Book Review

Watching news coverage of scores of Afghan civilians running alongside an American C-17 transport aircraft as it rolled down the runway of Kabul Airport in August 2021, it was hard not to think that one was watching a remake of an old movie. The previous version, set in Saigon in 1975, showed images of similarly desperate people trying to cling on to a helicopter as it rose from the roof of the American embassy, while North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops marched into the South Vietnamese capital. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan represent an unenviable hat-trick of military and strategic disasters for the USA. Much has already been written about Vietnam and Iraq, and now it’s the turn of Afghanistan. America’s failure in Afghanistan was both predicted and predictable. Writing in 2004, Michael Scheuer, who had been head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, commented that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were waging an insurgency that would force the USA either to escalate its military presence in Afghanistan massively or evacuate. Neither the USA nor its local allies had built “anything political or economic that would outlast the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces” (2004: xvi). Scheuer was proved right but even he might have found it hard to believe how badly things would turn out. The publication of Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers provides insights into the Afghanistan fiasco fromwhich future historians will profit, even if future American presidents continue to make the same mistakes. Whitlock quotes a Navy SEAL who asks a fundamental question which could also have been asked about his country’s involvement in Vietnam and Iraq: why does the USA undertake actions that are beyond its abilities? This question, the SEAL noted, “gets at strategy and human psychology, and it is a hard question to answer.” (p. 163) Whitlock’s gripping tale does not offer a definitive answer either, but it does offer a superb account of the many things that went wrong for America in Afghanistan. It started well. Once it was known that the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington were the work of al-Qaeda, the decision to attack its bases in Afghanistan came as no surprise. Within weeks, al-Qaeda was in retreat and the Taliban regime which had hosted the terrorist group had been toppled. Mission accomplished, one might have thought. Osama bin Laden was still alive but a spent force. Yet American soldiers remained in Afghanistan for another twenty years, until their ignominious departure in 2021 and the Taliban’s dramatic return to power. How did this happen? In 2016, Whitlock received a tip that the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) had conducted hundreds of interviews with soldiers, diplomats, and policymakers as part of a project called “Lessons Learned”. The breakthrough came when, after a prolonged legal battle, Whitlock obtained notes of the interviews on which SIGAR had based its reports. They showed that many senior officials and commanders privately viewed the war as an unmitigated disaster. The notes, together with a blizzard of previously classified memos dictated by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, constitute what Whitlock aptly labels as a “secret history of the war” (p. xvii). They do not make for comfortable reading. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. America “jumped into the war with only a hazy idea of whom it was fighting” (p. 19) and relied on the support of “war criminals, drug traffickers, drug smugglers and ex-communists.” (p. 21) President Karzai was incompetent and corrupt, and vast sums of money were pocketed by him and his allies. There was talk in the Lessons Learned interviews of mission creep and the absence of a coherent long-term strategy. These criticisms are not confined to President Bush. When faced with hard choices, President Obama failed to see that wavering between two options is not a workable third option. Trump talked tough but was no more effective than his predecessors. * Quassim Cassam q.cassam@warwick.ac.uk