The Pentagon Papers 50 Years Later…

The New York Times has spent the past week marking the 50th anniversary of its publication of the Pentagon Papers. Those documents exposed the lies the US government repeatedly told the American people about the Vietnam War.

Here is an excerpt from a commemorative report on June 9:

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Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst on the study, eventually leaked portions of the report to The New York Times, which published excerpts in 1971. The revelations in the Pentagon Papers infuriated a country sick of the war, the body bags of young Americans, the photographs of Vietnamese civilians fleeing U.S. air attacks and the endless protests and counterprotests that were dividing the country as nothing had since the Civil War.

The lies revealed in the papers were of a generational scale, and, for much of the American public, this grand deception seeded a suspicion of government that is even more widespread today.

Officially titled “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force,” the papers filled 47 volumes, covering the administrations of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Their 7,000 pages chronicled, in cold, bureaucratic language, how the United States got itself mired in a long, costly war in a small Southeast Asian country of questionable strategic importance.

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But I can think of no better way to mark this anniversary than to reprise “‘The Afghanistan Papers’: US Officials Have Always Known This War Is Unwinnable,” December 11, 2019.

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I have been pleading for nearly 15 years for the United States to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan. Because it has been patently clear for at least that long that the United States is fighting an unwinnable war eerily reminiscent of Vietnam.

Titles to just a few of my commentaries chronicle and bemoan this fateful symmetry:

• “Please Spare Us the al-Qaeda Obits!” December 5, 2005
• “Meanwhile Over in Afghanistan: Snatching Defeat from Hands of Victory,” September 18, 2006
• “Obama Saluting War Dead Will Be Defining Image of His Presidency,” October 30, 2009
•  “WikiLeaks on US War in Afghanistan,” July 27, 2010
• “Afghanistan: How Many More US Soldiers Must Die for a Mistake?” September 19, 2012

That’s why this “breaking news” came as no news to me:

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

‘We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,’ Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. …

‘If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction … 2,400 lives lost,’ Lute added. … ‘Who will say this was in vain?’

(The Washington Post, December 9, 2019)

There’s no denying the narrative my titles convey. They expose this “bombshell” Post report as an anticlimactic dud.

To be fair, though, this is a case more of political leaders spinning military reports for political gain than of military leaders fudging those reports for military vainglory (as was more the case in Vietnam). To elaborate, here is an excerpt from “Secret Pentagon Report: Training Afghans Is Hopeless … and Dangerous,” January 4, 2010:

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I was convinced that, even before Obama announced his candidacy, President Bush’s neglect (by diverting key resources to Iraq) had already turned Afghanistan into an unwinnable war:

Not so long ago, some of us considered the war in Afghanistan as much an unqualified success as we deemed the war in Iraq an unmitigated failure. But a new crop of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are beginning to surpass die-hard insurgents in Iraq in their ability to undermine US efforts to ‘stand up’ a democratic Afghan government. … Alas, victory in Afghanistan may prove another casualty of the war in Iraq.

(“Meanwhile Over in Afghanistan: Snatching Defeat from the Hands of Victory,” The iPINIONS Journal, September 18, 2006)

This is why I was so puzzled when, instead of cutting US losses, a now President Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan by ordering the deployment of an additional 47,000 troops:

I appreciate of course that Obama is merely fulfilling his campaign promise to fight and win this war.  But the political mess has changed circumstances on the ground, so much so that it would compromise even a perfect military strategy. This makes his decision to follow through on that promise almost as foolhardy as Bush’s decision to follow through with his invasion of Iraq (i.e., even after it was clear there were no WMDs).

(“Obama Escalates Afghan War: the Die Is Cast on His Presidency,” The iPINIONS Journal, December 2, 2009)

Nevertheless, I retained some hope that Obama’s decision was informed by the classified reports he received during his (Hamletian) strategy review last year, notwithstanding my informed view that he was giving these additional troops a truly impossible mission: to train an Afghan army to defend the country and a police force to maintain law and order by July 2011 (when he has vowed to begin withdrawing US troops).

Therefore, imagine my shock and dismay last week when leaked Pentagon Papers (Part II) revealed that the situation in Afghanistan is not only every bit as unwinnable as I’ve argued but even more dangerous than anybody could have imagined.

For here, in part, is how Richard Engel, NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, reported (on the December 29, 2009, edition of the Nightly News) what these papers say about the chances of American military success:

[T]he main mission of the United States Army, all of the different forces that are there, is to train the Afghan security forces so that American forces can ultimately leave. … The ANA (which is the Afghan National Army) above company level is not at war … nepotism, corruption, and absenteeism among ANA leaders makes success impossible. …

[R]ehabilitating the Afghan security forces will not take one year, it will take a long time . …   Another key finding in this report says that the numbers of Afghan troops and police on the ground are inaccurate, that some battalions will over-report by 40-50 percent, inflate their numbers.

This clearly begs a few critical questions, most notably:

1. Did Obama have access to this report during his strategic review?
2. If not, why not?
3. Reports abound about the patent futility of this war in any event, so how did Obama justify deploying more troops?
4. Everyone knows these facts, so isn’t it fair to assert that Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistanis even more willfully foolhardy than Bush’s decision to invade Iraq?

Meanwhile, if this dire report were not sobering enough, just consider all of the other recurring reports about desertion and drug use among army recruits, as well as those about the incidents (and looming danger) of ‘trained’ Afghan soldiers intentionally killing US and other coalition forces. …

The US legacy in Afghanistan will be distinguished either by a terminally wounded national pride – as American forces beat a hasty retreat in defeat (following the Russian precedent), or by tens of thousands of American soldiers dying in Afghanistan’s ‘graveyard of empires’ – as they continue fighting this unwinnable war (following America’s own precedent in Vietnam). … And more troops only mean more sitting ducks for Taliban fighters.

Therefore, Obama would be well-advised to cut America’s losses and run ASAP, let the Afghans govern themselves however they like,  and rely on Special Forces and aerial drones to ‘disrupt and dismantle’ Taliban and al-Qaeda operations there.

(“‘Without (or Even with) More Forces, Failure in Afghanistan Is Likely’,” The iPINIONS Journal, September 23, 2009)

Frankly, these Pentagon Papers convince me more than ever that, instead of closing Gitmo, Obama should have made withdrawing from Afghanistan the first major military decision of his presidency.

The only instructive precedent here is the one President Johnson set in Vietnam, which should warn Obama not to allow a military quagmire to doom his presidency the way a similar quagmire doomed Johnson’s.

(“Karzai Submits to Runoff Election,” The iPINIONS Journal, October 21, 2009)

Ultimately, though, one has to wonder how many more American soldiers will die in vain between now and July 2011 just so that Obama can establish his commander-in-chief bona fides.

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That was nearly 10 years ago, folks. “The Afghanistan Papers” merely affirm what I’ve been writing all along – complete with analogies to The Pentagon Papers.

The latter revealed that Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all knew (or should have known) the war in Vietnam was unwinnable. Yet they continued sending US troops there for nearly two decades to die in vain. The former reveals that Presidents Bush and Obama both knew (or should have known) the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable. Yet they continued sending US troops there for nearly 16 years to die in vain.

Nothing betrayed their consciousness of guilt quite like the infamous complaint Donald H. Rumsfeld, US defense secretary from 2001 to 2006, made on September 8, 2003:

I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.

(The Afghanistan Papers, Document 459)

Even worse is that citizen Donald Trump spent years railing against this war from the sidelines:

We have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Their government has zero appreciation. Let’s get out!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 21, 2013

Yet President Trump is now doing in Afghanistan what Johnson did in Vietnam, namely, keeping troops over there to die for what he knows is a mistake.  This moved me to vent my abiding outrage in “Trump Aping ‘Stupid’ Obama Who Aped ‘Crusading’ Bush on War in Afghanistan,” August 22, 2017.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department’s own figures show that the blood and treasure Trump seemed so concerned about wasting now amounts to 2,300 dead and 20,589 wounded and nearly $1 trillion spent, respectively.

When former Senator John Kerry was just a 27-year-old Navy veteran, he famously asked the most poignant and conscientious question about the manifest futility of that war in Vietnam:

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

Thanks to this Post report, history will record that Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, asked the most poignant and conscientious question about the manifest futility of this war in Afghanistan:

What did we get for this $1 trillion effort?

Sadly, for all that lost blood and treasure, here is what we got:

The Taliban by some estimates holds more territory than at any point since it was ousted following the 2001 invasion. Some analysts believe a full US withdrawal could unleash a repeat of the brutal civil war and Taliban rule that followed the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

(Financial Times, August 19, 2019)

In other words, we got nothing. Or, to answer Gen. Lute from above, I will say it was all in vain.

President Trump now seems desperate to strike any deal with the Taliban to end this longest war in US history. But any deal would require US troops to retreat in the same ignominious way they retreated from Vietnam in 1973. It speaks volumes that Soviet troops retreated from Afghanistan the same way in 1989. But the point is that, in each case, they retreated as vanquished imperialists with their tails between their legs.

Finally, every commentary I’ve written about the war in Afghanistan over the years has a corollary about the war in Iraq. This means that, instead of learning the lessons of Vietnam, political and military leaders doubled down by repeating similar lies and cover-ups about the manifest futility of two wars.

Therefore, I can think of no better way to sum up the march of folly in both Afghanistan and Iraq than to quote this famous observation, which is generally attributed to the Spanish philosopher George Santayana:

Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

Alas, we are living in doomed times – in this and so many other respects.

Related commentaries:
al-Qaeda obits…snatching defeat… failure in Afghanistan is likely…
Obama saluting… Pentagon report… WikiLeaks…
how many more must die… aping “stupid” Obama…

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