The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  And, to make matters worse, nighttime raids, like the drones, often mistakenly targeted innocent civilians. In May 2011, a midnight NATO raid on a home outside Jalalabad killed a local policeman mistakenly identified as a Taliban leader. Troops also killed his twelve-year old niece Nelofar, who was sleeping outside in the courtyard to escape from the sweltering indoor heat. A NATO official promptly apologized for the tragic accident. Nelofar’s grieving father took little comfort in the apology. “They killed my twelve-year-old innocent daughter and my brother-in-law and then told me, ‘We are sorry,’ ” he said. “What does it mean? What pain can be cured by this word ‘sorry’?”110 That the homegrown Taliban were guilty of killing more civilians than the foreign invaders that year did nothing to mitigate Afghans’ anger toward NATO forces.

  Reports surfaced repeatedly of American soldiers who went over the line, gratuitously killing innocent civilians in Afghanistan as was earlier the case in Iraq. One twenty-year-old soldier, who went AWOL in Canada, described the process that led to the erosion of human empathy:

  I swear I could not for a second view these people as anything but human. The best way to fashion a young hard dick like myself—“dick” being an acronym for “dedicated infantry combat killer”—is simple and the effect of racist indoctrination. Take an empty shell off the streets of L.A. or Brooklyn, or maybe from some Podunk town in Tennessee and these days America isn’t in short supply. I was one of those no-child-left-behind products. Anyway, you take this empty vessel and you scare the living shit out of him, break him down to nothing, cultivate a brotherhood and camaraderie with those he suffers with, and fill his head with racist nonsense like all Arabs, Iraqis, Afghans are Hajj. Hajj hates you. Hajj wants to hurt your family. Hajj children are the worst because they beg all the time. Just some of the most hurtful and ridiculous propaganda, but you’d be amazed at how effective it’s been in fostering my generation of soldiers.111

  One group of deranged young men formed a twelve-person “kill team” that murdered innocent Afghans and then staged evidence to make it look as if they acted in self-defense. One of the accused confessed to the murders. U.S. authorities were not pleased when photos of the soldiers posing with the corpses appeared in Der Spiegel.

  The damage done by American troop presence was only exacerbated by the deplorable behavior of Afghan leaders. When Matthew Hoh, a senior U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan’s Zabul Province who had previously served as a Marine Corps captain in Iraq, resigned in September 2009, he wrote that Karzai’s government is awash in “glaring corruption and unabashed graft” and that Karzai is “a President whose confidants and chief advisers comprise drug lords and war crimes villains, who mock our own rule of law and counter-narcotics effort.”112

  Ambassador Eikenberry too opposed throwing dollars and arms at the notoriously corrupt Karzai regime, headed by Karzai’s friends, family members, and political allies, who gorged themselves on the money that poured into the impoverished country, and warlords who were just as brutal, repressive, misogynistic, and undemocratic as the Taliban who preceded them—men who former Afghan parliament member and human rights crusader Malalai Joya described as “photocopies of the Taliban.”113 The Economist reported that in “parts of Afghanistan where insurgents have been driven out and the writ of the government has been restored, residents have sometimes hankered for the warlords, who were less venal and less brutal than Mr Karzai’s lot.”114

  In 2010, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan the world’s second most corrupt nation behind Somalia and two spots ahead of Iraq. The UN reported that in 2009 Afghans spent $2.5 billion to bribe police and government officials, which equaled approximately a quarter of Afghanistan’s legitimate gross domestic product. The bribes averaged out to $158 per capita—a substantial amount in a country where the average annual GDP is only $426.115

  The November 2010 release of part of the quarter million confidential diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks proved quite revealing and profoundly embarrassing. Corruption was pervasive, engulfing almost everyone in leadership positions. Karzai’s anti-corruption tsar, Izzatullah Wasifi, spent four years in a U.S. jail for selling heroin in Las Vegas. Karzai worked hard to protect family members and supporters, often seeing that charges were dropped even when they were caught red-handed.

  The Commerce Minister told diplomats that the Transportation Ministry collected $200 million per year in trucking fees, but only $30 million of that total ended up in government coffers. People pay up to $250,000 to get jobs overseeing these operations. The American Embassy in Kabul reported that Afghanistan’s first vice president from 2004–2009, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was found by customs officials to be carrying $52 million in cash when he visited the United Arab Emirates in 2009. Massoud denied the charges but didn’t explain how, on a salary of a few hundred dollars a month, he could afford to live in a waterfront house alongside other Afghan officials in Palm Jumeirah, a luxury Dubai community. Another cable acknowledged that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half brother and the most powerful man in Kandahar before his assassination in July 2011, who had long been on the CIA payroll, was “widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker.”116 Other Hamid Karzai allies also gorged on the drug trade. British forces caught the governor of Helmand with 20,000 pounds of opium in his office. Though ousted from the governorship, he was later appointed to the Senate.117

  The Taliban had actually done a good job keeping the drug trade under control when they were in power. But following the U.S. invasion, drugs had proliferated wildly. Opium production skyrocketed from 185 tons in 2001 to 8,200 tons in 2007, constituting 53 percent of the entire national economy and employing nearly 20 percent of the Afghan population.118 The drug lords lived in opulent carnival-colored mansions called “poppy palaces” that were distinguished by their non-Afghan “narcotecture” styles. But many Afghans suffered from the resulting drug abuse. In 2005, 920,000 addicts were reported. The number increased substantially after that.119

  Under Karzai, illicit drugs provided a steady flow of funds for the Taliban who taxed them at a rate of 10 percent and protected drug convoys for an additional fee. The Taliban also received hundreds of millions of dollars indirectly from the United States and NATO. Journalist Jean MacKenzie reported that in much of the country contractors factored at least a 20 percent cut on projects to the Taliban to let them proceed. One Afghan contractor reported, “I was building a bridge. The local Taliban commander called and said ‘don’t build a bridge there, we’ll have to blow it up.’ I asked him to let me finish the bridge, collect the money—then they could blow it up whenever they wanted. We agreed, and I completed my project.”120

  In 2010, American officials paid $2.2 billion to U.S. and Afghan trucking companies to transport supplies to U.S. bases. These trucking companies hired security firms that were often linked to top government officials to protect the trucks for between $800 and $2,500 per truck. The security firms, in turn, often faked fights to magnify the need for their services and bribed the Taliban to let the trucks pass without attacking them, leading one NATO official in Kabul to complain, “We’re funding both sides of the war.”121

  Karzai’s brother Mahmoud was exonerated by a commission appointed by Hamid Karzai to look into the massive fraud at Kabul Bank, the country’s largest, where powerful insiders and shareholders received $925 million in loans often without either collateral or documentation. Among the recipients were government ministers and members of Parliament. The commission reported that Mahmoud Karzai had paid back his loans although a Central Bank governor informed parliament that Karzai still owed $22 million. He wasn’t the only well-connected brother implicated. Abdul Hassin Fahim, the brother of the country’s powerful first vice president, owed over $100 million but assured the commission that he would pledge enough property to cover that amount.

  In June 2011, Abdul Qadeer Fitrat, the governor of Afghanistan’s Central Bank, resigned and fled the country. He had come under increasing
attack by Karzai’s allies in the wake of his testimony to Parliament and subsequent investigation into the bank fraud and feared for his life. Afghanistan’s attorney general brought charges against him. The allegations were supported by commission chairman Azizullah Ludin, who had earlier served Karzai as head of the Independent Electoral Commission that gave its stamp of approval to the hotly contested 2009 presidential elections, which was universally condemned as fraudulent.122

  The extent of vote fraud in that and other elections had proved an outright embarrassment to the United States and NATO. The UN’s Electoral Complaints Commission threw out more than a million votes, 28 percent of Karzai’s total. Deputy UN envoy Peter Galbraith declared, “The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.”123 When the Afghan parliament subsequently rejected Karzai’s attempt to replace the three foreign members of the five-member commission with hand-picked Afghans, Karzai threatened to join the Taliban.

  Outright buying of votes is so pervasive in Afghanistan that it was barely hidden during the September 2010 parliamentary elections. Votes that cost as little as $1 in Kandahar might go for $18 in eastern Ghazni Province. Most were in the five- to six-dollar range. And with only 2,500 votes needed to win in certain districts, this seemed like a sound investment. The New York Times explained, “many well-heeled Afghan independent candidates are looking to buy their way into the lucrative sinecure of a seat in Parliament. That not only comes with a healthy salary—about $2,200 a month gross—but tremendous opportunities for graft.” Registration cards for female voters were in particularly high demand both because they didn’t contain photographs and because men often voted for women who were not permitted to leave the house.124

  Much of this corruption and fraud was well-known to Obama while he was trying to decide which course of action to pursue in Afghanistan. On November 25, 2009, he met with Rahm Emanuel, national security advisor General Jones, and Jones’s deputy Thomas Donilon and expressed his frustration: “It’d be a lot easier for me to go out and give a speech saying, ‘You know what? The American people are sick of this war, and we’re going to put in 10,000 trainers because that’s how we’re going to get out of there.’ ” Woodward contends that was precisely what Obama wanted to say if he had the courage to stand up to his military advisors.125

  “It’s not the number,” Biden explained. “It’s the strategy.” Still wavering, Obama met with close National Security Council advisors over Thanksgiving weekend to weigh his options. “I don’t see how you can defy your military chain here,” Army Colonel John Tien warned him, implying that his entire military high command—Mullen, Petraeus, McChrystal, and Gates—might resign in protest. Donilon and CIA director Leon Panetta had been expressing similar views. “No Democratic president can go against military advice, especially if he asked for it,” Panetta admonished. “So just do it,” he recommended. “Do what they say.”

  Seeing that Obama was again being forced into a corner against his better judgment, General Douglas Lute, the NSC coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan, reminded him, “Mr. President, you don’t have to do this.” Just the day before, Colin Powell had offered the same advice. “You don’t have to put up with this,” he told the president. “You’re the commander in chief. These guys work for you. Because they’re unanimous in their advice doesn’t make it right. There are other generals. There’s only one commander in chief.”

  When it finally came down to decision time, Obama didn’t have the courage or integrity of a post–Cuban Missile Crisis John F. Kennedy. He settled on a 30,000-troop increase, giving the military leaders almost everything they wanted and more than they expected.126

  Borrowing a page from the Bush guidelines on patriotic atmospherics, Obama chose West Point for his December 1 speech outlining plans to increase U.S. troop levels to around 100,000. He explained that the United States and its allies had invaded Afghanistan because it had provided sanctuary for Al-Qaeda, which was responsible for 9/11. He forgot to mention at least three crucial facts. First, only fifty to one hundred of Al-Qaeda’s worldwide total of 300 cadre were actually in Afghanistan, while the rest of its badly degraded force operated out of Pakistan and received most of its support from citizens of U.S.-backed regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates. Second, Taliban leader Mullah Omar had actually opposed the 9/11 attack against U.S. targets. According to the official report of the 9/11 Commission, “As final preparations were under way during the summer of 2001, dissent emerged among al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan over whether to proceed. The Taliban’s chief, Mullah Omar, opposed attacking the United States. Although facing opposition from many of his senior lieutenants, bin Laden effectively overruled their objections, and the attacks went forward.”127 And, third, terrorists didn’t need a safe haven replete with training camps to conduct clandestine operations. As Paul Pillar, the former deputy chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, pointed out, “the operations most important to future terrorist attacks do not need such a home, and few recruits are required for even very deadly terrorism. Consider: The preparations most important to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took place not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States.”128

  Obama’s logic befuddled CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria: “If Al Qaeda is down to 100 men there at the most, why are we fighting a major war?” Citing the 100 NATO troops who had been killed the previous month and the $100 billion plus annual cost, he determined that the war was costing “more than one allied death for each living Al Qaeda member in the country in just one month” and “a billion dollars for every member of Al Qaeda thought to be living in Afghanistan in one year.” In response to those who justified the war because the Taliban were allies of Al-Qaeda, Zakaria observed, “this would be like fighting Italy in World War II after Hitler’s regime had collapsed and Berlin was in flames just because Italy had been allied with Germany.”129

  Jim Lacey of the Marine Corps War College made his own calculations, based on the 140,000 coalition soldiers, and determined the cost was actually $1.5 billion annually per Al-Qaeda member in Afghanistan. “Did anyone do the math?” Lacey wondered. “In what universe do we find strategists to whom this makes sense?”130

  Historian Andrew Bacevich pointed out the most glaring contradiction. If Afghanistan was really so critical to U.S. safety and security, which he considered “a preposterous notion,” “then why set limits on U.S. involvement there? . . . Why not send 100,000 troops rather than 30,000? Why not vow to do ‘whatever it takes,’ rather than signal an early exit? Why not raise taxes and reinstate the draft . . . ? Why not promise ‘victory’—a word missing from the president’s address?”131

  And the price tag was indeed astronomical and climbing. In 2006, congressional researchers estimated that it cost $390,000 per soldier per year in Afghanistan. By 2009, the figure had climbed to $1 million per year because of the heightened cost of mine-resistant troop carriers and surveillance equipment and the $400 per gallon cost of delivering fuel through insurgent-thick and forbidding mountainous terrain.132

  Obama tried to mollify his progressive supporters by announcing that troop withdrawals would begin July 2011 with all troops out by 2014. In The Promise, Jonathan Alter reported that Obama said to Petraeus and Mullen: “I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in eighteen months?” Petraeus replied, “Sir, I’m confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame.” Obama pressed further, “If you can’t do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?” Petraeus assured him, “Yes, sir, in agreement” and Mullen chimed in, “Yes, sir.”133

  But, as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wryly observed, “President Obama’s eighteen-month deadline for starting the Afghanistan pullout didn’t survive its first eighteen hours.” Administration offi
cials testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee the day after Obama’s speech made clear that the pullout date was only aspirational. Gates set the tone when he testified: “Our current plan is that we will begin the transition . . . in July of 2011. We will evaluate in December 2010 whether we believe we will be able to meet that objective.” Gates informed senators that the president had the prerogative to change his mind. Mullen agreed. Hillary Clinton added, “I do not believe we have locked ourselves into leaving.”134 In May 2010, at a dinner that Clinton hosted for Karzai and some top cabinet ministers, Gates assured the Afghans, “We’re not leaving Afghanistan prematurely. In fact,” he added, “we’re not ever leaving at all.”135 Indeed, the Pentagon was planning to keep 10,000 to 30,000 troops in Afghanistan and believed it was in a strong position to get its way because of Afghan dependence on foreign aid.

  Withdrawal was contingent upon training, arming, and equipping an ANA and police force that could provide security. McChrystal lobbied for a combined force of 400,000. Estimates of the annual cost of maintaining an Afghan security force that size ran to around $10 billion, but Afghan tax revenues only totaled some $2 billion, and three-quarters of the national budget came from foreign aid, leading John Kerry to ask: “So who will pay the bills to avoid having those armed soldiers and police mobilized as part of the next insurgency?”136