The main feature was “a formal reintegration ceremony, where they said, ‘I hereby renounce evil al-Qaeda, blah blah blah,’ ” Rota said in an Army oral-history interview. Most of those who reconciled were “just paid dudes that have nothing else to do. Sometimes they want to give it up and become part of the system again rather than get dragged off… and thrown in jail.”
Air Force Maj. Matthew Brown, who worked on a reintegration team in Helmand province in 2011, said the program was short-sighted and superficial. He said historical experience showed that most armed insurgencies were grinding conflicts that lasted for twenty to forty years, so expecting large numbers of Taliban fighters to suddenly change their allegiance made no sense.
“It doesn’t matter how smart you are, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend, it doesn’t matter how little you sleep every night, you’re not going to substantively change the environment you’re operating in in the short term,” Brown said in an Army oral-history interview. “It’s like society will push back against you the harder you push.”
Brown said he remained skeptical that the fighters who offered to reconcile “were the real deal.” Tribal leaders and Afghan government officials sometimes manipulated the system and funneled people through the reintegration program just to ingratiate themselves with the Americans.
“There’s so many power brokers in Afghanistan that it could be as simple as the governor saying, ‘Hey, I’m getting a lot of heat from the coalition. I need you to cough up six bodies.’ Some guy’s like, ‘All right. If I do that will you do this for me?’ The guy’s like, ‘Yes. Please just get these guys off my back for a month.’ Miraculously six bodies get coughed up and it’s a huge win for reintegration in Helmand.”
Karzai established an Afghan High Peace Council in 2010 to coordinate overtures with senior Taliban figures. The Obama administration didn’t want to undermine the Afghan government’s authority, so it shied away from reaching out to the Taliban without Karzai’s blessing.
But the Afghan-led diplomatic track moved at a glacial pace. Karzai and the warlords in his government had little incentive to agree to negotiations that might tacitly recognize the Taliban as a political movement or weaken their own hold on power. The Taliban likewise did not want to lend legitimacy to Karzai, whom they viewed as a foreign puppet. They refused to negotiate until foreign troops agreed to leave the country.
The Obama administration said it supported a dialogue between the Afghan government and the Taliban, but drew up its own list of demands: that the Taliban break ties with al-Qaeda, end violence and support equal rights for Afghan minorities and women.
When glimmers of progress did emerge, extremists on both sides tried to sabotage the process.
In September 2011, Burhanuddin Rabbani, a 71-year-old former Afghan president who led the peace council, received an emissary in his home who claimed he had a message to deliver from the Taliban leadership. When the messenger leaned in to greet Rabbani, he detonated a bomb hidden in his turban. Rabbani and the bomber were both killed. Two other members of the peace council were badly wounded.
U.S. diplomats nevertheless kept trying to nurture back-channel contacts. In January 2012, with Washington’s backing, the government of Qatar granted the Taliban permission to open a political office in the country.
The intent was to provide insurgent leaders a protected location in a neutral country where they could meet with U.S. or Afghan government negotiators. But before they could open the political office, the Taliban suspended preliminary talks with U.S. representatives, accusing the Americans of reneging on a deal to release Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay.
The Afghan government distrusted the Qatari back-channel because it feared losing control over negotiations. Ryan Crocker, who served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012, said he warned State Department officials that they risked alienating Karzai by endorsing the Taliban’s presence in Qatar, but they didn’t listen.
“Hamid Karzai was just incensed over that whole thing,” he said in a Lessons Learned interview. “We paid lip-service to the notion that this would have to be an Afghan-led, Afghan-managed process.”
An attempt by U.S. officials to restart talks the following year blew up again before they got very far. In June 2013, the Taliban finally opened their office in Qatar. But the group also raised a flag and banner advertising the premises as the home of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan—the old name of the Taliban government.
The action antagonized Karzai, who saw it as an in-your-face attempt by the Taliban to win diplomatic recognition. He halted the nascent negotiations with the Taliban and refused to sign a bilateral security agreement with the United States that the Obama administration had been pushing.
With the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan dwindling, the Taliban felt less urgency to rekindle talks unless the terms suited them.
James Dobbins, the career diplomat who returned to the State Department to serve as Obama’s envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2014, said the troop withdrawal timetable “was on balance probably unhelpful with respect to incentivizing the Taliban to enter into negotiations.” But he said there were other obstacles, “most notably Karzai’s deep ambivalence about whether or not he really wanted to do that and under what conditions.”
The Taliban held another advantage: a U.S. prisoner of war. In 2009, insurgents captured Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl after he wandered away from a U.S. military base in eastern Afghanistan. The Pentagon had been trying to get him back for years, but the Taliban was driving a hard bargain. It demanded the release of Taliban leaders from Guantanamo.
After painstaking negotiations brokered by Qatar, in May 2014, the Obama administration finally agreed to release five Guantánamo inmates who had held senior roles in the Afghan government during the years of Taliban rule. In exchange, the Taliban freed Bergdahl in a carefully orchestrated handover with U.S. Special Forces at a remote rendezvous in eastern Afghanistan.
At first, the Obama administration celebrated the deal as a diplomatic breakthrough and hoped it might lead to further talks with the Taliban. But Republicans in Congress blasted the release of the Taliban prisoners and accused Obama of endangering U.S. national security.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina labeled the inmates the “Taliban Dream Team” and said they “have American blood on their hands.” Sen. John McCain of Arizona called them “the hardest of the hard core.” Trump, then known chiefly as a reality TV show host, piled on with a tweet: “President Obama created a VERY BAD precedent by handing over five Taliban prisoners in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. Another U.S. loss!”
The political backlash killed off any chance of a further rapprochement for the rest of Obama’s tenure. For the next four years, unabated warfare consumed Afghanistan and crushed the tepid attempts to make peace.
* * *
By 2018, the fighting seemed as senseless as ever. Civilian casualties soared as violence intensified between the Afghan security forces and the insurgents, with U.S. warplanes dropping record-levels of bombs from above.
The first sign of a diplomatic opening surfaced in February 2018, when Afghan President Ashraf Ghani offered to hold unconditional peace talks and said he’d be willing to recognize the Taliban as a political party. The Taliban refused. Its leaders continued to insist on negotiating directly with the Americans and on a complete withdrawal of foreign troops.
Four months later, however, the Taliban relented. After Ghani declared that the Afghan government would observe a unilateral cease-fire to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan, the Taliban agreed to a three-day truce. For the first time since 2001, combatants from both sides put down their weapons and a brief euphoria took hold in a nation exhausted by war. The fighting resumed after seventy-two hours, but it became apparent that even many of the Taliban’s front-line soldiers hungered for peace.
The Trump administration attempted to take advantage of the moment. For the first time,
it authorized direct, high-level talks with the Taliban. In July 2018, a senior U.S. diplomat, Alice Wells, held a preliminary meeting with Taliban leaders in Qatar. In a major concession to the insurgents, officials from Ghani’s government were excluded from the meeting.
Soon after, the Trump administration called Zalmay Khalilzad, the veteran Afghan-American diplomat, back into public service to lead the negotiations with the Taliban. Khalilzad dove in. He met with the Taliban in Qatar in October. Days later, he persuaded the government of Pakistan to release the Taliban’s deputy emir, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, from prison.
Over several months, the two sides held multiple rounds of talks, many taking place in the fancy luxury resort in Qatar. Within a year, a deal appeared close. Under the terms, the United States would withdraw the remainder of its 14,000 troops and the Taliban would agree to negotiate a lasting settlement with the Afghan government and to forsake ties with al-Qaeda.
But in September 2019, the tentative accord unraveled in spectacular fashion. Trump had secretly invited Taliban leaders to Camp David to sign the deal, with Ghani as a witness. But both Ghani and the Taliban balked at the idea of traveling to the United States to join Trump for a photo op. When word leaked that the White House had invited leaders of a terrorist group to Camp David, members of Congress reacted with disbelief. Trump canceled the invitation and declared talks with the Taliban “dead.”
After the uproar faded, Khalilzad resumed negotiations with the Taliban in Doha. On February 29, 2020, the two sides signed a complex agreement to wind down the war.
The Trump administration pledged to withdraw U.S. troops in stages, with all forces leaving by May 2021, and to press for the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government. The Taliban promised to begin direct negotiations with Ghani’s regime and provided assurances that Afghanistan would not be used to launch attacks on the United States.
But the accord was fraught with gray areas, contingencies and unresolved issues.
After dragging their feet for several months, representatives of the Afghan government and the Taliban finally met in September 2020 in Qatar for official talks. But fighting continued apace as the Taliban pressed for military advantage.
Pentagon officials lobbied Trump to slow down or postpone the U.S. troop withdrawal. But after Trump lost his bid for reelection, he ordered the military to reduce the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to 2,500 by the end of his term in January 2021.
That marked the smallest U.S. troop presence since December 2001, back when Afghanistan seemed like a manageable, short-term challenge. At the time, the Taliban had surrendered its last stronghold in Kandahar, U.S. troops had bin Laden pinned down in Tora Bora, and most Americans thought they had decisively won a brief war in a faraway land. For the next two decades, as the conflict degenerated and the quagmire deepened, their leaders lied about what was happening and kept insisting they were making progress.
Like Bush and Obama, Trump failed to make good on his promise to prevail in Afghanistan or to bring what he mocked as “the forever war” to completion. Instead, he handed the unfinished campaign to his political rival, Joseph Biden, the fourth commander in chief to oversee the longest armed conflict in American history.
Biden had closely tracked the arc of the war for two decades, having first traveled to Afghanistan in early 2002 as a U.S. senator. During the Bush administration, he called for sending more troops and resources to Afghanistan to stabilize the country. But by the time he became Obama’s vice president in 2009, Biden had grown skeptical of what the United States could accomplish there.
During internal deliberations at the White House, Biden urged Obama to reject the expensive counterinsurgency strategy that expanded the war, pushing instead for a slimmed-down version of the troop surge. In 2011, he counseled Obama against sending the Navy SEALs into Pakistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden, arguing that the mission was too risky. In both instances, his advice went unheeded.
As soon as he became president in January 2021, Biden faced the same conundrum that had bedeviled Bush, Obama and Trump: how to end an unwinnable war? If he brought the remaining U.S. troops home, the Taliban stood an excellent chance of regaining power and the United States risked becoming the second superpower in a generation to leave Afghanistan in defeat. The alternative was to renege on Trump’s agreement with the insurgents and keep U.S. forces there indefinitely to prop up the ineffectual and corrupt government in Kabul.
For three months, Biden searched for another way. His administration prodded the Taliban and the Afghan government to accelerate their stalled negotiations and to hold a summit with regional powers. But the efforts held little promise and gained no traction.
On April 14, Biden announced his decision. In a speech from the Treaty Room of the White House, he promised to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021—the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Unlike his predecessors, Biden gave a sobering assessment of two decades of warfare. He did not try to frame the outcome as a victory. Instead, he said the United States had achieved its original objective long ago by destroying al-Qaeda’s stronghold in Afghanistan. He suggested that U.S. troops should have left after they killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011. “That was ten years ago. Think about that,” he said.
Ever since, he added, Washington’s rationale for staying in Afghanistan had become “increasingly unclear” as it strove to “create ideal conditions” for ending the war. He recalled how military commanders had insisted seven years earlier—during his second term as vice president—that the Afghan army and police were ready to take full responsibility for their country’s security, an assessment that proved to be feeble and foolish.
“So when will it be the right moment to leave? One more year, two more years, ten more years? What conditions must be met to depart?” Biden asked. “I’m not hearing any good answers to those questions. And if you can’t answer them, in my view, we should not stay.”
After his remarks at the White House, Biden crossed the Potomac River and visited Arlington National Cemetery to pay respects to the fallen. Carrying a furled black umbrella under overcast skies, he paced slowly through Section 60 of the cemetery, where veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are buried. Standing in front of a memorial wreath, he gave the sign of the cross and offered a salute. Then he gazed into the distance, surveying row upon row of white marble gravestones.
“Hard to believe,” he murmured. “Look at them all.”
Note on Sources
This book is based almost exclusively on public documents: notes of interviews with more than 1,000 people who played a direct role in the U.S. war in Afghanistan, as well as hundreds of Defense Department memos, State Department cables and other government reports.
The Washington Post obtained the Lessons Learned interview documents from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) after filing multiple public-records requests beginning in 2016, and two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits.
The Post’s lawsuits eventually compelled SIGAR to release more than 2,000 pages of unpublished notes and transcripts from 428 interviews, as well as several audio recordings. SIGAR staffers conducted the Lessons Learned interviews between 2014 and 2018. Almost all the interviews focused on events that occurred during the Bush and Obama administrations. About thirty of the interview records are transcribed, word-for-word accounts. The rest are typed summaries consisting of notes and quotations. SIGAR has stipulated in court that all the material it released was independently verified by the agency.
Most of the people interviewed by SIGAR were Americans. SIGAR analysts also traveled to Europe and Canada to interview dozens of foreign officials from NATO countries. In addition, they visited Kabul to interview current and former Afghan government officials, aid workers and development consultants.
SIGAR redacted the names of most—about 85 percent—of the people it interviewed, citing a variety of FOIA
privacy exemptions. In legal briefs, the agency categorized those individuals as whistleblowers and informants who might face harassment or embarrassment if their names became public.
The Post asked a federal judge to force SIGAR to disclose the names of everyone the agency interviewed for the Lessons Learned project, arguing that the public has a right to know the identities of officials who criticized the war and admitted that the U.S. government’s policies were flawed. The Post further argued that those individuals were not whistleblowers or informants because SIGAR interviewed them for the purpose of publishing a series of public reports, not as part of a law-enforcement investigation. As of the time of this writing, the drawn-out FOIA litigation is unresolved.
Separately, by cross-referencing dates and other details from the documents, The Post independently identified thirty-four of the people interviewed by SIGAR, including former ambassadors, military officers and White House officials.
The Post sought additional comment from individuals whom it was able to identify as having given an interview to SIGAR. Responses from those who are quoted by name are included in the endnotes.
This book describes the positions held by unnamed Lessons Learned interview subjects—such as “senior State Department official” or “former White House staffer”—based on information provided by SIGAR in response to The Post’s FOIA requests as well as the context of the interviews.
Besides withholding names, SIGAR redacted portions of the interview documents, including information that was subsequently classified by the State Department, Defense Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The Rumsfeld snowflake memos were shared with The Post by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research organization affiliated with George Washington University.
The Afghanistan Papers Page 28
