The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  Most of the Army oral-history interviews were conducted by the Operational Leadership Experience project, part of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The Combat Studies Institute interviewed more than 600 service members between 2005 and 2015 upon their return from Afghanistan. Most were mid-career Army officers enrolled in professional military education courses at Fort Leavenworth, but the number includes some enlisted soldiers and personnel from other branches of the armed forces. The Army oral-history interviews are unclassified, publicly available, word-for-word transcriptions based on audio recordings. This book identifies military personnel by the rank they held at the time of their oral-history interviews. Many served multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan.

  This book also cites a small number of oral-history interviews that the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C., conducted with senior officers in 2006 and 2007. Those interviews deal with events in the war from 2003 to 2005.

  The University of Virginia oral-history interviews with senior members of the Bush administration were conducted by the Miller Center, a nonpartisan affiliate of the university that specializes in presidential scholarship. The Miller Center opened a portion of its George W. Bush oral-history collection to the public in November 2019. The lengthy interview transcripts are based on audio recordings.

  Finally, this book draws on several diplomatic oral-history interviews that were conducted by the nonprofit Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. The ADST’s extensive, publicly available oral-history collection features interviews with U.S. diplomats about their experiences in the field during the past eight decades.

  1 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dictated thousands of succinct memos between 2001 and 2006 that his staff referred to as “snowflakes.” Worded in Rumsfeld’s brusque style, many of the snowflakes about Afghanistan foreshadowed problems that would haunt the U.S. military for years.

  2 Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confer in Washington on October 6, 2001, the day before the U.S. military began bombing.

  3 Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division looking for a weapons cache prepare to enter a housing compound during an early morning raid in southeastern Afghanistan in October 2002. About 9,000 U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan to hunt for al-Qaeda targets even though the vast majority of the network’s leaders had fled the country or had been killed or captured.

  4 Northern Alliance fighters take positions in a frontline trench during a skirmish with Taliban forces on November 7, 2001. During the next several days, the Northern Alliance—with the help of the U.S. military—seized control of several major cities, including Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Kabul and Jalalabad.

  5 Afghan fighters allied with the U.S. military maneuver tanks near the White Mountains during the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden escapes the region after several days of heavy fighting.

  6 Army Gen. Tommy Franks, left, and senior military officers at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, conduct a daily conference via satellite with U.S. forces in Afghanistan in February 2002.

  7 At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld records a video message for U.S. troops on March 21, 2003, after the U.S. military launched its invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration shifted almost all of its attention to Iraq and the war in Afghanistan became an afterthought.

  8 Girls from a remote Afghan village in Badakhshan province near the border with Tajikistan watch U.N. workers unload ballots before the October 2004 presidential election. The vote went smoothly and Hamid Karzai won a five-year term in office. The outcome was welcome news for the Bush administration, which was grappling with a rising insurgency and sectarian bloodbath in Iraq.

  9 Afghan women wearing veils walk past a portrait of Karzai in Kabul in October 2004. An elegantly dressed and highly educated Pashtun tribal leader, Karzai built a close rapport with the Bush administration. U.S. officials, however, gradually soured on him and the relationship turned dysfunctional.

  10 For its Lessons Learned project, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) interviewed hundreds of people who played a key role in the war in Afghanistan. SIGAR tried to keep the interview notes and transcripts a secret, but The Washington Post sued the agency and obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

  1 A girl plays with a clothesline in the ruins of a Soviet-built theater in 2005. Desperately poor and its infrastructure in tatters, Afghanistan had been consumed by continuous warfare since the Soviet invasion in 1979.

  2 Afghan police trainees walk to their rooms at a police academy in Kabul in May 2004. The United States and NATO bungled early attempts to create a national police force. In a 2005 memo, Rumsfeld called the training program a mess and said he was “ready to toss in the towel.”

  3 A helicopter used by an Afghan drug interdiction team lands during an operation in Nangahar province in eastern Afghanistan in May 2006. Opium production soared after the war began in 2001. The United States spent $9 billion on a dizzying array of programs in a futile attempt to deter Afghanistan from supplying the world with heroin.

  4 British Marines take cover while blasting a hole in a wall during an assault on a Taliban-held village near the Kajaki Dam in March 2007. The United States and its NATO allies spent hundreds of millions of dollars to fix and upgrade the hydroelectric dam in an ill-fated attempt to supply electricity to Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

  5 A farmer watches as Afghan police eradicate poppy fields in Badakhshan province in June 2006. The United States and its NATO ally, Britain, tried a range of strategies to curtail opium production. They paid farmers to stop cultivating poppies, hired mercenaries to destroy crops and drew up plans to spray defoliants from the sky. None of it worked.

  6 Army Spec. Brandon Olson leans against an embankment in a bunker at Outpost Restrepo in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan in September 2007. U.S. soldiers arrived in the Korengal in 2005 to clear out al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. The small stretch of land generated some of the deadliest firefights and ambushes of the war.

  7 Afghan security forces carry a wounded soldier to a U.S. medevac helicopter after a Taliban ambush near the village of Tsunek in Kunar province in March 2010. U.S. casualties peaked in 2010, when 496 troops lost their lives.

  8 Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point listen as President Barack Obama announces his plan to expand the war in a December 1, 2009, speech in Eisenhower Hall. Obama ordered the deployment of 30,000 more troops, boosting the size of the U.S. force to 100,000.

  9 Campaign leaflets dropped from a helicopter flutter to the ground as supporters of Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah cheer during a political rally at a Kabul stadium in August 2009. Hamid Karzai won reelection but the vote was discredited by massive fraud. A U.N.-backed investigative panel determined that Karzai received about 1 million illegal votes, a quarter of all that were cast.

  10 Hagi Zahir, an official in the town of Marja in Helmand province, meets with local elders in March 2010 after U.S. Marines seized control of the area from the Taliban. Initially hailed as a success, the military operation and subsequent efforts by the Afghan government failed to stabilize the region. Large parts of Helmand were reclaimed by insurgent forces.

  11 Afghan currency traders exchange piles of cash in a money market in Kabul in May 2009. The Obama administration flooded Afghanistan with tens of billions of dollars in aid and defense contracts, which exacerbated already staggering levels of corruption.

  12 The remains of Army Specialist Christopher Griffin of Kincheloe, Michigan, arrive in a transfer case at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware in October 2009. Griffin, 24, was one of eight soldiers killed when a large force of Taliban fighters attacked Combat Outpost Keating in Nuristan province.

  1 In the Lessons Learned interviews, senior U.S. officials admitted that their war strategy was fatally flawed and that they deliberately misled
the public with rosy accounts and constant talk of progress. In this interview, Army Maj. Gen. Edward Reeder Jr., a Special Operations Commander who served six tours in Afghanistan, acknowledged that “every time I went back security was worse.”

  2 Marine Cpl. Burness Britt is lifted aboard a medevac helicopter flight in Helmand province in June 2011. Britt was wounded by a bomb that insurgents planted near the town of Sangin. He was severely injured but survived.

  3 Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a powerful Uzbek warlord from northern Afghanistan, arrives at Kabul International Airport in July 2018. Dostum was accused of war crimes by human-rights groups but maintained a close relationship with the U.S. government. One U.S. diplomat called him “a babyface Stalinesque Tito.”

  4 Vice President Joe Biden, President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other national security officials gather in the White House Situation Room on May 1, 2011, to watch a live video feed of the mission that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

  5 U.S. soldiers lift weights in a makeshift outdoor gym at Observation Post Mustang in Kunar province in September 2011. The mountainous outpost in northeastern Afghanistan was near a major route that Taliban fighters used to infiltrate the country from Pakistan.

  6 Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, exercises in his quarters at military headquarters in Kabul in July 2011.

  7 Female officers in the Afghan National Army attend their September 2011 graduation ceremony in Kabul. The U.S. war strategy hinged on training and equipping Afghan security forces that could defend the country on their own. But the Afghan army and police forces became plagued by corruption and ethnic tensions.

  8 Afghan Army Sgt. Masiullah Hamdard takes his first steps using his new prosthetic legs and arm at a Red Cross orthopedic rehabilitation center in Kabul in October 2013. Hamdard lost both of his legs and left forearm in an explosion in Kandahar province.

  9 U.S. soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, board a plane to deploy to Afghanistan in November 2014. The next month, President Obama declared an end to the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan, but several thousand troops remained in the country—and continued to fight and die in combat.

  10 A gunner looks out of an Afghan army helicopter as it flies over Kabul in December 2019.

  11 A group of Taliban fighters displays their weapons in Marawara district in Kunar province in July 2020. The small district—near the Pakistani border—was a Taliban stronghold for several years. Despite peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, the fighters said they would continue to battle for control of the country.

  Acknowledgments

  Emblazoned on a wall in The Washington Post’s newsroom is a quotation—“Journalism is the first rough draft of history”—from Philip L. Graham, who served as the newspaper’s publisher from 1946 to 1961. To put it less succinctly, news reporting is an initial attempt to define and interpret noteworthy events: a preliminary step in a never-ending effort to understand and interpret the past.

  This book is a work of journalism, yet it doesn’t quite match Phil Graham’s definition; it more resembles a second, or even a third, draft of history. For the most part, The Afghanistan Papers reassesses events that occurred years ago and have already started to fade from memory. But the primary sources that provide the foundation for this book bring a new perspective on what went wrong and why the conflict persisted for so long. The Lessons Learned interviews, oral histories and snowflakes reveal for the first time, in blunt and incontrovertible terms, that U.S. leaders knew their war strategy was dysfunctional and privately doubted they could attain their objectives. Yet they confidently told the public year after year that they were making progress and that victory—winning—was just over the horizon.

  This knowledge only came to light because the leadership of The Washington Post, my professional home for the past 23 years, made an institutional commitment to uncover the truth about the longest war in American history. When SIGAR repeatedly stonewalled my public-records requests, The Post faced a decision: back down and move on to an easier story, or else, sue the federal agency under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

  Hauling the federal government into court is not for the faint-hearted. FOIA lawsuits are almost always expensive and time-consuming—words that no editor wants to hear—and there is no guarantee a case will go your way. So I will be forever grateful to The Post’s leadership for their resolve and dedication. Jeff Leen and David Fallis, my editors on the Investigative Desk, expertly managed the project from the start and gave me the time and space to dig. When I needed legal help and high-level support, Executive Editor Marty Baron, Managing Editor Cameron Barr and Publisher Fred Ryan didn’t hesitate or flinch. They recognized the potential importance of the Lessons Learned interviews and cleared the way to file not just one but two lawsuits against SIGAR to force the government to comply with the open-records law. Reporters can’t tackle difficult stories unless their bosses have their backs, and this group had mine.

  Special credit goes to The Post’s formidable legal department, especially James McLaughlin and Jay Kennedy, and three sharpshooter attorneys from the law firm Ballard Spahr—Charles Tobin, Maxwell Mishkin and Matthew Kelley—who represented The Post in federal court. They spent untold hours preparing and refining our FOIA cases, tangling with government attorneys and humoring my attempts at armchair lawyering. Without them, the trove of Lessons Learned documents would still be concealed from the public.

  As SIGAR grudgingly began releasing the documents in drips and drabs after repeated delays, it became clear the interviews were not just newsworthy but showed that senior U.S. officials had lied to the public. The Post’s editors decided that we would aim high with a multi-part series and present all the documents and audio recordings online so readers could see and hear for themselves. The newsroom leadership assembled a talented team of project developers, graphic designers, database whizzes and copy editors, as well as photo, video and audio producers. To ensure that word of our exclusive reporting didn’t leak out prematurely, we operated on a need-to-know basis and code-named the project Avocado.

  My everlasting thanks to the charter members of the Avocado team: Julie Vitkovskaya, Leslie Shapiro, Armand Emamdjomeh, Danielle Rindler, Jake Crump, Matt Callahan, Nick Kirkpatrick, Joyce Lee, Ted Muldoon, JJ Evans and Annabeth Carlson. Their talents are unmatched and they proved themselves worthy of the top-secret clearance. Former Kabul bureau chiefs Joshua Partlow and Griff Witte, two exceptionally smart and collegial correspondents, provided critical feedback on the story drafts through a separate back channel.

  When deadline approached, the team expanded. Managing Editor Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, another strong backer of the project, cracked wise that half the newsroom was busy working on Avocado. Important contributions were made by Martine Powers, Madhulika Sikka, Michael Johnson, Tom LeGro, Brian Cleveland, Laris Karklis, Jenn Abelson, Meryl Kornfield, Alex Horton, Susannah George, Sharif Hassan, Sayed Salahuddin, Jennifer Amur, Eva Rodriguez, Doug Jehl, Julie Tate, Tim Curran, Greg Manifold, MaryAnne Golon, Robert Miller, Tim Meko, Chiqui Esteban, Jason Bernert, Courtney Kan, Brian Gross, Joanne Lee, William Neff, María Sánchez Díez, Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn, Ric Sanchez, Jennifer Hassan, Travis Lyles, T.J. Ortenzi, Tessa Muggeridge, Robert Davis, Kenisha Malcolm, Emily Tsao, Molly Gannon, Aja Hill, Diyana Howell, Coleen O’Lear, Steven Bohner, Amy Cavanaile, Mia Torres, John Taylor, Chris Barber, Eric Reyna, Charity Brown, Greg Barber, Danielle Newman, Iris Long and Mike Hamilton.

  After the series was published, we heard from hundreds of readers who urged us to expand our reporting into a book. Marty Baron encouraged me to make it happen as a Post project. My literary agent, Christy Fletcher of Fletcher & Company, provided her usual wise guidance and played a critical role in transforming an idea into reality. Thanks also to Todd Shuster at Aevitas Creative Management and to Post managing editors Tracy Grant, Kat Downs Mulder and Kriss
ah Thompson.

  I am exceptionally grateful to the team at Simon & Schuster for recognizing the narrative potential in these historical documents and for devoting so much energy and resources to this book. Thanks in particular to Priscilla Painton, vice president and editorial director for Simon & Schuster’s nonfiction program. Her spot-on insights, inspirational feedback and laser-precise edits improved every chapter. I can’t wait to work together on our next book. Thanks also to the indispensable Hana Park for shepherding the project, to Kate Lapin for her proficient copyediting, and to John Pelosi for his careful legal review. It has also been a pleasure to work with a marketing and publicity dream team: Kirstin Berndt and Elise Ringo of Simon & Schuster and Kathleen Floyd of The Post.

  This book would have been impossible to write had I not been able to tap into several other troves of documents. The National Security Archive at George Washington University provides an irreplaceable public service by prying loose records from federal agencies that prefer to operate in the dark. Enormous thanks go to Thomas Blanton, the Archive’s director, and FOIA guru Nate Jones for suing the Defense Department under FOIA to obtain Donald Rumsfeld’s snowflakes and for allowing me to sift through the entire 50,000-page avalanche. The Archive also shared a valuable batch of declassified diplomatic cables.

  For more than a decade, the U.S. Army’s Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, had the foresight to conduct oral-history interviews with veterans of the war in Afghanistan as part of its Operational Leadership Experience project. I owe a large debt to the project organizers for their methodical work. Thanks to Don Wright, the deputy director of Army University Press, for patiently answering my questions. Thanks also to Andrew Ba Tran of The Post for gathering thousands of the transcripts and making them easily accessible for my research.