Steve's Reviews > The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

This is what winning looks like. -- Feb. 2013, General John Allen, Commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan.

I chose the above quote somewhat randomly. Variations of the same hollow rhetoric, from virtually every major American military figure associated with Afghanistan, appear every couple of pages in Craig Whitlock's devastating account of the history of the war in Afghanistan. And it isn't just the military, since both Republican and Democratic administrations also employed political happy talk when it came to discussing the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. From nearly the very beginning, with the U.S. invasion back in 2001, no one really knew what to do with the country after it fell. Bush insisted that they were not there to nation build, but that's exactly what we were doing, but with little understanding of the country and its people. Obama continued many of the same policies, but also pumped oceans of money into the county, but with no real meaningful plan or plans for real change. It did raise the levels of corruption to unbelievable levels in a country struggling to establish a fragile and probably already doomed democracy. (In some respects, in comparison, Vietnam was a real run enterprise.) One irony that jumps out at you from the beginning is that a chief source for Whitlock's book was a project by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) titled (unbelievably) "Lessons Learned." The purpose of the project was to interview numerous (military, political, etc.) figures associated with the war to identify mistakes made. If you know anything at all about the Vietnam conflict, it is as if we didn't learn a single thing thing from that earlier war. If anything, we do things more stupidly now. Interestingly, at the very end of the book, one political figure who had grown skeptical of the war back in 2009, Joe Biden, was finally in a position to something about it. And did.