 The Washington Post just released a bombshell report which they are calling the Afghanistan Papers and in a nutshell what this essentially tells us is that the Afghanistan war was doomed from the get-go because the strategy that we Implemented to fight terrorism was not the correct strategy We're trying to fight a problem, but we weren't actually attacking the root cause. So for example, we were in in Afghanistan Operating with this assumption that we fight terrorism by attacking terrorists directly The problem is that corruption in Afghanistan was systemic it was something that plagued society and Corruption was such a big issue that led to nationwide destabilization in Afghanistan and it actually led to more terrorism, but because we didn't understand Afghanistan or understand these political factors that led to terrorism Well, we were effectively fighting what was a losing battle and we're still there So I'm not gonna go to the Washington Post article But I will go to a summary that I think is more concise from slate and here's what they say This is from Fred Kaplan the war in Afghanistan 18 years old and still raging at a cost of nearly a trillion dollars 2300 US troops killed and more than 20,000 injured has been a muddle from the beginning Steered by vague and wavering strategies Fuelled by falsely rosy reports of progress from the battlefield and almost certainly doomed to failure all along This is the inescapable conclusion of a secret US government history of the war Consisting of 2000 pages based on interviews with more than 400 participants obtained and published by the Washington Post on Monday after years of battles to declassify the documents written by the office of the special inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction an agency created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud The report title lessons learned is the most thorough official critique of an ongoing American war Since the Vietnam War review commissioned in 1967 by then secretary of defense Robert McNamara Daniel Ellsberg leaked what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers In 1971 though widely disseminated they were officially declassified only in 2011 The Afghanistan papers as the post dubs the report is narrower in scope than McNamara's project The latter delved into the entire history of US involvement in Vietnam and Incorporated top-secret memos and other documents from throughout the national security bureaucracy Still the new report resonates with the same dread and melancholy about a war built on ignorance lies and counterproductive Policies central to the current war effort and its failure was corruption It was central because the Afghan government couldn't defeat the Taliban insurgents or win the support of its people as Long as it was corrupt from top to bottom The United States failed because the billions of dollars we poured into the country only made Afghanistan's corruption worse Now there's more but I just want to pause right there and reflect on what we've learned so far we've been in Afghanistan for 18 years and We can't leave because apparently we have to clean up this mess that we've made Except maybe if we're the ones making the mess we're incapable of cleaning it up because we don't know what we're doing we're like a bull in a china shop and We don't know how to clean up that mess We can't necessarily take inventory of every item that we've damaged So the best thing that we can do for us and the people of Afghanistan is to just to get out once and for all because we're not Helping them and the tactics that we implemented to try to help them It backfired tremendously like The idea was that we can turn Afghanistan into a thriving democracy by giving them a lot of aid But corruption was rampant. So what would happen? We'd give them the aid and that money would be used for patron client relationships It was fueling their corruption effectively, which means that we were making the situation worse And we thought we were helping Do you understand why nation nation building doesn't work? It's because we don't know what we're doing Our elected officials don't know what they're doing and this should make that crystal clear if it wasn't already obvious to people Now more on this Ryan Crocker former ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq told the investigators in a 2016 interview You just cannot put those amounts of money into a very fragile state and society and not have it fuel corruption He added that the same thing happened in Iraq where corruption is pandemic and deeply rooted and where it's hard to see how A better political order can ever be established a big problem Crocker said was a perennial American urge when intervening in a foreign conflict to start fixing everything as fast as we can We pour in billions of dollars which wind up in the hands of the powerful the report estimates that 40% of USA to Afghanistan was pocketed by officials gangsters or the insurgents themselves who become more corrupt still Sarah Chai's who served as an advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and who lived in Afghanistan for several years Told the investigators in 2015 that the problem was rooted in Washington Fighting terrorism was the chief US mission and some officials understood that corruption is a cause of terrorism But Chai said the notion hasn't sunk in enough for the causal flip to happen IE for the officials to see that countering corruption had to be a key ingredient in countering terrorism in September of 2009 as the Obama administration was debating a new policy toward the Afghanistan War Admiral Mike Mullen chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Testified at a Senate hearing that the main problem is clearly the lack of a legitimacy of the government in Kabul Senator Lindsey Graham pushed the issue quote we could send a million troops and that wouldn't restore legitimacy in the government He asked that is correct Mullen replied the threat of corruption He added is every bit as significant as the Taliban now in spite of Mike Mullen's testimony there in spite of knowing That corruption was the issue. What did he recommend Obama do? He recommended that Obama send 40,000 troops to help legitimize the Afghanistan government Let me repeat that rather than trying to root out the issue of corruption itself if that was even possible He wanted to send American troops to convince the people of Afghanistan that their government was in fact Legitimate and they should accept their government's authority Because if anything is going to legitimize an illegitimate government who is corrupt to its core It's going to be a foreign occupier Who's trying to convince you of that? Do you understand how ridiculous this is? So Obama took Mullen's advice and it didn't work. They were not convinced that the Afghan government was legitimate And most of the people within Obama's administration actually agreed with Mullen's advice But one person actually disagreed and you'll be surprised to know who that was It was actually Joe Biden who didn't think that would be a good strategy However, Joe Biden himself still didn't really have a good strategy because he still wanted to send 10,000 more troops But instead of having those troops try to convince the people of Afghanistan to accept their government's legitimacy he wanted them to train the Afghanistan army to I guess either fight corruption directly or Fight terrorists either way the strategy failed and we're still in Afghanistan with presumably no end in sight now eventually in 2010 general David Petraeus took over and He assembled an anti-corruption task force. You'd think finally right somebody is doing the right thing now What that task force found out was that if you really want to actually help the people of Afghanistan Then what you need to do is stop giving them aid because that aid is fueling corruption. It's not helping the situation What was general Petraeus's response? Meh He assembled the task force To assist them they tell him that the aid is essentially fueling corruption and our efforts there are futile And his response is to not take their advice What a colossal failure so across three different administrations George W. Bush Barack Obama in Donald Trump. We have used the same strategy that is not working We are trying to fight terrorism by fighting it directly but we're not addressing the root issue that's leading to terrorism and We're still there because we haven't rooted out the terrorists because we're not fighting it effectively and we have to be there until we Fight and defeat terrorists like do you understand? The situation is not going to get any better Nation-building does not work because we don't understand the dynamics The internal politics of these countries in which we are trying to nation-build not every society is Ready for you know democratization even though we want people to be free We want civil rights and civil liberties Trying to force it on people when they don't have the institutions necessary to sustain a thriving democracy Is just a fool's game game. It's not gonna work It's not going to work and you'd think that we would have learned our lesson time after time But we won't and after the Afghanistan papers revealed that once again We fucked up by not implementing the right strategy. Do you think that we'll honestly learn our lesson? No Now there are indications that our drone war in various countries Yemen Pakistan Somalia is also Fueling terrorism because we're trying to fight terrorists. But what are we doing? We are bombing innocent civilians and individuals who are affected by drones and terrorized by drones for lack of a better word Are getting radicalized and they are wanting to fight the United States because of the havoc that we are causing in their country So I mean, I don't know what to say US imperialism has not done the world any favors The only sector of society that this has benefited is the military industrial complex War capitalism is incredibly lucrative and that's why we're doing it period But I mean what this shows is that our leaders don't have the slightest idea About what they're doing in these countries They don't understand the countries that they are invading and they certainly don't have solutions to the problems We're making matters worse. This is not surprising whatsoever. Nonetheless, you know to see this You know play out with these documents and confirm what we suspected it really is important now Well, there be much attention paid to this. I suspect not regardless. It's still important