KABUL over the years, reveal secret documents.
The Washington Post published on Monday thousands of pages of documents highlighting America’s missteps and failures in Afghanistan.
Following a short-term victory over the Taliban and Al Qaeda in early 2002, the Pentagon focus shifted to Iraq and the Afghan conflict took a back seat.
As the Taliban staged a comeback, US military personnel on the ground took issue with the chinks in the American game plan.
However, senior officials ignored the concerns and kept insisting that steady progress was being made in the war-battered country.
Douglas Lute, a retired general who helped the White House oversee the war in Afghanistan under Bush and Obama administrations, acknowledged the shortcomings.
The then three-star general was quoted as saying: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing.
“Afghans knew we were there temporarily, and that affected what we could do,” Marc Chretien, who served as State Department adviser to the Marines in Helmand province, said in one interview.
An elder in the restive province once told him: ‘Your Marines live in tents. That’s how I know you won’t be here long.’”
Jeffrey Eggers, who served as a strategic adviser to ex- commander of US forces in Afghanistan McChrystal, spoke of a failed strategy in 2010 to retake Marja district from Taliban.
Despite optimistic governance and reconstruction plans touted by McChrystal and Pentagon civilians for Marja, the effort failed and showed larger problems with the counterinsurgency strategy.
Eggers told investigators: “One of McChrystal’s hardest lessons was his government-in-a-box program which typified the American wartime machinery, and he thought you could simply wave a magic wand and POOF!”
Of the $133 billion that the United States has spent on Afghanistan’s reconstruction, about $83 billion went toward training the Afghan Army and police forces.
But Robert Finn, the US ambassador to Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, told investigators the spending did not yield satisfactory results.
“It almost all went to the military and even most of that money went for local militia and police training,” he commented.
In a 2003 memo cited, ex-defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declared: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”
Although leaders touted success for almost 20 years, government and military officials told interviewers the US clearly failed in Afghanistan.
PAN Monitor/mud
