The Daily - A Secret History of the War in Afghanistan

Episode Date: December 16, 2019

For nearly two decades, U.S. government officials crafted a careful story of progress to justify their ongoing military campaign in Afghanistan. Newly disclosed documents reveal to what extent that story was not the reality of the war. Today, one former Marine speaks about the missteps the government concealed for years. Guest: Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a reporter in The New York Times Washington bureau and a former Marine infantryman and Eric Schmitt, who covers terrorism and national security for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading:Afghans have endured four decades of conflict, with little prospect of peace. This is the story of the last 18 years since the American invasion, as told by the men and women who’ve lived it.“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” one retired three-star Army general said in hundreds of classified memos obtained by The Washington Post.Here are our key takeaways from the declassified documents.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Newly disclosed documents reveal that for the past two decades, there was the story of the war in Afghanistan that U.S. officials told the public, and the reality of the war that they actively concealed. Times reporters Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmidt on what we're learning from the Afghanistan papers.

It's Monday, December 16th. So Tim, set the scene for me on this day. So it's the first week of December in 2009. I'm a 22-year-old Marine corporal, long before I was a New York Times reporter. I had just walked into a subway shop off base in Jacksonville, North Carolina. It was kind of a downtime between my last deployment to Afghanistan that came to a close in September of 2008, and we had been training for more than a year now for whatever came next. We were kind of in this weird limbo, and we knew that President

Obama was making a speech. So we had walked in and the lady behind the counter put it on the television and there was Obama and she turned up the volume. As Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan. This would come to be known as Obama's surge. The Taliban had been quickly resurging, and

this would be the first attempt to kind of go in, stabilize certain parts of the country where the Taliban had returned, and allow both the Afghan government and the Afghan military to come in behind the American forces in an attempt to prevent a complete Taliban resurgence. The 30,000 additional troops that I'm announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010, the fastest possible pace. And I remember thinking, well, I mean, I don't know who that unit is, but that's a quick turnaround. I mean, it's the beginning of December and, you know, they're probably getting ready to go. And by the time that I had gotten back to the barracks, we had received orders.

We were that unit. We were going to Afghanistan and we were going very soon to kind of be the vanguard of this new strategy that the president said is going to turn the tide. And we had kind of heard the name Marja. It was often billed as the last Taliban stronghold. Whether that was true or not is very arguable. But that would be the first part of the surge, right? That we would go in with other battalions and clear Marjah of the Taliban and install a local government from Kabul that could do what the Taliban were doing, but better. And how are you feeling about this deployment at this point?

I mean, I was 22 years old. I was in charge of seven other Marines as a team leader for a sniper team. I had never passed sniper school, so I was in kind of a weird position where I was in a job that maybe I shouldn't have had, but we had a pretty junior platoon, and where every member of the team, this would be their first deployment in a sniper platoon. So I was, I mean, nervous would be an understatement.

I would not only be doing this job for the first time, but I would be responsible for getting these seven guys back in one piece. So, yeah, I guess it boils down to really one word. I was scared. So what actually happens there? Right, so we get into Afghanistan. we kind of get everybody on their ground. Our battalion's a little over a thousand strong. And in the weeks and months leading up to the big operation to take Marjah in February,

our battalion at the behest of our battalion commander, and I'm sure commanders above him, thinks that it's a good idea to do smaller operations around Marsha. And the battalion commander called it, you know, bloody in our nose or something to that effect. And then at the end of January, January 24th, 2010, a platoon from Charlie Company got into a pretty vicious ambush. from Charlie Company, got into a pretty vicious ambush, and two Marines, Sergeant Daniel Angus and Lance Corporal Zach Smith, both triggered a set of roadside bombs, and they died. They died instantly.

Were these people you knew? I knew Sergeant Angus, but that was the battalion's first deaths. I think the battalion's leadership thought that these things had to happen. These Marines are new in Afghanistan, and they're going to go on this big operation. That's a big deal politically, militarily. The term that military planners like to use is called shaping operations. It was shaping the battlefield for a big offensive. I don't know if it successfully shaped anything. I just know that Zach Smith is dead and so is Dan Angus.

This is not going to be an easy deployment. This is not going to be a walk in the park. And what happens when the fighting ultimately gets underway to try to retake this city? It's February 12th, and I can kind of look at my journal here, and I can kind of recount late February 12th and early February 13th. Slept, ate, still waiting, unknown if going tonight. 10 p.m., staged, 11 p.m., on the flight line where the helicopters are.

So now it's February 13th, 2010. 0900 troops in contact begins begins heavy fire, all directions. Casualty in 3rd Platoon. I think that was Doc Morris. He was a corpsman. He survived. Engineer hit, killed in action. Clear up to Building 19, which was our company's objective that day.

And the engineer who was killed was Jacob Turbette. And the engineer who was killed was Jacob Turbette. He was just shot in a spot where his body armor didn't cover, kind of underneath his armpit. So we're moving up to Building 19. We're kind of getting shot at from a bunch of different directions. Sometimes it's heavy, heavy fire. Sometimes it kind of peters off.

So set up rooftop position on Building 19. Begin taking accurate small arms fire. My team is kind of providing overwatch or looking out for anything that might attack the company. And one of the junior guys in my team kind of asks quietly, is the whole deployment going to be like this? And I remember that very, very, very well. And within 15 minutes we were getting shot at from pretty much every direction so matt tooker matt bostrom hit matt tooker times

two in the right arm bostrom and his chest, medevaced. This part of my memory is these kind of snapshots of moments. I can see Matt yelling. I can see a lot of blood fumbling for a tourniquet, getting him off the roof. I mean, it's just these little hiccups, I guess, of images. They both survived, and Bostrom came back about a month later and took her, never returned the rest of the deployment.

So two members of your team have just been shot. Yeah, that was the first day. I went from eight people to six people, myself included. This is the thing you most feared. It was. Does this operation ultimately achieve its goal? Yeah, I mean, it does in the sense that I think in the next few weeks, maybe by the end of February,

somebody came out on some Pentagon briefing and said... So last week, I spent Monday and Tuesday down in Helmand Province in Marsha, actually talking with and being around the Afghan National Police Forces and the Afghan Army soldiers so that I could see the end product and how it's operating down there in that area. I would say most of us saw it performing better than I think the expectations were. The U.S. holds Marja. It's secure. It never felt like we held it. I mean, in 2008 and the deployment before this one, there was kind of this on-off switch.

We went into a district near Mar switch. It was, we went into a district near Marjah, there was some heavy fighting, and then all of a sudden the Taliban left. This was 2008. And so that was my understanding of kind of how maybe this went, right? We would go in, there would be some fighting, and then the Taliban would leave, and we'd, you know, pay back some locals for the house that we dropped a bomb on or a cow we killed or, God forbid, that anyone innocent was killed. We'd have to pay for that too. But that just wasn't the case. A lot of the villagers we talked to or the locals we talked to were pro-Taliban, had enjoyed the Taliban's governance and how fast they solved some of their problems.

And it was this creeping realization that maybe this isn't going to work. Whatever this is was maybe a little off. And off why? Because I don't think they wanted us there. It was kind of the feeling. And that quickly became apparent in those next days and weeks when maybe someone would be nice to us or we'd walk through a cluster of houses

and everyone would be welcoming and talk to whatever unit was walking through. And then the next day, there'd be an ambush in that exact same spot or there would be a roadside bomb. It was just complicated. We'll be right back. Eric Schmidt, you have covered the war in Afghanistan pretty much since it started 18 years ago.

As our colleague TM was fighting in Marjah as part of that 2009 surge, what was going through the minds of the generals who are overseeing the war? Let me tell you what one important three-star army general was thinking. This is Douglas Lute, who was appointed by President Bush to be the White House czar in Afghanistan and later stayed on under Obama. And Lutz says, quote, we were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking. No one is ever this candid.

And this is coming from the guy who was basically the top advisor to two presidents on Afghanistan policy. And he's basically saying even he didn't know what was going on. Right. And he's looking back on this and he's remorseful. At one point in this, he says, quote, If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction, 2,400 lives lost, who will say this was in vain?

Another thing you'd never hear a general talking about. So what is the context in which General Lute is being so startlingly frank and honest about an ongoing war? The context is essentially a secret history of the entire war in Afghanistan involving hundreds of interviews with senior White House, State Department, Pentagon officials, military commanders, and even Afghanistan officials there to get people to reveal why this Afghan war has proved to be so unwinnable. And all these people thought that what they said would remain secret. But that's not the way it's ended up. And if everyone who agreed to do these interviews thought they would be secret, why are they somehow sitting in front of you in that studio in Washington? Why are they now quite public? Well, the reason is the Washington Post went to court to basically make these interviews, audio tapes of the interviews, public. And after a three-year court battle, they largely succeeded. Even if these famous military leaders thought that these

interviews would remain secret, why would they be so bluntly critical about the war, the war that they helped oversee? Well, in military culture, there's a deeply rooted tradition of self-critique, of self-assessment, whether it's after an actual battle or whether it's after a campaign or a war in general. The military is very much about trying to learn lessons from whatever fight they were in so as not to repeat the mistakes in whatever battle they fight in the future. So this would be a familiar experience to military officials participating in this secret history. Yes, it would. And the most famous example of this kind of self-critique is one that took place in the early 1970s when the Defense Department commissioned a secret study of

the war going on in Vietnam. In newspaper terms, the Pentagon Papers are, of course, one of the major scoops of the century, and the New York Times treated it with suitable respect. And that report was leaked to the New York Times. And it caused such an uproar that the Nixon administration went to court to stop the Times from publishing it. And they actually succeeded for a while. First to follow the Times was the Washington Post. But then the Washington Post got their hands on the same set of documents and continued publishing.

The Boston Globe and Congressman Paul McCloskey announced they too had copies of the secret study. At this, the Pentagon gave in. 7,000 pages revealed to the public. Opinions differ as to precisely what the Pentagon papers reveal, but many observers have seen them as a crushing indictment of America's conduct of the war in Vietnam. From the published accounts, it certainly appears that mistakes were made and good advice went unheeded.

It laid bare all the lies that were being told, that even as the commanders and the officials back in Washington were putting the most positive spin on this war in Southeast Asia, that they knew, these generals and these officials knew, they were losing the war. The war was not going well at all. But they couldn't admit that publicly. And so they were losing the war. The war was not going well at all. But they couldn't admit that publicly. And so they misled the public. They misled the American people. So what do the Afghan papers lay bare that we didn't know or know as well

about this almost 20-year-old war? So I think the Afghanistan papers lay bare several things. First is that it shows just how chaotic the strategy was almost from the beginning. Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. This started out as a very narrow mission, kill al-Qaeda and topple the Taliban government that was hosting it. But that wasn't good enough for these administrations. They decided it had to morph, it had to grow,

and they decided they were going to rebuild Afghanistan in the image of America. We're determined to lift up the people of Afghanistan. The women and children of Afghanistan have suffered enough. This great nation will work hard to bring them hope and help. They were going to create new opportunities for women that didn't exist during the Taliban. They were going to counter narcotics.

They were going to build huge public works projects. And one after another, these missions piled on top of each other until at one point in the documents, a senior state department official says, if there was ever a notion of mission creep, it is in Afghanistan. They've taken a very narrow mission, very focused mission, and turned it into something much larger. And that gets to the second point, that Afghanistan, in the vision that the administrations had, was essentially ungovernable. Here was a country that just geographically had never had a strong central government.

had a strong central government. And yet the United States wanted to come in and create a very strong central government with one guy, President Hamid Karzai. And that just also proved untenable. And in the documents, a senior official, an anonymous official, points out the flaw in this thinking by saying, quote, in Afghanistan, our policy was to create a strong central government, which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government. And then perhaps a third key lesson learned was what a missed opportunity there was after Al-Qaeda had been defeated, after the Taliban regime had been ousted in 2002. The United States had an option. They had a choice. They could negotiate a peace with the vanquished Taliban

or they could continue to fight on. And it's that moment that's captured in one of the documents where Zalmay Khalilzad, United States ambassador to Afghanistan, puts it this way, quote, maybe we were not agile enough or wise enough to reach out to the Taliban early on that we thought they were defeated and that they needed to be brought to justice

rather than that they should be accommodated or some reconciliation be done. At that crucial moment when the United States could have been negotiating with the Taliban. It instead started a new war with Iraq that lasted for years. And it was during that time that the Taliban regrouped, rearmed, and became stronger than ever. Perhaps stronger than they even were in 2001. Before the war began. Before the war even began. before the war even began. Eric, I wonder what, if anything,

the documents tell us about the particular mission that our colleague TM was on in Afghanistan, the Obama-ordered surge that began in 2009. You know, from the very beginning, commanders felt that the surge would fail for several reasons. Even as the president was announcing 30,000 additional troops, he was also putting a deadline on those troops that within 18 months, they would start withdrawing these forces. And all that said to the Taliban was just wait it out. Wait out the Americans until these forces start drawing down. Yet this put tremendous pressure on the commanders in the field Post said that Colonel Bob Crowley, an Army counterinsurgency officer, described. Quote, truth was rarely welcome. Bad news was often stifled.

Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible. Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable, but reinforced that everything we were doing was right, and we became a self-licking ice cream cone. In one document, an official says, quote,

it was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers, trained, violence levels, control of territory, and none of it painted an accurate picture. This was the mission TM was on. Tim, I'm curious what you're feeling when you start reading these documents inside this secret history of the war in Afghanistan, in which commanding officers, in many cases, I have to imagine your superiors, are candidly expressing their own doubts and misgivings about the mission that you and your colleagues were on. Yeah, it's tough.

I mean, all friends' lives, or you start peeling it apart and looking at everything in some attempt to figure out why we did what we did. And then something like this comes out, right? These documents that kind of just stare at you with people that you kind of trusted that said, hey, this battle will go down in history. This is the turning point in the war. Like, you know, as a 22-year-old or as an 18-year-old, as a 19-year-old,

you want to believe that. That's, you think what you're doing is some net positive. You think the bombs that you dropped and the people that you killed were that they should have died. But here we are. It's 2019. We're negotiating. The United States is negotiating with the Taliban. Who's to say that Marja had to happen at all?

And, you know, I guess what makes it tough, especially today and covering the Pentagon as a reporter for The New York Times, is that, you know, I'm still getting fed talking points. The same talking points, the same things that, you know, they were saying in February of 2010. Hey, this is an Afghan-led operation. Everything's going well. The Afghan troops are, you know, dependable allies when on the ground they were not, right? Like, I'm getting different variations of that today as part of my job. And I know on the receiving end, somewhere in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, there might

be a younger version of myself who kind of blindly takes everything at face value. And I mean, again, you just read these documents and it just always ends with me asking where my friends are and why Josh and Brandon, Jacob Turbette, Zach Smith and Dan Angus, where are they? Why are they gone?

And I know that's melodramatic, but... It doesn't seem melodramatic. Yeah, where are they? We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. And everything I do during this, I'm coordinating with White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president's position and our position as to how to handle this to the extent that we can. As the House of Representatives prepares to impeach President Trump, the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, said he is actively coordinating with the White House about how best to defend the president during a trial in the Senate. We all know how it's going to end. There's no chance the president's going to be removed from office. My hope is that there won't be a single Republican

who votes for either of these articles of impeachment. Speaking to Fox News, McConnell predicted that a Senate trial would exonerate Trump and asked his Republican colleagues to vote down any articles of impeachment adopted by the House. Well, you know, the Constitution prescribes a special oath for the senators when they sit as a trial in impeachment. They have to pledge to do impartial justice.

House and Senate Democrats reacted to McConnell's remarks with outrage, saying he had abdicated his role as an impartial juror in the trial. By Sunday, several Democrats had called on McConnell to recuse himself from the proceedings. And here you have the majority leader of the Senate, in effect the former of the jury, saying he's going to work hand in glove with the defense attorney. That's a violation of the oath that they're about to take,

and it's a complete subversion of the constitutional scheme. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.