For a deep dive (and a much more expansive list of selected readings than the one I’ve put together) I recommend Scott Horton’s book, Fool’s Errand, which moves through this labyrinthine story with stinging insights and historical sweep. Horton is a walking encyclopedia of U.S. foreign intervention, having spent decades tirelessly examining, with unmatched clarity of purpose, how the insatiable tentacles of war strangle just about everyone in their path, one way or another.
His website is a goldmine, featuring literally thousands of interviews with some of the sharpest thinkers, columnists, and investigative reporters around.
Listed below are links to selected readings I used in this four-part series, and a postscript with passages from articles that have emerged since I put this together.
Books
Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War Against the Taliban (Stephen Tanner, Da Capo Press, April 28, 2009)
Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42 (William Dalrymple, Alfred A. Knopf, April 16, 2013)
Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (James Risen, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 14, 2014)
Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan (Scott Horton, The Libertarian Institute, August 16, 2017)
The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (Craig Whitlock, Simon & Schuster, August 31, 2021)
Reports and Investigations
Afghanistan in 2012: A Survey of the Afghan People (Mohammad Osman Tariq, Fazel Rabi Haqbeen, and Palwasha Lena Kakar, The Asia Foundation, 2012)
The Strategic Lessons Unlearned From Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold, and the Implications for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan (M. Chris Mason, United States Army War College Press, June 2015)
Perspectives on Peace From Taliban Areas of Afghanistan (Ashley Jackson, United States Institute of Peace, May 2019)
The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (Craig Whitlock, The Washington Post, December 9, 2019)
The Cost of Debt-financed War: Public Debt and Rising Interest for Post-9/11 War Spending (Heidi Peltier, Watson Institute, International & Public Affairs, Brown University, January 2020)
Afghanistan Opium Survey 2020 (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2020)
What We Need to Learn: Lessons From Twenty Years of Afghan Reconstruction (John F. Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, August 2021)
The 9/11 Wars (The Intercept)
Must Read
The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit (1 hr, Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, March 17, 2019)
A CIA-Backed Militia Targeted Clinics in Afghanistan, Killing Medical Workers and Civilians (25 min, Andrew Quilty, The Intercept, October 30, 2019)
Commentary on The Afghanistan Papers (40 min, Richard Hanania, December 9, 2019)
The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads (1 hr, 30 min, Andrew Quilty, The Intercept, December 18, 2020)
Highway to Hell: A Trip Down Afghanistan’s Deadliest Road (1 hr, Jason Motlagh, Rolling Stone, January 22, 2021)
An Afghanistan Veteran Looks Back on the "First Postmodern War" (30 min, Matt Taibbi, April 19, 2021)
A War’s Epitaph: For Two Decades, Americans Told One Lie After Another About What They Were Doing in Afghanistan (40 min, James Risen, The Intercept, August 26, 2021)
General Failure: How the U.S. Military Lied About the 9/11 Wars (30 min, Peter Maass, The Intercept, September 8, 2021)
The Truth About Afghan Women (25 min, Cheryl Benard, UnHerd, September 17, 2021)
Recent Articles
Costs of the Afghanistan War, In Lives and Dollars (4 min, AP News, August 16, 2021)
Why Afghan Forces So Quickly Laid Down Their Arms (12 min, Anatol Lieven, Politico, August 16, 2021)
The U.S. Government Lied For Two Decades About Afghanistan (20 min, Glenn Greenwald, August 16, 2021)
Can the Taliban Bring Peace? (20 min, Aris Roussinos, UnHerd, August 16, 2021)
We Failed Afghanistan, Not the Other Way Around (10 min, Matt Taibbi, August 18, 2021)
Why the West Will Learn No Lessons From the Fall of Kabul (10 min, Nesrine Malik, The Guardian, August 23, 2021)
Afghanistan Always Defeats the West (20 min, William Dalrymple, UnHerd, August 28, 2021)
On Afghanistan Withdrawal, NYT’s Peter Baker Turns to Raytheon Board Member for Independent ‘Analysis’ (15 min, Adam Johnson, August 29, 2021)
Joe Biden’s Critics Lost Afghanistan (10 min, Ross Douthat, The New York Times, August 31, 2021)
Corporate Boards, Consulting, Speaking Fees: How U.S. Generals Thrived After Afghanistan (25 min, Isaac Stanley-Becker, MSN, September 4, 2021)
How the Neocons Got Away With It (15 min, Razib Khan, UnHerd, September 7, 2021)
Tortured by Guantánamo (20 min, Alice Speri, The Intercept, September 10, 2021)
How bin Laden Won (20 min, Aris Roussinos, UnHerd, September 11, 2021)
Other Key Articles
Reports Link Karzai’s Brother to Afghanistan Heroin Trade (15 min, James Risen, The New York Times, October 4, 2008)
Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A. (15 min, Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti, and James Risen, The New York Times, October 27, 2009)
Losses at Afghan Bank Could Be $900 Million (15 min, Alissa J. Rubin and James Risen, The New York Times, January 30, 2011)
Afghanistan Sees Rise in ‘Dancing Boys’ Exploitation (10 min, Ernesto Londoño, The Washington Post, April 4, 2012)
U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies (15 min, Joseph Goldstein, The New York Times, September 20, 2015)
Bacha Bazi: Afghanistan’s Darkest Secret (10 min, Jesutofunmi E. Somade, Bright Blue, August 18, 2017)
What Did the U.S. Get For $2 Trillion in Afghanistan? (10 min, The New York Times, December 9, 2019)
The Taliban Are Megarich - Here’s Where They Get the Money They Use to Wage War in Afghanistan (8 min, Hanif Sufizada, The Conversation, December 8, 2020)
Corruption, Murder, Pederasty: The Afghan Government Is Not Worth Fighting For (6 min, Richard Hanania, The American Conservative, March 5, 2021)
The Forever War in Afghanistan Is Far From Over – Recent Taliban Successes Are Thanks to Government Weakness (10 min, Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, July 9, 2021)
“A Big Money Funneling Operation” — Afghanistan Vet Reflects On Withdrawal of US Forces (10 min, Michael Tracey, July 13, 2021)
Postscript
The Truth About Afghan Women (Cheryl Benard, UnHerd, 25 min.)
The sad secret underlying our Great Afghan Liberation Project is this: when we set out to rescue Afghan women, we had no idea of who, how or why. We worked with those we could readily find and interact with, the urban and urbane, the ones who figured us out and gratified our need for photogenic success. We never got to the ones in the slums and the villages.
We created and coddled a tiny, entitled urban elite of professional feminists who were great on the Western lecture circuit but were disconnected from — and I venture to say, uninterested in — the actual lives of Afghan women, and who rarely used their privileges to benefit their poorer sisters.
We loved to build girls’ schools. It was fashionable, and we ignored early signs that the mantra “build it and they will come” wasn’t true for Afghanistan. There weren’t enough teachers, and the unending violence made it unsafe to undertake anything but a very short journey. It surely would have been better to build clinics instead, and trained traveling nurses and midwives, and focused on nutrition projects and water projects and basic public education on hygiene and first aid.
Then came 2021 and suddenly the Taliban were in Kabul, and we reacted with hysteria. A Plan B would have been judicious, a ready visa process in the event of imminent danger to educated people or high-profile activists. Instead, we preemptively grabbed as many male and female professionals as we could possibly shove onto airplanes — all the people with useful talents: doctors and nurses, journalists, women with artisanal skills, teachers, IT experts. Anyone who could have kept civil society, economic relations, social services and moderate values alive was hustled onto a plane and flown as far away as possible. Not an evacuation, more like a reverse cultural revolution that erased in the space of days what we had nourished over two decades.
I had long since lost respect for the self-promoting feminists of Kabul, who knew exactly which Western buttons to push but deployed that skill almost exclusively for their own benefit. They loved attending conferences abroad, were expert at obtaining lucrative contracts to “train” each other in such skills as public speaking, leadership and “advocacy,” and enjoyed being celebrated for their “courage” in foreign news media. You wouldn’t find them in the provinces, trying to uplift rural women. And when leadership and their much-vaunted courage were urgently required, they decamped for the West. Like their country’s national army, they were a colossal disappointment.
Afghan girls playing soccer. An Afghan woman street artist. An Afghan girls’ robotics team.
What else but extreme condescension explains the delighted surprise with which we received such stories? Why is it so amazing that Afghan girls can learn how to play a musical instrument or kick a ball? Why shouldn’t they be like any other girl in any other country, if given the chance? Given the dire situation of the average Afghan girl, were these really the activities that deserved our attention?
These are the spoiled children of our bad parenting, the products of an education that taught entitlement over idealism. In the past, groups of them used to be brought to Washington DC and trotted out at gala fundraisers in five-star hotels. At the end of the evening, they’d be brought back on stage to press for additional donations.
Was it to support some programme for the underserved, literacy tutoring for village girls, perhaps? No, they were prompted to ask for money for new sports jerseys, and everyone applauded and got out their check books. Wonderful! Afghan girls shooting hoops.
The adult members of the Living Success Story typically hail from affluent families or clans. Many have dual nationality or family overseas. They are well-travelled and have passports and visas. Most of them were well away even before the airlift.
How bin Laden Won (Aris Roussinos, UnHerd, 20 min.)
Emphasis on the War on Terror as a giant, entrapping money pit for the American empire runs throughout bin Laden’s messages. In his 2002 Letter to the American People, bin Laden taunted the inhabitants of “the worst civilisation witnessed by the history of mankind” that “it was easy for us to provoke this administration and lure it into perdition. All we had to do was send two mujahidin to the Far East to raise up a rag on which “al-Qaeda” was written, and the generals came running. This inflicted human, financial, and political losses on America without them even achieving anything worth mentioning, apart from providing business for their private corporations.”
General Failure: How the U.S. Military Lied About the 9/11 Wars (Peter Maass, The Intercept, 30 min.)
The generals who misled Congress and the American public about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not needed to worry about negative consequences for their careers. After 20 years of conducting a disinformation campaign about what was really happening on the ground, not a single U.S. general has faced any punishment. The reverse happened — they were praised for their deceptively upbeat assessments and given more stars, and when they retired with generous military pensions, they landed high-paying jobs on corporate boards, further profiting from their disingenuousness.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, several hundred thousand civilians and combatants have perished (including more than 7,000 American soldiers), millions of people have become refugees, and trillions of dollars have been wasted. Politicians were responsible for this, pundits were responsible, and so-called experts from think tanks were responsible too. But the generals were closest to these wars and most aware, or should have been, of what was happening. Few were closer or profited more than two in particular: Gen. Lloyd Austin, who is now secretary of defense, and Gen. David Petraeus, one of the most lauded military figures of the past 20 years.
A few years after the invasion, Austin returned to Iraq as the commander of U.S. forces there, and later he took charge of Central Command, the headquarters for military operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan. His charmed path became even more charmed after he retired from the military. In addition to drawing a monthly pension of about $15,000, Austin joined several corporate boards, including the board of directors of United Technologies Corporation, the military contractor that merged with Raytheon in 2020, from which he has received more than $1.5 million, and advisory boards at Booz Allen Hamilton and a private equity firm called Pine Island Capital Partners. Biden’s secretary of defense owns a $2.6 million mansion in the Washington, D.C., area with seven bedrooms, a five-car garage, two kitchens, and a pool house.
Based on secret interviews the government conducted with officers and civilians who served in Afghanistan, journalist Craig Whitlock’s new book, “The Afghanistan Papers,” offers overwhelming evidence that military leaders knew the war was failing and lied about it. The book cites an Army colonel, Bob Crowley, as saying that “every data point was altered to present the best picture possible.” Whitlock described the military’s upbeat assessments as “unwarranted and baseless,” adding that they “amounted to a disinformation campaign.”
America’s political leaders have been co-conspirators with the generals in sustaining the bloodshed overseas. As the dust settles on 20 years of American warfare in Afghanistan, Congress is on track to approve a military budget that will be the largest ever.