There are Heroes, and Then There are Heroes

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Hugh Thompson, Jr.

Memorial Day has its roots in the US Civil War, and has expanded to include remembrance of all those who have served their country and have died. In various places, the remembrance may focus on a particular conflict, like the Civil War and Carbondale, IL. It might also center on a location, like Arlington Cemetery or the Pearl Harbor Memorial. It might focus on recipients of the Medal of Honor. In a lot of places, Memorial Day is a big deal.

But on this Memorial Day, with the protests on college campuses in the US and around the world related to the unfolding events in Gaza and the West Bank, my thoughts go to Hugh Thompson, Jr., Glenn Andreotta, and Lawrence Colburn. They were three members of the US Army, who received the Soldiers Medal on March 6, 1998 for their actions 30 years earlier as they flew a mission on March 16, 1968.

Thompson commanded a observation helicopter at the time, tasked with locating enemy firing positions and then directing US forces in response. As their helicopter came over the village of My Lai, they observed no enemy fire, but were shocked to see US military forces killing obvious Vietnamese civilians. At one point, Thompson maneuvered his helicopter between civilians and US forces on the ground, so as to protect the Vietnamese civilians, and he ordered Colburn, his door gunner, to open fire on the US forces if they tried to prevent him from protecting the civilians. Colburn, without hesitation, concurred. Andreotta, the crew chief, was shocked to see the atrocities committed by US forces, and helped locate other civilians who had been shot and needed medical care. As Thompson described it,

Glenn Andreotta—if there was a hero, I don’t like that word, but if there was a hero at My Lai—it was Glenn Andreotta, because he saw movement in that ditch, and he fixed in on this one little kid and went down into that ditch. I would not want to go in that ditch. It’s not pretty. It was very bad. I can imagine what was going through his mind down there, because there was more than one still alive—people grabbing hold of his pants, wanting help. “I can’t help you. You’re too bad [off].” He found this one kid and brought the kid back up and handed it to Larry, and we laid it across Larry and my lap and took him out of there. I remember thinking Glenn Andreotta put himself where nobody in their right mind would want to be, and he was driven by something. I haven’t got the aircraft on the ground real stable. He bolted out of that aircraft into this ditch. Now he was a hero. Glenn Andreotta gave his life for his country about three weeks later. That’s the kind of guy he was, and he was a hero that day.

For their actions in 1968, Thompson. Andreotta, and Colburn received the Soldier’s Medal, given to “any person of the Armed Forces of the United States or of a friendly foreign nation who, while serving in any capacity with the Army of the United States, including Reserve Component soldiers not serving in a duty status at the time of the heroic act, distinguished himself or herself by heroism not involving conflict with an enemy.”

That last phrase — not involving conflict with an enemy — is central to why these three received the Soldier’s Medal and not the Medal of Honor.

Thompson’s medal was awarded with this description:

Soldier’s Medal, Hugh C. Thompson, Jr., then Warrant Officer One, United States Army:

For heroism above and beyond the call of duty on 16 March 1968, while saving the lives of at least 10 Vietnamese civilians during the unlawful massacre of noncombatants by American forces at My Lai, Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam. Warrant Officer Thompson landed his helicopter in the line of fire between fleeing Vietnamese civilians and pursuing American ground troops to prevent their murder. He then personally confronted the leader of the American ground troops and was prepared to open fire on those American troops should they fire upon the civilians. Warrant Officer Thompson, at the risk of his own personal safety, went forward of the American lines and coaxed the Vietnamese civilians out of the bunker to enable their evacuation. Leaving the area after requesting and overseeing the civilians’ air evacuation, his crew spotted movement in a ditch filled with bodies south of My Lai Four. Warrant Officer Thompson again landed his helicopter and covered his crew as they retrieved a wounded child from the pile of bodies. He then flew the child to the safety of a hospital at Quang Ngai. Warrant Officer Thompson’s relayed radio reports of the massacre and subsequent report to his section leader and commander resulted in an order for the cease fire at My Lai and an end to the killing of innocent civilians. Warrant Officer Thompson’s Heroism exemplifies the highest standards of personal courage and ethical conduct, reflecting distinct credit on him, and the United States Army.

Thompson and his crew did not act against a foreign enemy, but against members their own US military. The Soldier’s Medal, therefore, was as high an honor as they could receive — but the fact that it took 30 years for the DOD to admit that they deserved it is a stain on the US military. (Stars and Stripes has a great writeup of My Lai and the aftermath, written at the death of Larry Colbrun – the last of the three heroes, and it includes the push it took to get the DOD to award these medals.)

All this came back to mind as I read a Guardian piece yesterday about a prison camp run by the Israel Defense Force:

Prisoners held at an Israeli detention camp in the Negev desert are being subjected to widespread physical and mental abuses, with at least one reported case of a man having his limb amputated as a result of injuries sustained from constant handcuffing, according to two whistleblowers who worked at the site.

The sources described harrowing treatment of detainees at the Israeli Sde Teiman camp, which holds Palestinians from Gaza and suspected Hamas militants, including inmates regularly being kept shackled to hospital beds, blindfolded and forced to wear nappies.

According to the two sources, the facility, located approximately 18 miles from the Gaza border, consists of two distinct sections: an enclosure where up to 200 Palestinian detainees from Gaza are confined under severe physical restrictions inside cages, and a field hospital where dozens of patients with war injuries are handcuffed to their beds and often deprived of pain relief.

One whistleblower, who has worked in the facility as a prison guard, said detainees were forced to stand up for hours, or to sit on their knees. The source, who spoke out at risk of reprisals, said several detainees were beaten with truncheons and not able to move their heads or to speak at the facility.

“The prisoners are detained in a sort of cages, all blindfolded and handcuffed,” the source said. “If someone speaks or moves, they are immediately silenced or they are forced to stand with their hands raised above their head and handcuffed for up to one hour.

“If they are unable to keep their hands raised, the soldiers attach the handcuffs to the bars of the cage. Many of the detainees had infected wounds that were not being properly treated.”

[snip]

The prison guard’s statements are corroborated by a second whistleblower who spoke to the Guardian and who was part of the medical staff operating in the field hospital in Sde Teiman.

“There were about 15 patients in total, they were all handcuffed and blindfolded,” he said. “They were naked, wearing diapers and were covered by blankets. Most of them appeared to have obvious war injuries, some had undergone amputations and others underwent major abdominal or chest surgery. They were practically naked except for a diaper.”

The member of the medical staff added: “I understand that it is difficult to treat a patient accused of heinous crimes, but it is the job we have chosen and as physicians we should recognise that every human being has a right to appropriate healthcare regardless of their backgrounds.”

There’s a lot packed into that article, and the link under “the facility” in the excerpt above is a big deal. It goes to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which says this about the conditions in this camp (emphasis in the original):

The testimonies of innocent people held in the Sde Teiman Military Base and released after being interrogated painted a horrifying picture of inhumane prison conditions, humiliation and torture. The detainees are held in a kind of cage, crowded, sitting on their knees in a painful position for many hours every day. They are handcuffed at all hours of the day and blindfolded. This is how they eat, relieve themselves and receive medical care.

Detainees at the facility were physically punished by tying them to a fence for hours with their hands raised. Those whose hands were tired and took them down were beaten. In addition, soldiers at the facility beat detainees, extinguished cigarettes on them, urinated on detainees, and deprived them of food, toilets, and sleep. Additional evidence of the inhumane conditions in the detention facility arises from requests from doctors, who serve in the hospital established at the base, for the purpose of treating detainees. They testify that detainees’ arms and legs are routinely amputated due to handcuffed wounds, lack of medication, inadequate medical care, violence suffered by detainees, and lack of food.

I have no complaints about those who have received the Medal of Honor for their heroic actions in the face of enemy fire. But folks like the heroes of My Lai and the anonymous guard and medic at Sde Teiman publicly confirming what released prisoners have said about the actions of the Israeli Defense Force are even more heroic. It’s one thing to stand up to “the enemy,” but standing up to your brothers and sisters in arms when they violate basic humanitarian norms — putting your own bodies in the path of their weapons — is truly amazing.

Enjoy your BBQ this weekend — a tradition that has been part of Memorial Day since the beginning (at least in Carbondale) — and a raise a glass to Thompson, Andreotta, Colburn, and all those who defend civilians, even in the midst of war.

Because that’s when civilians are most in need of protection.

The Biden Administration Staved Off Russia’s First Round of InfoWar on Ukraine, But How about the Second?

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As I’ve noted (most recently in my series on Jeff Gerth’s error-ridden screed about “Russiagate” [sic]), Russian denialists cling to the John Solomon report, from the period when he and Rudy Giuliani were chumming up people like Dmitry Firtash, that Konstantin Kilimnik was really a State Department source, which — they fancy — proves he was not a Russian spy.

The actual communications between Kilimnik and people at State show him attempting to stovepipe shoddy propaganda to his State contacts, not offering useful information.

But a potentially more telling example of Kilimnik’s contacts with State are his description, after going out to drinks with John Kerry’s then-Chief of Staff, Jonathan Finer, just before Klimnik traveled to New York to meet with Paul Manafort about the election, that “Finer or whatever the fuck is his name,” was, “In total space.”

On the evening of May 6, 2016, Kilimnik’s communications suggest he met for “off the record” drinks with Department of State employees.368 Kilimnik was frustrated by this meeting, stating that he met “Finer or whatever the fuck is his name. In total space.”369

Patten said he understood “[i]n total space” to mean “in outer space” and.therefore not well informed on issues involving Ukraine. Patten Tr., p. 79; FBI, FD-302, Patten 5/22/2018.

In 2016, Paul Manafort’s handler was pissed that Finer wasn’t buying his bullshit about Ukraine.

Which is why I find these passages, from Politico’s oral history of the events leading up to Russia’s expanded invasion of Ukraine, a good place to start reading it. Finer — now Biden’s Deputy National Security Adviser — described bringing allies around to preparing for Russia’s attack by “bombarding them” with so much information they could no longer ignore evidence of Russia’s likely attack.

AMANDA SLOAT: It got to the point where we had to say to the Europeans, “Fine, we can agree to disagree analytically, but let’s start planning as if we are right. If we are right, then we’re in a good place because we’ve got all our planning. If you’re right, that’s the best possible outcome because then there’s not going to be an invasion — at best, this will have just been a waste of time.”

JON FINER: We eventually brought people around by bombarding them with information that you could not ignore.

More importantly, Finer — the guy who, Kilimnik scoffed, was “in total space” about Ukraine — described how Biden’s team preempted Russia’s efforts to use disinformation to justify their attack.

JON FINER: There was a very high likelihood that Russia would use disinformation — which is a fancy word for lies — to create some pretext for invading. By putting out information well in advance of their inevitable attempts to create this justification, we thought that we would be able to discredit any attempt by Russia to portray this as a just war.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you set some time aside to read the whole thing. It’s a remarkable account of American efforts to do what’s right.

It’s also an expression of the auspicious collection of people in place for the fight against Ukraine. At various times, I’ve thought about how lucky the US was to have lifelong diplomat Bill Burns at CIA, to have no-drama Avril Haines at DNI, to have an expert like Tony Blinken at State. This piece provides a glimpse of how well they all worked together, little over a year after taking over from the shambolic Trump Administration.

As Burns — who spent over thirty years at State — described, this is the way government is supposed to work.

BILL BURNS: It’s the way government should work, in my opinion. The president set a very clear sense of direction. There was a shared understanding of the problem and coordination amongst the principals. Broadly speaking, the U.S. government performed the way it should perform in a situation like that.

There are specific details I’ll likely return to: comments suggesting the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was a necessary step before Putin would launch the invasion, descriptions from deputy NSA for international economics Daleep Singh and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco about how they’re targeting corrupt oligarchs.

But the most salient comments are about something that has already gotten a lot of coverage: the decision to declassify a great deal of information to undercut Russia’s information advantage.

EMILY HORNE: Many of the senior policymakers who were in and still are in the administration remember vividly seeing these intel streams in 2014 and then seeing what had been predicted come to life. There was this feeling of: “We knew this was coming, but we couldn’t say so because it was classified.” People remember that frustration and felt that we couldn’t let that happen a second time. All the conditions were there for us to try something new and bold, but risky. It was a gamble that this would work.

JAKE SULLIVAN: We convened a meeting of our team to talk through a strategy of downgrade [declassification], and then I engaged directly with the senior most people in the intelligence community about how we could do this.

BILL BURNS: The president made the decision to declassify some of our intelligence relatively early on, which is always a complicated choice to make. Along with my colleagues in the intelligence community, the DNI and others, I believe strongly that it was the right choice. I had seen too many instances where Putin had created false narratives that we never caught up to.

AVRIL HAINES: I remember quite clearly when [the president] directed me to do this. I have this sense of “OK, we’ve got to figure out how to do this in a way that protects sources and methods and understand what it is that we’re trying to achieve here.” It became a real team sport. How do we do this in a way that allows us to protect what we hold dearest?

JAKE SULLIVAN: What we would do is send to [the intelligence community] in classified form the things that we wanted to be able to say, they would tell us what could be declassified, and what couldn’t. We would take what they declassified and put it out. That began in early December and became a central feature of our approach through the beginning of the invasion — and since.

[snip]

GEN. PAUL NAKASONE: People are always asking, “Hey, did you ever think you’d be releasing your most sensitive intelligence to the American public?” I thought to myself, “Little bit of change.” But what I really think: “This is the nation’s intelligence. This isn’t an agency or the intelligence community’s or anyone else’s intelligence. When it benefits our national security, why do we not do that?”

JOHN KIRBY: I think this is one of the most valuable lessons that we have learned from a communications perspective — the real benefit to downgrading intelligence and making it public. You can really affect the decision-making process of a potential adversary. We were beating Putin’s lie to the punch, and we know that by doing so we got inside his decision-making loop.

Between this and extensive efforts to avoid the invasion, which have gotten less focus, this represented several departures from the poisonous secrecy of “the Deep State” in the decades leading up to it. Those complaining about “the Deep State” likely won’t notice, though, since they’re re-reading a debunked Sy Hersh story for the fourth time.

The oral history doesn’t address several questions I have about US efforts to anticipate and undercut Russia’s information war.

While the piece talks a lot about increased intelligence sharing, it doesn’t discuss the extent to which increased information sharing is a factor in the large number of spy networks — in Europe — that have been rolled up in recent years, starting before the invasion but accelerating since, as WaPo recently laid out.

Over the past year, as Western governments have ramped up weapons deliveries to Ukraine and economic sanctions against Moscow, U.S. and European security services have been waging a parallel if less visible campaign to cripple Russian spy networks. The German case, which also involved the arrest of a senior official in the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, followed roll-ups of suspected Russian operatives in the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Poland and Slovenia.

The moves amount to precision strikes against Russian agents still in Europe after the mass expulsion of more than 400 suspected Russian intelligence officers from Moscow’s embassies across the continent last year.

U.S. and European security officials caution that Russia retains significant capabilities but said that its spy agencies have sustained greater damage over the past year than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

Russia laid the groundwork for this invasion for years, and it seems Europe is only now reversing some of Russia’s efforts behind it.

But what hasn’t been rolled back — and where this oral history seems overly optimistic — is a Russian backed network of propagandists who have gotten louder with the anniversary of the war.

No one has gotten louder than Tucker Carlson, who seems to be making support for Russia a litmus test in his support for 2024. In his anniversary special, he made the following baseless claims:

  • There was no proof that Russia hacked the DNC (Tucker alters the timeline by a month to sustain this claim); the Democrats weren’t even hacked.
  • The investigation into Trump was all a hoax.
  • If the Ukraine war continues, the US will lose.
  • Biden never mentioned the costs on the support for Ukraine.
  • Biden is censoring information about the war.
  • Zelenskyy is a destroyer who wants US troops to fight.
  • Ukraine is “the least free place in all of Europe, which is why it’s Joe Biden’s favorite place.”
  • Biden was elected in a sketchy election and has never had a majority of support in this country, so he has no legitimacy (Tucker made no mention of Trump’s failure to ever get majority support).
  • Extremism (he doesn’t say terrorism) will have been caused by neglect.
  • Bolsonaro and Trump are moderates.
  • The Biden Administration blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.

This is Tucker doing what he balked at doing during the transition, until he grew desperate to stave off the “demonic force” that is Trump: undermining the legitimate President of the US. This is Tucker simply making stuff up about Russia’s attack on the US in 2016, taking the already baseless claims of denialists and pushing them five steps further.

He’s doing it, of course, while mining exclusive access of footage to the most sensitive spaces in the Capitol.

I think Tucker is right about one thing: Biden sounds overly optimistic. Because the Republican Party — and a large number of horseshoe leftists — would rather Russia win this war than let him succeed. And that’s a harder information battle to win.

My Veterans Day

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In the Summer of 1964 as I prepared to enter the University of Notre Dame as a freshman, the Army ROTC program sent me something about enrolling. I talked to my Dad, a deeply conservative man who served two years as an Army doctor and five years in the Public Health Service as a doctor in a rural Georgia town. He insisted that I sign up for the first two years, and then make a final choice for the last two years. The War in Viet Nam was nearly nothing, and it didn’t seem like a big deal, so I did.

Then in the Spring of ’66, I had to decide whether to commit to two more years of ROTC and a two-year enlistment, or quit. I talked to my Dad again. He thought it would be best to stay in. Besides the small monthly stipend, he pointed out that I was likely to be drafted, and that serving as an officer was better than being an enlisted man. Officers made more money and had a somewhat larger amount of control over their lives, he said, which was funny because he truly hated being bossed around when he was an Army pediatrician. So I stayed.

In the Spring of ’68, we were all asked to select a branch and a location. I picked Signal Corps, because they had a significant computer-oriented section, and I was good at that; and Germany and Korea as a back-up. A couple of days later Major MacIntosh asked me to stay after class. He said he had noticed my concerns about the War, and wondered if I really wanted to serve. I didn’t. I wanted to go to grad school. But I knew I was likely to be drafted, and I surely wasn’t going to go in as an enlisted man when I had the chance to be an officer. So I made up some mealy-mouthed answer. I got into the Signal Corps, and was assigned to Germany. Frankfurt I think.

I entered in October ’68. I immediately realized how much I didn’t like it. And then I was told I’d have to re-up for two more years to keep the Germany assignment. Eventually I was sent to Sinop Turkey by Betty Sammons of blessed memory.

I was reminded of this by an essay by David French in The Atlantic. I think it’s fair to say that French and I are about as far apart on the political spectrum as it’s possible for two people to be.

In his essay, French says he had been a vocal supporter of the Iraq invasion on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had to go. In 2005, French, then 36 and and out-of-shape activist lawyer, jaoined the Army as a JAG officer, and volunteered for service in Iraq. He served with a forward unit for a year and then in the Reserves. He explains his motivation:

One evening, at home in Philadelphia, I read the story of a Marine officer who had been wounded in Anbar province. He’d used the reporter’s satellite phone to call his wife and two kids and tell them that he was hurt but he’d be okay. At that instant I was hit with a burning sense of conviction. How could I support a war I wasn’t willing to fight?

French knew the Iraq War was a nightmare, but he volunteered to serve at the front. He thinks his service was worth the pain and grief he suffered.

It reminded me once again of my rationale for joining the Army, as best I can reconstruct it through the haze of he decades and many retellings. I know I was opposed to it on the grounds we discussed at Notre Dame, St. Augustine’s Just War Theory. We all talked about it all the time, discussing morality, duty, and options. I was also opposed to getting hurt or killed. I don’t clearly remember other considerations, but as I told the story to others over the years. I usually mentioned a couple of things. The alternative of going to Canada or trying to duck seemed cowardly. It’s my duty to sere my country, even if I thought the War was immoral. And, I didn’t want to make some other person take my place. At least, that’s how I remember it today.

French says his service was worthwhile not because of anything he did that was of benefit to Iraquis or the US, but because of the people he served with, and because of the experiences he had. In the same way, I think I learned a lot about being an adult, and being a leader, and figuring out how to use persuasion, technical skills, and bravado, to achieve decent results for members of my unit and myself.

French writes:

The decision to serve is a tangible declaration that you love your home—the place and its people—enough to bear profound burdens to sustain its existence and its way of life.

I was and am angry about the War in Viet Nam. I know dead and wounded men. I cried the first time I went to the Viet Nam Memorial in DC. and thinking about it chokes me up today. I’ve met men whose lives were wrecked by pain, drugs and alcohol as a result of their service. I knew other men who served, and who came out fine. Very rarely, we talked about out motivations.

But throughout the years I’ve felt two things above all: I was willing to take my turn. I didn’t hide out in the Reserves like W. Bush and Dan Quayle, and I didn’t duck out like Bill Clinton.

And slowly, slowly, I’ve come to agree with French about the decision to serve. I love our country and its people, and our way of life. Even when I when I am certain we need to change.

=======
Update: all of us faced terrible choices in the Viet Nam War era, because of the draft. Everyone has a story about their decisions. This is mine. I hope veterans of all eras will use this post to discuss their stories for the Emptywheel community.

Two Possible End Games in Ukraine

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Brothers in Authoritarian Leadership: Stalin and Putin (h/t openDemocracy, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

With all the conversations around Russia’s withdrawal from around Kyiv in order to refocus on the Donbas, and the discussions of the various negotiations that seek to arrange for a cease fire if not a complete end to the fighting, there are two big possible end games that appear increasingly likely to me, though I don’t see anyone publicly talking about them. (More common are big picture “likely outcome” pieces like this.) I don’t know the odds of either of the following two end games happening, but the odds are not zero for either one of them and, IMHO, they are going up.

End Game 1 begins with a simple premise: from Putin’s point of view, Putin cannot fail – he can only be failed.

Given the demise of the initial battle plan of some of Putin’s generals and the absence of the cake walk with Ukrainians greeting the Russian Army as liberators predicted by at least some of Putin’s intelligence officers, there is plenty of failure to go around.

Per BBC Russian, via The Guardian, the Russian officer corps has been taking extreme casualties.

. . . [G]rowing evidence suggests high numbers of casualties among the units that led Russia’s invasion in February, including paratrooper units considered to be the “tip of the spear”.

The video of the memorial for the 247th Guards Air Assault Regiment, which is based in Stavropol, Russia, showed a number of men whose deaths have already been confirmed through public accounts.

Another video from a nearby cemetery that is used by the unit, along with others, showed a long row of funeral wreaths.

The unit was reported to have fought in southern Ukraine near the city of Kherson, which has been held by the Russian army since late February. A Ukrainian counter-attack near Kherson has led to heavy losses for Russian troops there.

Last month, Russia reported the death of the commander of the regiment, Col Konstantin Zizevsky, one of at least eight Russian colonels to have been killed during the war in Ukraine.

BBC Russian, which has kept a confirmed count of the number of Russian losses, has said that 217 of its 1,083 confirmed Russian war dead were officers, from junior lieutenants to generals. Senior Russian officers often fight alongside their units because decisions must be confirmed by higher-ranking personnel.

Of the confirmed deaths in the military, more than 15% come from Russia’s elite airborne, or VDV, units. The high number of losses among those units has also been accompanied by reports of desertions.

The NY Times emphasizes those casualty figures in this little nugget on the BBC report:

The Russian service of the BBC counted 1,083 military death announcements by local officials or news outlets. But 20 percent of those deaths concerned officers — a disproportionate toll indicating that vast numbers of deaths of lower-ranking soldiers may be going unreported.

Lots of dead officers means lots of newsworthy funerals, funerals, and more funerals. Add in reports of desertions by soldiers already in Ukraine. And now this as reported by the NY Times:

Word of the dangers of fighting is filtering down through the public in Russia. Mikhail Benyash, a lawyer in the southern city of Krasnodar, said he had received more than 100 requests from Russian military and national guard service members about their legal rights should they refuse to fight.

“They don’t see a point in killing anyone,” Benyash said. “Plus, they don’t see a point in being killed.”

From Putin’s POV, all of this is unacceptable, and all of it is proof that he has been failed. This, obviously, cannot be allowed to stand. With End Game 1, the question for Putin is who he should hold responsible for these failures.

Russian history demonstrates how a leader obsessed with his personal power and who sees himself as the embodiment of the nation reacts to a situation like this: he makes An Example of someone. Or several someones. Or hundreds of someones. In the post-WWII USSR, Stalin invented what came to be known as the Doctors’ Plot — a conspiracy theory that various doctors had or were preparing to kill various Soviet leaders. Stalin did so in order to justify a purge of his political enemies, consolidate power, and in various other ways continue to build up the cult of personality around him. The only thing that saved these doctors was that Stalin died before the trials could be held.

Three years later, Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in his secret speech to the 20th Communist Party Congress entitled “On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences.” As Khrushchev noted, the Doctors’ Plot was but a small piece of a larger whole for Stalin:

Stalin’s willfulness vis-a-vis the party and its central committee became fully evident after the 17th party congress, which took place in 1934…

It was determined that of the 139 members and candidates of the party’s Central Committee who were elected at the 17th congress, 98 persons, that is, 70 percent, were arrested and shot (mostly in 1937-38). [Indignation in the hall.] . . .

The same fate met not only the central committee members but also the majority of the delegates to the 17th party congress. Of 1,966 delegates with either voting or advisory rights, 1,108 persons were arrested on charges of anti-revolutionary crimes, i.e., decidedly more than a majority. This very fact shows how absurd, wild, and contrary to commonsense were the charges of counter-revolutionary crimes made out, as we now see, against a majority of participants at the 17th party congress. [Indignation in the hall.] . . .

The parallels between Stalin and Putin are . . . troubling. The murder of Boris Nemtsov. The repeated assassination attempts against and subsequent imprisonment of Alexei Navalny. Dig a little more, and you come to names like Sergei Magnitsky, Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko, . . .

The list is long, and the pattern is clear: cross Putin or fail Putin, and Putin will have you killed.

So how might Putin choose to deal with the generals, colonels, and intelligence officers in Moscow who failed him? The more charitable path would be that Putin reassigns them to take the places of the generals, colonels, and intelligence officers killed in Ukraine. I say “charitable” because this lets them take their chances with the Ukrainians, who seem incredibly good at killing senior Russian officers, but not completely effective at it.

The less charitable path cuts out the Ukrainian middle men, and is more emphatic and more thorough: Putin simply executes them in Russia. I can hear the statement from the Kremlin now . . . “They did not properly train their troops . . . They criminally diverted money to equip our fine troops with the equipment they needed, and lined their own pockets instead . . . They lied to me about the prospects of this special military operation . . . They were acting as spies for the West . . . They have failed me. They have failed Russia. They have failed you, the Russian people. They will do so no longer.”

Either way End Game 1 is for Putin to declare failure in Ukraine, blame it on military and intelligence officers he wants to get rid of, dispose of them, and move on from there.

Which brings us to End Game 2.

Russian military and intelligence officers are no doubt much more acutely aware of and worried about End Game 1 than I am. End Game 2 is that the generals take matters into their own hands, hoping for a more successful result than Operation Valkyrie had on July 20, 1944.

Of course, Putin is aware of the possibility of End Game 2, which may make him more anxious to work toward End Game 1. But the generals know that Putin is aware of this, which may make them more anxious to work toward End Game 2. But Putin is aware that the generals are aware . . .

Let me be clear: I have no secret sources in anyone’s intelligence agencies. I simply read what is publicly available, and put it alongside a bit of historical perspective. As I said at the top, I don’t know the odds of either of these End Games happening. But between the sanctions taking a stronger bite every day and the ongoing military failures on the ground in Ukraine, Putin and his generals both need some way to bring this to an end, and fast. End Game 1 will accomplish that, and so will End Game 2.

Journalists Getting Suckered by Ass-Covering Sources on Afghanistan

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Rather than explaining why the government didn’t know that Ashraf Ghani was going to flee the country, allegedly with bags of cash, national security sources are busy suckering journalists to report that they warned of the quick demise of the Afghan military.

A positively egregious example is this piece from WSJ’s Vivian Salama. What it reports is that 23 people in the State Department concerned about the rapid collapse of the Afghan government warned that the collapse would happen after August 31 — that is, still eleven days in the future from today. It also reports that the Biden Administration was already hastening efforts to get allies out of Afghanistan the day after those 23 people warned Tony Blinken (meaning, State was already aware of and working on the urgency).

The cable was sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Director of Policy Planning Salman Ahmed. Mr. Blinken received the cable and reviewed it shortly after receipt, according to the person familiar with the exchange, who added that contingency planning was already under way when it was received, and that Mr. Blinken welcomed their feedback.

[snip]

The signatories of the dissent channel cable urged the State Department to begin registering and collecting personal data in advance for all Afghans who qualify for Special Immigrant Visas, aimed at those who worked as translators or interpreters; locally employed embassy staff; and for those eligible for other U.S. refugee programs while there was still six weeks left before the withdrawal deadline.

It also urged the administration to begin evacuation flights no later than Aug. 1, the people said.

On July 14, a day after the cable was sent, the White House announced Operation Allies Refuge to support the relocation of interested and eligible Afghan nationals and their immediate families who supported the U.S. government for the special immigrant visas. Evacuations didn’t kick into high gear until last week and have been complicated by the Taliban takeover of Kabul on Sunday.

Several other actions that have since been taken by the administration were consistent with some of the requests and recommendations in the cable, the person familiar with the cable exchange said. [my emphasis]

In other words, the story should be about how top Biden officials were already ahead of where the 23 people who signed this dissent cable were, and where they weren’t, they integrated the recommendations of the cable.

The story should be about how the process worked. The story should be about how, even these 23 people who were really alarmed about the fragile state of the Afghan government were still too optimistic about how long it could survive.

The story probably should also be about how, after Biden made comments on July 8 (which the article quotes) that were far too rosy about the state of the Afghan government, someone got him to stop.

That’s not what the story is about though. The paragraph describing how contingency planning was already underway is the seventh paragraph in the story; the paragraphs describing how the White House had already prepared an attempt to accelerate SIV evacuations appear at paragraphs 16 to 19.

In paragraph two, meanwhile, the story uses the word “imminent” to suggest days when it really means weeks.

The classified cable represents the clearest evidence yet that the administration had been warned by its own officials on the ground that the Taliban’s advance was imminent and Afghanistan’s military may be unable to stop it.

And the headline doesn’t note that the cable’s warning was, like all other warnings, too optimistic about the state of the Afghan government.

Internal State Department Cable Warned of Kabul Collapse

I get that such stories — suggesting that Biden ignored warnings and so owns this collapse — will drive a lot of traffic. Biden does own this collapse, along with Trump, Obama, and (especially) George Bush. But he owns it because of stupid decisions made 18 months and 18 years ago, not the efforts he made in July to mitigate the aftermath of those earlier decisions.

A far more urgent, and honest, story is the explanation for why, thus far, zero anonymous sources have claimed to have an explanation why no one knew that Ghani was going to flee. Another urgent story is to understand what forces helped the Taliban succeed so wildly, and how such efforts were able to so thoroughly evade our intelligence collection. Another interesting story is why Afghan veteran Christopher Miller, who was promoted way outside of his expertise level and was surrounded by flunkies fiercely loyal to the President, is making shit up about what was the real plan he was hired to implement.

Every story claiming prescience published thus far has in fact revealed that the people claiming prescience didn’t know this would happen either. It’s time to stop pretending they did and starting figuring out why they didn’t.

There May Well Have Been an Intelligence Failure in Afghanistan

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Almost as quickly as Republicans and Democrats rushed to blame the other for the humiliating fall of Afghanistan, and as quickly as bipartisan NeoCons and bipartisan anti-Imperialists blamed the other for victory of the Taliban, the Intelligence Community and DOD have rushed to blame each other.

This story is just one example, but there are many.

In 2019, U.S. spy agencies delivered a sweeping assessment known as a National Intelligence Estimate of the conflict that warned many of America’s often-stated objectives were in jeopardy even with a continued U.S. military presence, and without direct American backing all but destined to collapse.

“We would run into really serious battles with the Pentagon, which would say, ‘We’ve got boots on the ground, we know the truth,’ ” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official.

The diverging views on the war were a reflection of the institutional predispositions of military planners groomed to accept even the most daunting missions and find ways to deliver results.

In Afghanistan, “you had good people who tried mightily believing they could do it,” the former intelligence official said. “And in the end are forced to face the reality that they couldn’t.”

One thing all these parties are fighting over is whether there was an intelligence failure.

Mike Morell, like many of the spooks being interviewed, says it wasn’t his fault.

Michael Morell, the former acting and deputy director of the CIA wrote on Twitter: “What is happening in Afghanistan is not the result of an intelligence failure. It is the result of numerous policy failures by multiple administrations. Of all the players over the years, the Intelligence Community by far has seen the situation in Afghanistan most accurately.”

And he’s right: Anyone who didn’t know, going back well over a decade, that an Afghan regime would collapse without US backing simply wasn’t paying attention.

That said, just days ago the most dire intelligence predicting that the Afghan government would fall to the Taliban spoke in terms of a month, not a weekend.

The Biden administration is preparing for Afghanistan’s capital to fall far sooner than feared only weeks ago, as a rapid disintegration of security has prompted the revision of an already stark intelligence assessment predicting Kabul could be overrun within six to 12 months of the U.S. military departing, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

One official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the issue’s sensitivity, said Tuesday that the U.S. military now assesses a collapse could occur within 90 days. Others said it could happen within a month. Some officials said that although they were not authorized to discuss the assessment, they see the situation in Afghanistan as more dire than it was in June, when intelligence officials assessed a fall could come as soon as six months after the withdrawal of the U.S. military.

At the same time, spooks saying that they didn’t know the effect that a quick withdrawal would have on the timing, even though others note the timing has always been known — including by the Taliban and our regional adversaries. That is, the IC didn’t fail to warn about how fragile the Afghan government was, but they seem to have been surprised by the snowball effect.

There are discrete decisions that do require accountability, such as the decision — apparently made by Mark Milley — that keeping Bagram running until we exited was not “tactically necessary.”

[Congressman Doug] Lamborn asks if it is “at all possible” for the United States to keep open Bagram Airfield. Gen. Milley responds that it is not tactically necessary.

If things get really bad in the days ahead, it will be because US armed forces rushed in to maintain order while the US evacuates are working at the airport rather than Bagram, which is far easier to secure.

But I do wonder whether there was not, in fact, a really dire intelligence failure having largely to do with how Ashraf Ghani and other Afghan leaders were paid off to cede power.

On top of weakened morale and lack of air support, the best explanation for the Taliban’s quick success has to do with “surrenders” that became the only viable option for Afghan soldiers after Trump’s deal with the Taliban last year.

The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s military that allowed Taliban fighters to walk into the Afghan capital Sunday despite 20 years of training and billions of dollars in American aid began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government’s lowest-ranking officials.

The deals, initially offered early last year, were often described by Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and a U.S. official.

Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces, according to interviews with more than a dozen Afghan officers, police, special operations troops and other soldiers.

[snip]

The negotiated surrenders to the Taliban slowly gained pace in the months following the Doha deal, according to a U.S. official and an Afghan officer. Then, after President Biden announced in April that U.S. forces would withdraw from Afghanistan this summer without conditions, the capitulations began to snowball.

As the militants expanded their control, government-held districts increasingly fell without a fight. Kunduz, the first key city overrun by the militants, was captured a week ago. Days of negotiations mediated by tribal elders resulted in a surrender deal that handed over the last government-controlled base to the Taliban.

Soon after, negotiations in the western province of Herat yielded the resignation of the governor, top Interior Ministry and intelligence officials and hundreds of troops. The deal was concluded in a single night.

This, too, was obviously known and knowable.

What I wonder is how far up in the Afghan government such discussions went, and if that was also known.

A really worthwhile thread from Afghanistan’s former Central Bank Governor, Ajmal Ahmady, describes rumors that the decision came from higher up.

There were multiple rumors that directions to not fight were somehow coming from above. This has been repeated by Atta Noor and Ismael Khan. Seems difficult to believe, but there remains a suspicion as to why ANSF left posts so quickly. There is something left unexplained

It describes how he kept going to work even while learning that Ghani had fled. 

On Saturday night, my family called to say that most government had already left. I was dumbfounded. A security assessment accurately forecast Taliban arrival to Kabul within 36 hours and its fall within 56 hours I got worried & purchased tickets for Monday as a precaution

[snip]

Saw VP Danish leaving – reportedly for Qatar. By then it was rumored that VP Saleh had left. Ministers + others were waiting for a Fly Dubai & Emirates flights. Both were cancelled I secured a Kam Air flight Sunday 7pm. Then the floor fell: the President had already left

Almost immediately after Ghani fled, Russian news sources reported that he had taken mountains of cash with him.

Russia’s embassy in Kabul said on Monday that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash and had to leave some money behind as it would not all fit in, the RIA news agency reported.

That’s not unlikely — it’s just rather curious that Russia was the first to know of it.

Even as and because that happened, a diplomatic effort to negotiate a transitional government failed.

The weeks leading up to Kabul’s collapse saw a flurry of diplomatic activity by the U.S. and its allies in Qatar aimed at heading off exactly the chaotic scenes in the Afghan capital that have so horrified the world and put Joe Biden’s presidency on the defensive.

Among those efforts was a tantalizing agreement that could have guaranteed calm. Afghan and Taliban negotiators tentatively reached a deal in which all sides would declare a two-week cease-fire in exchange for President Ashraf Ghani’s resignation and the start of talks on setting up a transitional government, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations.

That opportunity, which hasn’t been previously reported, was lost when Ghani fled the country, according to the people. Ghani’s decision to leave Afghanistan — he said he did so to avoid a bloodbath — surprised his negotiating team in Doha, American diplomats and even his chief of staff and other top aides, said the people.

This, it seems to me, is where the real intelligence failure begins. Not even Ghani’s own ministers, according to current reports, knew he was going to flee, possibly with a chunk of cash.

And that has repercussions that may explain the rest. In his speech on Afghanistan last night, Biden described Ghani refusing to do any of the things Biden asked for in June and July. Of particular interest, Ghani seems to have refused to engage with the diplomatic effort that was undermined by Ghani’s capitulation.

I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.

So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.

[snip]

When I hosted President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah at the White House in June and again when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations.  We talked about how Afghanistan should prepare to fight their civil wars after the U.S. military departed, to clean up the corruption in government so the government could function for the Afghan people.  We talked extensively about the need for Afghan leaders to unite politically.

They failed to do any of that.

I also urged them to engage in diplomacy, to seek a political settlement with the Taliban.  This advice was flatly refused.  Mr. Ghani insisted the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong.

No one can claim to be surprised that the Afghan military folded. That it would has been clear for over a decade.

There are real questions, though, about whether the intelligence community knew how far up the Afghan government the plans to capitulate in exchange for payment went. And that question drives further intelligence questions. Ashraf Ghani has been privy to our Afghan intelligence collection. Hamid Karzai, who is playing a clear broker role but it’s not yet clear with and for whom, likewise was privy to a lot of our intelligence collection. The Taliban have had twenty years to learn how to evade our surveillance. Russia has been stealing key technical data for the last decade, focusing closely on our Afghan operations, and they seem quite chuffed with recent events.

If some or all those people have been working in concert, and may well have been since Trump acceded to this plan last year, it would be child’s play for them to hide from US intelligence how far up the chain of command would cede to the Taliban, if not actively disinform US intelligence. And that, in turn, would make it far easier to take over the country so quickly that the Taliban were even shocked.

If that happened, then it was a real intelligence failure that explains why the US wasn’t better prepared for the collapse of the Afghan government, even without excusing self-serving claims that the Afghan military might have lasted a week or a month or a year longer than they did.

What If the US Had Fought the Saudis Instead of the Taliban?

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Poof.

Our twenty year occupation of Afghanistan is ending in humiliating fashion. Jim and I are thinking about re-running every one of his posts cataloging the failures of training Afghans who would — and now have — changed sides when necessary or convenient.

While I’ve got burning questions about how Trump and his hand-picked Acting Secretary of Defense, Christopher Miller, made this defeat more certain, I’m going to hold off on recriminations for a bit. After all, we have two decades of accountability to demand.

I am, however, interested in how the way in which we’re fleeing Afghanistan will influence how President Biden responds to a demand from the families of the 9/11 victims to declassify more intelligence from the investigation. They have said Biden is not welcome at the memorial if he does not respond to their demand.

Families of 9/11 victims say an FBI offer to release some documents from its investigation into the attack has not gone far enough, and are demanding a comprehensive declassification review of all relevant material, particularly on Saudi Arabia’s role.

The FBI offer on Monday followed a call by some victims’ families and first responders for Joe Biden to stay away from ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the attack next month, if the president failed to honour a campaign pledge to lift the secrecy surrounding the multi-agency investigations.

The families want information on who financed and supported the attacks, and are currently suing the Saudi Arabian government in a federal court in New York. As part of that case, three former Saudi officials were questioned in June by the plaintiffs’ lawyers about their links with two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who spent several months in southern California before the attack. Their testimony cannot be shared with the families under secrecy rules.

Of course, if Biden does respond fully, it will demonstrate that, rather than occupying Afghanistan for two decades, we should have been fighting the Saudis.

And yet, we remained allies with the Saudis, continuing to let Saudis like Ahmed Mohammed al-Shamrani enter the US without adequate vetting, allowing yet another Saudi-linked terrorist attack on US soil.

We have hidden the role that our “allies” the Saudis had in 9/11 for two decades because if we actually held them accountable, rather than inflicting our need for revenge on the Taliban, their oil could no longer be a cornerstone to our  empire.

We could not hold the Saudis accountable because if we did, we would have had to stop burning oil.

We would have had to replace Saudi oil with renewables, a more modest way of life, and some humility.

We would have, out of necessity, done something about climate change.

We have plenty of time for recriminations about our failures in Afghanistan. But we have no time left to make up for the twenty years we might have spent addressing climate change instead.

19 Years On

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Next year it will be twenty years on. A few minutes ago it was exactly 19 years to the minute. The first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 am EST. We now suffer a 9/11 every couple of days in the US thanks to Trump’s bungling of the Coronavirus response.

Fires are decimating some of the most beautiful parts of the country on the west coast. Corona is almost certainly set to rage again with the great “re-opening”.

But let’s take a minute to remember what happened 19 years ago, and how the nation came together and responded then. Imperfectly, and sometimes tragically, from the Bush/Cheney regime. It has all been covered here on these pages. The moment could have created a lasting unity and, instead, was exploited to the opposite. But for a couple of days, it felt different. Let us remember why.

The Republican Party Is No Longer the Party of Personal Responsibility

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In a cynical speech that, if we’re lucky, will be an effort to deescalate militarily by imposing more sanctions on Iran (which is not a good thing but far better than the alternative), Trump just pre-blamed Barack Obama for the failures most experts predict and have correctly predicted will come from Trump’s Iran policy. He suggests, falsely, that the current escalation is the result of Obama’s peace deal, rather than the demonstrable result of his suspension of it.

Iran’s hostilities substantially increased after the foolish Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2013, and they were given $150 billion, not to mention $1.8 billion in cash. Instead of saying “thank you” to the United States, they chanted “death to America.” In fact, they chanted “death to America” the day the agreement was signed.

Then, Iran went on a terror spree, funded by the money from the deal, and created hell in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The missiles fired last night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration. The regime also greatly tightened the reins on their own country, even recently killing 1,500 people at the many protests that are taking place all throughout Iran.

The very defective JCPOA expires shortly anyway, and gives Iran a clear and quick path to nuclear breakout. Iran must abandon its nuclear ambitions and end its support for terrorism. The time has come for the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia, and China to recognize this reality.

I’ll leave it to others to unpack how dishonest this claim, both with respect to what JCPOA did and what has led to the increase in tension since Trump reversed our commitment to it.

But it exists in a larger context in which the Trump’s supporters are both refusing to take responsibility for their own actions, including but not limited to their support for Trump, but also doing so by pre-blaming Democrats.

This has been going on for the entirety of the Trump Administration (indeed, arguably it has been going on for at least 15 years). But with respect to Iran, it has consisted of:

  • Blaming Obama’s successful peace deal for the effects of Trump’s own rejection of it
  • Claiming Trump couldn’t brief Democrats on the Soleimani assassination because otherwise they would leak
  • Suggesting that Democrats’ past impeachment of Trump will have a future effect on his ability to respond to the crisis he created with the assassination

Let me be clear: I don’t think Trump assassinated Soleimani to distract from impeachment. I think he assassinated Soleimani because he’s a narcissist who responds to slights by lashing out, and his top advisors Mark Esper and Mike Pompeo are committed to Raytheon, Rapture, and a dangerously escalatory Iran policy, and so in this case did not rein in the natural result of arming someone with Trump’s narcissism, which is to use force where diplomacy would be more effective.

But here we are, with a dead Iranian general and fewer allies in the Middle East and few adults running policy, which may well be a recipe for disastrous things to come.

Trump (and his supporters’) refusal to take responsibility for their own actions is particularly toxic in this context because his policies and incompetent implementation of them are highly likely to fail, and the only way Trump can sustain support while presiding over obvious and foreseeable failures is to blame some other entity, which in this case includes Democrats and Iranians. And the only way for him to continue failing policies even while it’s clear they are failing is to pretend they’re not the cause of the failure.

Trump’s excuses for not briefing the Gang of Eight are particularly worrisome. It’s bad enough he didn’t do so, both for Constitutional and practical reasons. Even Richard Burr or Mitch McConnell might have advised Trump to take a more moderate approach. And had Trump briefed Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, or Chuck Schumer, any one of them might have said something to make it clear that if he did this and it blew up in his face, they would make it clear to the public that he had made the decision against their advice. Our system of briefing the Gang of Eight on covert operations is a terrible way to vet military and intelligence operations (not least because you don’t get in those positions unless you’re a hawk). But in this instance, it might have made Trump worry about being shamed if he ignored the advice. It also would have offered Trump the ability — one George Bush used aggressively to survive his scandalous embrace of torture and illegal wiretapping — to claim there was bipartisan awareness of the actions, which might make it more likely to craft a bipartisan response if things do start to go south.

But Trump doesn’t like the humiliation of hearing advice he doesn’t like, and so he didn’t brief  the Gang of Eight beforehand.

He owns this decision, and all its consequences, because he chose to make the decision without following the norm that would allow him to share the blame.

But that raises the stakes for him to find scapegoats. It’s a feedback loop, where his refusal to listen to competent advice increases the likelihood of stupid decision and his defensiveness about admitting all that, thereby raising the stakes on having scapegoats still further.

And that, in turn, raises the aggressiveness he needs to direct at his scapegoats. Democrats (and Iranians and NATO) must not be wrong. They must be disloyal or traitors or Jew-ridden socialist countries or terrorists. Indeed, that’s likely one of the reasons why Trump so readily adopts inflammatory slurs with no basis in fact: because he has to dehumanize his scapegoats, to make sure no one thinks too much about what function that scapegoating plays.

It’s all a recipe for increasing violence.

And at the core, on the Soleimani assassination, the case that Trump is responsible is not just obvious — best embodied by his refusal to brief the Gang of Eight even while telegraphing his attack to his cronies at Mar-a-Lago — but a root cause of why he wants to build his scapegoats in from the start.

Afghanistan: A Trillion Dollars’ Worth Of Lies

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Jim here.

This morning, the Washington Post published The Afghanistan Papers, so-named as a tribute to Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers. It’s hardly surprising that what we learn from the collection of documents is that the US has been lying about Afghanistan since the very earliest days of the war:

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

Sadly, the war has come at an unfathomable cost:

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

/snip/

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

Left out of these numbers are the lives lost by Afghan civilians and the lives disrupted by those families displaced by 18 years of hostilities.

John Sopko

These documents were obtained by the Post through a three year FOIA effort aimed at getting the raw materials generated by Inspector General John Sopko’s office, the Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Sopko came into this oversight job in 2012 and he has done incredible work in trying to hold the military and the politicians directing military policy to account for what has been going on in Afghanistan.

Much of my early blogging was centered on Afghanistan, and this false narrative from the military that we were “making progress” despite being in a situation that was clearly unwinnable (and that any check of a history book would have confirmed as an impossible task) was a frequent target. The persistence with which Sopko’s team documented and evaluated material coming from the military was impressive, especially as the military continually developed “new” tools for assessing progress on security and on training of Afghan troops, primarily so that they could make comparisons to previous data irrelevant. Eventually, the military essentially gave up on this approach and decided simply to classify the bulk of this sort of data so that their lack of progress would not be noted every six months as SIGAR came out with their Congressionally-mandated reports.

Around the time of this development, Sopko and his team embarked on a new strategy, interviewing various key figures in the military and in related efforts in Afghanistan to develop a series of “Lessons Learned” reports. The documents being released today are the raw materials from many of these interviews.

Finally, as a result of these materials, we now have extensive documentation that much of what we have been told by officials about Afghanistan is a lie:

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

But then, some of us have known that for a long time. Back in 2010, I came across this interesting graphic on how the military engages in military deception. It turns out there’s a well-described process for it:

In the Post article, we learn that, of course, there was no lesson learned from Vietnam:

The specter of Vietnam has hovered over Afghanistan from the start.

On Oct. 11, 2001, a few days after the United States started bombing the Taliban, a reporter asked Bush: “Can you avoid being drawn into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan?”

“We learned some very important lessons in Vietnam,” Bush replied confidently. “People often ask me, ‘How long will this last?’ This particular battlefront will last as long as it takes to bring al-Qaeda to justice. It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two. But we will prevail.”

In those early days, other U.S. leaders mocked the notion that the nightmare of Vietnam might repeat itself in Afghanistan.

“All together now — quagmire!” Rumsfeld joked at a news conference on Nov. 27, 2001.

But throughout the Afghan war, documents show that U.S. military officials have resorted to an old tactic from Vietnam — manipulating public opinion.

In news conferences and other public appearances, those in charge of the war have followed the same talking points for 18 years. No matter how the war is going — and especially when it is going badly — they emphasize how they are making progress.

And yes, I was seeing that this “We’re making progress” claim was bullshit long ago. Here are posts from 2010, 2013 and 2016 on the futility of our efforts there. But there’s one more side of this that we need to bring front and center to get a feel for one of the primary driving forces for why we would flush a trillion dollars and so many lives down the toilet. Back in 2008, the New York Times documented how the military carried out an “information operation” (which would rely on military deception) on the status of the war in Iraq. A bevy of “military analysts” was rolled out to make pronouncements in the media about how well things were going (despite the reality that they weren’t) and they were described primarily as “retired military”. What wasn’t disclosed in most cases was that these same “analysts” were also lucratively employed by defense contractors.

This report from the Washington Post on lies from the military closes the loop with the report from the Times on lies from analysts in the media. Senior military figures lie about how wars are going. They eventually retire and then get lucrative jobs with defense contractors. From these positions, they sometimes pose as “analysts” to spout similar falsehoods in the media, prolonging futile wars but enriching the contractors. I wonder if the magnitude of the lies told while in the military determines the size of the salary once they are hired by the contractors. The net result, though, is futile wars that can’t be won, but with endless spending on them anyway.