The Foreign Service Journal, October 2021

76 OCTOBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Understanding America’s War The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War Craig Whitlock, Simon & Schuster, 2021, $30/hardcover, e-book available, 368 pages. Reviewed by Edmund McWilliams Craig Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers is a timely, dispassionate contribution to our understanding of America’s nearly 20-year engagement in Afghanistan, a failed adventure that cost thousands of American and NATO partner lives. As this chronicle makes clear, the cost for Afghans was much higher. Some of the more than one trillion dollars expended in the course of the war clearly benefited the Afghan people, fostering much improved health care, infrastructure development and educa- tional opportunity, especially for girls. But vast sums were wasted on failed efforts to build Afghan security forces and in extraordinary corruption perpe- trated by self-serving Afghans and U.S. and other contractors. Moreover, the U.S. intelligence and military penchant for bribing brutal warlords inevitably destabilized Afghan governance and programs aimed at controlling illicit opium production. The special value of the book lies in its extensive reliance on documents compiled by the U.S. government, which The Washington Post obtained through the Freedom of Information Act over a three-year period. These include U.S. military and State Department interviews and notes and, most important, reports and interviews by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The Foreign Affairs Oral History Program is notably useful in capturing State Department officials’ candid comments. These documents, particularly the SIGAR reports, are a trea- sure trove for historians, which are yet to be fully exploited. Links to the interview transcripts can be found online at https://bit.ly/wpost- afghanpapers. Like the “Penta- gon Papers,” the documents assembled by the Post and digested and summarized by Whitlock, offer a devas- tating record of mendacity perpetrated by senior military, intelligence and State Department officials whose public claims of progress in the war enabled successive administrations to avoid any public reckoning for their failed policies. The book is especially power- ful as it contrasts public statements and testimony by senior officials with often contemporaneous private or classified commentary. The book also documents dishon- esty by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. One of the typical examples is provided by President Trump. On Aug. 21, 2017, he announced: “Our troops will fight to win. From now on, victory will have a clear definition.” One month earlier, meeting with his gener- als, Trump had called the engagement in Afghani- stan “a loser war.” Trump privately told his generals that, unlike Obama, he would be more secretive, explaining: “We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities.” As Whitlock observes, this secrecy was intended to keep the Taliban guessing but also would “leave Americans in the dark.” The reports and interviews also reveal the appalling ignorance with which senior U.S. military and intelligence officials approached social, cultural and historical realities in Afghanistan. This misunderstanding of Afghanistan hobbled U.S. strategy from the begin- ning. At the December 2001 Bonn con- ference, the United States, with concur- rence of international partners, designed a strong center-led Afghan government. This was completely contrary to suc- cessful governance in Afghanistan whose multitude of ethnic and tribal groups have historically preferred significant regional autonomy. The late King Zahir Shah (1933-1973) ruled as a benevolent but dis- tant monarch during Afghanistan’s golden period. Soviet efforts to build a strong cen- tralized government model failed under BOOKS The book is especially powerful as it contrasts public statements and testimony by senior officialswith often contemporaneous private or classified commentary.