders and defeats it visits upon the carcass of the nation, or how much money it plunders, impoverishing the citizenry and leaving governing institutions and the physical infrastructure decayed.
Hedges goes even further, calling U.S. intervention and the resentment it has fostered among so many in Afghanistan - courtesy of the architects of war that included then-Sen. Joe Biden - the starkest of ironies and “the best thing that ever happened to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”
In Part Four, we’ll try to square the circle and contemplate whether there is any hope to be found, either for Afghanistan or for the West.