The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  But years later, U.S. government auditors would conclude that the Obama administration had based many of its statistics regarding infant mortality, life expectancy and school enrollment on inaccurate or unverified data.

  John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told Congress in January 2020 that U.S. officials “knew the data was bad” yet bragged about the numbers anyway. He said the lies were part of “an odor of mendacity” that permeated the government’s portrayal of the war.

  In Lessons Learned interviews, U.S. military officials and advisers described explicit and sustained efforts to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common in the field, at military headquarters in Kabul, at the Pentagon and at the White House to skew statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

  “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. commanders in 2013 and 2014, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

  At military headquarters, “truth was rarely welcome” and “bad news was often stifled,” Crowley said. “There was more freedom to share bad news if it was small—we’re running over kids with our MRAPS [armored vehicles]—because those things could be changed with policy directives. But when we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn’t welcome.”

  John Garofano, a Naval War College strategist who advised Marines in Helmand province in 2011, said military officials in the field devoted an inordinate amount of resources to churning out color-coded charts that heralded positive results. “They had a really expensive machine that would print the really large pieces of paper like in a print shop,” he said in a Lessons Learned interview. “There would be a caveat that these are not actually scientific figures, or this is not a scientific process behind this.”

  But Garofano said nobody dared ask whether the charts or numbers were credible or meaningful. “There was not a willingness to answer questions such as, what is the meaning of this number of schools that you have built? How has that progressed you toward your goal?” he said. “How do you show this as evidence of success and not just evidence of effort or evidence of just doing a good thing?”

  Military officers and diplomats hesitated to pass negative assessments up the chain of command for another reason: careerism. Nobody wanted the blame for problems or failings on their watch. As a result, regardless of conditions, they claimed they were making progress.

  “From the ambassadors down to the low level, [they all say] we are doing a great job,” Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who oversaw military intelligence during Obama’s troop surge, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “Really? So if we are doing such a great job, why does it feel like we are losing?”

  For the duration of the war, U.S. Army brigade and battalion commanders were given the same basic mission upon their arrival in Afghanistan: to protect the population and defeat the enemy. “So they all went in for whatever their rotation was, nine months or six months, and were given that mission, accepted that mission and executed that mission,” Flynn said. “Then they all said, when they left, they accomplished that mission. Every single commander. Not one commander is going to leave Afghanistan… and say, ‘You know what, we didn’t accomplish our mission.’ ”

  The data regarding bombings, attacks and other violent encounters grew bleaker every time Bush or Obama conducted another review of the war strategy. It was impossible to square the negative trends with the optimistic public messaging about progress, so U.S. officials kept the complete datasets confidential.

  “Every time data is shared it showed that everything was getting worse, especially with these strategic reviews,” an unnamed senior U.S. official who served under Bush and Obama said in a Lessons Learned interview.

  In another Lessons Learned interview, an unnamed National Security Council staff member said the Obama White House and Pentagon pressured the bureaucracy to produce figures to show that the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary.

  “It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture,” the National Security Council staff member said. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war.”

  Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the White House and Pentagon would spin them in their favor. They portrayed suicide bombings in Kabul as a sign that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat. They said a rise in U.S. troop deaths proved that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.

  “It was their explanations,” the White House staff member said. “For example, attacks are getting worse? ‘That’s because there are more targets for them to fire at, so more attacks are a false indicator of instability.’ Then, three months later, attacks are still getting worse? ‘It’s because the Taliban are getting desperate, so it’s actually an indicator that we’re winning.’ ”

  U.S. military officials tossed out so many different types of statistics and metrics that the public had no idea which ones really mattered.

  Lawmakers also wondered. During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in April 2009, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) asked Michèle Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, how the Obama administration would know if the troop surge was successful.

  “How will we know if we’re winning?” Collins said. “How will you know whether or not this new strategy is working? It seems to me that you need a set of clear benchmarks, clear metrics going in.”

  Flournoy gave a muddled answer. “There are a whole host—much more developed set of inherited metrics, given that we’ve been conducting these operations for a long time,” she said. “What we’re trying to do is sort through these more carefully. Some of them are more input related. And what we’re really trying to focus on is outcomes and actual impacts. So we aren’t starting with a blank sheet, but we are in the process of refining the metrics that have been used in Afghanistan.”

  As troops surged into the war zone, military commanders refined the art of cherry-picking statistics to make the case that their strategy was working.

  At a July 2010 news briefing with reporters at the Pentagon, Army Maj. Gen. John Campbell, the commanding general of U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, said the Taliban had carried out 12 percent more attacks during the first half of the year compared to the first six months of 2009.

  Aware that might sound bad, Campbell quickly added that “the effectiveness of those attacks have gone down about 6 percent.” He did not explain how the military measured “effectiveness” with such precision. But he reassured reporters that the war was going well.

  “Winning is achieving progress, and I think every single day we are achieving progress,” he said.

  In March 2011, the House Armed Services Committee summoned General Petraeus to provide an update on the war. He bombarded lawmakers with a fusillade of disjointed figures. Petraeus cited “a fourfold increase” in weapons and explosives caches “turned in and found.” He said U.S. and Afghan commandos were killing or capturing “some 360 targeted insurgent leaders” in a “typical ninety-day period.” In Marja, a town in Helmand province that had been pried loose from Taliban control, 75 percent of registered voters had cast ballots in a community council election. Throughout Afghanistan, the number of surveillance blimps and towers had increased from 114 to 184 since August.

  “In closing,” Petraeus said, “the past eight months have seen important but hard-fought progress.”

  Military officers in the field knew the blizzard of numbers meant little. “Unfortunately, with numbers you can spin them any way you want,” Arm
y Maj. John Martin, a self-described “staff bubba” who served as a planner at Bagram Air Base, said in an Army oral-history interview. “For example, if last year there were 100 attacks and this year there were 150, does that mean the situation has gotten worse because there have been more attacks?” Martin added. “Or does that mean now you have more guys going to more places and finding more bad guys, so there are more attacks, but you’re making the situation better because you are finding more bad guys?”

  Other senior officials said they placed great importance on one statistic in particular, albeit one that the U.S. government rarely mentioned in public. “I do think that the key benchmark is the one I’ve suggested, which is how many Afghans are getting killed,” James Dobbins, the U.S. diplomat, told a Senate panel in 2009. “If the number’s going up, you’re losing. If the number’s going down, you’re winning. It’s as simple as that.”

  Up to that point, however, nobody had bothered to reliably track Afghan casualties. For the Pentagon, the subject was a touchy one. Defense officials didn’t like to answer questions about civilian deaths, much less talk about who was responsible. Tracking the number of wells dug and schools built was easier and generated more favorable publicity.

  In a Lessons Learned interview, an unnamed senior NATO official said the alliance started to track civilian casualties in 2005 and set up “what was supposed to be the mother of all databases.” But the program was dropped for unspecified reasons. “It should be a standard operating procedure from the start to record civilian casualties, but it wasn’t,” the senior NATO official said.

  In 2009, the United Nations expanded a campaign to count civilian deaths and injuries in Afghanistan. The U.N. program became the first comprehensive tally of civilian casualties, but the numbers were discouraging and growing worse. On average, dozens of people were dying each week.

  As U.S. troops surged into Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011, the annual number of civilian deaths rose from 2,412 to 3,133. The total dipped in 2012, but increased in 2013 and kept rising, reaching 3,701 deaths in 2014.

  That meant the number of Afghan civilians getting killed had soared 53 percent over five years. Under Dobbins’s simple rule, the United States and its allies were losing badly.

  The United Nations survey blamed insurgents for most of the deaths. But regardless of who was responsible, the casualty figures showed that Afghanistan was growing more unstable and insecure—the exact opposite of what the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy was supposed to accomplish.

  U.S. intelligence assessments also cast doubt on the war’s progress. Intelligence analysts in the CIA and the military prepared reports that were far more pessimistic than the pronouncements from commanding generals in the field. But intelligence officials rarely spoke in public and their reports remained classified.

  Once a year, Congress summoned senior intelligence officials to testify in open session about global threats to U.S. national security. They spoke in monotones and jargon, but their comments about Afghanistan were uniformly dour.

  In February 2012, Army Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, gave a brief but dreary assessment to the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said Obama’s troop surge and war strategy had done little to deter the insurgency.

  He said the Afghan government was plagued by “endemic corruption” and that the Afghan army and police were riddled with “persistent qualitative deficiencies.” In comparison, he described the Taliban as “resilient” and said it had been able to withstand losses inflicted by U.S. troops.

  “From its Pakistani safe havens, the Taliban leadership remains confident of eventual victory,” Burgess added.

  At the same hearing, lawmakers asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to explain why U.S. intelligence agencies held such a negative view while military commanders were so optimistic. Clapper replied that the same disconnect emerged during the Vietnam War when intelligence officials knew the U.S. military was stuck in a quagmire but the generals didn’t want to admit it in public.

  “If you’ll forgive a little history,” Clapper said, “I served as an analyst briefer for General [William] Westmoreland in Vietnam in 1966. I kinda lost my professional innocence a little bit then when I found out that operational commanders sometimes don’t agree with [intelligence officials about] their view of the success of their campaign.”

  Indeed, when it was their turn to testify one month later, U.S. military commanders remained resolute: They were making progress.

  “The progress is real and, importantly, it’s sustainable,” Marine Gen. John Allen, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2012. “We have severely degraded the insurgency.”

  Senator Collins, the Maine Republican, pointed out that Allen and other generals had been singing the same refrain for years. “I recall that I’ve heard very similar assessments from our commanders for ten years now, that we’re making progress,” she said. “Why are you optimistic that ultimately we will be successful and prevail?”

  “Ma’am, if I didn’t think it was doable, I would tell you,” Allen replied. “And I’d tell you very quickly, because I wouldn’t want to spend another life in this fight if it wasn’t doable.”

  The false narrative of progress became harder to maintain as more American troops withdrew. In 2013, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan dipped below 50,000 for the first time in four years. The Afghan army and police struggled to fill the void left by the Americans. The Taliban revived its forces and spread into new territory.

  But the generals doubled down on their talking points. They also embraced a word they once avoided: winning.

  When General Allen completed his nineteen-month stint as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in February 2013, he sounded more buoyant than ever. He said the Afghan security forces had improved and that the Afghan government was ready to take responsibility for its own security.

  “This is victory,” he said at his change-of-command ceremony in Kabul. “This is what winning looks like. And we should not shrink from using these words. This campaign is, and always has been, about the Afghan people and about winning.”

  Until that moment, commanders rarely promised outright victory. But other generals soon adopted Allen’s language and bravado.

  “I talk a lot about winning these days and I firmly believe that we’re on a path to win,” Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., Allen’s successor, said at a military ceremony in Kabul in May 2013.

  Dunford’s deputy, Army Lt. Gen. Mark Milley, echoed his boss at the same ceremony when he addressed Afghan troops on the parade ground. “You will win this war and we will be there with you every step of the way,” Milley said. He proclaimed that they were “on the road to victory, on the road to winning, on the road to creating a stable Afghanistan.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Enemy Within

  The team of U.S. Army soldiers peered through thermal-imaging scopes over the edge of their makeshift observation post, looking down into the barren valley for signs of the enemy. They thought they were safe behind their three-foot-high berm of sandbags, hidden underneath camouflage cover and the dark September sky.

  About 1 a.m., gunfire erupted directly behind them. Afghan fighters carrying AK-47s, who had snuck up from the rear, ambushed the soldiers at close range.

  Sgt. Sapuro Nena, 25, a guitar-playing Pacific Islander, was shot several times in the back. Private First Class Jon Townsend, newly married at age 19, was hit in the upper chest. Specialist Joshua Nelson, 22, a signals intelligence analyst from eastern North Carolina, took a barrage of gunfire in both legs. Private First Class Genaro Bedoy, a 20-year-old Texan with a baby daughter back home in Amarillo, was shot in his face. None of the four soldiers survived.

  The killers were not strangers. They had enlisted in the Afghan National Police and worked alongside U.S. troops for weeks in Zabul province, a gateway for insurgents crossing between southern and eastern Afghanista
n. What prompted the Afghan police officers to open fire on their American allies was not clear, but the murders escalated an alarming trend.

  The act of treachery on September 16, 2012, capped a brutal two-month period during which uniformed Afghan security forces carried out sixteen fratricidal attacks, killing twenty-two U.S. and NATO personnel and wounding twenty-nine others.

  Such assaults from within rarely occurred during the early years of the war. But as the Obama administration accelerated its efforts to train the Afghan army and police forces, the insider-threat phenomenon exploded. The number of publicly reported attacks by uniformed Afghans against their foreign allies rose from two in 2008 to forty-five in 2012, causing the deaths of at least 116 U.S. and NATO personnel during that period. The incidents became so common, it seemed as if U.S. troops were training the enemy.I

  In some of the attacks, members of the Taliban infiltrated the Afghan army or police with the specific intent of inciting mayhem from within. In other cases, Afghan soldiers or police with no known connections to the insurgency took revenge on foreign troops for personal or ideological reasons. Often, the motives never became clear.

  The burst of insider attacks jeopardized the U.S. and NATO mission. To win the war, the Western allies needed to expand and transform the Afghan army and police into a competent fighting force that could defeat the Taliban with minimal foreign help and stabilize the country in the years to come.

  U.S. forces trained, equipped and mentored Afghan soldiers and police in close proximity around the clock. During joint operations, commanders exhorted Americans and Afghans to work “shoulder-to-shoulder”—shohna ba shohna in Dari. The system hinged on trust, so it risked collapse if the Americans had to worry that their Afghan partners might shoot them in the back.

  But U.S. troops also committed acts that destabilized and undermined the coalition. In January 2012, a video that showed Marines urinating on Taliban corpses went viral online. In February, U.S. personnel at Bagram Air Base inadvertently burned copies of the Koran in a trash pile, sparking public protests. In March, tensions hit a peak when an Army staff sergeant massacred sixteen villagers in Kandahar province.