Roanoke Times Op-Ed Death, taxes and whatever the US does in Afghanistan will fail

By John Freivalds

Roanoke Times, Roanoke Virginia

Published 9/22/2021

It was Founding Father Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) who first said” in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” If he were alive today, he certainly would have added the abject failure of everything the US tried in twenty years of war in Afghanistan would fail. Hey, that’s not just my opinion but the conclusion of Craig Whitlock in his new book The Afghanistan Papers. Whitlock, an investigative reporter for the Washington Post interviewed 1,000 people in a “lesson learned “project who were involved with the Afghan war. What an exhausting tale of woe and very expensive cultural blindness! Whitlock examined the military efforts, the geopolitical strategies, the nation building, the economic efforts to try to find something, anything, that the US could be proud of. Results: Nope. Nada. No way José. And now Congress will try to figure out what went wrong-and who to blame.

There are more than a few co-conspirators in this failure, who would love to throw it all on President Biden and let the others escape history but it ain’t so. From the beginning the US military plays a key role in always mouthing “we are making progress.” It was crazy bureaucrat logic. If there were no attacks by the Taliban for a given week, the military would gloat “see we are making progress; however, if there were a lot of attacks with multiple US deaths they would say” the Taliban is getting desperate, so we are winning.”

The politicians followed these fuzzy predictions with delusions of their own to enhance their political standing. Comparing Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump you would have to say Obama was the most delusional in dealing with Afghanistan. He was the classic ugly American, good intentions but not a clue about the cultural environment. According to author Paul Starobin US strategy in Afghanistan was “arrogant, muddled, naïve and dangerous.” And I would add expensive!

Trump at least gave a date when the US should quit and Biden was left with the big evacuation mess. But at least he got our soldiers out. Sure, the extraction was beyond an embarrassment but in the history of mankind was there ever an acrimonious divorce that went smoothly?

So, who really kept the inertia of the war moving? US funding was a gold mine for American and Afghan contractors with Congressional backing. They made out quite well over twenty years and took a great deal of the $2.5 trillion that the US spent. And why not give an engineer (who was making $100,000 in the states) a $250,000 salary and charge the US government $500,000. And remember that the US embassy had some 1,500 contractors who seldom if ever never left the Embassy to go and check up on projects they started. Too dangerous.

There was one private initiative that almost got off the ground. Unocal wanted to build a pipeline across Afghanistan to move natural gas. According to Ahmid Rashid in his book Taliban “a Taliban delegation came to Houston in 1997 and were put up in a five-star hotel, visited the zoo, supermarkets and the NASA space center. However, a woman’s group with the name “Feminist Majority Foundation to Stop Gender Apartheid” attacked Unocal involvement with the Taliban pipeline. The groups shamed Unocal to give up the project due to how the Taliban treated women.

Since no private investment was available the US government financed almost everything in the hopes the US was loved. To all this you must add the corruption. The Wall Street Journal reported suitcases of billions in cash were flown out of Kabul to Dubai which helped build all those desert skyscrapers. Wouldn’t those dollars be useful now in rebuilding the Gulf Coast and developing SW Virginia fixing flood damage in New England?